This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Margaret Mead (1901–1978). At the beginning of the twenty–first century, she still holds the title as the world's most famous anthropologist. This year the American Museum of Natural History honors her contributions to anthropology and image–making-especially her dedication to reaching a broad and varied public and her insights into the influence of generations upon one another.
For lovers of documentary film, culture, and the unexpected, the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival is an annual autumn ritual in New York City, and its tour to PFA each November has become a tradition in its own right. Begun in 1977 as a one–time event to mark Mead's seventy–fifth birthday and her fifty years at the Museum, twenty–five years later the festival is a week–long celebration of international cinema attracting filmmakers from around the world, and showcasing a broad range of documentary, from indigenous community media to experimental nonfiction and animation.
This year's festival selections at PFA include new work by some influential ethnographic filmmakers who have come in from the field to make observational films much closer to home: Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson have returned from the New Guinea highlands to the battlefields of Australian academia; and Dennis O'Rourke, who electrified us all with the nuclear parable Half–Life, presents an intimate portrait of a hardbitten rural Australian town. Meanwhile, Kim Longinotto continues to pursue feminist subjects in Iran, while Raoul Peck takes on Western capitalism in his philosophical new film; British feminist Melissa Llewelyn–Davies offers a glimpse of a busy hospital ward in East London; Lindsey Merrison looks at the high theatrics of spirit worship in Myanmar, and we get an inside look at the last days of Milosevic in Yugoslavia. But perhaps Harun Farocki's searing analysis of consumer culture is relevant precisely in that it knows no national boundaries.
