Comparing The Hunters And Dead Birds

Going into the class, I thought that all the films we would watch in class would be like Marshall’s The Hunters and Gardner’s Dead Birds. That is to say I expected the class to focus on films about people in remote and exotic locations, with the “voice of God” narration telling me what to think about what I was watching. Fortunately, I was mistaken, and I learned a lot about a variety of film styles, methods, and approaches. However, I think that the films we viewed towards the middle of the semester were the most anthropologically interesting.
The first two films we viewed were Man with a Movie Camera and Nanook of the North. While these films were remarkable technical accomplishments for their time, they suffer from the limitations of their

technology. For example, Man with a Movie Camera did an amazing job of giving the audience a sense of what daily life was like for a variety of people in a Soviet city during the 1920’s, and perhaps offered the best sense of the environment in any film we saw throughout the semester. However, it did not give the audience much of a sense of what the people living in the city were like. Because of the near-nonexistence of sound recording, the people in the film were unable to tell us what life was like, for themselves. This was also the downfall for Nanook of the North. The audience’s perception of Nanook is almost entirely dependent on Flaherty’s perception of him. This is what I think led to the class’s skepticism to trust the film when we discussed it in class.
The Hunters, Dead Birds, and The Ax Fight were more anthropologically interesting than the previous two films, but still not quite the best.

The Hunters and Dead Birds when viewed back to back from one another showed me that there are two very different ways to do the “voice of God” narration, and made me look back at similar documentaries I viewed in a different light. Similar to the work of Flaherty and Vertov, the work of Marshall and Gardner did not tell me much about the people in the film, but how the filmmakers saw them. Even worse, The Ax Fight did not tell me anything about the people in the film, and simply left me wondering what I was

watching.
Jumping forward to People’s Park and Leviathan, these two films I think are similar because of their lack of narration and voices.

Throughout each film, the audience is left to wonder what the film is showing and making them listen to. It is not so much about the people in the film, as how they interact with the environment around them, and the environment itself. Because of this, I think that these two films are the least anthropologically interesting out of all the films we watched. There was little information about people in the film, rather information about the environment, which still proved useful in the scope of the entire class, because I learned how to film a space so that the audience can feel like they are there with the camera as it is filming.
Doon School Chronicles also gave the audience a good sense of setting like the previous two films, but it incorporated this among interviews with people, and the purposeful filming of specific events that went along with the interviews, and created a stronger sense of what the setting was like not only physically, but culturally and ideologically. Because of this balance between space and the people onscreen, I would say that Doon School Chronicles was one of the most anthropologically interesting films viewed over the course of the

semester.
The two films I found to be the most anthropologically interesting were Chronicle of a Summer and Number Our Days. This is because both films interviewed the people in them, and let them shape the film so that they made it their story and not the filmmakers’. These two films taught me the most about the people in them, perhaps more than all of the other films combined. This is why I think that my final project included a lot of interviews, so that it created the same sense of the Hamline-Midway neighborhood as these two films did with their respective environments.
Over the course of the class, I learned a lot about visual anthropology through the films we saw both in and out of class. The films taught me what to and what not to do while filming the various projects throughout the semester. The next time I see an ethnographic film, I will be able to learn much more from it had I not seen the rest of the films mentioned, and I might even willingly take notes.