Recent Work on Third World Cinema

If you have been paying attention to the ins and outs of anthropology in the last couple of decades, you have probably noticed that the field of visual anthropology has gained vertiginous academic traction not only in Brazil but worldwide. The reasons for this are manifold, but it is a fact that the ease of use and relatively low cost of audiovisual equipment brought about by the digitalization of the filmmaking process has immensely contributed to the growth -in number and in quality -of films produced inside anthropology departments. However, the extent to which the filmmaking process has been the object of scholarly investigation in the social sciences thus far has largely coincided with the need for affirming its appropriateness as a research method; close to no serious inquiry has sought to convey to the academic community the "flesh and blood" or the "spirit" (MALINOWSKI, 2015, p.23) of contemporary practices of recording and editing film. An unfortunate result of neglecting to study the skilled practices of the filmmaker is their continued absence from a public forum where they can be scrutinized and debated in ways that advance the possibilities of harnessing their features -and even their quirks-to the benefit of the anthropologist.

Film as Ethnography, 1992

Journal of Film and Video, 2008

TECHNOLOGICAL EMERGENCE OF VIDEO AND NOLLYWOOD, 2021

Prior to Nollywood, foreign movies were agent of cultural imperialism. Influenced by Hollywood movies, every youth want to talk and dressed like an America. Nigerian women whose favourite films are those from India developed a penchant for Indian wrapper. Importantly, real world content that deal with local issues are now being produced as a result technological enablement of a local industry.

Animation, Film, Interactive Media in Education and Culture, 2022

This article documents a research on the emerging phenomenon of (extra) short film production, that transcends the limits of national characteristics, while having a worldwide distribution, in mostly young audiences. Social media have brought in the frame of audiovisual narratives, through the use of filmic language, a popular practice of storytelling. All kinds of genre are allowed, with a time constraint of a few minutes, not to say seconds. These genres not only have their own audiences, but also gain new ones, due to the way the extra short films are being projected, in a non-linear and often random sequence. In this new "filmic" landscape, the notion of copyright takes a whole new meaning: copy becomes a kind of recognition and homage to the original director, who in turn, becomes instantly famous among thousands of followers. Are these (extra) short films capable of forming a sur-genre themselves? In the context of social media, is video production becoming a new form of folk art?

2013

T he value of practice-based learning, especially in the case of children and young people, has long been acknowledged. It can be traced back to John Dewey (1859-1962), 1 a pioneer in the "learning by doing" and "problem solving" approach that sought to integrate school with society; and to Maria Montessori (1870-1952), 2 who saw independence as the aim of a child's education and realized that to achieve this, the child should take control of at least part of the learning process, with the environment playing a crucial role. And, importantly in Latin America, Paulo Freire (1921-1997) centered his whole model for pedagogy on informed praxis, thereby refusing the split between theory and practice while firmly situating educational activity in the lived experience of participants. The ultimate goal of this pedagogy-initially termed "of the oppressed" 3 and later "of hope" 4-was to achieve emancipation. Underlying all these approaches is the belief that childhood is a central period of an individual's life, in which the foundations of personality are laid, and that the principles of respect, responsibility, and community are best understood by children through exploration and discovery. Whether we take the view that learning is socially, psychologically, emotionally, or cognitively constructed, practice-based education integrates all these dimensions. 5 Nonetheless, formal education, especially in the realm of film, has often remained subject-centered and teacher-led. It has also tended to have a sharp focus on theory, whether it was aimed at adults or young adults. Only recently has the spread of digital technology, which is affordable and easy to use, made practice-oriented film education for children a real possibility. As a result of such developments, the medium has in various ways been expanded and, indeed, returned to the democratizing potential that Walter Benjamin once thought was inherent in it.

Anthrovision, 2017

In 1977, while reviewing a film about East African people, P.T.W. Baxter stated that anthropology and film ethnography were incompatible, because "they fundamentally differ in methods and aims." (In Taylor 1996: 64) On this occasion, as Lucien Taylor suggests in his article Iconophobia: How anthropology lost it at the movies, Baxter argued that each discipline seeks quite different aspects of truth and utilises different means of stitching scraps of culture together creatively. To Baxter, whereas anthropology is detached and open-minded, film is anything but: "Substituting a single glass lens for our two human eyes is imperious and monocular; its beauty is distorting; it tries to simplify and disarm, as well as to impose." (1996: 64) A decade later, as Taylor continues to argue, Maurice Bloch not only declared that he is "not very interested" in ethnographic films, but more bellicosely that "he can hardly bear to watch them at all." (1996: 64) Bloch states that if ethnographic films must be made at all, they should be made with a thesis component. For him, textuality itself, and textuality alone is the only means to legitimate a serious visual anthropological endeavour. Visuality, on the other hand, becomes merely ancillary, illustrative rather than constitutive of anthropological knowledge. In the same vein, the anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup has continued to defend the written primacy of the discipline to combat photographic and audiovisual representations of a given culture. In her article Anthropological visions: some notes on visual and textual authority,

Oxford Bibliographies , 2020

This article discusses an anthropological project centred on the production of audiovisual and hypermedia works, begun in 2009 with the Cidade Tiradentes Arts Map and completed in 2011 with the release of the ethnographic film Art and the Street. The project’s guiding premise was Jean Rouch’s concept of shared anthropology, but with its own particularities reflecting the contemporary world, including the intensification of image production and sharing, as well as the emergence of various collaborative forms of information production based around the popularization of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). We discuss three distinct moments of this shared visual anthropology project: fieldwork, editing and screenings of the ethnographic films.

Whose impact is it? A decolonised approach in intercultural communication and creative methods in practice-based research, 2022

This project report focuses on the complexities, dynamics and impacts of intercultural communication, with the example of indigenous video productions by the Zhigoneshi Collective from the Arhuaco community in Colombia. A decade-long filmmaking journey undertaken by the collective targeted the violent political situation in the region and challenged some of the past films made about the community by external filmmakers. A collaborative self-reflective research film concludes the project; it explores the researcher’s positionality, inevitable power struggles, tensions around indigenous agency, intellectual ownership of the footage, politics of representation (who has the right to represent whom) and the importance of contexts of dissemination. More importantly, it explores the complex role of external filmmakers who must strike a balance between inevitable pre-assumptions, cultural stereotyping and their own privileged positionality.