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Transcultural Cinema. David MacDougall. Edited and with an Introduction by Lucien Taylor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. 318.
JEFFREY HIMPELE
California State University---Fullerton
Transcultural Cinema collects influential documentary filmmaker David MacDougall's new and past writings into a single volume. Framing the book as a revitalization of cross-cultural film and its cinematic way of knowing, editor Lucien Taylor introduces the essays with an appreciative analysis of MacDougall's work. Since the late 1960s, UCLA-trained filmmakers David and his wife Judith MacDougall have collaborated on over twenty films in East Africa, Australia, Europe, and India, in which they initiated new techniques in documentary film and anticipated wider theoretical and epistemological concerns in anthropology, cinematically worked out into sensitive and subtly self reflexive portrayals of everyday life. MacDougall writes in the preface, "Much of this writing was done as a kind of counterweight to the experiences of filmmaking, for making films generates countless questions that the films themselves can address only indirectly" (p. ix). More than a written supplement to his films, however, this book delves into MacDougall's own experiences as a filmmaker, surveys the field of documentary cinema, and elaborates on the anthropological dilemmas and capabilities of film.
In the contemporary climate of heightened ethnographic reflexivity and experimentation, MacDougall argues that making and viewing films are inherently reflexive because they inscribe, objectify, and perform the intersubjectivity (pp. 87-90) of the social space inhabited by both filmmakers and subjects. In "Whose Story Is It?" for example, he raises questions about authorial voices that will be familiar to all anthropologists. Like writers, filmmakers ultimately decide what and who to include and exclude, yet because film images index and are connected to their original contexts in a materially causative way, additional information "leaks" from them so...