Academic literature on the topic 'Ethnofiction'

The taxonomic difficulties generated by the essay film are rooted in its in-between positioning vis-à-vis genres, which facilitates the subversion of their conventions and the uncovering of their ideological underpinnings. The chapter works through these ideas by engaging with a particular type of essayistic ethnofiction, as represented by Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes (Land without Bread, 1933), Werner Herzog’s Fata Morgana (1971), and Ben Rivers’s Slow Action (2011). Located somewhere between documentary and fiction, surrealism and ethnography, science fiction and anthropology, these texts create

This chapter discusses Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution, an inaugural book of the University of Toronto Press that is based on Sherine Hamdy's ethnographic work on organ transplantation in Egypt and Coleman Nye's research on cancer genetics in the United States. It describes Lissa as a graphic work of what the groundbreaking ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch called “ethnofiction.” It also follows two women in Lissa as they grapple with difficult medical decisions in the context of the popular uprisings that began in January 2011. The chapter explores the collaborative dimension of Lissa at the heart of its success in reaching a range of audiences within and beyond anthropology, while also making valuable methodological contributions to the field. It cites Lissa as a unique example of the possibilities of collaborative scholarship to unsettle conventional ideas of authorship, expertise, voice, text, theory, and study.

This chapter discusses the international film culture of the 1960s and 1970s against the backdrop of the massive urbanisation of what used to be called the ‘Third World’. During these decades not only did world cinema modernise itself in the form of numerous, highly politicised and predominantly leftist, ‘new waves’, but so, too, did many (mega)cities of the global South. The chapter’s first case example, Moi, un noir (Rouch 1958), depicts how rural migrants, full of hopes for and dreams of a better future, flocked to these cities in search of jobs. The intersections between social and film history on a global scale, hence, between the emergence of a politically engaged international film culture and the massive urbanisation of the ‘Third World’, are, as the author argues, not coincidental, and neither is the rise of docufictional forms. Whether theorised as ethnofiction, docudrama, cinéma vérité or Impefect Cinema, these hybrid forms share their historical links with earlier movements (neorealism and the Grierosonian documentary, in particular), as this chapter’s second main example illustrates: De Cierta Manera (Gómez 1974), an essayistic docudrama that investigates the Cuban government’s slum removal policies in a Havana neighbourhood.