Experimental Film and Anthropology urges a new dialogue between two seemingly separate fields. The book explores the practical and theoretical challenges arising from experimental film for anthropology, and vice versa, through a number of contact zones: trance, emotions and the senses, materiality and time, non-narrative content and montage. Experimental film and cinema are understood in this book as broad, inclusive categories covering many technical formats and historical traditions, to investigate the potential for new common practices. An international range of renowned anthropologists, film scholars and experimental film-makers engage in vibrant discussion and offer important new insights for all students and scholars involved in producing their own films. This is indispensable reading for students and scholars in a range of disciplines including anthropology, visual anthropology, visual culture and film and media studies.

This edited volume from two leading scholars explores the interrelation between experimental film and anthropology.

About the Author
Arnd Schneider is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway.Caterina Pasqualino is researcher at the CNRS (Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), Paris, France.

Reviews

"[Experimental Film and Anthropology] tries to go beyond this established dichotomy in understanding experiment and anthropological practice as one and the same practice - and succeeds in this in a very compelling manner ... This book is much more than a mere contribution to the ""sensual turn"" in anthropology: it makes us think beyond the established canon of anthropological filmmaking, it makes us think in terms of creativity about our field, our methodology, and a medium we thought we knew all about. It might not be considered exaggerated to consider this volume one of the greatest achievements in writing on visual anthropology in the last decade. - Anthropological Notebooks

Arnd Schneider and Caterina Pasqualino have brought together an innovative collection of works that challenge a number of anthropological premises through the exploration of the many and varied techniques of experimental film ... A highly engaging and provocative collection of essays that raises a number of important and challenging questions for the practice of both written and visual anthropology. - The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology - Tiffany Cone, Australian National University, Australia

Experimental Film and Anthropology represents a profound and welcome paradigm shift for visual anthropology ... Even those with a more general interest will find fresh insights into ways of thinking about, gathering, and representing anthropological knowledge and the experiences of ethnographic subjects ... I found the book a bracing tonic, well worth the demands of time and attention, and have already incorporated it in my teaching of film as a method and mode of ethnographic inquiry. - Asian Ethnology

A very interesting collection on experimental ethnographic film [that] explores some of the technical and theoretical issues and possibilities of disturbing conventional ways of seeing, thinking, and experiencing but also implicitly raises warnings about the subjectivizing of anthropological knowledge. ...a worthy addition to [Bloomsbury's] list and to the overlapping fields of art/film and anthropology. - Anthropology Review Database

[The book] successfully shows that while experimental film has been accused of an anti-representational, self-referential and art-pour-l'art approach, it does not necessarily lack resistance to normative thinking on the real. - TAJA: The Australian Journal of Anthropology

This collection of essays examines the history and points to the future of experimental ethnography. Full of insights into experimental forms and new cultural knowledges produced through experiments in audio-visual media, this book explores an eclectic group of films. Voices of anthropologists and filmmakers come together for a fresh new perspective on the intersections of experimental and ethnographic film practices. - Catherine Russell, Concordia University, Canada"

Book Information
ISBN 9780857854438
Author Arnd Schneider
Format Paperback
Page Count 222
Imprint Berg Publishers
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 408g