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Dead Birds is a 1963 American documentary film by Robert Gardner (1925-2014) about the ritual warfare cycle of the Dugum Dani people who live in the Baliem Valley in present-day Irian Jaya province on the western half of the island of New Guinea that is part of present-day Indonesia. The film presents footage of battles between the Willihiman-Wallalua clan and the Wittaia clan with scenes of the funeral of a small boy killed by a raiding party, the women's work that goes on while battles continue, and the wait for enemy to appear. In 1964 the film received the Grand Prize "Marzocco d'Oro" at the 5th Festival dei Popoli rassegna internazionale del film etnografico e sociologico in Florence, Italy, the Robert J. Flaherty Award given by the City College of New York, and was a featured film at the Melbourne Film Festival. In 1998, Dead Birds was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and recommended for preservation. Dead Birds has come to hold canonical status among ethnographic films.
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.
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Herb Di Gioia is an Italian, American documentary film director who pioneered the field of "observational cinema" in his work and impacted ethnographic film making through his contributions as a teacher at Britain’s National Film and Television School. Di Gioia's films are recognized as a significant departure from the better-known works of other observational documentarians, like David and Judith MacDougall.
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David MacDougall is an American-Australian visual anthropologist, academic, and documentary filmmaker, who is known for his ethnographic film work in Africa, Australia, Europe and India. For much of his career he co-produced and co-directed films with his wife, fellow filmmaker Judith MacDougall. In 1972, his first film, To Live with Herds was awarded the Grand Prix "Venezia Genti" at the Venice Film Festival. He has lived in Australia since 1975, and is currently a professor in the Research School of Humanities & the Arts at Australian National University.
Judith MacDougall is an American visual anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, who has made over 20 ethnographic films in Africa, Australia and India. For many of the films, she worked with her husband, David MacDougall, also an anthropologist and a documentary filmmaker. Both of them are considered among the most significant anthropological filmmakers in the English-speaking world.
The Doon School Quintet is a five-part ethnographic film series made by the American visual anthropologist and documentary filmmaker David MacDougall, between 1997 and 2000, at The Doon School, an all-boys boarding school in India. For thirteen months over three years, MacDougall lived with the students and was given unprecedented access for filming inside the residential campus. By the end, MacDougall had more than 85 hours of material, which he edited into 5 parts, with a total duration of about 8 hours. The project ranks among MacDougall's most ambitious and longest works and is the only film series in his oeuvre.
Paul Hockings is an anthropologist whose prime areas of focus are the Dravidian languages, social, visual and medical anthropology.
A Wife Among Wives is a 1981 ethnographic documentary produced by filmmakers Judith and David MacDougall. It is about the dynamics of polyamorous marriage in a small Turkana village in Kenya. The film premiered at the 1981 Margaret Mead Film Festival. It has a runtime of 72 minutes.
References
- ↑ Wedding Camels, VHS. Directed by David MacDougall, Judith MacDougall, 1974, Berkeley, CA: University of California Extension Center for Media, 1980.
- ↑ Emory University Institute of African Studies. “African Studies Media Catalog,” Emory University. http://www.ias.emory.edu/catalog.cfm?keyword=Turkana (accessed Nov. 13, 2009).
- ↑ Barnouw, Erik. Documentary- A History of the Non-Fiction Film. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 330.
- ↑ Young, Colin (1982). "MacDougall Conversations". RAIN. 50 (50): 5–8. doi:10.2307/3031771. JSTOR 3031771.
- ↑ "Berkeley Media: The Wedding Camels".
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