Ethnography

The artist and documentarian on capturing the vernacular South. 

Documenting disappearing languages.

From Andrei Tarkovsky to Lucrecia Martel, Peter Hutton to Nathaniel Dorsky, entire aesthetic philosophies, genres, and approaches to filmmaking have been rooted in the elements. 

On occasion of Sniadecki’s current project, A Shape of Things to Come, the two filmmakers trade insights on “sensorial cinema” and working with reclusive desert-dwelling subjects.

“Questions that once belonged to the cinematic institution have been set upon the world of spectacle we live in today. These questions belong to all of us now.”

The book reopens questions about appropriation, intellectual property, and colonialism that followed Sun City Girls throughout their career, and also situates these questions within an increasingly globalized and digitized twenty-first century.

Early film, nineteenth-century science fiction, and experimental musical languages serve a young artist’s explorations of race and our political present.

“It was no longer important to be accurate. I came to understand that imagination and dreams were as important to them as any fact.”

Selections by Deana Lawson, C. Spencer Yeh, Andrew Bourne, Orit Gat, Clinton Krute, and Brian Evenson.

Robert Flaherty invented ethnographic filmmaking, and Jean Rouch transformed it into sociology. 

Where sacred slams into secular, you’ll find the sequined banners of Haiti.

That far downtown, the Hudson can smell leaf green and has an oceanic glint. Overlooking freshets and container ships, the retired Explorer occupies steep rooms in a building where Thomas Edison invented the rotary telephone.