IGNOU CBCS BSOS 184 Techniques of Ethnographic Film Making in English – Latest Edition IGNOU Help Book with Easy Notes and Solved Previous Year’s Question Papers Techniques of Ethnographic Film Making is a part of the Skill Enhancement Courses offered by IGNOU for Bachelor Degree Programme. Ethnographic Film Making is a research technique that is used by the researcher. In order for Ethnographic film making to be fully utilized as a research technique, it is important to place it in the larger context of Visual Anthropology. Through the medium of films the researcher is able to capture the visual in the field. The visual that is depicted by the researcher is a part of the culture being studied. All cultures have visual aspects and visuals are diverse. They vary from the visuals that we see on media-television, print media or even social media including zines. IGNOU CBCS BSOS 184 Techniques of Ethnographic Film Making in English – Latest Edition IGNOU Help Book with Easy Notes and Solved Previous Year’s Question Papers

The earliest anthropologists faced the problem of how to handle the visual. The earliest anthropologists used pictures of the tribes that they studied and put them in their monographs. The depiction in photographs was unrealistic and the people portrayed in the photographs were removed from their surroundings and were generally stylised unnatural photographs. As MacDougall writes “…there was something disquieting about it. They appeared to show everything yet, like the physical body, remained annoyingly mute. ….. Visual objects having exerted great fascination as the products and indicators of culture, but failing as expositors of it, began to acquire a new function (in museums) as metaphors for anthropology. And as metaphor, the visual flourished”(MacDougall, 1999, p. 277). In order to understand the visual it is important to understand how the visual is constructed. The visual is often taken at its face value and is considered to be truthful and factual.

The seen is often accepted as the truthful portrayal of the object that is being depicted. The construction of the visual and its understanding has become an important part of cultural and media studies. Vision is a cultural activity not just limited to cinema but also to the everyday of acts of seeing and showing. What we see and how we see are a very important part of our lives. Visual culture is the visual construction of the social not just the social construction of vision. We see what we see because of the structures with which we see and think. Visuality is also linked with visualization of history. It tells us about how things are visualised structurally and historically. It’s so entrenched into a culture that people believe it to be a given, to be “normal,” to be inevitable. They are the ideas that we might think are “just the way things are” when they are really culturally constructed. It deals with naming, categorizing defining people. In fact, these ideas are so parts of the culture’s fabric that they can go unnoticed unless we truly look at our surroundings carefully. The course aims to expose the students to some aspects of these discussions. IGNOU CBCS BSOS 184 Techniques of Ethnographic Film Making in English – Latest Edition IGNOU Help Book with Easy Notes and Solved Previous Year’s Question Papers

IGNOU CBCS BSOS 184 Chapterwise Notes 

Unit 1 Anthropology and Filmmaking: The Text and the Image 
Unit 2 Different Modes of Filmmaking 
Unit 3 Filmmaker and the Filmed: Relationship and Understanding ‘Ethics’
Unit 4 Editing and Construction of Meaning 
Unit 5 Understanding Multiple Shots and Camera Movements 
Unit 6 Filming Oral Testimonies, Interviews and Interaction: Final Film Projects
Unit 7 Final Film Projects

IGNOU CBCS BSOS 184 Important Questions 

What is the similarity between the production of a text and a film?

Write an essay on Margaret Mead’s contribution to visual anthropology.

Why the ethnographic films of the 1920s were not considered a serious ethnographic works?

What were the dilemmas faced by the anthropologists and filmmakers in the 1970s?

What is the significance of the different modes of filmmaking?