Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Epigraph
- Dedication
- Introduction: States of Curation
- 1 Curatorial Work
- 2 The Incurable-Image
- 3 Roger Bartra: Intrusion and Melancholia
- 4 Post-Mexican Fugue (Farewell to ¡Que Viva Mexico!)
- 5 The Incurable Park: Fundidora
- 6 Untimely Futures
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Epigraph
- Dedication
- Introduction: States of Curation
- 1 Curatorial Work
- 2 The Incurable-Image
- 3 Roger Bartra: Intrusion and Melancholia
- 4 Post-Mexican Fugue (Farewell to ¡Que Viva Mexico!)
- 5 The Incurable Park: Fundidora
- 6 Untimely Futures
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
MONTAGE AND ANIMATION
From the mid 1990s on many anthropologists have rallied around cinematic and media arts tropes to account for their increasingly complex fieldwork mise-en-scènes, multi-sited ethnographies, and contemporary figurations of “anthropos” and “ethnos.” In a now classic essay titled “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage” George Marcus foregrounded Soviet avant-garde film artist Dziga Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera as a powerful prototype to account for the simultaneities, movements, temporalities, and, more broadly, the non-linear dynamics generated by our multilayered fieldwork mise-en-scènes. Marcus’ essay had fascinated and inspired many of us who were training as cultural anthropologists with a medial perspective. Some of us also noted that both the status of montage as metaphor, as well as Marcus’ distinction between realist and modernist ethnographic modes, then very much necessary, would have to be qualified and shown contingent at a later stage. This amendment, we thought, would foster a new relationship between media arts and anthropology beyond the opposition between literalism and metaphoricity,1 on the one hand, and beyond the opposition between realism and modernism,2 on the other. In a recent conversation, Marcus reiterated his commitment to the initial “affinities” not only between moving-image media and anthropology but also, and more broadly, between the conceptual arts and experimental ethnography:
My own personal evolution in this direction since Writing Culture is marked by the mid 1990s essay on the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. This was before the expansion of the internet, but it did envision, in a tentative way, a terrain in which fieldwork could no longer be what it used to be. At the same time I became interested in certain projects of installation and conceptual art that involved inquiry similar to fieldwork in their production. […] While I don't think ethnography is or should be the same as these art movements, my attraction to the latter captures something in terms of practice that I think ethnographic inquiry is lacking and needs very much. (Elhaik and Marcus, 2012)
Since then, many cinephile anthropologists have suggested that we could approach media art forms by directing our attention to a “film's anthropology” and to the complex modes in which technology is always “encultured.” These anthropologists have underscored, in particular, how “studies of narrative films made by people about their own societies are often rich in ethnographic registers.”
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- The Incurable-ImageCurating Post-Mexican Film and Media Arts, pp. 21 - 55Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016