The multipart film: extended anthropological analysis and non-textual forms

Abstract

Ethnographic filmmakers have long struggled to make a case for the intellectual seriousness of their work. Although this is changing, especially in certain areas of the discipline (sensory ethnography, collaborative research, for example), the kinds of inquiry the medium of film facilitates is often not clear to those whose familiarity lies exclusively with written argument-based forms. Another problem for the ethnographic filmmaker, hitherto unacknowledged, is the dominance of the self-standing film and the limitations it places on the analytical possibilities of their medium. This article explores the potential of a multi-part work as an important alternative. Drawing on selected films of David MacDougall (To Live With Herds, the Turkana Trilogy and the Doon School series), it highlights his experimentation with academic form. Offering fresh insight into MacDougall’s contribution to an intellectually ambitious agenda for filmmaking in anthropology, it raises questions about the nature and scope of analytical work pursued outside of the discipline’s established textual conventions. How might multipart work offer an important example of how film can function as a medium for extended anthropological inquiry?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author is grateful to the anonymous readers for their critical input and editorial suggestions. She is also grateful for the generous support and encouragement of David MacDougall in the development of this work

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] Llewelyn-Davies is an important exception. See Grimshaw (2001). The rise of Netflix, Hulu and other streaming services has changed the media landscape in important ways. Not least it has precipitated a range of novel production and viewing practices. Particularly prominent is the emergence of the mini-series. It is not yet clear what analytical possibilities such a genre opens up for anthropology.

[2] MacDougall asserts that there is no straightforward continuity between these modes of anthropology. Crucial to his understanding of the distinction between an image-and-sequence and a word-sentence approach is ‘excess’ (Barthes 1977). Interpretive possibilities in the case of the former are open; for the latter, meaning is more tightly controlled.

[3] The film has four parts or movements, whose relationship to one another is not based around a developmental logic but generates a series of poetic connections and resonances across the work as a whole. MacDougall has long acknowledged a debt to Wright’s, Song of Ceylon, in the development of his own cinematic sensibility (MacDougall 1995).

[4] MacDougall Dossier, unpublished ms. Quoted with permission.

[5] MacDougall Dossier.

[6] MacDougall Dossier.

[7] Grimshaw and Ravetz (2009); Sharma (2011); Vaughan 2006.

[8] Bateson and Mead (1942) recognised the intangible web of cultural resonances that exceeded linguistic description, what they called ‘ethos’.

[9] Although MacDougall’s publications (1998, 2006, 2019) have laid the foundations for an intellectually ambitious visual anthropology, the potential of the multipart film as a new analytical form, has not been directly addressed in his writing. However, he touches on it in his important essays on the Doon School series.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Grimshaw

Anna Grimshaw is the author of The Ethnographer’s Eye (2001) and co-author of Observational Cinema (2009).   Over a number of years, she has been making films in Machiasport, a small fishing town in Downeast Maine.  In 2013 she completed a four-part film work, Mr Coperthwaite: a life in the Maine Woods (Berkeley Media/RAI), a companion piece, A Chair: in six parts (RAI), and At Low Tide (RAI). She teaches anthropology at Emory University.