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
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.
. Notes 1 Radio Télévision Belge Francophone (2014) ; Médecins sans frontiéres (2013) . 2 In the words of Jeff Green, directeur of Griffin Underwriting, quoted by Dorothée Moisan ( Moisan, 2013 : 93). 3 And Dan Johnson, Manager of Special Projects – Security at Anadarko Petroleum, says: ‘We believe that kidnap for ransom is entirely a financial negotiation and that we can bring about a resolution financially by coming
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
Technologies and the Biomedicalisation of Everyday Activities: The Case of Walking and Cycling’ , Sociology Compass , 8 : 4 , e12572 . Couldry , N. and Mejias , U. A. ( 2019 ), ‘ Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject’ , Television & New Media , 20 : 4
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.
Nothing' has been at the centre of Samuel Beckett's reception and scholarship from its inception. This book explains how the Beckett oeuvre, through its paradoxical fidelity to nothing, produces critical approaches which aspire to putting an end to interpretation: in this instance, the issues of authority, intertextuality and context, which this book tackles via 'nothing'. By retracing the history of Beckett studies through 'nothing', it theorises a future for the study of Beckett's legacies and is interested in the constant problem of value in the oeuvre. Through the relation between Beckett and nothing, the relation between voice and stone in Jean-Paul Sartre and Beckett, we are reminded precisely of the importance of the history of an idea, even the ideas of context, influence, and history. The book looks at something that has remained a 'nothing' within the Beckett canon so far: his doodles as they appear in the Human Wishes manuscript. It also looks at the material history of televisual production and places the aesthetic concerns of Beckett's television plays. The book then discusses the nexus between nothing and silence in order to analyse the specific relations between music, sound, and hearing. It talks about the history of materiality through that of neurology and brings the two into a dialogue sustained by Beckett texts, letters and notebooks. The book investigates the role of nothing through three works called neither and Neither: Beckett's short text, Morton Feldman's opera, and Doris Salcedo's sculptural installation.