The Survivor's Suite: The Life of the International Festival of Ethnological Film in Belgrade through Interesting Times

This paper is an attempt, based on many years of following the International Festival of Ethnological Film, organized by the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade, to provide insight into the way in which it has so far fulfilled its purpose, while at the same time experiencing tumultuous, occasionally even tragic events and processes. The main question concerns the way in which “interesting times” have left their mark on and shaped the world of human experience of people who have lived through them, thus also film production and festival practice. The phrase “interesting times” is used in the sense in which it was used by the historian Eric Hobsbawm, who used it as a label for “the most extraordinary and terrible century in human history”. Two elements are of prime importance in the paper – the assumption that “interesting times” can exist simultaneously with, and can cause or heighten emotional and creative tension, and also the fact that the limited possibilities that the resulting states of mind and initiatives can be fulfilled through the usual channels, such as political ones, can lead to attempts to satisfy them through art or cultural forms. Film production and festival activities can, under certain circumstances, offer alternative channels for expressing moods and content that arise or are enhanced during “interesting times”. On the one hand, the framework for analysis will provide reflections on the nature and the possible social roles of film festivals, including festivals of documentary and ethnographic films. Essentially, it will be necessary to consider the questions of the types of experiences provided by the Festival to its participants and attendees, the cinematic experiences it offers, and the specific aims and ideologies advocated as part of it. On the other hand, relying on valuable testimony in the form of the Festival Catalogue, words and images which testify to the achievements of the Festival will be identified. At the very beginning, in the turbulent times when political orders were overthrown, along with legal and ethical frameworks, it seemed that the Festival had managed to be conceptually ahead of its time. It was a dream come true and a model for many, a place where “miracles” happened. After a number of years, its long history temporarily weakened the Festival's creative potential. The times became somewhat less interesting, slightly dull even, and the Festival followed suit. And yet through all the changes, the Festival has not ceased to be a place where people meet and learn; a place where images inspire thoughts, and thoughts seek visual means of expression; a place where, by meeting Others, we learn something about ourselves as well, but also a place where by seeking to find a way to represent ourselves, we enrich Others.

Basic Approaches to Ethnographic Film Usage as a Method of Developing of Ethnocultural Competence of Future Journalists

The article discusses the features of the application of the methodology of visual education based on the use of ethnographic films in the organization of independent work of future journalists. On the basis of emic and ethical approaches, the main functions of ethnographic cinema are identified and described in the light of creating an image of ethnoculture in the process of training future journalists. The principles of representation of ethnoculture in the media sphere are considered, on the basis of which the ethnological motivation of future journalists is formed as the basis of ethnocultural competence.

The context of presenting “others”: the construction of meaning and the potential of communication in ethnographic film

How can images be used as an expressive, yet clearly limited, tool to represent “the other” in ethnographic films? Based on the objectives of visual anthropology and visual communication, this article analyzes the four presentational traditions of meaning construction. These traditions have been incorporated into the audio-visual communication context to illustrate the similarities or differences between ethnographic films and ethnographic texts in terms of traditions, structures, features, and limitations. Through the analysis of the four traditions, the relationships between visual presentation and text writing, visual patterns and communication concepts, and visual potentials and ethnographic films have been fully examined. In the context of Chinese ethnographic films, the four presentational traditions have been well showcased and developed. These works, in their different contexts, have constituted a meaningful visual text system of contemporary Chinese anthropology.

On Not Knowing

The Department of Music of the University of Pennsylvania has an ongoing research partnership with several faith-based organizations in the Philadelphia area. At the core of this partnership, ethnomusicology professors are leading academically based community service (ABCS) classes in which students engage with local Christian and Islamic communities in order to produce ethnographic films that document the history and musical practices of these communities. The chapter discusses the authors’ experiences in ABCS work, with a focus on gospel music research projects and studies of the relationship between music, spirituality, and Islam. A second project explored the ways in which young members of an Islamic community partnership organization engaged with hip-hop culture. The process described can be best characterized by an idea of “creative uncertainty.” Drawing on growing literature in visual arts that takes the position of “not knowing” as a strategy of engagement, the authors suggest that the production of community research through principles and processes of academically based community service and engagement are best served if researchers know how little they know, and are humbly open to what they might learn, while willing to share expertise they may have to jointly create narratives of community history and belonging in dialogue with members of neighborhood faith-based organizations.

Ethnographic Films from Iran

Iranian ethnographic films began with a focus on preserving Iran’s diverse traditions and indigenous cultures. Many of these films were salvage documentaries marked by nostalgia for disappearing traditions of rural and tribal life. The earliest film from this tradition is Grass (1924), which is about tribal migration and was made by American explorers before ethnographic films were recognized as a tradition. The impetus to preserve rural and tribal cultures first came from a group of filmmakers who were trained by a team of specialists from United States Information Service’s (USIS) film program and a team of filmmakers from Syracuse University, who came to Iran in the late 1940s and 1950s to help with development and modernization. They made propaganda and educational films that promoted industrialization, health, agriculture, and education in remote regions of Iran. They also trained Iranian filmmakers who later made actuality films, some of which could be considered ethnographic, with support from state institutions such as the Ministry of Culture and Art and National Iranian Radio and Television (NIRT). The notion of what constitutes ethnographic film has been debated by scholars and filmmakers since ethnographic film was first conceived. Ethnographic film has occupied a marginal space in the academic discipline of anthropology because many films that are considered ethnographic lack rigorous scientific research and are not made by anthropologists. Many of the films discussed here are documentaries that provide detailed documentation of daily life and customs of Iranian people but most are not films made by ethnographers. Meaningful university support for the production of academic ethnographic films was rarely available in Iran, except during the leadership of Nader Afshar Naderi at Tehran University’s Social Sciences division in the early 1960s. He introduced ethnographic film to Iranian academia and made several films with detailed attention to customs and traditions of Iranian tribes. Besides films about tribes and Iran’s cultural traditions that have continued into the present day, since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, films of ethnographic value have been made about the Iran-Iraq War and more recently about urban life. Filmmakers documented the eight-year war in a long-running television series that observed soldiers on the front lines. Finally, since the early 2000s, some independent filmmakers have made films that focus on city life, particularly documenting lives of young Iranians, or have made personal and autobiographical films by turning the camera on their own lives.

Primitivism and Race in Ethnographic Film: A Decolonial Re-visioning

Ethnographic film, given its history as a vestige of colonial visual culture, has been defined by and constrained by the racist and imperial ideologies of those who were the earliest ethnographic filmmakers. Scientistic, distanced, observational film-making techniques continued the colonial quest for totalizing knowledge through the romantic ideal that film was “objective.” At the same time, the earliest ethnographic films relied on the perceived difference between white, Western, “civilized,” “modern” filmmakers and non-white, “primitive,” tribal, backwards peoples rendered mute on-screen. This ethnographic film history was predicated on observing and salvaging the histories of the “primitive,” soon-to-be-extinct peoples through visual documentation and, in so doing, these ethnographic films neatly mapped race onto culture, unabashedly fixing “primitive” practices onto bodies. Such films also differentially imposed sexist stereotypes on both men and women, pre-determining hierarchies of colonial heteronormative masculinity and femininity within which non-white Others were slotted. In the past thirty years, anthropologists realized the fallacy of essentialized biological racial difference and began reckoning with the role that visual technologies played in re-producing “culture-as-race” mythologies. And yet, ethnographic filmmakers have largely neglected the explicit conversation on race and racialization processes that their projects are inevitably a part of despite the fact that the subjects and objects of ethnographic filmmaking continue to be, for the large part, previously colonized peoples whose contemporary practices are still heavily impacted by the racialized values, institutions, and technologies of the colonial period. As a response, this entry provides a history of ethnographic film which focuses on processes of racialization and the production of “primitive” subjects over time. Part of the task in this entry is to begin to “re-read” or “re-see” some traditional and iconic ethnographic films through an attention to how decolonial visual anthropologists have theorized the ways that the film camera (and visual technologies more broadly) has been used to primitivize, facilitate racializing processes, and produce the expectation of radical cultural alterity. The entry will engage with content that has been produced by anthropologists while also engaging with films outside of the anthropological canon that disrupt, disturb, and unsettle anthropological ways of seeing. These disruptions have obviated the fact that anthropological filmmakers cannot revert our gaze, but instead must find new ways of acknowledging the complex and messy histories from which the discipline has emerged while carefully engaging with the emerging global hierarchies that rely on neocolonial ideologies and produce new racist ways of seeing for (still) largely white and white-adjacent audiences. Each section will include texts and films as examples of how various visual techniques have emerged in order to challenge earlier processes of visual primitivizing. Note: Words such as primitive, tribal, and backwards are used here to describe characterizations imposed on anthropological subjects by (neo)colonial ethnographic filmmakers and do not reflect the views of the author.

THE VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ETHNOCULTURAL COMMUNITIES OF THE NORTH IN THE DOCUMENTARIES (THE FILM OIL FIELD)

The article investigates the one of types of contemporary visual sources in Anthropology - the ethnographic films about the indigenous peoples of the Russian North. The authors focus on the documentary film Oil Field (Oil Field; Ivan Golovnev 2012) that depicts a life of the family Piak in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug-Yugra. Focusing on the daily life of a Khanty family, authors develop a narrative structure, in which the protagonist Vasilii Piak received an identity and began to command the viewers’ emotions. Particular attention is paid to the visual representation of the traditional forms of economy (reindeer herding) in Khanty and Nenets culture, including the indigenous people’s relation to nature in the North. Authors consider also the interaction between indigenous peoples and oil companies in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug. The paper states that oil development has become the context of contemporary life among northern minorities. On the one hand, oil companies present an environmental and cultural threat to the indigenous inhabitants. On the other hand, they bring important elements of life to the North: fuel, food, roads, work, a system of benefits and other matters which have become part of the local northern reality. Thus, for many Khanty, oil companies are an important source of family income. This is perhaps one of the most difficult moments in situation of the relations of among contemporary northerners, who have already adapted to this tense but mutually advantageous proximity.