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Bad Film Histories
Ethnography and the Early Archive
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Book Presentation:
A daring, deep investigation into ethnographic cinema that challenges standard ways of writing film history and breaks important new ground in understanding archives
Bad Film Histories is a vital work that unsettles the authority of the archive. Katherine Groo daringly takes readers to the margins of the film record, addressing the undertheorization of film history and offering a rigorous corrective. Taking ethnographic cinema as a crucial case study, Groo challenges standard ways of thinking and writing about film history and questions widespread assumptions about what film artifacts are and what makes them meaningful. Rather than filling holes, Groo endeavors to understand the imprecisions and absences that define film history and its archives.
Bad Film Histories draws on numerous works of ethnographic cinema, from Edward S. Curtis’s In the Land of the Head Hunters, to a Citroën-sponsored “croisière” across Africa, to the extensive archives of the Maison Lumière and the Musée Albert-Kahn, to dozens of expedition films from the 1910s and 1920s. The project is deeply grounded in poststructural approaches to history, and throughout Groo draws on these frameworks to offer innovative and accessible readings that explain ethnographic cinema’s destabilizing energies.
As Groo describes, ethnographic works are mostly untitled, unauthored, seemingly infinite in number, and largely unrestored even in their digital afterlives. Her examination of ethnographic cinema provides necessary new thought for both film scholars and those who are thrilled by cinema’s boundless possibilities. In so doing, she boldly reexamines what early ethnographic cinema is and how these films produce meaning, challenging the foundations of film history and prevailing approaches to the archive.
About the Author:
Katherine Groo is assistant professor of film and media studies at Lafayette College.
Contents:
Contents
Introduction: Untimely Historiographies, Ethnographic Particularities
1. Of Other Archives: The Excursive Minors of La Maison Lumière and Les Archives de la Planète
2. Historical Figures: Dance and the Unlettered Line
3. Following Derrida: Ethnocinematic Animals, Death Effects, and the Supplement of Expedition Cinema
4. Language Games, or the World Intertitled
5. Ethnography Won’t Wait: New Media and Material Histories
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
See the publisher website: University of Minnesota Press
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