John Melville Bishop (born April 4, 1946, in North Dakota) is a contemporary, U.S., documentary filmmaker known for the breadth of his collaborations, primarily in the fields of anthropology and folklore. He has worked with Alan Lomax, John Marshall, and extensively with the Human Studies Film Archive at the Smithsonian Institution and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. In 2005, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Visual Anthropology. [1]
Known for the grace of his camera work and editing, Bishop "has worked as a free-lance cameraman, editor, archivist, and writer in Africa, the Himalayas, the South Pacific, the Caribbean, and most of the United States. [1] [2] He collaborated with Alan Lomax and Worth Long on The Land Where the Blues Began (1979) and with John Marshall, spending several months in 1989 shooting film footage for Marshall's six-hour ethnographic film series, A Kalahari Family. [3] In the 1980s, Bishop oversaw the accession of Marshall's Kalahari footage for Documentary Educational Resources and the Human Studies Film Archives at the Smithsonian. [4] In 1994, he produced and edited a revised edition of the 26-part anthropology telecourse, Faces of Culture. [1] He produced and directed Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me: Edmund Carpenter (2002) with Harald Prins, a documentary that takes its title from Edmund Snow Carpenter's visionary 1972 book on media ecology and includes never-before-released footage from Carpenter's 1969-70 fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, as well as interviews with Carpenter discussing the "now-famous 'culture and communication' project" he launched in the 1950s with his close friend Marshall McLuhan. [5] For his film In the Wilderness of a Troubled Genre, "Bishop interviewed most of the great figures of ethnographic film" over a ten-year period to "constitute a wonderfully varied take on the role of documentary film in anthropology". [6] He is quoted extensively in Cross-Cultural Filmmaking (1997) by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor and provided several of the photographs included in the book. [7]
Bishop founded Media-Generation, as a documentary production company and umbrella for production services and, in 2001, began producing and distributing DVDs with the goal of including contextual information—such as extra footage, filmmaker interviews, transcripts, and scholarly articles—alongside specific folklore and ethnographic film titles. Through Media-Generation, Bishop published DVDs of Lomax's four Choreometrics films (see Cantometrics), producing contextualizing videos and texts included on the DVD; re-engaging the 1951 Lomax film, Oss Oss Wee Oss in the DVD release Oss Tales (2007); and restoring Lomax's unreleased 1961 house concert film Ballads, Blues, and Bluegrass.
From 2011 to 2016, Bishop worked with historians on the Civil Rights History Project, shooting 130 on-location oral histories with veterans of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement for the Smithsonian Institution Museum of African American History and Culture, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, and the Southern Oral History Project at the University of North Carolina. [8]
From 1995 to 2008, Bishop taught courses in video production, choreography and the camera, ethnographic film, and visual thinking in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He supervised numerous video and research projects at the Pacific Arts Festival, including 14 students in Western Samoa (1996), 8 students in New Caledonia (2000), and 13 students in Palau (2004). While at UCLA, he also served as Director of the Video Lab (2002-2004) for the School of Arts and Architecture and as Video Director at the Center for Digital Arts (1999-2002) where he designed, built, and maintained a lab of tape and non-linear editing systems.
Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was a musician, folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries, and helped start both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. He collected material first with his father, folklorist and collector John Lomax, and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song, of which he was the director, at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs.
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.
Cantometrics is a method developed by Alan Lomax and a team of researchers for relating elements of the world's traditional vocal music to features of social organization as defined via George Murdock's Human Relations Area Files, resulting in a taxonomy of expressive human communications style. Lomax defined Cantometrics as the study of singing as normative expressive behavior and maintained that Cantometrics reveals folk performance style to be a "systems-maintaining framework" which models key patterns of co-action in everyday life. His work on Cantometrics gave rise to further comparative studies of aspects of human communication in relation to culture, including: Choreometrics, Parlametrics, Phonotactics, and Minutage.
Timothy Asch was an American anthropologist, photographer, and ethnographic filmmaker. Along with John Marshall and Robert Gardner, Asch played an important role in the development of visual anthropology. He is particularly known for his film The Ax Fight and his role with the USC Center for Visual Anthropology.
Chris Owen was an Australian filmmaker, who specialised in ethnographic documentary films about Papua New Guinea and its inhabitants.
The USC Center for Visual Anthropology (CVA) is a center located at the University of Southern California. It is dedicated to the field of visual anthropology, incorporating visual modes of expression in the academic discipline of anthropology. It does so in conjunction with faculty in the anthropology department through five types of activities: training, research and analysis of visual culture, production of visual projects, archiving and collecting, and the sponsorship of conferences and film festivals. It offers a B.A. and an MVA in Visual Anthropology.
The Human Studies Film Archives (HSFA) is a sister archive to the National Anthropological Archives within the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. HSFA preserves and provides access to ethnographic films and anthropological moving image materials. It is located at the Smithsonian Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland.
The Margaret Mead Film Festival is an annual film festival held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. It is the longest-running, premiere showcase for international documentaries in the United States, encompassing a broad spectrum of work, from indigenous community media to experimental nonfiction. The Festival is distinguished by its outstanding selection of titles, which tackle diverse and challenging subjects, representing a range of issues and perspectives, and by the forums for discussion with filmmakers and speakers.
Edmund "Ted" Snow Carpenter was an American anthropologist best known for his work on tribal art and visual media.
Harald E. L. Prins is a Dutch anthropologist, ethnohistorian, filmmaker, and human rights activist specialized in North and South America's indigenous peoples and cultures.
Video ethnography is the video recording of the stream of activity of subjects in their natural setting, in order to experience, interpret, and represent culture and society. Ethnographic video, in contrast to ethnographic film, cannot be used independently of other ethnographic methods, but rather as part of the process of creation and representation of societal, cultural, and individual knowledge. It is commonly used in the fields of visual anthropology, visual sociology, visual ethnography and cultural studies. Uses of video in ethnography include the recording of certain processes and activities, visual note-taking, and ethnographic diary-keeping.
Bess Lomax Hawes was an American folk musician, folklorist, and researcher. She was the daughter of John Avery Lomax and Bess Bauman-Brown Lomax, and the sister of Alan Lomax and John Lomax Jr.
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.
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.
John Kennedy Marshall was an American anthropologist and acclaimed documentary filmmaker best known for his work in Namibia recording the lives of the Juǀʼhoansi.
Lorna Marshall was an anthropologist who in the 1950s, 60s and 70s lived among and wrote about the previously unstudied !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert.
George Pickow was an American photographer and filmmaker who chronicled the folk and jazz music scenes in the United States, United Kingdom, and other countries. He was married to the well-known Kentucky folk musician Jean Ritchie.
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.
Incidents of Travel in Chichén Itzá is an ethnographic film . Jeff Himpele and Quetzil E. Castañeda, filmmakers and producers. Production 1995 and 1997. Postproduction release: 1997.