Início do EIAV para o público em geral: 04/11
Horário: 09h00 - 10h00
Credenciamento:
Local: Saguão da Casa da Cultura Japonesa
10h00-12h00
Conferência de Abertura
Peter Crawford (AArhus University, Dinamarca)
The character, the plot and the spectacle. Anthropological challenges and narrativity in ethnographic and observational cinema
Film is about something, but so is anthropology. Lying behind my very inclusive attempt of delineating what an ethnographic film is, is that these two ‘abouts’ must somehow be seen to be compatible and inform one another. I have spent more than thirty years fighting for ethnographic film and visual anthropology to be permissible in mainstream anthropology. Realizing that anthropologists too were story-tellers, the concept of narrative increasingly infused the debates with issues that in many ways reopened the doors to the world of film, most possibly because narrative film had become the most common form of cinematic structuration, not only in fiction films but also in documentary and ethnographic films. Film, being both record and language, obviously offered ways of looking at some cultural aspects which word-based research could only manage with great difficulty, perhaps most evidently those aspects that relate to what we now describe as the ‘corporeal’ and forms of embodied culture and knowledge, involving the senses in a more direct way than the intellect. The purpose of this seminar is to trace the theoretical implications of these developments, and take into account how they have been affected by technological developments in the history of cinema and the question how they possibly currently are undergoing even more radical changes due to digital media technology, which we already know has revolutionized our ability to produce and give access to ‘information’, the question remaining being whether it may also assist us finding new ways of procuring anthropological ‘knowledge’ or possibly even new forms of knowledge? Those of us involved in ethnographic film and visual anthropology, who have been arguing that the use of audio-visual means cannot but improve the anthropological endeavour, should perhaps realise that time has come to raise more awkward and challenging questions, acknowledging that there are, at least potentially, also serious tensions between the agendas of anthropology as an academic discipline and cinema as a form of art.
(com tradução simultânea)
Local: Auditório da Casa da Cultura Japonesa
