"The movies," said Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "are peculiarly suited to make manifest the union of mind and body, mind and the world, and the expression of one in the other." And it is for such couplings of the cognitive and the behavioral, the subjective and the objective, and the self and the other, as well as for its prevailing tendency to explore cross-cultural differences, that ethnographic film has made its contribution to anthropology and documentary film alike. This year's Margaret Mead Film Festival has a special emphasis on films from and about Haiti-the first successful national slave revolution in history and, after the United States, the second oldest republic in the Americas, immersed today in a state of misery almost unimaginable to the vast majority of Americans. Almost all the films in the Festival address or evoke the relationship between the "global" and the "local"-between homogenization and fragmentation, simultaneous but countervailing forces that continually surprise us with novel expressions of cultural difference and regeneration in an (ostensibly) increasingly unified world. And in this, regardless of the distress to which so many of the films bear witness, they also offer cause for hope. - Ilsa Barbash and Lucien Taylor
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, the Townsend Center for Humanities, and the Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley. PFA thanks Festival Director Elaine Charnov.
Filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor are the authors of Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos (UC Press, 1997), and are on the faculty at the University of Colorado, Boulder.