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Reviewed by:
  • Ninth Rai Festival of Ethnographic Film
  • Aparna Sharma
Ninth Rai Festival of Ethnographic Film Organized by the Royal Anthropological Institute, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford and the Oxford Brookes University. Oxford, U.K., 18-21 September 2005.

Visual anthropology has been in the throes of debate around the expressive documenting of research and encounters—at best, confronting and problematizing the binary of observer and observed. In the process, ethnographic engagement that values the specifics of culture/s has increasingly embedded that consciousness within an imperative for dialogue introduced at varied levels—e it between participants including the researcher, visual regimens or culturally informed narrative and construction possibilities. The Ninth RAI Festival of Ethnographic Film, co-organized by the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA), University of Oxford and the Oxford Brookes University, bore an indiscernible yet compelling strain that reflected variegated contemporary and complex sociocultural possibilities for ethnographic film.

Gathering a selection of films from across the world, the festival reflected distinct social and cultural motivations. n the process, it offered a stimulating scope for exchange between disparate subjects as much as competing forms f documentation, which served to approach questions of documentation by conceding the imbrication of content and form—ituating ethnographic practice as context-specific, unbound by determinisms of form or content in isolation.

Fittingly, the festival opened with Hugh Brody's Inside Australia, in which we follow British artist Antony Gormley's sculptural installation at Ballard, a salt lake in Western Australia. Ethnography is doubly inscribed in this film, first at the level of content—Gormley's interaction with the Menzies community, which his sculptural installation commemorates—and second, at the level of the film that traces the evolution of Gormley's installation. This double inscription of course enriches the film but further sets up for us the intricacies of the ethnographic process that we find as dialogic, spontaneous and culturally nuanced on both levels. he visual scope of the film complements the film's themes with its clear yet contained use of sound and image. visual spectacle, Inside Australia is measured and leaves the audience with necessary distance to engage and reflect.

With a rather distinct visual formulation yet expositing a similar possibility for audience engagement was David MacDougall's The New Boys, the fourth film from his Doon School project. In this MacDougall's camera is at its haptic best. The film follows the first term of the fresh entrants to one of India's most prestigious and elite schools, the Doon school in Dehradoon, north India. Through the course of the film we occasion moments that lend to the narrative a depth and fullness that balance the film's sensual and poetic tendency, subtly resuscitating it from slipping into pure lyricism. Clearly postcolonial, this piece enjoys critical insight. The Doon School prides itself on alumni that include a former Indian prime minister. As the film unfolds, the elitism of this institution mixes with a medley of philosophical underpinnings suggested through the film's characters. nyone with slight exposure to modern Indian history and philosophy cannot evade the rival discursive tendencies the film traces, which allow us to better situate and critique the absent-mindedly benevolent and problematic liberalism that percolates through the elite Indian psyche.

Besides MacDougall's film, the festival had a sizeable representation from the Indian subcontinent. Two documentaries, [End Page 274] The City Beautiful, by Delhi-based Rahul Roy, and The Bond, by the Bombay team Anjali Monteiro and K.P. ayasankar, cut right into the complexities of the ethnographic and documentary project around the subaltern subject. Both films center on urban subjects. While Roy follows the tribulations of two families from a working-class colony on the margins of Delhi, The Bond is about conflict resolution and communal harmony initiatives within one of Asia's largest slums, Dharavi in Bombay. Both films benefit from sustained filming around the subjects and very unabashedly reveal the multifaceted aspects of life at the margins. learly contextualized, there is no air of exoticism in either, even in moments such as the trance sequence in Roy's film. There is also no deliberation...

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