Muddied Waters. The Fictionalisation of Ethnographic Film

Visual anthropologists and ethnographic film-makers continue to disagree on what is and what is not ethnographic film. Meanwhile the situation becomes ever more unclear, possibly to the detriment of ethnographic film. Toni de Bromhead now tackles this problem from the point of view that an ethnographic film must, by definition, offer reliable ethnography. She does this by closely examining a number of documentary films about southern Italy, made from 1948 to 2018, some made by great Italian filmmakers, such as De Seta, and others by respected non-Italians, for instance David MacDougall