ABSTRACT
It is a risky business to write seriously about the historical film. The social sciences in general have shown a profoundly skeptical attitude toward the cinema. Anthropology, for example, long resisted using film technology as a tool of research, despite what would seem the obvious potential for visual observation the medium provides. When ethnographers hesitatingly adopted film as one technique of observation, notably through the practice elaborated by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in their work in Bali, they were concerned to control the use of film through properly ethnographic guidelines. For Mead, this meant a strategy of observation grounded in the “holistic” vision provided by long takes from one observational position and by the all-encompassing long shot. “Fragmentation”—the effects of film editing in the mid to late 1930s that Mead associated with fiction-was to be avoided, as was the calculated mise en scène of documentary films of the period. Moreover, Mead argued that film as an instrument of observation belonged to the stage of work that preceded conceptualization and that film data should ultimately be examined, sorted, and reduced to written analysis.
