From Documentation to Representation: Recovering the Films of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson

Henley, Paul

doi:10.1080/08949468.2013.751857

Cited by 11 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 8 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Whilst using the camera is a relatively recent practice in IR, it is an established tradition within ethnography and visual anthropology. Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson documented rituals and cultural practices in Indonesia through film in the 1930s (Henley, 2013). Auto-ethnographic documentaries, in contrast, can be a research inquiry in and of itself or form a part of research that explores one’s own group or a journey.…”

Section: Framing Documentary Filmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dealing With Sri Lanka’s Demons: Using Documentary Film for Peacebuilding

Premaratna

2021

Journal of Peacebuilding & Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Documentary film is a popular resource amongst peacebuilding organisations and practitioners. Despite this popularity, research on documentary film is still emerging in peace and conflict studies. This article explores documentary film’s role in the study and practice of peacebuilding by examining the documentary Demons in Paradise and its engagement with issues of peace and conflict in post-war Sri Lanka. This article makes conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions. Drawing from empirical research, I identify and discuss documentary film’s engagement along three analytical angles: documentary film as a text, within social processes, and within research processes. Under each angle, I explore how empirical observations and understanding of peace emerge through the visual, using diverse methods and data, including interviews, participant observation, visual elicitation in post-screening focus groups, and film analysis. I conclude that documentary film can contribute to the study and practice of peacebuilding by offering multiple analytical angles that elucidate plural, disparate understandings of peace in post-war societies.

show abstract

Section: Framing Documentary Filmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dealing With Sri Lanka’s Demons: Using Documentary Film for Peacebuilding

Premaratna

2021

Journal of Peacebuilding & Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Alongside the series of films by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson made in the 1930s in Bali and New Guinea, it is also a film noted for its scientific nature and the deliberately analytical character it assumes 17 . 17 For a close reading of Bateson and Mead's films, see Henley (2013). Nevertheless, Paul Henley speaks of a "transitional phase in the development of ethnographic filmmaking" (p. 101) to realize that the films of Mead and Bateson would not have the sole purpose of serving as an objective record of reality: "the ciné-camera was conceived of as a scientific instrument supposedly capable of recording objective ethnographic data that The four-part film records and analyzes a fight that, in the meantime, is triggered between Yanomami family groups.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Aesthetic Authenticity in Cinema

2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

From very early on, realism has been one of the great guiding pillars of cinematographic theory, alongside with formalism. The realistic character of cinema is a commonplace that is based, from the outset, on the very technical nature of the device. However, beyond this basic premise, we can identify very different approaches to realism in cinema -or, if we prefer, different realisms. The same cinematographic work can be read in the light of the epistemological or testimonial accuracy of its content, the mimetic fidelity (verisimilitude), the correspondence with the sensitive and immanent truth of its images (for instance in the Deleuzian sense), the semantic literality, the ethical relevance, the ability to produce poetic or performative effects of authenticity, etc. There are more naive versions of realism -which relate directly to the literal, the natural or the factual -and there are less naive realisms that accept the inevitability of performance and artifice, even though, at the same time, they also seek to preserve, or even intensify, some form of truth or authenticity. For instance, this is what Werner Herzog proposes when he highlights the subjectivity and poetic effort involved in cinema, including documentary cinema. In his words: "There are deeper layers of truth in cinema and there is a 9 Aesthetic Authenticity in Cinema (thereby proving false, misleading, damaging-slipping from 'culture' to 'cult'), and at last, emerging in our present predicament in which few have a command of the concept, and fewer still have strident commitments to a single meaning of the term" (p. 42). And yet, the concept always returns, even if readjusted to new historical contexts and respective epistemological, ontological, aesthetic binders. Perhaps this recurrence is fundamentally driven by what Nietzsche described, in LaRocca words, as a "'truth drive' in humans, something that, ironically, [also] gives rise to a passion for dissimulation" (p. 37).In art, the use of the term authenticity seems to remain transversal even to the distinction between realism and formalism. LaRocca notes: "If we turn to ask about formalism, especially in experimental and avant-garde cinematic traditions, its celebrated standard bearers may seem very far from "realistic"-and yet may still derive from an artist's 'authentic ' vision"(p. 35). Ultimately, despite the ever-renewed attractiveness of the concept, perhaps we may be condemned to verify its theoretical indomitability, its resistance to watertight and transhistorical boundaries: "Authenticity is a buzz word-that is, a word with a charge (and occasionally a sting) but also without any fixed or formal or agreed upon definition. The word makes an impact-we feel its power when applied-but also cannot account for what it entails" (p. 39). However, this assumption should not deter us from realizing new uses or interpretations of the concept, namely from the perspective of the present time in which we live and from which we direct our questioning. According to LaRocca: "We're not so much in an ...

show abstract

“…anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson documented complex rituals of tribes in New Guinea by using frame-by-frame film in the late 1930s (Henley, 2013), a tradition that has become common in anthropology as a method of documentation.…”

Section: Ethnographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Gas county: a case study on how West Virginia's recent gas boom is transforming a county

Karlsson¹

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

From Documentation to Representation: Recovering the Films of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson

Cited by 11 publications

References 8 publications

Dealing With Sri Lanka’s Demons: Using Documentary Film for Peacebuilding

Dealing With Sri Lanka’s Demons: Using Documentary Film for Peacebuilding

Aesthetic Authenticity in Cinema

Gas county: a case study on how West Virginia's recent gas boom is transforming a county

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About