Taking the idea of the “Ethnographic Film” as a starting point this course will explore how film and video is both practiced and theorised within anthropology. The long history of anthropological filmmaking has been accompanied by contentious debates from both within and outside the discipline. Now more than ever the world encounters diversity through visual media and the ethnographic is being redefined by cultural producers whose platforms for their work are as likely to be social media sites as documentary film festivals or television. What are the dynamics of an engaged anthropologically-informed film/video practice sensitive to the transformative power of visual representations? We will explore this question using examples of films/videos that exemplify different ideas of the ethnographic. We will watch the work of visual media makers who use innovation and experimentation to contest the power relations, ethics and genre of cinematic realism many argue are inherent whenever a video camera is used to represent the lives of real people living real lives. This course will raise questions about how our understandings are mediated through film and video media; media that can present everyday realities as everything and anything, from the excruciatingly mundane to the extraordinarily exotic and spectacular. Such inquiries are inevitably reflexive and will require us to consider our own habits of desire, fascinations and situated knowledges. Thursday 7:00-10:00 pm