This new collection of essays presents the latest thoughts of one of the world’s leading ethnographic filmmakers and writers on cinema. It will provide essential reading for students in cinema studies, filmmaking, and visual anthropology. The dozen wide-ranging essays give unique insights into the history of documentary, how films evoke space, time and physical sensations, and the intellectual and emotional links between filmmakers and their subjects. In an era of reality television, historical re-enactments, and designer packaging, Mac Dougall defends the principles that inspired the earliest practitioners of documentary cinema. He urges us to consider how the form can more accurately reflect the realities of our everyday lives. Building on his own practice in filmmaking, he argues that this means resisting the pressures for self-censorship and the inherent ethnocentrism of our own society and those we film.
Table of Content
Introduction
Part I: Filmmaking as practice
1 Looking with a camera
2 Dislocation as method
3 Camera, mind, and eye
4 Environments of childhood
Part II: Film and the senses
5 The third tendency in cinema
6 Sensational cinema
7 The experience of colour
8 Notes on cinematic space
Part III: Film, anthropology and the documentary tradition
9 Observation in the cinema
10 Anthropology and the cinematic imagination
11 Anthropological filmmaking: an empirical art
12 Documentary and its doubles
Bibliography
Filmography
Index
About the author
David Mac Dougall is an Honorary Professor in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University, Canberra
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