American ethnographic film and personal documentary the Cambridge turn - MacDonald, Scott (University of California Press, 2013)
Includes bibliographical references and index
"American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary is a critical history of American filmmakers crucial to the development of ethnographic film and personal documentary. The Boston and Cambridge area is notable for nurturing these approaches to documentary film via institutions such as the MIT Film Section and the Film Study Center, the Carpenter Center and the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard. Scott MacDonald uses pragmatism's focus on empirical experience as a basis for measuring the groundbreaking achievements of such influential filmmakers as John Marshall, Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch, Ed Pincus, Miriam Weinstein, Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee, Robb Moss, Nina Davenport, Steve Ascher and Jeanne Jordan, Michel Negroponte, John Gianvito, Alexander Olch, Amie Siegel, Ilisa Barbash, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. By exploring the cinematic, personal, and professional relationships between these accomplished filmmakers, MacDonald shows how a pioneering, engaged, and uniquely cosmopolitan approach to documentary developed over the past half century."--
Cover; American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary; Title; Copyright; Dedication; CONTENTS; Introduction; A Tentative Overview of Boston-Area Documentary Filmmaking; Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary; Pragmatism: Learning from Experience; The Mission of American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn; Subjects for Further Research; Acknowledgments; 1. Lorna and John Marshall; Beginnings: Lorna Marshall and First Film; John Marshall: The Hunters; Idylls of the !Kung; Pedagogy; Expulsion from Eden: Bitter Melons and N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman
The Pittsburgh Police Films and Brakhage's EyesPutting Down the Camera and Picking Up the Shovel; The Road Taken: A Kalahari Family; A Process in Time; 2. Robert Gardner; East Coast/West Coast: Early Experiments; Gardner and the Marshalls; Dead Birds; The Experience of Filmmaking as Thought Process; Robert Fulton: Reality's Invisible-"Serious Playing Around"; Screening Room: Midnight Movies; City Symphony: Forest of Bliss; The Return of the Repressed: Ika Hands; Still Journeying On: Unfinished Examinations of a Life; Studio7Arts: Sharon Lockhart's Double Tide and Robert Fenz's Correspondence
3. Timothy AschDodoth Morning and the Ethnographic Deadpan; Asch and the Yanomamo; The Ax Fight; 4. Ed Pincus and the Emergence of Personal Documentary; The Miriam Weinstein Quartet and Richard P. Rogers's Elephants: Fragments of an Argument; Ed Pincus's Diaries (1971-1976); Alfred Guzzetti: Family Portrait Sittings; Guzzetti: It's a Small World; Guzzetti: Time Exposure; 5. Alfred Guzzetti and Personal Cinema; Air; Experimental Video: "Language Lessons"; Scylla and Charybdis; Still Point; 6. Ross McElwee; Finding a Muse: Charleen