ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critical review of practices of experimental film-making and explores their possible relevance for anthropological research and representation. The 'cinematic metaphor of montage' has been widely discussed in relation to ethnographic writing, visual anthropology and ethnographic cinema, and phenomenologically inflected ethnographic research. By contrast, experimental cinema particularly in its 1970s version of so-called 'structuralist' or 'materialist' film. As a parallel strand to the anthropological rethinking of 'montage' which, after experimental beginnings, is now a feature of mainstream narrative cinema, the chapter explores the conceptual and theoretical potentials and challenges of experimental film-making for anthropology. To make 'visible the invisible' is a trope not unfamiliar to anthropology, and is indeed good to think with, if we consider the many phenomena which are not immediately visible or perceptible to us in ethnographic research. Alfred Gell on the anthropology of time worked on modern artist Marcel Duchamp.
