Does Ethnographic Film (Still) Matter? Reflections on the Genre in a World of Multimodality

Abstract

For almost a century ethnographic filmmakers liked to think of their work as the radical alternative to a hidebound textual anthropology. Such claims are now increasingly challenged. On the one hand, the rise of “experimental’ or “multimodal” scholarship has changed the existing terms of debate about alternative modes of anthropological practice. On the other hand, debates about the decolonization (or decanonization) of the discipline have served to underline long-standing problems in conventional narratives of the tradition of ethnographic film. What is the future for ethnographic film? Is it now an obsolete form, superseded or absorbed into the broader and more diverse category of multimodal anthropology? Or is there a case to be made for retaining its distinctiveness as a mode of inquiry?