Ethnographic Documentary Production

The term “documentary production” within anthropology characterizes the making and circulation of ethnographic research and scholarship which includes film and video as the primary medium of storytelling and communicating cultural knowledge. These categories evolve frequently and what constitutes a film as “ethnographic” cinema is a topic of lengthy ongoing debates. In his Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology entry “Ethnographic Film,” Matthew Durington provides an overview of some of these debates in attempting to narrow down theoretical frameworks and parameters of filmic ethnography. Ginsburg’s 1998 essay “Institutionalizing the Unruly: Charting a Future for Visual Anthropology” (cited under Foundations) charts the lineage of visual anthropology on the development of the subfield as “born of a union between anthropology and documentary film” (p. 173). From its earliest application within ethnographic research, some scholars have approached filmmaking as a methodological and analytical tool that privileges scientific rigor while others regard it primarily as a medium for storytelling and scholarly output. Early adopters of using film within anthropological research, including Mead and Bateson in their 1977 article “On the Use of Camera in Anthropology” (cited under Foundations), have openly quibbled about the role of the camera and the filmmaker in capturing culture on film. These disagreements have been useful in broadening the boundaries of ethnographic cinema, inspiring filmmakers to experiment with different ways of making meaning, as it has been customary from the genre’s inception led by pioneering figures like Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. For a threshold for what constitutes “ethnographic film and media productions,” we can turn to Jean Rouch, who in his essay “The Camera and Man” (cited under Foundations) insists that ethnographic filmmakers must apply the same anthropological rigor—“spend a long time in the field before beginning to shoot (at least a year),” and thereby possessing an intimate understanding of the communities among whom they work while mastering essential “film and sound recording skills” (p. 40). Building on insights offered by Rouch and by drawing on scholarship from documentary and media studies, the goal of this entry is to outline the fundamentals of non-fiction filmmaking geared toward anthropologists who are already trained in ethnographic research. This entry also insists upon a more inclusive definition of ethnographic cinema, one that does not rely on the filmmaker’s academic pedigree as the primary criteria for inclusion into what has historically been a rather insular enterprise. Instead, a section of this entry is devoted to highlighting voices and perspectives from historically marginalized communities—queer, feminist, people of color, immigrants, indigenous filmmakers, who have been sidelined within the discipline of anthropology with its vestiges of colonialism. Another section of this entry highlights the need to decenter the hegemony of North American and European gaze when telling cross-cultural stories by focusing on transnational ethnographic and documentary production, specifically from countries in the Global South.