This series is presented under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History's Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, New York, and in association with the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology and the Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley. PFA thanks Festival Director Elaine Charnov. The Margaret Mead Festival at PFA is programmed by Kathy Geritz, Associate Film Curator. "Ethnographic film," critic J. Hoberman once wrote, "is the documentary's avant-garde," but Hoberman was pretty much the only person who thought so. Surviving as best it can at the margins of both the anthropological academy and the world of mainstream documentary, ethnographic film, like the Trickster, has long had to scavenge what it can by night. But, the times, they are a-changing. The moribund nature of formulaic documentary is becoming increasingly plain for all to see. For their part, anthropologists are beginning to acknowledge that their own expository prose may not be best suited to the representation of human consciousness-which is organized, like film iteself, in multi-stranded networks of signification that do not lend themselves to verbal expression, whether by "natives" or anyone else.The Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival has likewise had new life breathed into it in recent years. Director Elaine Charnov has broadened the festival's purview beyond "ethnographic film" per se, to relink it to related genres and indeed with cinema as a whole. The topical emphasis this year is recent work from Brazil, while the thematic orientation is documentary reenactment, which raises provocative questions about the relationship between documentary and fiction. Academic commentators have tended to wax lyrical of late about the pleasures of subverting the "archaic" dichotomy between fact and fiction, but few have paused to reflect on what might distinguish the two in the first place-not necessarily as different genres of film (definitions of which are notoriously leaky), but as different dimensions or potentialities of film. It is to questions of this order that many of the films in the Pacific Film Archive's superb selection from this year's Margaret Mead Festival invite us to return.-Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor Program notes for PFA's presentation of the Mead Festival are written by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor. A documentary and ethnographic filmmaker, Barbash teaches courses in ethnographic film history, theory, and production in the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Barbash and Taylor are co-authors of Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos (University of California Press, 1997).Thursday November 13, 1997
