Ethnographic film

An ethnographic film is a non-fiction film, often similar to a documentary film, historically dealing with non-Western people, and sometimes associated with anthropology.

Prospector, explorer and eventual filmmaker, Robert J. Flaherty, is considered to be the forefather of ethnographic film. His film Nanook of the North. Flaherty's attempts to realistically portray Inuit people were valuable pictures of a little-known way of life, Flaherty was not trained in anthropology, but he did have good relationships with his subjects.

The contribution of Felix-Louis Regnault should be noted as his project may have started the movement. He was filming a Wolof woman making pottery without the aid of a wheel at the Exposition Ethnographique de l'Afrique Occidentale. He published his findings in 1895. His later films followed the same subject, described to capture the "cross cultural study of movement". He then proposed there to be an archive of anthropological research footage after becoming more experienced with motion pictures.

The Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits, initiated by Alfred Cort Haddon in 1898, covered all aspects of the Torres Straits life. Haddon wrote to his friend Baldwin Spencer recommending he use film for recording evidence. Spencer then recorded the Australian Aborigines, a project that consisted of 7,000 feet of film, later housed in the National Museum at Victoria.

In the 1930s, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead discovered that using film frame-by-frame was an essential component of documenting complex rituals in Bali and New Guinea; John Marshall made what is likely the most-viewed ethnographic film in American colleges (The Hunters), his filming of the Ju/'hoansi of the Kalahari (the !Kung-San) spans from 1951 to 2000. His ethnographic film N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman is not only ethnography but also a biography of the central character, N!ai, incorporating footage from her childhood through adulthood. Marshall ended his career with a five-part series, A Kalahari Family(2004) that critically examined his fifty-year involvement with the Ju/'hoansi. Napoleon Chagnon and Tim Asch's two famous films, The Ax Fight and The Feast (filmed in the 1960s), are intimately documented ethnographic accounts of an Amazonian rainforest people, the Yanomamo.

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