Ethnofiction refers to a subfield of ethnography which produces works that introduce art, in the form of storytelling, "thick descriptions and conversational narratives", and even first-person autobiographical accounts, into peer-reviewed academic works.[1][2][3]
In addition to written texts, the term has also been used in the context of filmmaking, where it refers to ethnographic docufiction, a blend of documentary and fictional film in the area of visual anthropology. It is a film type in which, by means of fictionalnarrative or creative imagination, often improvising, the portrayed characters (natives) play their own roles as members of an ethnic or social group.
Jean Rouch is considered to be the father of ethnofiction.[4] An ethnologist, he discovered that a filmmaker interferes with the event he registers. His camera is never a candid camera.[5] The behavior of the portrayed individuals, the natives, will be affected by its presence. Contrary to the principles of Marcel Griaule,[6][7][8][9] his mentor, for Rouch a non-participating camera registering "pure" events in ethnographic research (like filming a ritual without interfering with it) is a preconception denied by practice.[10][11][12][13][14]
An ethnographer cameraman, in this view, will be accepted as a natural partner by the actors who play their roles. The cameraman will be one of them, and may even be possessed by the rhythm of dancers during a ritual celebration and induced in a state of cine-trance.[15][16] Going further than his predecessors, Jean Rouch introduces the actor as a tool in research.[17][18][19][20]
A new genre was born.[21]Robert Flaherty, a main reference for Rouch, may be seen as the grandfather of this genre, although he was a pure documentary maker and not an ethnographer.
Being mainly used to refer to ethnographic films as an object of visual anthropology, the term ethnofiction is as well adequate to refer to experimental documentaries preceding and following Rouch's oeuvre and to any fictional creation in human communication, arts or literature, having an ethnographic or social background.
History
Parallel to those of Flaherty or Rouch, ethnic portraits of hard local realities are often drawn in Portuguese films since the thirties, with particular incidence from the sixties to the eighties,[22] and again in the early 21st century. The remote Trás-os-Montes region (see: Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro Province in Portugal), Guinea-Bissau or the Cape Verde islands (ancient Portuguese colonies), which step in the limelights from the eighties on thanks to the work of certain directors (Flora Gomes, Pedro Costa, or Daniel E. Thorbecke, the unknown author of Terra Longe[23][24][25]) are themes for pioneering films of this genre, important landmarks in film history. Arousing fiction in the heart of ethnicity is something current in the Portuguese popular narrative (oral literature): in other words, the traditional attraction for legend and surrealistic imagery in popular arts[26] inspires certain Portuguese films to strip off realistic predicates and become poetical fiction. This practice is common to many fictional films by Manoel de Oliveira and João César Monteiro and to several docufiction hybrids by António Campos, António Reis and others.[27][28] Since the 1960s, ethnofiction (local real life and fantasy in one) is a distinctive mark of Portuguese cinema.
↑ Nannicelli, Ted (July 2006). "From Representation to Evocation: Tracing a Progression in Jean Rouch's Les magiciens de Wanzerbé, Les maîtres fous, and Jaguar". Visual Anthropology. 19 (2): 123–143. doi:10.1080/08949460600596558. S2CID144385606.
Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking developed by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, inspired by Dziga Vertov's theory about Kino-Pravda. It combines improvisation with use of the camera to unveil truth or highlight subjects hidden behind reality. It is sometimes called observational cinema, if understood as pure direct cinema: mainly without a narrator's voice-over. There are subtle, yet important, differences between terms expressing similar concepts. Direct cinema is largely concerned with the recording of events in which the subject and audience become unaware of the camera's presence: operating within what Bill Nichols, an American historian and theoretician of documentary film, calls the "observational mode", a fly on the wall. Many therefore see a paradox in drawing attention away from the presence of the camera and simultaneously interfering in the reality it registers when attempting to discover a cinematic truth.
Jean Rouch was a French filmmaker and anthropologist.
Visual anthropology is a subfield of social anthropology that is concerned, in part, with the study and production of ethnographic photography, film and, since the mid-1990s, new media. More recently it has been used by historians of science and visual culture. Although sometimes wrongly conflated with ethnographic film, visual anthropology encompasses much more, including the anthropological study of all visual representations such as dance and other kinds of performance, museums and archiving, all visual arts, and the production and reception of mass media. Histories and analyses of representations from many cultures are part of visual anthropology: research topics include sandpaintings, tattoos, sculptures and reliefs, cave paintings, scrimshaw, jewelry, hieroglyphics, paintings and photographs. Also within the province of the subfield are studies of human vision, properties of media, the relationship of visual form and function, and applied, collaborative uses of visual representations.
Marcel Griaule was a French author and anthropologist known for his studies of the Dogon people of West Africa, and for pioneering ethnographic field studies in France. He worked together with Germaine Dieterlen and Jean Rouch on African subjects. His publications number over 170 books and articles for scholarly journals.
Salvage ethnography is the recording of the practices and folklore of cultures threatened with extinction, including as a result of modernization and assimilation. It is generally associated with the American anthropologist Franz Boas; he and his students aimed to record vanishing Native American cultures. Since the 1960s, anthropologists have used the term as part of a critique of 19th-century ethnography and early modern anthropology.
Pedro Costa is a Portuguese film director. He is best known for his sequence of films set in Lisbon, which focuses on the lives of the impoverished residents of a slum in the Fontainhas neighbourhood.
Germaine Dieterlen was a French anthropologist. She was a student of Marcel Mauss, worked with noted French anthropologists Marcel Griaule (1898-1956) and Jean Rouch, wrote on a large range of ethnographic topics and made pioneering contributions to the study of myths, initiations, techniques, graphic systems, objects, classifications, ritual and social structure.
Ala-Arriba! is a 1942 Portuguese romantic docufiction set in Póvoa de Varzim, a traditional Portuguese fishing town.
In Vanda's Room is a docufiction film by Portuguese director Pedro Costa. This is the second film in his Fontainhas trilogy.
Les maîtres fous is a 1955 short film directed by Jean Rouch, a well-known French film director and ethnologist. It is a docufiction, his first ethnofiction, a genre he is considered to have created.
The Hauka movement is a religious movement which arose in French colonial Africa. It consists of ceremonies, including mimicry and dancing, in which the participants perform the elaborate military ceremonies of their colonial occupiers. It was depicted in the 1955 short film Les maîtres fous directed by Jean Rouch, a well-known French film director and ethnologist. Hauka was popular in the late colonial and early post-colonial era, but the practice has since dwindled. However, as of the late 2010s, ceremonies continue to be practiced in certain circles in Niamey.
Docufiction is the cinematographic combination of documentary and fiction, this term often meaning narrative film. It is a film genre which attempts to capture reality such as it is and which simultaneously introduces unreal elements or fictional situations in narrative in order to strengthen the representation of reality using some kind of artistic expression.
An ethnographic film is a non-fiction film, often similar to a documentary film, historically shot by Western filmmakers and dealing with non-Western people, and sometimes associated with anthropology. Definitions of the term are not definitive. Some academics claim it is more documentary, less anthropology, while others think it rests somewhere between the fields of anthropology and documentary films.
António Campos was one of the pioneer filmmakers of visual anthropology in Portugal. Mainly using pure documentary techniques, he shot ethnographic films and tried docufiction. As well as in fictional films, he used the methods of direct cinema to portrait the life of ancient human communities (ethnofiction) of his country.
Ethnocinema, from Jean Rouch’s cine-ethnography and ethno-fictions, is an emerging practice of intercultural filmmaking being defined and extended by Melbourne, Australia-based writer and arts educator, Anne Harris, and others. Originally derived from the discipline of anthropology, ethnocinema is one form of ethnographic filmmaking that prioritises mutuality, collaboration and social change. The practice's ethos claims that the role of anthropologists, and other cultural, media and educational researchers, must adapt to changing communities, transnational identities and new notions of representation for the 21st century.
Moi, un noir is a 1958 French ethnofiction film directed by Jean Rouch. The film is set in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
Jaguar is a 1967 French ethnographic film directed by Jean Rouch. Set in the 1950s, it follows three men from Niger, Damouré, Lam, and Illo, who travel to the Gold Coast for work. Much of the dialogue and narration in the film is provided by the three men themselves as they comment on their past experiences on their journey.
The Human Pyramid is a 1961 Ivorian docufiction film directed by Jean Rouch. He cast black African and white French students to improvise interactions with each other at an integrated high school in Abidjan.
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