2014-06-25
0
As retailers, wholesalers, and negotiators, Asante women of Ghana dominate the huge Kumasi Central Market amid the laughter, argument, colour and music. The crew of this `Disappearing World' film have jumped into the fray, explored, and tried to explain the complexities of the market and its traders. As the film was to be about women traders, an all female film crew was selected and the rapport between the two groups of women is remarkable. The relationship was no doubt all the stronger because the anthropologist acting as advisor to the crew, Charlotte Boaitey, is herself an Asante. The people open up for the interviewers telling them about their lives as traders, about differences between men and women, in their perception of their society and also about marriage.
A short film featuring several dancers from different countries: first an Arabian dancer, then an Algerian belly dancer, and finally Scottish highlanders in kilts performing a jig. Section one is rendered in hand-color.
After a failed suicide attempt and time in a psychiatric hospital, Raffael, a young father, decides that he must create his own “missing screw.” Over the next six months, with the help of a sculptor friend, he meticulously crafts a 10-foot screw sculpture while documenting the process with a found video camera. Raffael leaves the psychiatric hospital, curious to see if art and creativity could help him survive in the outside world. With no money and only a vague plan, he says goodbye to his family and embarks on an epic, poignant, often hilarious journey around the globe. He travels with the screw to the Dachau concentration camp, Van Gogh’s grave, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Ganges River in India. Along the way Raffael finds patrons, lovers, and friends - but his son feels abandoned. Can Rafael reinvent himself, his art, and his family?
An ethnographic documentary which looks at the relationship between music and work in predominantly rural cultures. It depicts the lives of fisherman, shepherds and farmers and their relationship with music. The film also describes Basque ancestral instruments, with special emphasis on the origin and history of ‘bertsolarism’ (Basque verse singing) as a form of oral communication.
An ethnographic film that documents the efforts of four !Kung men (also known as Ju/'hoansi or Bushmen) to hunt a giraffe in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia. The footage was shot by John Marshall during a Smithsonian-Harvard Peabody sponsored expedition in 1952–53. In addition to the giraffe hunt, the film shows other aspects of !Kung life at that time, including family relationships, socializing and storytelling, and the hard work of gathering plant foods and hunting for small game.
John Gunther, a great traveler in many parts of the globe, presented on the American ABC channel the documentary program "John Gunther's High Road" from September 7, 1959 to October 1, 1960, namely 30 episodes. Two adventure trips filmed in distant places were broadcast: The first documentary film was shot exclusively for the show and the second film offered was a great classic adventure or exploit film by another director.
The darkness of the mine, invaded by the miners' light, by the noisy machines and the permanent and intense smell of ore in the air, leads us to an environment in which time and space become confused. A documentary film at Panasqueiras' Mine, between 2008/09. A reality captured by an eye-observer which does not interfere, but follows the compost that grows from the earth and is decomposed by man-machine.
Early Mondo film featuring primitive rituals, animals being butchered, unusual birth defects, and a legit trepanation scene.
"With characteristic wit and rigor, experimental filmmaker Larry Gottheim here applies his impressionistic editing style to footage collected during his travels in the Dominican Republic. Gottheim’s formal emphasis on repetition and fissures between sound and image resonates here as a mode of sociological reflection (with the fragmentary montage mirroring elements of ritual while also destabilizing the ethnographic gaze). A largely overlooked antecedent to the contemporary blending of avant-garde and ethnographic filmmaking, MACHETTE GILLETTE… MAMA still poses a potent challenge to documentary convention." - Max Goldberg
Shot with stunning elegance and clarity, NAKED SPACES explores the rhythm and ritual of life in the rural environments of six West African countries (Mauritania, Mali, Burkino Faso, Togo, Benin and Senegal). The nonlinear structure of NAKED SPACES challenges the traditions of ethnographic filmmaking, while sensuous sights and sounds lead the viewer on a poetic journey to the most inaccessible parts of the African continent: the private interaction of people in their living spaces.
John Bishop and Naomi Bishop present a portrait a peculiar life style of the Himalayan indigenous Sherpa people in their documentary , the Himalayan Herders. The 76 minutes long film is about the diverse culture and life style of herders community near Mt. Everest region of Nepal.The film was made in 1997 as a part of Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology Series.
This provocative and profound film documents the Choqela ceremony, an agricultural ritual and song of the Aymara Indians of Peru. By offering several different translations of the proceedings, the film acknowledges the problems of interpretation as an inherent dilemma of anthropology.