Ethnographic film

An ethnographic film is a non-fiction film, often similar to a documentary film, historically dealing with non-Western people, and sometimes associated with anthropology.

Origins

Prospector, explorer and eventual filmmaker, Robert J. Flaherty, is considered to be the forefather of ethnographic film. His film Nanook of the North falls into the second category, combining home movie, documentary and stagecraft. Flaherty's attempts to realistically portray Inuit people (although he actually used actors and staged a good deal of the production) were nevertheless valuable pictures of a little-known way of life, viewers none-the-less saw his films as "real". Flaherty was not trained in anthropology, but he did have good relationships with his subjects.

The contribution of Felix-Louis Regnault should be noted as his project may have started the movement. He was filming a Wolof woman making pottery without the aid of a wheel at the Exposition Ethnographique de l'Afrique Occidentale. He published his findings in 1895. His later films followed the same subject, described to capture the "cross cultural study of movement". He then proposed there to be an archive of anthropological film after becoming more experienced with motion pictures.