STS.S91 Special Topic: New Approaches to Ethnographic Documentary
Fall 2016: Wednesdays, 2-5 pm in E51-165
Ethnographic documentary has a long and rich history. From Haddon’s pioneering 1898 sound and moving image recordings in the Torres Strait Islands to Jean Rouch’s Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, directed with sociologist Edgar Morin), from Flaherty’s enacted Nanook and George Boas’ staged demonstration films to Oppenheimer’s re-enacted The Act of Killing, technologies and modes of representation have changed, in the process challenging anthropological norms and provoking reflection on who represents and how.
Today’s interactive, immersive and location-based technologies pose the greatest challenge yet. Their capacities for representing in innovative ways and forging new relationships among subjects, makers and the public, while exciting, can also seem at odds with the notions of expertise, authorship and the carefully structured points of view that characterized the past.
This course will explore ethnographic documentary and particularly the fast-changing partnership between technologies and ways of seeing.
- a critical look at key moments in the history of ethnographic filmmaking and reception by the field;
- discussions with makers regarding their visions and choices in this moment of change; and
- a semester-long interrogation of a project-in-development by a linear documentary maker who is shifting to interactive forms.
Each session will be split in two: a working-practice segment with a focus on the student’s work, and a background-theory session, during which active filmmakers will be invited to share their perspectives-choices. In class screenings of clips will be supplemented by readings and films to watch out of class.
Professor Michael M.J. Fischer
Thorsten Trimpop
Register for 12 units in
STS.S91 Special Subject: Science, Technology and Society.