The Looking Machine - (Anthropology, Creative Practice and Ethnography) by David Macdougall (Paperback)

About the Book

This book of essays brings together his latest ideas on filming, documentary, anthropology and the art of cinema, based on his practice as an award-winning maker of ethnographic films.

Book Synopsis

This new collection of essays presents the latest thoughts of one of the world's leading ethnographic filmmakers and writers on cinema. It will provide essential reading for students in cinema studies, filmmaking, and visual anthropology. The dozen wide-ranging essays give unique insights into the history of documentary, how films evoke space, time and physical sensations, and the intellectual and emotional links between filmmakers and their subjects. In an era of reality television, historical re-enactments, and designer packaging, MacDougall defends the principles that inspired the earliest practitioners of documentary cinema. He urges us to consider how the form can more accurately reflect the realities of our everyday lives. Building on his own practice in filmmaking, he argues that this means resisting the pressures for self-censorship and the inherent ethnocentrism of our own society and those we film.

From the Back Cover

In this collection of wide-ranging essays, MacDougall provides unique insights into the history of documentary and calls for a re-investment in the ideas that originally inspired it.

As one of the world's leading ethnographic filmmakers and writers on film, Macdougall explores the complex relationships between human perception, the senses, and the mind and eye behind the camera, while drawing on his own filmmaking experience - award-winning classics of ethnographic cinema, including To Live with Herds, The Wedding Camels, Photo Wallahs, Doon School Chronicles, and Gandhi's Children.

MacDougall urges us to consider how the documentary form can become a 'cinema of consciousness' that more accurately reflects our everyday lives, particularly in this era of reality television, historical re-enactments, designer packaging and corporate authorship. He defends the principles that inspired documentary's early practitioners, and also considers issues such as the pressure for self-censorship and the inherent ethnocentrism of our own society and the societies we film.

This book adds new thought-provoking commentaries on cinema to those that readers will know from MacDougall's previous volumes of essays, and is essential reading for students in cinema studies, filmmaking and visual anthropology.

Review Quotes

'MacDougall is masterful in writing succinctly about how audiences and their bodies connect to the films that they are watching. The Looking Machine is a must read for those interested in the history and humanity of movies.'
Choice

'This book is a tour de force, tracing the formation of the field of visual anthropology in dialogue with those documentary-makers and early photographers, whom MacDougall commends for rejecting 'sanitized or highly edited accounts of what we witness', and instead portraying 'the particularities of everyday life - painful, awkward or pleasurable'. What I cherish most about this book is the insistent thread of 'looking' and what the camera affords: An embodied, sensuous cinema where the camera figures as an extension of the body and consciousness, allowing us to see differently. There is something for readers well acquainted with MacDougall's writing in this book, as well as for newcomers to his oeuvre; for students and practitioners within film (studies), anthropology, and related disciplines. The many examples and references are a rich resource, and the reader should set aside time for watching film clips alongside reading this book. The Looking Machine inaugurates the Manchester University Press' Series in Anthropology, Creative Practice and Ethnography, and beautifully sets the scene for the books to come.'
Ethnos

About the Author

David MacDougall is an Honorary Professor in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University, Canberra