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Human Studies Film Archives
The Human Studies Film Archives (HSFA) is a sister archive to the National Anthropological Archives within the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. HSFA preserves and provides access to ethnographic films and Anthropology, anthropological moving image materials. It is located at the Smithsonian Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland. History The Archives started in 1975 as the National Anthropological Film Center (NAFC) by creating and collecting films of anthropological research. The NAFC was founded through the advocacy of notable anthropologists and filmmakers Margaret Mead, John Marshall (filmmaker), John Marshall, Timothy Asch,Alan Lomax and Jay Ruby. The first director of the NAFC, E. Richard Sorenson, promoted anthropological film as a scientific research tool. The center received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Institutes of Health. In 1981, the NAFC was renamed the Human Studies Film Archives and became part of the De ...
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National Anthropological Archives
The National Anthropological Archives is the third largest archive in the Smithsonian Institution and a sister archive to the Human Studies Film Archive. The collection documents the history of anthropology and the world's peoples and cultures, and is used in indigenous language revitalization. It is located in the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland, and is part of the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History. History The National Anthropological Archives (NAA) is the successor to the archives of the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), which was founded in 1879 by John Wesley Powell. In 1968, The NAA was formalized, incorporating the collections of the BAE, which focused on Native Americans in the United States, American Indians, as well as the papers of Smithsonian anthropology curators and other anthropologists who conduct research around the world. The establishment of the NAA was supported by grants from the Wenner-Gren Found ...
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Photographic Film
Photographic film is a strip or sheet of transparent film base coated on one side with a gelatin photographic emulsion, emulsion containing microscopically small light-sensitive silver halide crystals. The sizes and other characteristics of the crystals determine the sensitivity, contrast, and image resolution, resolution of the film. Film is typically segmented in ''frames'', that give rise to separate photographs. The emulsion will gradually darken if left exposed to light, but the process is too slow and incomplete to be of any practical use. Instead, a very short exposure (photography), exposure to the image formed by a camera lens is used to produce only a very slight chemical change, proportional to the amount of light absorbed by each crystal. This creates an invisible latent image in the emulsion, which can be chemically photographic processing, developed into a visible photograph. In addition to visible light, all films are sensitive to ultraviolet light, X-rays, gamma ...
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Film Archives In The United States
A film, also known as a movie or motion picture, is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, emotions, or atmosphere through the use of moving images that are generally, since the 1930s, synchronized with sound and (less commonly) other sensory stimulations. Etymology and alternative terms The name "film" originally referred to the thin layer of photochemical emulsion on the celluloid strip that used to be the actual medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist for an individual motion-picture, including "picture", "picture show", "moving picture", "photoplay", and "flick". The most common term in the United States is "movie", while in Europe, "film" is preferred. Archaic terms include "animated pictures" and "animated photography". "Flick" is, in general a slang term, first recorded in 1926. It originates in the verb flicker, owing to the flickering appearance of early films. ...
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Jorge Preloran
Jorge Ricardo Preloran (May 28, 1933 – March 28, 2009) was an Argentine filmmaker and a pioneer in ethnobiographic film making. Life and career Preloran was born in Buenos Aires to an Argentine father and an Irish American mother. He made a short film, ''Venganza'', in 1954, and left Argentina to enroll at UCLA, graduating with a film studies major in 1961. Holding dual citizenship, he served with the U.S. military in West Germany. He began a career as a filmmaker in 1961, when the Tinker Foundation offered him a grant to make several films on the gauchos of Argentina. Preloran sought to redefine the genre of ethnographic films, moving away from depicting their subjects as exotic or primitive, striving to make films that, as he told ''Americas'' magazine, "do not use the people about whom they are made." From 1963-1969 Preloran produced educational films and films on Argentine folklife at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán in Tucuman, Argentina. He also began to wor ...
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Yanomami
The Yanomami, also spelled Yąnomamö or Yanomama, are a group of approximately 35,000 indigenous people of the Americas, indigenous people who live in some 200–250 villages in the Amazon rainforest on the border between Venezuela and Brazil. Etymology The ethnonym ''Yanomami'' was produced by anthropologists based on the word , which, in the expression , signifies "human beings." This expression is opposed to the categories (game animals) and (invisible or nameless beings), but also (enemy, stranger, non-indigenous). According to ethnologist Jacques Lizot: ''Yanomamö'' and ''Yanomama'' are variant spellings. Supporters of the work on the tribe of anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon usually use ''Yanomamö''. Those who oppose his work or are neutral usually use ''Yanomami'' or ''Yanomama''. History The first report of the Yanomami is from 1654, when a Spanish expedition under Apolinar Diaz de la Fuente visited some Ye'kuana people living on the Padamo River. Diaz wrote: ...
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Napoleon Chagnon
Napoleon Alphonseau Chagnon (27 August 1938 – 21 September 2019) was an American cultural anthropologist, professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of Missouri in Columbia and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Chagnon was known for his long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö/Yanomami, a society of indigenous tribal Amazonians, in which he used an evolutionary approach to understand social behavior in terms of genetic relatedness. His work centered on the analysis of violence among tribal peoples, and, using socio-biological analyses, he advanced the argument that violence among the Yanomami is fueled by an evolutionary process in which successful warriors have more offspring. His 1967 ethnography '' Yanomamö: The Fierce People'' became a bestseller and is frequently assigned in introductory anthropology courses. Admirers described him as a pioneer of scientific anthropology. Chagnon was called the "most controversial anthropologist" ...
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Sound Recording And Reproduction
Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical, Mechanical system, mechanical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog recording and digital recording. Acoustic analog recording is achieved by a microphone diaphragm that senses changes in atmospheric pressure caused by acoustics, acoustic sound waves and records them as a mechanical representation of the sound waves on a medium such as a phonograph record (in which a stylus cuts grooves on a record). In magnetic tape recording, the sound waves vibrate the microphone diaphragm and are converted into a varying electric current, which is then converted to a varying magnetic field by an electromagnet, which makes a representation of the sound as magnetized areas on a plastic tape with a magnetic coating on it. Analog sound reproduction is the reverse process, with a large ...
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Photograph
A photograph (also known as a photo, or more generically referred to as an ''image'' or ''picture'') is an image created by light falling on a photosensitivity, photosensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic image sensor. The process and practice of creating such images is called photography. Most photographs are now created using a smartphone or camera, which uses a photographic lens, lens to focus the scene's visible spectrum, visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of what the human eye would perceive. Etymology The word ''photograph'' was coined in 1839 by Sir John Herschel and is based on the Greek language, Greek φῶς ('':el:phos, phos''), meaning "light", and γραφή (''graphê''), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light". History The first permanent photograph, a contact-exposed copy of an engraving, was made in 1822 using the Bitumen of Judea, bitumen-based "heliography" process developed by Nicéphore Niép ...
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Ethnographic Film
An ethnographic film is a non-fiction film, often similar to a documentary film, historically shot by Western filmmakers and dealing with non-Western people, and sometimes associated with anthropology. Definitions of the term are not definitive. Some academics claim it is more documentary, less anthropology, while others think it rests somewhere between the fields of anthropology and documentary films. Anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall wrote in a 1978 paper: "Ethnographic films cannot be said to constitute a genre, nor is ethnographic film-making a discipline with unified origins and an established methodology. Since the first conference on ethnographic film was held at the Musée de l'Homme 30 years ago, the term has served a largely emblematic function, giving a semblance of unity to extremely diverse efforts in the cinema and social sciences." The genre has its origins in the colonial context. Scholars and practitioners have put great efforts to disa ...
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Travel Documentary
A travel documentary is a documentary film, television program, or web series, online series that describes travel in general or tourist attractions without recommending particular package deals or tour operators. A travelogue film is an early type of travel documentary, serving as an exploratory ethnographic film. Ethnographic films have been made for the spectators to see the other half to relate with the world in relative relations. These films are a spectacle to see beyond the cultural differences as explained by the Allison Griffith in her journal. Before the 1930s, it was difficult to see the importance of documentary films in Hollywood cinema but the 1930s brought about a change in the history of these films with the popularity of independent filmmakers. The genre has been represented by television shows such as ''Across the Seven Seas'', which showcased travelogues produced by third parties, and by occasional itinerant presentations of travelogues in theaters and other ven ...
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Documentary
A documentary film (often described simply as a documentary) is a nonfiction Film, motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". The American author and Media studies, media analyst Bill Nichols (film critic), Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries". Research into information gathering, as a behavior, and the sharing of knowledge, as a concept, has noted how documentary movies were preceded by the notable practice of documentary photography. This has involved the use of singular Photograph, photographs to detail the complex attributes of History, historical events and continues to a certain degree to this day, with an example being the War photography, conflict-related photography achieved by popular figures such as Mathew Brady during the Am ...
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