TV to tell us almost nothing’, Guardian (15 March 2013 ), www.theguardian.com/tvandradioblog/2013/mar/15/our-queen . 2 For example, Ann Gray and Erin Bell, History on Television (Routledge: London, 2013 ), pp. 100–29. 3 See Joe Moran, Armchair Nation (Profile
The origins of ethnographic film sponsorship by British television Prior to its sponsorship by television, ethnographic film-making in Britain was almost non-existent. Since the pioneering work of Haddon and Spencer at the turn of the twentieth century, the number of British anthropologists who had taken moving image cameras with them to the field had been very few, and even those that had done so, had generally used them not to make documentaries as such, but rather for documentation purposes. Facilities and support for
television in the ‘golden era’ and explore the ways in which the authorial praxes that their makers developed for making films in that environment could enrich their own repertoires. Notes 1 In 1989, the Royal Anthropological Institute carried out a survey among first-year students of anthropology, receiving 256 responses. Of these, 25 per cent said that they had first come across anthropology through ‘seeing films or TV
Philadelphia Story . In this response, I will make a qualified case for the opposite view and suggest that films and even television shows can be texts that encourage reflexivity about moral paradox, political obligation and community. I will do this through a reading of a more recent work in the genre of “the tragedy of remarriage”: the television show The Americans . The
Beyond Observation offers a historical analysis of ethnographic film from
the birth of cinema in 1895 until 2015. It covers a large number of films made
in a broad range of styles, in many different parts of the world, from the
Arctic to Africa, from urban China to rural Vermont. It is the first extensive
historical account of its kind and will be accessible to students and lecturers
in visual anthropology as well as to those previously unfamiliar with
ethnographic film.
Among the early genres that Paul Henley discusses are
French reportage films, the Soviet kulturfilm, the US travelogue, the classic
documentaries of Robert Flaherty and Basil Wright, as well as the more academic
films of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Among the leading film-makers of the
post-war period, he discusses Jean Rouch, John Marshall and Robert Gardner, as
well as the emergence of Observational Cinema in the 1970s. He also considers
‘indigenous media’ projects of the 1980s, and the ethnographic films that
flourished on British television until the 1990s.
In the final part, he
examines the recent films of David and Judith MacDougall, the Harvard Sensory
Media Lab, and a range of films authored in a participatory manner, as possible
models for the future.
The author reviews Barry Jenkins’s 2018 film adaptation of Baldwin’s novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, finding that Jenkins’s lush, painterly, and dreamlike visual style successfully translates Baldwin’s cadenced prose into cinematic language. But in interpreting the novel as the “perfect fusion” of the anger of Baldwin’s essays and the sensuality of his fiction, Jenkins overlooks the novel’s most significant aspect, its gender politics. Baldwin began working on If Beale Street Could Talk shortly after being interviewed by Black Arts poet Nikki Giovanni for the PBS television show, Soul!. Giovanni’s rejection of Baldwin’s claims that for black men to overcome the injuries of white supremacy they needed to fulfill the breadwinner role prompted him to rethink his understanding of African American manhood and deeply influenced his representation of the novel’s black male characters. The novel aims to disarticulate black masculinity from patriarchy. Jenkins’s misunderstanding of this aspect of the novel surfaces in his treatment of the character of Frank, who in the novel serves as an example of the destructiveness of patriarchal masculinity, and in his rewriting of the novel’s ending.
situation and audience, determining how much to publicise ongoing and past cases and always keeping in mind the interests of current and potential hostages. Notes 1 Radio Télévision Belge Francophone (2014) ; Médecins sans frontiéres (2013) . 2 In the words of Jeff Green, directeur of Griffin
airs the weekly TV programme Arrêt sur images , presented by journalist Daniel Schneidermann. Prior to the website’s creation, Arrêt sur images was aired on French public television from 1995 to 2007. 6 For example: ‘“ Les femmes violées du Kivu, c’est un marronnier ”. Médias, guerres et humanitaire en débat ’ [‘Women
travails of the Sea-Watch 3 , however, was the response of civil society. Within twenty-four hours of Rackete’s arrest, a campaign launched by two German television presenters had netted more than €1 million in donations. In fact, in July 2019, Sea-Watch received so much private funding that the organisation was able to share some of it with other NGOs running SAR missions in the Mediterranean. On the weekend of 6 and 7 July, tens of thousands took to the streets to protest against Rackete’s arrest, the criminalisation of rescue missions in the Mediterranean and the
: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject’ , Television & New Media , 20 : 4 , 336 – 49 . Crawford , K. and Finn , M. ( 2015 ), ‘ The Limits of Crisis Data: Analytical and Ethical Challenges of Using Social and Mobile Data to Understand Disasters