Interdisciplinarity and Collabo­rative Filmmaking in Anthropological Cinema

Anthropological cinema is the most representative form of visual anthropological research, due to which it can be considered a kind of calling card of visual anthropology. It is confirmed by facts from the history of the scientific discipline and by constant, continuous interest in anthropological films both from researchers and from the audience. This is caused by variety of different factors, though the key ones are the “visual turn” in the 20th century culture, the development of cinema and television, mostly in the second half of the 20th century, and the media-oriented socio-cultural direction in the period of postmodernism.

We can see that the 20th century, despite a lot of negative events, was a fertile ground for the foundation and further development of visual anthropology. However, nowadays we can still observe new different trends in the development of this scientific direction. The increase in the number of interdisciplinary researches, the high degree of involvement in collaborative work of researchers from various scientific spheres, the advancing level of audiovisual media democratization and popularization, and the continuous development of filmmaking technologies — all these, clearly, are modern factors that determine the further direction and specificity of the development of visual anthropology and, in particular, anthropological cinema.

This article considers and analyzes the above-mentioned characteristic features of the anthropological cinema of the postmodern period. Special attention is paid to the development of interdisciplinary contacts between visual anthropology and related scientific disciplines, the democratization of video production and the sphere of audiovisual media, and the direction of collaborative anthropological filmmaking.

Study and analysis of these features of the anthropological cinema of the postmodern period can help to identify further ways for development of academic and applied visual anthropology in the socio-humanitarian sphere, to understand the nature of media relations within the framework of visual anthropological research, and to determine the role of author-researcher in contemporary visual anthropological discourse.

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