Article ID: CBB916469776

Filming Fore, Shooting Scientists: Medical Research, Experimental Filmmaking, and Documentary Cinema (2019)

unapi

After World War II the research film increasingly became instrumental in medical science and cultural anthropology, especially in the recording and analysis of non-recurring events in isolated or “primitive” communities. Ambitiously, Carleton Gajdusek and Richard Sorenson in the 1960s sought to accumulate a global film archive of such communities, focusing on clinical disorders, such as kuru among the Fore people of New Guinea, and patterns of child health and development. Ostensibly objective, and certainly distancing, the camera also was for them a desiring machine, thus relating their archival project to the contemporary experimental films of Warhol in New York. Comparison with associated documentary film, with its emphasis on editorial selection, thematic coherence and narrative closure, reveals differences in how filmic investigators engage with their subjects, as well as discordances in valuation and ethics.

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB916469776/

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Authors & Contributors
Buschmann, Rainer F.
Dickson, Jessica
Long, Max
Brian Hochman
Jacobson, Brian R.
Hosek, Jennifer Ruth
Concepts
Ethnography
Anthropology
Motion pictures; cinema; movies
Medicine
Documentary-style films
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Time Periods
20th century, late
21st century
20th century
20th century, early
19th century
Places
New Guinea
Australia
Los Angeles (California)
Islands of the Pacific
South Africa
Italy
Institutions
British Petroleum Company
National Anthropological Film Center (U.S.)
Smithsonian Institution
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