In my current book project, Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early Archive, I explore the ways in which early ethnographic films produce meaning and what these unusual visual artifacts mean for early film history, historiography, and the archive.
Ethnographic cinema overflows disciplinary taxonomies, crosses and combines genres, and constructs a potentially limitless catalogue of films that wander and waste time. Put simply: these films resist our efforts to write and recover early film history and, in so doing, pose a number of important questions to the recuperative historiographies that have shaped early film history for three decades. This project also challenges the prevailing critical approaches to early ethnographic cinema, which read this mode and moment of film production as either a seamless ideological extension of colonial force or an early film “attraction” among many others.
In Bad Film Histories, I consider: What kind of artifact is an early ethnographic film? What kind of historical claims do these films make? And what kind of archive(s) do they combine to form? The answers to these questions tell us something about early ethnographic film, but these questions also aim for early film history, a field that eerily echoes ethnographic discourses of salvage and preservation, while simultaneously overlooking the frenzy born of these discourses in the ethnographic archive. In foregrounding the ellipses and excesses of ethnographic cinema, my research articulates an alternative archival site, as well as an alternative approach to early film history. Rather than filling holes, this work tries to theorize the emptiness.
