NYU Doctoral students Alia Ayman and Melissa Lefkowitz recently published an edited transcript of their organized panel discussion “Making the Rounds: Ethnographic Film in Circulation” in the Cultural Anthropology website’s Visual and New Media Review. The event featured five anthropologists, filmmakers, and industry professionals whose work is integral to thinking about ethnographic film today to discuss their perspectives on the genre: Alice Apley, Executive Director of Documentary Educational Resources; Rachel Chanoff, Director of THE OFFICE performing arts + film; Faye Ginsburg, David B. Kriser Professor and Director of the Center for Media, Culture, and History at New York University; Toby Lee, Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University; and Pegi Vail, Associate Director of the Center for Media, Culture and History. You can read more about the event here.
Ayman and Lefkowitz organized the event to explore how ethnographic film, as a genre of filmmaking whose definition is often contested, becomes stabilized through particular practices that aim to mark it as a recognizable category of cultural production. Instead of focusing on the genre’s history, they locate the reproduction of the genre in its afterlife. Turning their attention to infrastructures of distribution and exhibition, they posed the following questions: How does ethnographic film travel? Who are the actors involved? How is the category itself being produced and redefined through festivals, distribution companies, scholarly production, and educational institutions?
