Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes)

Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel is the father of surrealist cinema. "Un Chien Andalou" - an early collaboration with Salvador Dali - is a landmark psychological (Fruedian) film. Bunuel was also adamantly political. He filmed "Land Without Bread" in 1933, just a few years before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Once Franco's dictatorship began, Bunuel lived in exile in the United States.

Screening: November 3rd at 2pm - Donnell Library Media Center
20 West 53rd Street

LuisBunuel.org
LuisBunuel.com
Las Hurdes
Slant magazine

Jaguar

Jean Rouch's contributions to both film and anthropology are immense. He created over seventy ethnographic films throughout his career. His work, along with sociologist Edgar Morton, "Chronicle of a Summer" is considered the pioneer cinema-verite film, greatly influencing French New Wave filmmakers such as Godard and Truffaut. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment, however, are the ways he impacted the African continent. He focused on collaboration, teaching his African co-workers about film technology. Many great filmmakers of West Africa once worked with Rouch.

Screening: November 3rd at 2pm - Donnell Library Media Center
20 West 53rd Street

Documentary Educational Resources
DER Filmmaker: Jean Rouch
Jean Rouch: A Tribute
A Tribute to Jean Rouch in Rouge

Navajos Film Themselves

"Navajos Film Themselves" is the result of the collaborative efforts of anthropologists John Adair and Sol Worth. Between 1966 and 1971, Adair and Worth taught Navajo students how to study and document their cultures, rituals, families and everyday lives through film. The work was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and resulted in six films. Adair and Worth later published "Through Navajo Eyes," a book analyzing both the films and their constructions.

Screening: October 21st at 6pm - Jen's Pad
183 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
Old Antelope Lake
Intrepid Shadows

Navajo Film Themselves
Projet Navajo
Who Can Be an Actor in a Navajo Film?
Visual Anthropology by Jay Ruby

The Ax Fight

Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and filmmaker Timothy Asch spent years studying and documenting the lives of the Yanamamo in Brazil and Venezuela. They filmed visits throughout the 1970's, creating a documentary series called the "Yanamamo Series." "The Ax Fight" is the most well-known and controversial of the series. It documents a fight between villagers and their guests from another village. Before Asch died in 1994, he (along with others) created a CD-Rom titled "Interactive Yonamamo: Understanding the Ax Fight" which "promises to be a novel and exciting tool for the teaching of undergraduate and graduate anthropology" (see link below).

"The Ax Fight" was already a controversial film for displaying the impact/intervention of the filming anthropoligist, but Chagnon's entire career as an anthropologist was called into question in 2000, when "Darkness in El Dorado" was published. The text claims that anthropologists, especially Chagnon, played an important, perhaps even intentional, role in spreading measles to the Yanomamo. Read the debate below.

Screening: October 21st at 6pm - Jen's Pad
183 Ashland Place, Brooklyn

Documentary Educational Resources
Yonamamo Interactive
Darkness in El Dorado review
Peter Biella response

Forest of Bliss

"Forest of Bliss" is a visual meditation on the rituals that make up life and death along the Ganges River of Benares, India. Robert Gardner created the film in 1985 while acting as director of The Film Study Center at Harvard University. Rejecting narration and dialogue translation, the film re-presents the "being" of a people and a culture.


"I have shaped the film so that it occupies the time between two sunrises. It stands as an exclusively visual statement about people being and also dying."
Robert Gardner

"Nominally an ethnographic study of funerary practices in Benares, it straddles ethnography, cinema vérité and experimental filmmaking."
Brian L. Frye (Senses of Cinema)

Screening: October 6th at 4pm - Columbia University

Conversation between Gardner and Ostor
The Film Study Center at Harvard University
Senses of Cinema

Nanook of the North

Robert Flaherty filmed "Nanook of the North" in 1920 and 1921, releasing the silent documentary to an eager public in 1922. Flaherty's work documented the "epic" and "exotic" life of Nanook, an Inuit (then-called Eskimo) living in the arctic region of Hudson Bay (Canada) with his family. Flaherty pioneered film as "exploration" and met with great success when he revealed the ethnographic "truths" of the Inuit to the Western world. His ground-breaking work ushered in (as its necessary companion) a series of crises: the truth of ethnographic images (filmed, photographed, or otherwise); the role of the filmmaker/ethnographer (ethical, constructivist, participatory); the method of constructing and presenting the story (or truth) of the text; the purpose or usefulness of the completed text (ethnography or ethnographic film), in other words, "how" the text will be used.

Screening: dvd only

How I Filmed Nanook of the North
One World Magazine
Silent Film Sources Review