This study explores issues of technique, methodology and style in ethnographic/documentary films, with a focus on Sardinia. How are cultural realities constructed in documentary and ethnographic films? In what ways do practical filmmaking strategies reflect wider epistemological questions and ethical concerns? The thesis examines the general stylistic principles that have guided the making of a substantial body of documentary films about Sardinia. Attention has been paid to a range of different methods used by a select number of documentary and ethnographic filmmakers, covering important theoretical points on the distinctive set of technical, aesthetic and ethical problems embodied in the epistemology of their filmmaking practice.

The study concludes that scholars should look for a more balanced fusion between film as a multisensory medium of ideas and forms of ethnographic enquiry conducted through language. The nonverbal elements and visual imagery in ethnographic/documentary films suggest obliquely that a kind of knowledge expressed in the concrete case requires an acknowledgment of domains of experience that often elude written expression.

Documentary film, observational style and postmodern anthropology in Sardinia: a visual anthropology

This paper historicizes American cities after the Second World War through the rich motif of noir literature and film. But, in doing so, the paper is also a critical consideration of noir's work in...

Cities in Shade: Urban Geography and the Uses of Noir

Todd Berliner’s book is certainly one of the best I have seen about 1970s cinema. Berliner noticed that the films of that decade just didn’t make sense in the usual way that Hollywood studio cookie-cutter films of the 1940s and 1950s did. Leslie Halliwell, once a presumptive touchstone of popular taste, complained about the ‘‘arrogance’’ of the 1970s filmmakers, objecting to the narrative peculiarities of their films. But that alleged ‘‘arrogance’’ was exactly what made them appealing to audiences of the generation after Halliwell’s. Berliner calls that ‘‘arrogance’’ narrative perversity, and celebrates it as one component that set the films of that decade apart from all others, and also helped to make them popular. Berliner is especially interested in American filmmakers influenced by European and Asian art cinema, who then began creating odd, moody, ambiguous, and unpredictable characters populating looser narrative structures dominated by elliptical, disrupting flashbacks, and flashforwards, influenced by films as diverse ad Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Bergman’s Persona, and rendering both characters and plots mysterious and inscrutible. Especially influenced himself by the narrational notions of David Bordwell and others, Berliner should be able to press forward with more confidence than he sometimes seems able to muster. Nonetheless, during this experimental period, American cinema became less parochial and more interesting, more mature, and sophisticated than it had heretofore been. Some films got multiple viewings because viewers just were not sure what had conspired (in such films as Antonioni’s Blow-Up or Kurosawa’s Rashomon, for example). Berliner takes a particular interest in the creative implications of many of the films Tino Balio describes in his book Foreign Film Renaissance (2010). I only wish that Berliner’s book had been published earlier, before The Encyclopedia of Francis Ford Coppola (which I co-authored) was published, for I believe Berliner’s thesis unlocks one of the secrets of Coppola’s success. No book has so far explained Coppola’s process of serialization so well as Berliner, and the subsequent success of Godfather II, which is, apparently, another exercise in ‘‘narrative perversity.’’ By 1974, Berliner claims, ‘‘seventies narrative design was dirmly established, and The Godfather, Part II epitomizes that form’’ (88). The family was perverse, the morality was perverse, and so was the fable, so the ‘‘perverse’’ treatment made it all of a piece. Audiences not only noticed this, but loved it. The strategy was brilliant. The last two chapters examine the ‘‘limits of seventies narrative design’’ as evidenced in two films, Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and the John Cassavetes film, Woman Under the Influence (1974), each intended to demonstrate both the ‘‘extremes’’ and the ‘‘commercial hazards’’ of this newly discovered ‘‘narrative perversity.’’ Of course, other scholars (like David Cook, for example) noticed that many of the films of the 1970s were artistically innovative. Peter Lev linked that innovation to the decade’s ‘‘conflicting ideological currents.’’ But explaining ideology and culture won’t necessarily explain box-office popularity, or what, exactly, the ‘‘innovations’’ involved, or why they caught on with popular audiences. Todd Berliner does just that, and that is why this book is so important. In conclusion: Don’t attempt to teach the 1970s without it. This is surely one of the most important film books of the decade, pure and simply. Ignore it at your own risk. Note: Jim Welsh is coauthor and coeditor (with Rodney Hill and the Rev. Gene D. Phillips, S. J.) of The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclopedia, published in 2010 by The Scarecrow Press. —Jim Welsh Salisbury University, Emeritus

Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema

Ethnography and Exhibition: The Child Audience, The Hays Office and Saturday Matinees

Scholars generally have studied the emergence of American film stars in one of two ways: as an aesthetic, cultural phenomenon or as part of the larger story of corporate consolidation in the film industry. This article combines these approaches, arguing that the early film star played two overlapping roles. Within the new long feature films, stars served as focal points for continuity across complex narratives; within the new vertically integrated film corporations, they became focal points for the coordination of production, distribution, and promotion. The article concludes by suggesting that the interconnections between aesthetic practice and industrial organization bear further examination.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0007680500058608

Incorporating the Star: The Intersection of Business and Aesthetic Strategies in Early American Film

We are currently in the midst of a theoretical re-examination of thirdperson voice-over narration. Rejected by documentarians and critics alike as authoritarian, elitist, oppressive, and offensive, the technique has been in disfavor for two decades, while other structures-cinema verite, the interview film-have held sway. Critical opinion has now come to the conclusion (presaged by Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961]), that the avoidance of narration is no guarantee of egalitarianism or objectivity, that "showing" is really just another and more covert form of "telling," about which one might have more political/moral squeamishness. Mary Ann Doane, following Pascal Bonitzer,' believes that documentaries which eschew narration actually promote: the illusion that reality speaks and is not spoken, that the film is not a constructed discourse. In effecting an "impression of knowledge," a knowledge which is given and not produced, the film conceals its own work and posits itself as a voice without a subject. The voice is even more powerful in silence. The solution, then, is not to banish the voice but to construct another politics.2

Sarah Kozloff

Papers

Humanizing "The Voice of God": Narration in The Naked City

Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling by Jason Mittell (review)