Beyond observation

A history of authorship in ethnographic film

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by Paul Henley

Type: Essays
Subject: Genre > Documentary
Keywords: documentary, ethnology
Publishing date: 2020
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Collection: Anthropology, Creative Practice and Ethnography
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 568 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-5261-3136-2

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Book Presentation:
Beyond Observation is structured by the argument that the ‘ethnographicness’ of a film should not be determined by the fact that it is about an exotic culture – the popular view – nor because it has apparently not been authored – a long-standing academic view – but rather because it adheres to the norms of ethnographic practice more generally. On these grounds, the book covers a large number of films made in a broad range of styles across a 120-year period, from the Arctic to Africa, from the cities of China to rural Vermont.

Paul Henley discusses films made within reportage, exotic melodrama and travelogue genres in the period before the Second World War, as well as more conventionally ethnographic films made for academic or state-funded educational purposes. The book explores the work of film-makers such as John Marshall, Asen Balikci, Ian Dunlop and Timothy Asch in the post-war period, considering ideas about authorship developed by Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner and Colin Young. It also discusses films authored by indigenous subjects themselves using the new video technology of the 1970s and the ethnographic films that flourished on British television until the 1990s. In the final part of the book, Henley examines the recent work of David and Judith MacDougall and the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, before concluding with an assessmentof a range of films authored in a participatory manner as possible future models.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

About the Author:
Paul Henley is Professorial Research Fellow at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester and an ethnographic film-maker. He was previously the founding director of the Granada Centre, 1987–2014

Press Reviews:
'The scope of this book is extraordinary and, in my experience, unprecedented in the published record. [...] I suggest that this book will be of interest to practising ethnographic film-makers, film historians, and social anthropologists who would be interested in looking at the historical record for insights on how to develop their craft.'
Carlo Cubero, Social Anthropology

' Paul Henley’s latest book examines filmic productions ranging from the end of the 19th century to the 2010s. Not only is Beyond Observation impressive for its sheer size (it is uncommon to see books of this length in the current academic publishing scene) and for the variety of epochs and styles that it covers, it is also brave of the author for trying to systematize these examples under different declinations of the idea of authorship. [...] His prose is always straight to the point and the crucial concepts are always defined in accessible but rigorous terms, something increasingly rare nowadays and that will make this book very useful to students of visual anthropology and of ethnographic film in particular.'
Lorenzo Ferrarini (Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester), Visual Anthropology

'Beyond Observation is subtitled A History of Authorship in Ethnographic Film, and its first part, brilliantly and indispensably, is just that. It offers a balanced and insightful account of the archive, warts and all, focused on its basically European, indeed (especially as we approach the present, Anglophone) makers.'
Brian Winston (University of Lincoln), Studies in Documentary Film

See the publisher website: Manchester University Press

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