Anthropologists go to the movies: observations on the constitution of the movie as field

Abstract

The object of this paper is to identify and analyze the most important anthropology works dealing with feature films, searching for the specificities of the anthropological view on movies. My motivation arises from my difficulty in finding systematic information on anthropological methods in film-analysis and previous researches on this line. What is presented here is mostly the result of a bibliographic research. Of special relevance is the series of fi1m—ana1ysis in the context of the Studies of Culture at a Distance, made at C0lumbia University from 1947 to l95 3. Recently, there has been new approaches on the analysis of anthropological questions through movies and the analysis of movies through anthropology, for instance on experimental ethnographies. Therefore, this research reveals a short history of an anthropology of movies and identifies some methods and interpretative practices which should help those anthropologists who are interested in images.