Scientific Cinema
"Exploring Ethnographic Filmmaking" is a four-part film series that explores anthropology’s longstanding, complex engagement with visual media, asking how film has been used not only to document and render social life, but to categorize, analyze, theorize, and intervene in the world.
Program 1: "Scientific Cinema"
Four Families (1960, Margaret Mead, 60 min)
Trance and Dance in Bali (Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, 1951, 22 min)
Groh Groh (Rehearsal for Rangda) (Leyla Stevens, 2023, 28 min)
Total runtime: 1 hr 50 min
The first program "Scientific Cinema" examines early efforts to establish film as a scientific tool for anthropological observation and analysis. Works by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson exemplify early disciplinary attempts to use the camera to systematically document family life, ritual, and trance, treating film as a medium capable of capturing patterns of behavior that might elude textual description. These films reflect a period in which anthropology sought visual evidence to support comparative analysis, while also revealing the assumptions and limits embedded in claims to objectivity and ethnographic authority.
Paired with Leyla Stevens's Groh Groh (Rehearsal for Rangda), this program also prompts reflection on the afterlives of scientific images and archives. By revisiting and reframing earlier visual materials, the program asks how ethnographic films continue to generate meaning beyond their original analytic frameworks. Viewers are invited to consider what scientific cinema reveals and obscures about the relationship between observation, interpretation, and the power to define social reality.
The screening will be introduced by Natasha Raheja, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Performing & Media Arts, and Parisa Vaziri, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Studies.
Free admission! Supported by the Department of Anthropology, the Nazaara Media Lab, a Visual Anthropology Research Lab at Cornell University, the Department of Performing & Media Arts, and the Southeast Asia Program.