Antrofilm: Ethnographic film within itself - Reflections on contextual explication

Velkommen til  foredrag og filmvisning!
 

Foredrag:

Hvordan kontekstualiseres etnografiske filmer?
I dette foredraget vil Peter Crawford (UiT) se på hvordan sosialantropologer har brukt ulike strategier for å kontekstualisere materialet i sine filmproduksjoner. I noen filmer bruker antropologiske filmskapere forklarende fortellerstemmer for å skape et narrativ og en kontekst, men andre henter elementer fra kunstfilmen inn i det antropologiske arbeidet.
Med eksempler fra den etnografiske filmhistorien, viser Crawford ulike metoder for å ramme inn det antropologiske filmmaterialet.

Lecture:

Lecture by professor of visual anthropology, Peter Crawford (UiT).

How are ethnographic films contextualized? In this lecture, Peter Crawford (UiT) will look at how social anthropologists have used various strategies to contextualize material in their film productions. In some films, anthropological filmmakers use explanatory commentary to create a narrative and a context, whilst others bring art film approaches into the anthropological work. With examples from ethnographic film history, Crawford shows different methods for framing the anthropological film material.

Abstract:
Ethnographic film within itself. Reflections on contextual explication.

My presentation is based on an idea for a book project inspired by a paper by Ian Dunlop, ‘Image into meaning: representing Aboriginal ritual in film’ (1990). The idea is, by using a series of film examples, to analyse ways in which contextualisation is employed in ethnographic films and identify what may be described as contextualizing strategies. These may range from almost purely verbal, such as either so-called ‘voice-of-God’ commentary or formal interviews, both often used in more journalistic films, to purely (audio-)visual, in which words are hardly used at all, often adhered to in films emanating from more artistic approaches.

Each chapter will focus on a specific film from the ethnographic film canon, with a final chapter linking these to a more general discussion of ‘context’ in cinema and ethnographic film vis-à-vis the notion of context in anthropology as an academic discipline. Are the characteristics and uses compatible or even comparable? Do they refer to the same kind of contexts and, ultimately, reality? What is the role of narrative – in both a fictional and non-fictional sense – and concepts linked to that, such as plot and characters?