Editor’s Note: Participant and Observer

Persistently, but this time in ajubilee attire, we reinstate once again the concept of our Festival as a cultural event in which the art of film permeates the tasks, objectives, results and, therefore, the specific social mission of ethnology/anthropology, and especially its role in the safeguarding and promotion of cultural heritage. We started this work a quarter century ago in a specific socio-cultural and political environment; the fact that it was a turbulent period, gave an impetus to the Ethnographic Museum for laying the foundations for a new level of ethnographic museology...

Marko Stojanović
Executive Director of the Festival

The Rise and the Soul of Ethnological Film

As it was demonstrated, anthropological film came into existence as the crucial, meaningful moment in development of film in general, as it was only with the consciousness of “the film sight authenticity” that the real film started “unwinding” within the tawdry panorama of miracles and sensations. This “real film” stemmed from the inner nature of the medium, the real and the un-real, the realistic and the un-realistic, the factual and the artistic...

Božidar Zečević

Ethnological Film: Between Technical Perfection and the Crisis of Narrative

Ethnological film is undoubtedly intertwined with other genres and there is hardly a topic that could not be covered within this framework. However, it has to find its own specific character, something that will make it immediately recognizable. These are actually the frameworks for narration, or more precisely, the frameworks for its interpretation...

Aleksandra Pavićević

Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Ethnography SASA

ROUND TABLE: ETHNOLOGICAL FILM AND MASS(IVE) COMMUNICATION

Continuous recording and presentation of reality in an environment marked by the technological configurations of mass media and already globalized institutions of social networks have become pivotal in the distribution of information, art, entertainment, images and the symbols of cultures. Their relations to ethnological film suggest that the democratization of the right to an auteur (re)construction of a living cultural environment, underpinned by a rapid technological progress, has led to the redundancy of themes and expressions, but also to the gradual disappearance of the positive corrections regarding the duration and the significance of the presented subject-matter. Narratives are becoming autonomous results, whereas the unhindered flow of images and sound turns into the primary goal devoid of discursive attitudes or a reference to the culture contextualized by means of cinematic laws.