This new collection of essays presents the latest thoughts of one of the worlds leading ethnographic filmmakers and writers on cinema. It will provide essential reading for students in cinema studies, filmmaking, and visual anthropology. The dozen wide-ranging essays give unique insights into the history of documentary, how films evoke space, time and physical sensations, and the intellectual and emotional links between filmmakers and their subjects. In an era of reality television, historical re-enactments, and designer packaging, MacDougall defends the principles that inspired the earliest practitioners of documentary cinema. He urges us to consider how the form can more accurately reflect the realities of our everyday lives. Building on his own practice in filmmaking, he argues that this means resisting the pressures for self-censorship and the inherent ethnocentrism of our own society and those we film.

David MacDougall is an Honorary Professor in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University, Canberra

IntroductionPart I: Filmmaking as practice1 Looking with a camera2 Dislocation as method3 Camera, mind, and eye4 Environments of childhoodPart II: Film and the senses5 The third tendency in cinema6 Sensational cinema7 The experience of colour8 Notes on cinematic spacePart III: Film, anthropology and the documentary tradition9 Observation in the cinema10 Anthropology and the cinematic imagination11 Anthropological filmmaking: an empirical art12 Documentary and its doublesBibliographyFilmographyIndex