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CS92PROD
Film and Anthropology

ANTH 285
Spring 2024
Section: 01  
Crosslisting: FILM 323
Course Cluster and Certificates: Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory Certificate

Film & Anthropology is an exploration of the cross-pollinating relationship between ethnographic and filmmaking methods and styles. This is, in part, an effort to understand the contributions of both to the observed and documented experience of cultural life. We will watch films weekly and discuss them, as well as respond to them individually in weekly critical précis. We will, in the course of these viewings, come to some consensus as to what we mean by ethnographic and cinematic elements. The films themselves will cross genre boundaries, running the gamut from "traditional" ethnographic films to various forms of documentary and experimental film that in some way address or explore what I consider ethnographic elements. We will cover canonical early ethnographic work (Gardner, Asch, Marshall), feminist experimental interventions in ethnographic film (Minh-Ha, Varda, Deren), and contemporary work that experiments with ethnographic elements, and we will synthesize various genres into new forms of long-form documentary, ethnofiction, and trance film (Marker, Oppenheimer, Sensory Ethnography Lab, Gonzalez, Rosi, Minervini, Kuchar). We will observe the progression of style through the 20th century into the 21st, with the various intellectual threads of post-structuralism, creating modifications of centering the experience and voice of the oppressed, narrative reflexivity/abstraction/unreliability, formal experimental editing styles, the decolonial method as filmmaking practice, and the historicization and interrogation of anthropology as a fraught discipline.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS ANTH
Course Format: SeminarGrading Mode: Student Option
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Requirement for: (ANTH)(CSCT)
Past Enrollment Probability: Less than 50%

Last Updated on OCT-13-2024
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