MONTAGE AND ANIMATION

From the mid 1990s on many anthropologists have rallied around cinematic and media arts tropes to account for their increasingly complex fieldwork mise-en-scènes, multi-sited ethnographies, and contemporary figurations of “anthropos” and “ethnos.” In a now classic essay titled “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage” George Marcus foregrounded Soviet avant-garde film artist Dziga Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera as a powerful prototype to account for the simultaneities, movements, temporalities, and, more broadly, the non-linear dynamics generated by our multilayered fieldwork mise-en-scènes. Marcus’ essay had fascinated and inspired many of us who were training as cultural anthropologists with a medial perspective. Some of us also noted that both the status of montage as metaphor, as well as Marcus’ distinction between realist and modernist ethnographic modes, then very much necessary, would have to be qualified and shown contingent at a later stage. This amendment, we thought, would foster a new relationship between media arts and anthropology beyond the opposition between literalism and metaphoricity,1 on the one hand, and beyond the opposition between realism and modernism,2 on the other. In a recent conversation, Marcus reiterated his commitment to the initial “affinities” not only between moving-image media and anthropology but also, and more broadly, between the conceptual arts and experimental ethnography:

Since then, many cinephile anthropologists have suggested that we could approach media art forms by directing our attention to a “film's anthropology” and to the complex modes in which technology is always “encultured.” These anthropologists have underscored, in particular, how “studies of narrative films made by people about their own societies are often rich in ethnographic registers.”