ABSTRACT
The term ‘observational cinema’ has been applied to a range of different documentary film-making practices, some of which are based on mutually contradictory principles and strategies. At one extreme, it has been used to denote film-making in which there is no engagement with the subjects, who are filmed remotely, as if from a watchtower, in the interests of maintaining a supposedly ‘scientific’ objectivity. At another extreme, it can be used of television documentaries which feature slightly longer takes, slighdy less commentary and slightly fewer interviews than is normal in such productions. However, the ‘observational cinema’ that I shall be concerned with in this article is the documentary practice that first developed in the late 1960s around the Ethnographic Film Training Programme at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
