Observational Cinema

DAVID MACDOUGALL
Australian National University, Australia

Observational cinema is a mode of documentary filmmaking that has historically had

a close relationship with ethnographic filmmaking and the emergence of the field of
visual anthropology. The term itself, however, is more recent and is usually attributed
to Colin Young, although in 1971 Richard Leacock was already speaking of “observa-
tional, observing films” and, as early as 1938, John Grierson wrote of “this fresh new art
of observation and reality” (Grierson 1938, 138; Leacock 1971, 215). In his essay “Ob-
servational Cinema” published in 1975, Young sought to distinguish filmmaking built
around fragmentation and synthesis (a cinema created as a didactic presentation or
spectacle for the audience) from filmmaking that looked at the world from the less priv-
ileged position of an attentive observer, sharing this perspective with the film viewer.
Young saw observational cinema as a fulfillment of the unique possibilities opened up
by the invention of the motion picture camera, “to do what only the camera can do, that
which even the fastest speed writer or stenographer in the field could never do—record
actuality in a form that when replayed, allows a viewer elsewhere to have a sense of expe-
riencing the event.” Far from conceiving of the camera as a simple recording device,
a “surveyor’s instrument,” or a means of arriving at a single objective scientific truth,
Young stressed the subjective, contingent role of the observer.
Observational cinema emerged as a new mode of filmmaking and anthropological
communication in the 1960s, but it owed much to earlier developments in both cinema
and anthropology. Colin Young’s ideal of a cinema that allowed others to see what the
filmmaker had seen is clearly evident in some of the first films ever made, including
those of the Lumière Company in the 1890s and those by scientists such as W. Baldwin
Spencer, who used a motion picture camera as early as 1901 to film Aranda rituals in
Central Australia. Even earlier, anthropologists had taken great interest in the visible
aspects of culture, using drawings and photographs extensively in their publications.
Although this interest declined during the interwar period as anthropology took a turn
toward more abstract aspects of culture such as kinship and belief systems, cinematog-
raphy continued to be used as a form of data collection about rituals and technology.
Steps toward broader uses of observational filming in anthropology were taken by Gre-
gory Bateson and Margaret Mead (1942) in their study of child rearing and personality
in Bali and New Guinea in the 1930s. The project used still photography and film exten-
sively to record interactions between mothers and their children. Mead and Bateson’s
intellectual interests in filming differed, however. Mead’s primary interest was in the
use of film to document and justify her findings, whereas Bateson regarded filming as
a more active and analytical method of research.

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1535
2 O B S E R VAT I O N A L C I N E M A

The emergence of observational cinema was encouraged by new developments in fic-

tion filmmaking in the postwar period. One response to the chaos of the war and the
postwar years was the work of the Italian neorealist directors, notably Roberto Rossellini
and Vittorio de Sica. Neorealism rejected the froth and artifice of much previous Italian
film production, especially melodramas and the “white telephone” films, which ignored
the lives of ordinary Italians, particularly the underprivileged. Instead, neorealist films
focused in detail on the undramatic moments of everyday life, often allowing scenes to
play out in real time and avoiding the fragmentation and multiple camera angles that
characterized most fiction films. Neorealist films also looked at the mean streets and
urban interiors that had previously been largely invisible in the cinema. Ordinary peo-
ple rather than professionals were often cast as actors, and the possibility of observing
their natural behavior, rather than a performance was integral to the new realist aes-
thetic. The shift was celebrated by the French film critic André Bazin (1967, 14), who
advocated a “cinema of duration” that would permit a different kind of engagement on
the part of the viewer. Viewers were meant to watch and learn on their own terms as
much as on those of the director.
Soon nonfiction films too were beginning to reject the assumptions of earlier work,
aided by developments in camera technology. Most nonfiction films up until the 1960s
were either of a didactic variety, with a dominant voice-over commentary supported
by disconnected images, or semipoetic evocations of human society, typified by the
documentaries made in Britain under the aegis of John Grierson. Both approaches
used images in an illustrative or symbolic way rather than as a means of giving the
viewer greater access to specific events. Both tended to treat human beings as types
or in the mass and were more about general social forces than the life of individuals.
An important exception was the work of Robert Flaherty who, although he tended to
romanticize people in other societies, paid close attention to their everyday lives, start-
ing with Nanook of the North in 1922.
Lightweight cameras and sound recorders, which had their origins in newsreel pro-
duction and wartime technology, were developed further in the 1950s and 1960s and,
together with more sensitive film stocks, made possible new forms of documentary,
characterized by synchronous sound and smaller production units, sometimes of only
two or three persons. Films that had previously required large crews and heavy equip-
ment could now be made almost anywhere, under almost any conditions.
The Direct Cinema movement in the United States and cinéma vérité in Canada and
France were crucial to the emergence of observational cinema but differed from it in
several respects. What they all had in common was the use of lightweight, maneuver-
able equipment and an interest in recording spontaneous events. Direct Cinema films
by Albert and David Maysles, such as Salesman (1969), and films made by Richard Lea-
cock and Donn A. Pennebaker for Robert Drew at Time Inc., such as Primary (1960)
and The Chair (1963), tended to rely on events with a built-in dramatic structure of
conflict, climax, and resolution, while many of the cinéma vérité films, such as La lutte
(Wrestling) (1961), Lonely Boy (1961), and Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Sum-
mer, 1961) were without a single identifiable author behind the camera. Crucially, they
lacked the sense of a sustained personal encounter between filmmaker and subject that
we nowadays tend to associate with observational cinema.
 O B S E R VAT I O N A L C I N E M A 3

Although many of these forms were similar, what distinguished observational cinema
from other kinds of documentary filmmaking was its commitment to inquiry rather
than presentation and its positioning of the filmmaker as observer at the center of the
film. The spirit of inquiry inspired a number of other approaches to documentary as
well. One of the most widely influential was the National Film Board of Canada’s Chal-
lenge for Change Program directed by George Stoney, which sought to use film and video
as a means of social activism in endangered communities.
Apart from maneuverability, the most significant feature of the new camera equip-
ment was its ability to record sound synchronously, particularly speech. Almost all
earlier documentaries had lacked spoken dialogue, even though this had been routine
in fiction films since the 1930s. In consequence, most of the human beings who
appeared in documentaries were exemplars of general types rather than individuals,
and any speech in the film was reserved for the commentary about them. With
the newfound ability to record synchronous sound in the field, nonfiction films
were suddenly filled with speech, most of it spontaneous conversations or interview
material.
This had major implications for anthropological filmmaking. If people were now
speaking, it was obvious that viewers would want to know what they were saying. Sub-
titles had long been a standard feature of fiction films in foreign languages, and they
now began to appear in ethnographic films, some of the first by John Marshall, Tim-
othy Asch, and David and Judith MacDougall. The subtitling of speech had important
further consequences. People of other societies, who until now had been largely anony-
mous figures, could be portrayed as distinct individuals, exhibiting a wide range of
personality types. Their everyday conversations, and not just more formalized uses of
language, could be a way of revealing important aspects of their culture. Above all,
speech in ethnographic films gave newfound access to the intellectual and emotional
lives of individuals in other societies.
Filmmakers began using recorded speech in diverse ways, establishing varied
approaches to documentary filmmaking. Some filmmakers recorded only spontaneous
conversations; others also used the camera to include their own interactions with their
subjects. These interactions were sometimes formal interviews in which the subject
responded to questions, but frequently they were more like conversations in which
the subjects spoke informally about their lives and the events going on around them.
Sometimes the two kinds of speech were inextricably mixed, as in Gary Kildea’s Celso
and Cora (1983), in which the two main protagonists talk alternately to the filmmaker
and to each other. A few films became virtual monologues by the film subjects, as in
Tanya Ballantyne’s The Things I Cannot Change (1966). In including such material,
these films were not necessarily less observational than the others; they had simply
broadened their approach to include the kinds of interactions that would be a normal
part of fieldwork. Melissa Llewelyn-Davies’s ethnographic film The Women’s Olamal
(1984) uses just such low-key exchanges to illuminate the place of women in Maasai
society. It was only when documentary films began to be composed almost entirely of
interviews and archival footage that they veered significantly away from observational
cinema.
4 O B S E R VAT I O N A L C I N E M A

Most observational films focus on one person or a group of persons and follow the
events in their lives, using a more or less chronological structure. This has the effect of
involving the audience in a manner not unlike that of fiction films. Thus observational
films, in abandoning the editing structures and heavy reliance on melodrama of
traditional fiction films, often retain, like the Italian neorealist films before them,
the forward movement of narrative cinema. In the case of ethnographic films, this
approach proves valuable in allowing viewers to understand better the kinds of social
forces bearing upon individuals as they negotiate the dramas of community life. Films
such as Charlie Nairn’s Ongka’s Big Moka (1976) and Jean Rouch’s Jaguar (1967)
exemplify this approach.
In their book Observational Cinema (2009), Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz
trace the history of observational cinema and its links with anthropology to the circle
of filmmakers around Colin Young and the Ethnographic Film Program at the Uni-
versity of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in the late 1960s. This group included,
among others, Joan Churchill, Richard Hawkins, David Hancock, Herbert di Gioia,
David MacDougall, Judith MacDougall, Mark McCarty, Hubert Smith, Chick Strand,
and Neil Reichline. The program was created by Young, head of the film school, and
Walter Goldschmidt, then head of the UCLA anthropology department, to bring young
filmmakers and anthropologists together with the aim of producing useful collabora-
tions between them, a model later adopted by the Granada Television ethnographic
series Disappearing World in Britain. This initially produced groundbreaking films like
The Village (1968), made by Mark McCarty and the anthropologist Paul Hockings, and
in the longer run produced several filmmaker-anthropologists committed to develop-
ing new forms of visual anthropology.
Although Grimshaw and Ravetz’s (2009) book emphasizes the role of the UCLA
program, observational cinema owed much to developments in European documen-
tary, including Chris Marker’s exploratory cinema, especially Le joli mai (The Lovely
Month of May, 1963), and the collaborative cinema of Jean Rouch and his associates
in West Africa, which Rouch dubbed anthropologie partagée, or “shared anthropology”
(Rouch 2003, 45). Another important influence was John Marshall’s intimate filming
of Ju|’hoansi everyday life in the Kalahari Desert of southwest Africa, such as A Group
of Women (1961) and A Joking Relationship (1962), which were characterized by his
deep personal involvement with his subjects and his interest in filming spontaneous
conversations. He developed this observational approach further when filming Titicut
Follies (1967) with Frederick Wiseman and in films about the Pittsburgh police, such
as Three Domestics (1971). Another key figure was Robert Young, whose work on Asen
Balickci’s Netsilik Eskimo series (1963–68) and the film Cortile Cascino (1962) was
marked by skillful use of the camera to film the nuances of interpersonal behavior.
At about the same time, Roger Sandall was using an observational approach to film
Australian Aboriginal rituals and their social context. Earlier, the Argentine filmmaker
Jorge Prelorán had begun using a sound recorder as another kind of observational
tool, recording the personal testimonies of individuals in marginal parts of Argentine
society and later combining these with observations of their everyday lives, made
in short takes with a spring-wind 16-mm camera. The anthropological knowledge
that these films conveyed was not the knowledge of explanation but of individual
 O B S E R VAT I O N A L C I N E M A 5

experience and agency. It was grounded in the encounter between filmmaker and
subject, of which the film was also evidence. While it observed, it did so from the
engaged and analytical position of an ethnographic fieldworker.
Observational cinema has in many respects been defined by the filmmaker and cine-
matographer being one and the same person. The film then represents a conjunction of
visual and intellectual perspectives. This has led to a large number of films in which the
filmmaker operates alone or with one other person, a feat made increasingly possible by
the introduction of digital video cameras in the 1990s. Many other observational films
have been made by a cinematographer working with a director, who may also act as the
film’s sound recordist. Notable for such work is Frederick Wiseman, who forged a close
working relationship with the cinematographer William Brayne on such films as Hos-
pital (1969), Essene (1972), and Juvenile Court (1973). In a significant departure from
most observational films, Wiseman’s work has tended to adopt a theme-and-variations
structure rather than following one group of individuals throughout a film.
A considerable number of observational films have also been codirected by two per-
sons working closely together but adopting different technical roles. Such combinations
include Albert and David Maysles; David Hancock and Herbert di Gioia, makers of the
ethnographic film Naim and Jabar (1974); David and Judith MacDougall, joint mak-
ers of The Wedding Camels (1977) and other films; the Australians Bob Connolly and
Robin Anderson, codirectors of Joe Leahy’s Neighbours (1988) and Black Harvest (1992);
the Finnish team of Ilkka Ruuhijärvi and Ulla Turenen, who documented the same
group of children through successive years at school; and the team of Nick Broom-
field and Joan Churchill, makers of Soldier Girls (1981), about women recruits in the
American army.
Observational cinema has been the subject of a number of misconceptions, foremost
of which is that it seeks to produce a definitive record of events from a position of
scientific and personal detachment—the so-called fly on the wall. While this may char-
acterize some journalistic reportage, observational cinema in general is the opposite
of this in two respects—as a highly authored genre and one in which there are usually
close relations between filmmaker and subject. A further misconception is that it lacks
an interpretive or analytical dimension, aiming to create a neutral, objective record.
This is based on the mistaken idea that because it does not contain the explanatory
structure of anthropological texts it lacks a point of view and the rigor of scholarly
knowledge production. But the analytical strengths of observational cinema lie else-
where: in examining specific cultural themes and conveying the multiple features of
social events, not through disassociating them from one another or in the abstract but
in their simultaneity and material and sensory dimensions. In widely differing ways,
films influenced by observational cinema, such as Timothy Asch’s The Ax Fight (1975),
Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss (1985), and David MacDougall’s To Live with Herds
(1972) and Doon School Chronicles (2000) attempt to create new formal structures
for visual anthropology, revealing interwoven strands of cultural meaning and social
behavior.
Finally, it is often assumed that observational cinema relies predominantly on long
camera takes or that, philosophically, it requires them to preserve the unities of space
6 O B S E R VAT I O N A L C I N E M A

and time. While it is true that many observational films use long takes to allow inter-
actions to play out in real time, more central to observational cinema is its stance of
paying close attention to specific events. An observational sequence in a film may well
contain shorter glimpses of certain details while still maintaining the continuity of a
longer scene. The idea that the camera should be left running in order to be faithful to
the event is part of the view that it is simply a method of collecting data for later analysis.
As expressed in Malinowski’s classic formulation of fieldwork, however, observational
cinema is not simply observation but “participant observation.”
The anthropologist Paul Henley (2004), founding director of the University of
Manchester’s Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology and another of Colin Young’s
former students, maintains that the observational mode of filmmaking is closest in
spirit and method to traditional anthropological fieldwork and therefore the most
appropriate for ethnographic filmmaking. Whatever their theoretical orientation, he
argues, these films will hold their value because they are most likely to preserve useful
ethnographic information. While this may suggest the narrower aim of using film pri-
marily for data collection, Henley is careful to add that gaining useful anthropological
knowledge is best achieved by using a camera for specific research purposes rather than
in a random way in the hope that something of value will be caught by it. Like all good
research, it proceeds out of the particular interests of the fieldworker. The Manchester
program, as one of the oldest devoted to visual anthropology, has been instrumental
in training several generations of postgraduate students in an observational approach
to ethnographic filmmaking. Other programs with a similar approach have been
established in universities around the world, including the universities of Tromsø,
Leiden, Sao Paulo, and Yunnan.
Despite the resemblance between traditional anthropological fieldwork methods
and observational filmmaking, there remain significant differences between them. If
the aim is to produce a written text, an anthropologist first learns about a community
and compiles notes about it. Then, on reflection, he or she composes a journal article or
monograph. But ethnographic film material is very different from an anthropologist’s
writing. It can be selected, combined, and edited in various ways but it cannot be
rewritten. The material recorded at the moment of contact with the subject becomes
the fabric of the finished work and will always carry the indelible stamp of the original
encounter. This means that the analytical process must be brought into play at an
earlier stage, when the filmmaker’s choices become crucial to what the viewer will
eventually see. At the same time, the film becomes explicit evidence of the process of
inquiry. More than in any other kind of filmmaking, the observational film exposes
the contingency and provisional nature of the way anthropologists acquire knowledge
of others in the field. Perhaps partly inspired by films, anthropologists have made
significant efforts in recent years to include this aspect of fieldwork in their writing.
Central to the thinking underpinning observational cinema has been a recalibration
of the relationship between filmmaker, film subject, and film viewer. In the view of
the noted writer on documentary, Bill Nichols, the conventional documentary film is
organized around the assertion of an argument (1991, 18). The audience is presented
with an interpretation of events that it can accept or reject, but there is little room
in the film for the viewer’s own interpretation. Frequently the argument is presented
 O B S E R VAT I O N A L C I N E M A 7

in the form of a voice-over commentary that dominates the images but, even if not,
the filmmaker usually occupies a position of anonymity and unchallenged authority.
An observational film differs from this by moving the frame outwards, in a figurative
sense, to reveal more of the presence of the filmmaker and his or her engagement
with the subject. In doing so it takes the viewer further into its confidence about the
process of filmmaking and invites a more active critical response to the contents of the
film. In minimizing the fragmentation and restructuring of images, the observational
film also seeks to give the viewer greater access to continuities of time and space. The
film is no longer a set of conclusions about a subject constructed after the fact as a
kind of lesson but a more modest presentation of the filmmaking encounter. Making
the film becomes a research process in itself and less the gathering of raw materials to
construct a film later.
In discussing viewers’ responses to observational films, the filmmaker and critic
Lucien Taylor writes that
an observational aesthetic … does not relinquish authorial control entirely, but it does
so differently from other documentary forms. Observational films are still authored,
but less authoritatively. They are still reductive, but watching observational films is a
more digressive experience than watching other documentaries. In these regards they
empower the film’s subjects and the spectators alike: the subjects are less mutilated by the
montage, and the spectators may garner meanings or simply come away with sensations
and impressions that are at odds with the maker’s. (1996, 76)

Critical reservations emerged early on about an observational film’s potential

to create a false illusion of unmediated reality or to become a form of voyeurism
that objectifies the subject without commensurate risk taking on the part of the
filmmaker. This was soon followed, on the one hand, by filmmakers’ attempts to create
more openly participatory films and, on the other, by calls from critics for greater
transparency and self-reflexivity about how the films were made. Reflexivity, it was
further argued, need not take the form of erecting an explanatory structure around the
work but should be seen as already implicit in this kind of filmmaking and recognized
as such by film viewers. Some observational filmmakers and writers on film have
been particularly conscious of the varied implications of what it means to observe.
This has stimulated a number of experiments in observational cinema in which
observation itself is subjected to closer scrutiny. While narrow definitions of obser-
vation have tended to regard it as a kind of surveillance, filmmakers themselves have
generally insisted that observation does not imply a lack of personal involvement or
responsibility.
As early as 1960, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin put the question of observation at
the center of their film Chronique d’un été, asking how much could be learned about
how people lived by filming them. Other films such as Peter Adair’s Some of These
Stories Are True (1982) and Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1987) questioned the
possibility of deriving any definitive knowledge from filming individuals or their tes-
timonies, while films such as Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes
(1971) and David MacDougall’s SchoolScapes (2007) asked viewers to reflect on the act
of observation itself: how, and how attentively, does one observe, and what can one learn
from it?
8 O B S E R VAT I O N A L C I N E M A

These films have been part of a trend toward employing longer or more intensely
searching camera takes. Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Bread Day (1998) follows a group of people
pushing a railway carriage to their village to secure their weekly provision of bread.
Sergei Loznitsa’s The Train Stop (2000) observes people sleeping at an isolated railway
station, and his Landscape (2003) combines slow pans over the faces of people wait-
ing for a bus with snatches of conversations recorded at the same location, although
nonsynchronously. Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks (2003) and J. P. Sniadecki’s Demo-
lition (2008) and The Iron Ministry (2014) apply a long-take approach to a demolition
site and Chinese railways, respectively. These films emphasize the sensory qualities of
their subjects, as do Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s Sweetgrass (2009), about
sheep herders in Montana, and Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan (2012),
about fishermen in the North Atlantic. They create heightened sensory experiences for
the viewer, sometimes expressing those of the filmmakers, sometimes those of the sub-
jects, even if the connections with anthropology are not always fully developed. Obser-
vational cinema has also had a major impact on documentary filmmaking in South
and East Asia, leading to such films as Rahul Roy’s The City Beautiful (2003) in India;
Shinsuke Ogawa’s films in Japan; and Wu Wenguang’s Bumming in Beijing (1990), Zhao
Liang’s Crime and Punishment (2007), Cong Feng’s Doctor Ma’s Country Clinic (2008),
and Ji Dan’s When the Bough Breaks (2013) in China.
Jean Rouch anticipated the observational approach in his film Les maitres fous (The
Mad Masters, 1955) and developed it further in later films, especially those on the
Sigui ritual cycle of the Dogon in Mali, made from 1966 to 1974 in collaboration with
the anthropologist Germaine Dieterlen. Since then ethnographic filmmakers in many
countries have adopted an observational approach. It is often difficult, however, to dis-
tinguish the work of ethnographic filmmakers from that of makers of social documen-
taries, as the fields overlap and a number of filmmakers have worked in both areas.
Many prominent ethnographic films have been made by filmmakers who were not for-
mally trained as anthropologists but were influenced by its ideas and methodology. The
two fields have been increasingly drawn together by common interests in ethnogra-
phy; material culture; the agency of individuals; and the role of emotion, aesthetics,
and performance in social life.
Observational cinema has also had a significant impact on fiction filmmaking. Jean
Rouch inspired the filmmakers of the New Wave in France and was at the center of
developments in both fiction and nonfiction. Jean-Luc Godard incorporated aspects
of observational documentary in fiction films such as Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live,
1962) and Masculin féminin (1966). In Britain, Tony Richardson and Lindsay Ander-
son, and later Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, created low-key scenes that depended on
the observation of nuanced personal interactions in working-class families. Observa-
tional cinema has also had a marked influence on European fiction filmmaking, for
example in such works as Milos Foreman’s The Fireman’s Ball (1967), Béla Tarr’s Sátán-
tangó (1994), Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le quattro volte (The Four Times, 2010), and
the films of Romanian directors Corneliu Porumbolu and Christian Mungiu. Its influ-
ence is also evident in films of the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Japanese
directors Susumu Hani and Kaneto Shindo, and the Iranian directors Abbas Kiarostami
and Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
 O B S E R VAT I O N A L C I N E M A 9

The observational approach continues to be a viable form of filmmaking, despite

sometimes becoming overly formulaic or being overshadowed by more fiction-oriented
and abstract approaches. It has gradually overcome the idea that it tries to produce a ver-
batim copy of reality or that audiences will be misled into thinking that this is what they
have seen. Its analytical potential is increasingly recognized. There is renewed respect
for André Bazin’s advocacy of a realist cinema attentive to the existence of things in
their own right. Above all, many consider that observational cinema expresses the most
fundamental and distinctive capacity of cinema: to convey to others what the film-
maker has seen, mediated by the filmmaker’s relation to the subject. This is unlikely
to change and is already being expanded further by the use of visual media on the
internet.

SEE ALSO: Corporeal Vision; Ethno-Fiction Film; Ethnographic Film; Ethnography,

Intersubjective; Filmmaking, Collaborative; Gardner, Robert (1925–2014); Mac-
Dougall, David (b. 1939) and Judith (b. 1938); Montage; Participant Observation;
Rouch, Jean (1917–2004); Visual Anthropology

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Bateson, Gregory, and Margaret Mead. 1942. Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. New
York: New York Academy of Sciences.
Bazin, André. 1967. What Is Cinema? Vol. 1. Edited and translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Grierson, John. 1938. “The Course of Realism.” In Footnotes to the Film, edited by Charles Davy,
137–61. London: Lovat Dickson.
Grimshaw, Anna, and Amanda Ravetz. 2009. Observational Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press.
Henley, Paul. 2004. “Putting Film to Work: Observational Cinema as Practical Ethnography.”
In Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography, edited by Sarah Pink,
Lásló Kürti, and Ana Isabel Afonso, 109–30. Oxford: Routledge.
Henley, Paul. 2009. The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and The Craft of Ethnographic Cinema.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Leacock, Richard. 1971. “Interview.” In G. Roy Levin, Documentary Explorations, 195–221. New
York: Doubleday.
Leacock, Richard. 2011. The Feeling of Being There: A Filmmaker’s Memoir. Paris: Semeïon.
MacDougall, David. 1975. “Beyond Observational Cinema.” In Principles of Visual Anthropology,
edited by Paul Hockings, 109–24. The Hague: Mouton.
MacDougall, David. 1998. “Visual Anthropology and the Ways of Knowing.” In Transcultural
Cinema, 61–92. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
MacDougall, David. 2006. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Marcorelles, Louis. 1973. Living Cinema: New Directions in Contemporary Film-Making. Trans-
lated by Isabel Quigly. New York: Praeger.
Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Rouch, Jean. 2003. Ciné-Ethnography. Edited and translated by Steven Feld. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press.
Taylor, Lucien. 1996. “Iconophobia.” Transition 6 (1): 64–88.
Vaughan, Dai. 1999. For Documentary. Berkeley: University of California Press.
10 O B S E R VAT I O N A L C I N E M A

Young, Colin. 1975. “Observational Cinema.” In Principles of Visual Anthropology, edited by Paul
Hockings, 65–80. The Hague: Mouton.