Documentary Resources
Below are guides, books and links that we often recommend to those who ask us for resources on documentaries, visual anthropology, and ethnographic filmmaking. If you know of a superb documentary resource not included among the links below, please email us.
Resources- A Kalahari Family website
- Jean Rouch tribute website
- Jean Rouch interviewed by John Marshall and John W. Adams
- How to Create a Curriculum Guide for Your Documentary Film
- 40 Years of Silence - General (film page)
- 40 Years of Silence - College (film page)
- Abstience Comes To Albuquerque (film page)
- Acting Like a Thief (film page)
- Afghan Nomads: The Maldar (film page)
- Ajishama - The White Ibis (film page)
- Amir (film page)
- Ancient Mariners (film page)
- Argument About Marriage, An (film page)
- Ausangate (film page)
- Ax Fight, The (film page)
- Baobab Play (film page)
- Bitter Melons (film page)
- Blooms Of Banjeli: Technology and Gender in African Ironmaking, The (film page)
- Box of Treasures (film page)
- Celebration of Origins, A (film page)
- Children Throw Toy Assegais (film page)
- Down The Project: The Crisis of Public Housing (film page)
- Faces of Change (link to series)
- Feast, The (film page)
- Feast Day of Tamar and Lashari, The (film page)
- Fit Surroundings (film page)
- From the Inside Out (film page)
- Frontier Conversation, A (film page)
- Funeral Chants from the Georgian Caucasus (film page)
- Hajari Bhand Of Rajasthan: Jester Without Court (film page)
- Hanoi Eclipse (film page)
- In Iirgu's Time (film page)
- Introduction to the Primates (film page)
- Jero Tapakan (film page)
- Joe Sun (film page)
- Lessons From Gulam (film page)
- Living Maya, The (film page)
- Magical Death (film page)
- Makiko's New World (film page)
- Man Called Bee, A (film page)
- Mahasweta Devi (film page)
- Meat Fight (film page)
- Moonblood: A Yanomamo Creation Myth as Told by Dedeheiwa (film page)
- Myth of Naro as Told by Dedeheiwa (film page)
- Myth of Naro as Told by Kaobawa (film page)
- Mr. Patterns (film page)
- N!ai, The Story of a !Kung Woman (film page)
- Red Bowmen, The (film page)
- Reindeer Thief, The (film page)
- Rite of Passage (film page)
- Shugendo Now (film page)
- Sons of Haji Omar (film page)
- Swahili Beat (film page)
- Tapir Distribution (film page)
- To Hold Our Ground (film page)
- Today the Hawk Takes One Chick (film page)
- Tsundu: Becoming a Lama (film page)
- Tubabs In Africa Study Guide (film page)
- Tug of War - Bushmen (film page)
- (Un)veiled (film page)
- Uprising of '34, The (film page)
- Wandering Warrior (film page)
- Wasp Nest (film page)
- Water and the Dream of the Engineers (film page)
- Yoyo Man (film page)
- Anthropology (5)
- Archives (4)
- Documentary News (5)
- Film Festivals (22)
- Media Advocacy (5)
- Movie Archives (2)
- Social Issues (3)
- Supporting Educational Materials
Documentary Study Guides in PDF
Documentary Production
Details the process of making documentary films from structuring an idea to controlling crew and participants during a shoot.
The second edition of MDFV fully updates the popular guidebook that has given readers around the world the knowledge and confidence to produce their first documentary film.
Comprehensive guide to making documentary films and video.
Technical book on planning and executing shots. Presents a wide variety of approaches to filmic composition.
A sequel to Katz other book, it offers insights into filmic composition and direction from a wide variety of directors.
A technical book on creating film budgets, includes details on documentary budgets large and small. Line-by-line budgets included in book.
Information about resources, risk capital, pre-sales, finding investors, and case studies from independent filmmakers.
Templates, detailed explanations and legal advise concerning intellectual property contracts and movie production. Geared toward British law, but suitable for understanding U.S. contracts.
Covers most of the useful contracts for producers ranging from music license rights to depiction and copyright release.
General guide to digital filmmaking and production from low-cost techniques to promotion.
Documentary History and Theory
In this new edition, Karl Heider thoroughly updates Ethnographic Film to reflect developments in the field over the three decades since its publication, focusing on the work of four seminal filmmakers — Jean Rouch, John Marshall, Robert Gardner, and Timothy Asch.
The most thorough resource on Jean Rouch available in any language, Ciné-Ethnography makes clear this remarkable and still vital filmmaker's major role in the history of documentary cinema. A long-overdue English-language resource that distills Rouch's thinking on filmmaking, ethnography, and his own career.
The authors provide the first critical history and in-depth appraisal of the observational cinema movement and make a new case for the importance of observational work in an emerging experimental anthropology.
A comprehensive guide to visual anthropology and the use of film in ethnographic research. This book is an excellent guide for ethnographic research, and for film and other media instruction concerned with cross-cultural representation.
An important ethnographic filmmaker's frank ruminations on his life-long documentary subject: the !Kung of Africa. Marshall addresses pioneering field techniques as well as the dispossession of the !Kung.
Though relatively unsung in the English-speaking world, Jean Rouch (1917-2004) was a towering figure of ethnographic cinema. Over the course of a fifty-year career, he completed over one hundred films, both documentary and fiction, and exerted an influence far beyond academia.
The first volume of essays dedicated to Gardner's work — a corpus of aesthetically arresting films which includes the classic Dead Birds, Rivers of Sand, and Forest of Bliss. Eminent anthropologists, philosophers, film theorists, and fellow artists assess the innovations of his films and the controversies they've spawned.
More than the chronicle of a single work, this detailed and candid account of the making of Dead Birds is also a thoughtful examination of what it meant to record the violent rituals of warrior-farmers in the New Guinea highlands and to present to the world a graphic story of their behavior as a window onto our own.
Including nearly 500 photographs, The Impulse to Preserve contains the thoughts and images of a lifetime spent probing human experience in the world's most remote corners.
Making Forest of Bliss, the first in Harvard Film Archive's series "Voices and Visions in Film," presents a dialogue between Gardner and his colleague anthropologist Ákos Östör, illustrated with more than 150 images captured from the film.
A compassionate and ethical history of documentary films providing such breadth that most people will want to reread several times to absorb Barnouw's rich historical information.
Important documentary film scholar that comprehensively, but succinctly covers the issues surrounding documentary history and criticism.
Analysis of important documentaries that have defined the field of documentary filmmaking.
Highly recommended handbook on documentary and ethnographic filmmaking with information on shooting, funding, distribution and ethics.
Provides counter theory and critical insight into some of the more widely established documentary issues.
A series of thirteen interviews from documentary filmmakers such as Nick Broomfield to Albert Maysles.
A series of essays ranging from the influence of early-documentary filmmaking to digital filmmaking's influence and possible destruction of the documentary form.
Covers many ethical issues surrounding documentary filmmaking especially in regard to contemporary television forms.
A survey of the development and achievements of documentary films from the 1920s to 1970. The books includes the writings of nearly 100 filmmakers and critics.
A compilation of edited articles from important documentary scholars and filmmakers. Offers more depth than general documentary history books.
Extensively covers anthropological research as it relates to photography.
This book presents visual anthropology as a work-in-progress, open to the myriad innovations that the new audiovisual communications technologies bring to the field.
Illustrated anthology of essays published in Visual Anthropology Review from 1990 to 1994. Contains essays from indigenous media to postmodern theories on documentary filmmaking.
Important academic scholar of visual anthropology who covers a variety of topics as it relates to ethics, research, ethnographic image making, and important filmmakers such as Tim Asch and Robert Garner.
Technically focused book covering aspects of visual research, especially as it relates to sociology. The book focuses on photography as a research tool.
A collection of essays on films representation of the other and the creation of cultural understanding from that representation.
Exploration of visual ethnographic research qualitative abilities and the problems associated with visual information. Extensive review here.
This book explores early-twentieth-century representations of non-Western indigenous people in films ranging from the documentary to the spectacular to the scientific. (From the Publisher)
A collection of essays by leading anthropologists covering topics from Balinese television to the study of landscapes from the perspective of visual anthropology.
A collection of essays on the history of visual anthropology and issues surrounding the field. Important are the challanges to thinking that visual anthropology is just a visual record of traditional ethnography.
A history and analysis of visual ethnographic image making from important historical figures such as Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Jean Rouch, and David and Judith MacDougall.
An overview of visual perception in how it relates to drawing, problem-solving, and mind-brain interaction. The book contains puzzles, experiments, and problems.
Excellent resource and theorizing on visual communication, especially in using the visual form for learning and teaching.
Ma vie avec les Ovahimba is a moving testimony about the years anthropologist and filmmaker Rina Sherman spent in the Namibian village of Etanga. She offers both a scientific and a woman's point of view as seen through the lens of her film and photographic cameras. In French.
Documentary Links:
|
|
|
