X-Nico

3 unusual facts about Ethnographic film


Ethnographic film

Napoleon Chagnon and Tim Asch's two famous films, The Ax Fight and The Feast (filmed in the 1960s), are intimately documented ethnographic accounts of an Amazonian rainforest people, the Yanomamo.

Robert Gardner and Karl Heider were among the first to carefully plan the use of filming and editing as crucial research techniques.

The Academy Award-winning film Black Orpheus can be considered another milestone in the second category.


Montxo Armendáriz

Tasio (1984), Armendáriz's debut as full length feature film director, traces the generational history of the title character, a charcoal burner in the Urbasa mountains, whose threaten way of life is detail in a series of elliptical sequences in a visual style that approximates ethnographic cinema.

Salt for Svanetia

As one of the earliest ethnographic films, it documents the life of the Svan people in the isolated mountain village of Ushguli in Svanetia, in the northwestern part of the Georgian Soviet Republic.

Salvage ethnography

Salvage ethnography started to be applied methodically in visual anthropology as ethnographic film since the fifties by filmmakers such as Jean Rouch in France, Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault in Canada, or António Campos in Portugal (early sixties), followed by others (seventies).


see also

Barbara Myerhoff

This was first documented in the 1976 ethnographic film Number Our Days, directed by Lynne Littman.

The Ax Fight

The Ax Fight (1975) is an ethnographic film by anthropologist and filmmaker Tim Asch and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon about a conflict in a Yanomami village called Mishimishimabowei-teri, in southern Venezuela.