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The film festival of the Royal Anthropological Institute – a personal memoir
on its thirtieth anniversary.
Paul Henley
The film festival of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) has been in existence
since 1985. It has been a peripatetic event, moving from one host institution, usually a
university, to another, mostly on a biennial basis. Like the RAI itself, it is aimed at those
who are interested in archaeology as well as anthropology, and it has been primarily
directed by academics on a voluntary basis, working in collaboration with the staff of the
RAI in London. As I write, the most recent edition of the festival took place just over six
months ago, in June 2015, at the Watershed, an arts cinema complex located in the
refurbished harbourside area of Bristol docks, in the southwest of England. It was the 14th
edition and consisted of the screening of some 60 films over the course of four days. Many
of these films were in competition for one or more of eight different prizes, including an
Audience Prize, while others were shown hors concours as part of thematic programmes
devised by the organisers. In addition, there were a number of workshops and discussions
on particular topics, including one on the potential of interactive documentary as a mode
of ethnographic film-making and another ‘making of’ session on a recent television series
on the Hamar pastoralists of Ethiopia, which had employed a fixed multicamera set-up to
film their daily domestic life. However, in contrast to many previous editions of the
festival, on this occasion there was no accompanying academic conference.
By common consent, the quality and variety of the programme at Bristol were both
excellent, continuing the high standards that the festival has achieved over the thirty
years of its existence. So too were the technical facilities and the support of the
Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol. Even so, this
edition posed certain issues that have confronted the RAI festival ever since its inception as I know from personal experience, having been involved to some degree in every edition
to date. Firstly, attendance at the screenings was disappointing: some of the films that
would later be awarded prizes, and whose makers had come from a long way to support,
played to very small audiences. Secondly, some of the films selected for screening and
even some of those awarded prizes provoked controversy since they had been made by
filmmakers with neither debt nor allegiance to academic anthropology and without any
prior prolonged ethnographic research. On what grounds therefore, some participants
asked, had they been included in the programme of an ethnographic film festival?
On the “ethnographicness” of the RAI Film Festival
A broad range of practical factors may impact on attendance at any film festival,
including location and transport facilities, the precise calendar dates, the cost of
registration and accommodation, and the effectiveness of publicity - to name only the
most obvious. Yet the quality and nature of the programme also has an effect and it is
here that there is a relationship to be considered between the level of attendance and
what, after Karl Heider, we might call the “ethnographicness” of the films on offer (Heider
1975, 46). The important point to take on board here is that “ethnographicness” is a
relative rather than an absolute quality and as such can be applied to a broad range of
films, some of which will be more ethnographic than others.
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The RAI has generally taken the view that if we were to restrict ourselves to films that
are very strongly or obviously ethnographic in the sense that they have been made both
by and for academic anthropologists and are based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork,
we would be unlikely to end up with a selection of films that was sufficiently strong either
in number or in quality to sustain a stimulating festival with an international profile.
Besides, to restrict ourselves in this way would be entirely contrary to the historical
mission of the RAI, which, since its foundation in the nineteenth century, has been to act
as a two-way bridge between the academic world and the broader public, not only
providing a means whereby anthropologists and archaeologists can communicate their
knowledge to non-academic audiences, but also a means of introducing ideas and
interests from the outside world into the academy. Given this historical mission, it
behoves us particularly to ask not only what academics can do for ethnographic
filmmaking by non-academics, but also what non-academic filmmakers can do for the
practice of ethnography by academic anthropologists.
Typically, the RAI festival now receives over 300 submissions for one or more of its
prizes. In selecting amongst this vast field of entries, the RAI has tended to adopt a rather
catholic definition of the term “ethnographic”. In common with the practice in
contemporary academic anthropology generally, in this definition, “ethnography” is no
longer considered merely synonymous with the culturally exotic. That may still be the
most widespread popular view, but this was an association that became obsolete in the
academic world at least 80 years ago when anthropologists began to carry out
ethnographic studies on the streets of Chicago. In this more modern definition,
ethnography, be it filmic or textual, is typically taken to involve the study or exploration of
the customary and recurrent forms of social and cultural life, regardless of the degree of
cultural exoticism entailed. It may involve an account of exceptional events, of a political,
or ritual nature, for example, but in the unfolding of those events, customary relations,
ideas and values will in the ideal case be invoked, even highlighted or brought to light
when normally they remain hidden. An ethnographic film defined in this way will often
also be about particular individuals, and may even constitute highly personalised
portraits, but it will be through these individuals’ idiosynractic life experiences that the
film will offer a broader view onto the culture or society of which they are part.
There is also a methodological and even an ethical dimension to this present-day
definition of the ethnographic. In the ideal case, an ethnographic film will be based on the
prolonged cohabitation of the filmmakers with the subjects and the film that emerges
from this cohabitation will be one that is built upon the relationship of trust developed
between subjects and filmmakers during this period. The resulting film will be at the very
least non-judgemental, and may even be partisan in the sense that its aim will be to
present the way of life of the subjects, not just as they understand it intellectually, morally
or politically, but even, to the degree that the audiovisual medium allows it, as they
experience it. In this way, an ethnographic film should be aiming to access what Bronislaw
Malinowski, the original Ethnographer with a capital ‘E’, called the “subjective desire of
feeling” and which he also pronounced, in those less gender-aware days, to be “the
greatest reward which we can hope to obtain from the study of Man” (Malinowski 1932,
25).
In applying this definition of the ethnographic to the films submitted to the RAI festival,
the selection committees have generally worked to the principle that it is not necessary to
be an academic anthropologist to make a film that is ethnographic – though as with crazy
people in some offices, it can certainly help. Nor is it necessary for a film to conform to the
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definition in every particular for it to be considered ethnographic: even if it deviates in
some regards, its “ethnographicness” can still be sufficient for it to merit a place at the
festival. It is also not necessary for films to conform to any particular style or genre: they
can be observational, interview-based, commentary-led, archival or even fictional, and
still manifest sufficient “ethnographicness” to be included. All subject matters are
similarly possible.
The upside of this broad definition of the ethnographic is that RAI has generally had a
very rich field of films from which to choose. The downside is that it is often very difficult
to choose between them. How does one assess self-consciously cinematic works in the
mould of Robert Gardner, with the more soberly observational films of the kind made by
David MacDougall? How does one compare a sophisticated documentary feature of the
kind produced by Kim Longinotto with a much shorter film about, say, basket-weaving,
that is based on extended firsthand field research but with a fraction of the budget, not to
mention a relative absence of the technical film skills that Longinotto can call upon? This
last comparison is complexified by the fact that the RAI film festival is supposed to cater
to the needs not only of anthropologists but also archaeologists, many of whom have a
particular interest in films about technology and “material culture”. Similarly, how does
one balance the claims of archival films against those of ethnofictions, or the films made
by students (which constitute a large proportion of the entries) against those made by
more experienced filmmakers? And what should be the place of indigenous media
producers? Should we also strive to find a place for art installations, websites and
interactive documentaries, all of which pose logistical problems of exhibition?
Over the course of its thirty-year history, the RAI festival has sought to come to terms
with the diversity of the submissions that it receives in two related ways. Firstly, by the
proliferation of prizes, so that there is now a prize for a broad range of different
categories of film, thereby going some way towards avoiding invidious or absurd
comparisons. Secondly, by the proliferation of strands, so that there are now usually at
least three strands of film-screenings or more discussion-based events taking place
simultaneously. But although these may sound like effective solutions, they merely
replace one set of problems with another: not only do three strands disperse the
audience, which historically has often been small enough anyway at the RAI festival, but at
the same time, it increases the costs of running the festival. For each prize has to be
judged and the judges’ expenses paid, and each strand has to be accommodated in its own
screening facility, thereby usually increasing room and equipment hire costs.
In my personal view, the only way to square this particular circle is to increase the
attendance substantially so that there is sufficient audience to fill every session
adequately. But one of the longstanding obstacles to doing this has been the fact that
historically the RAI festival has been a moveable feast, never remaining in the same
location for more than two consecutive editions, thereby making it difficult both to build
up a local audience and to develop a familiar brand that will attract people from afar. This
mobility also increases the cost of running the festival over the longer term, since in every
new location, a new infrastructure has to be devised and created.
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The origins of the RAI Festival
As it is presently constituted, the RAI festival represents the amalgamation of two
previously existing events – a “one-off” film festival and a film prize competition - that
have been subsequently overlain by all sorts of later accretions. The “one-off” film festival
took place in September 1985 at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), which
is part of London University. It was a “one-off” in the sense that it was originally conceived
as an isolated event, rather than as the first of what would become a series of festivals.
The intention was that it would be international in nature but that it would also reflect the
range of ethnographic filmmaking initiatives taking place at that time in the UK. Over the
course of three days, there were screenings of a number of relatively recent, mostly
acclaimed ethnographic films, which had been selected by the organisers and arranged
around three themes: life crises, change and development, and cultural self-expression.
The first day was chaired by Colin Young, then head of the National Film and Television
School (NFTS) in the UK and a leading supporter of ethnographic filmmaking, while the
second and third days were chaired by the eminent filmmakers David MacDougall and
Jean Rouch respectively. A generous grant from UNESCO enabled the organisers to keep
the registration fee low and to invite a number of participants from what was then still
known as the “Third World”.
The programme of screenings was enhanced by a number of ancillary events, including
a one-day pre-Festival conference focused on the use of film in multicultural educational
contexts to combat racism. There were also a number of supporting events, well-attended
by the general public, at the National Film Theatre, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the
French Institute and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) in
Piccadilly. The latter served as the location for a memorable double bill consisting of Jean
Rouch’s bizarre paen to pre-industrial life, Dionysos (1984), and Robert Gardner’s aboutto-be-released masterwork, Forest of Bliss (1986). Both filmmakers were present for the
discussion afterwards but as the films, each in its own way, had mostly stunned or
perplexed the audience, this proved to be rather fragmentary.
This was still within the highwater period of the patronage of ethnographic filmmaking
by British television and the Festival was opened by Sir Denis Forman, CEO of Granada
Television and godfather of the Disappearing World strand (Forman, 1985). With each
film based on the field research of a consultant anthropologist, this strand had been
running since 1969 and had completed nine series by this point, representing 34 films (it
would go on to produce a further 22 films in 7 series, finally ending in 1993). After a
number of more thematic series broadcast in the late 1960s and 1970s, the BBC had
recently set up a new unit at Bristol to produce the Worlds Apart strand, modelled on the
Disappearing World formula. This strand had begun broadcasting in 1982 and was already
into its second series. Meanwhile, Channel 4 had come on-stream and had signalled its
intention to support ethnographic filmmaking, not only by broadcasting Nanook of the
North (1922) on the centenary of the director Robert Flaherty’s birth in 1984, but also by
commissioning films by the anthropologist-filmmakers Hugh Brody and Toni de
Bromhead (for the latter, see de Bromhead 2014).
The RAI itself had also played an important part in promoting ethnographic film during
this period. In fact, it had supported ethnographic filmmaking since at least as far back as
the early 1950s when it had provided the anthropologist Harry Powell with a camera that
he used to shoot sequences of kula exchange in the Trobriand Islands. Later, in the 1960s,
the RAI Film Committee had been formed. But the promotion of ethnographic filmmaking
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at the RAI had entered a new phase with the appointment of Jonathan Benthall as the
Director in 1974. Under his editorship, RAIN, the newsletter of the RAI, began to carry
regular reviews of the ethnographic films screened on television as well as more general
comment pieces about ethnographic film.
One of the thematic series that appeared on British television in the 1970s, Face Values
(David Cordingley, 1978), was originally proposed to the BBC by a committee of the RAI
chaired by Edmund Leach. Although it had featured the then royal patron of the RAI,
Prince Charles, as an unlikely anchorman (which had at least ensured high viewing
ratings), the series received what are euphemistically known as “mixed notices”.
However, this did not deter the RAI from its continued support of ethnographic
filmmaking. In the 1980s, this took a very different form in the shape of a scheme
developed in collaboration with the National Film and Television School whereby, with
the aid of funding from the Leverhulme Trust, a number of post-doctoral academic
anthropologists were trained in practical filmmaking over the course of one or two years.
This scheme, which I was very fortunate to be part of myself, was in full flow at the time of
the first RAI film festival and the two of us then on the scheme, the enthnomusicologist
John Baily and myself, were invited to show preliminary cuts of the films that we had
made.
However, this first festival did not feature any sort of competitive element. The origins
of this aspect of the festival lay in an entirely different initiative of the RAI Film Committee
that predated the festival by a number of years. The first RAI Film Prize was awarded in
1980 to David and Judith MacDougall’s well-known film, The Wedding Camels (1977).
Although a considerable number of films had been entered for this competition, only the
prize-winning film had been screened publicly. The same procedure applied in 1982,
when Kim Mckenzie’s film, Waiting for Harry (1982) won the prize. But in 1984, four
shortlisted films were screened at the RAI’s headquarters, which were then still located in
offices rented from the Royal Asiatic Society in Queen Anne Street. The judges’ decision to
award the film to Gary Kildea’s film, Celso and Cora (1983), generated some controversy
since a number of those present, including myself, felt that while Celso and Cora had many
merits, Melissa Llewelyn-Davies’ magnificent film, The Women’s Olamal (1984) had a
better claim to be considered the best specifically ethnographic film in that year’s
competition (Henley 1984).
In 1986, the RAI Film Prize was supplemented by a second prize funded by Robert
Gardner. This was named in honour of Basil Wright, who had been one of Grierson’s
protegés in the celebrated GPO documentary film unit in the 1930s and whose work
Gardner greatly admired, particularly his quasi-ethnographic film, Song of Ceylon (1934).
This prize was to be awarded, Gardner stipulated, to a film “in the ethnographic tradition”
that communicated “a concern for humanity" and took advantage of the “evocative
faculty” of film to do so. This allowed for a sort of division of labour between the prizes:
the Basil Wright Prize came to be adopted as a means of recognizing works, such as those
of Gardner himself, or indeed Basil Wright, that exploited the aesthetic potential of film in
an artistic or poetic manner, while the RAI Film Prize came to be reserved for more
aesthetically realist films, typically concerned with social or political topics.
The first recipient of the Basil Wright Prize was the Franco-Bulgarian director Gueorgui
Balabanov, for his artistically constructed meditation on mortality (an appropriately
Gardnerian theme) in the film Pomen (1979), while the RAI Prize that year was awarded
to the more straightforwardly realist observational film, Two Ways of Justice (1985),
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which was one of Melissa Llewelyn Davies’s Maasai Diary series broadcast on BBC2, and
which contrasts the Maasai way of administering justice with that of the Kenyan state.
These awards took place in the SOAS cinema in the presence of Basil Wright himself,
whom I was delegated to look after. Sadly, however, Wright was by then rather infirm and
seemed confused as to what he was doing there. He died the following year, aged 80, and
was commemorated in an elegant obituary published by Gardner in the recently launched
RAI magazine, Anthropology Today (Gardner 1988).
In 1988, the screening of the short-listed finalists, now for two prizes, moved out of
London for the first time when it was hosted in Manchester by the Granada Centre for
Visual Anthropology. This had been established at the University of Manchester the
previous year with myself as its director. The event was held at the Cornerhouse, a local
arts cinema, and was attended by both academics and members of the general public.
However, it seemed to us a great shame that we then had to return the eighty or so other
films that had been submitted for these prizes from all over the world without ever
showing them in public. It was out of this sense of lost opportunity that the idea of
combining the prize screenings and the festival into a single event was born. Accordingly,
we proposed to the RAI Film Committee that we would host a second edition of the film
festival at Manchester that would also incorporate the 1990 edition of the film prize
screenings. Although some members of the Committee had their doubts, our proposal was
accepted. The RAI Film Festival had hit the road in more senses than one.
The trajectory of the RAI Film Festival
The 1990 edition of the festival was considerably more substantial than the first
edition that had taken place five years beforehand. Over 350 people registered for the
1990 event, including many of the leading visual anthropologists and filmmakers of the
day, from all over the world (Fig. X-1). A large proportion of the attendees were students.
Due to a bursary fund set up in memory of another of Grierson’s protegés, Harry Watt, the
RAI was able to pay the airfares of a number of participants from the global South. It
extended over five days, Monday to Friday, running from 9:00am to 11:00pm, and
involved the screening of over 80 films as well as a conference at which there were some
60 presentations and various specialised workshops. A selection of papers from this
conference was later edited by my Manchester colleagues, Peter Crawford and David
Turton, into a volume that would become an important landmark in the literature of
visual anthropology (Crawford and Turton 1992).
The nine films shortlisted for the RAI and Basil Wright prizes were screened in a single
strand over three evenings. The other two evenings were dedicated to a series of special
events: a lecture named in honour of Sir Denis Forman and given by Peter Loizos, as well
as to the screening of recent works by the two leading monstres sacrés of ethnographic
film: Ika Hands (1988) by Robert Gardner, and Jean Rouch’s backhanded ethnofictional
tribute to the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité … et
puis après? (1990). The latter was so recently released that it had not yet been subtitled
into English, but Rouch himself was on hand to give a simultaneous translation in his
celebrated Maurice Chevalier accent. During the day, there were two or more parallel
strands consisting of conference presentations, non-competitive screenings (a sort of
salon de refusés for films submitted for the two main prizes) and films shortlisted for two
new prizes, one for Material Culture and Archaeology, and the other a Student Prize
sponsored by JVC in the form of a then state-of-the-art VHS video recorder.
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The 1990 edition established the general model for the RAI Film Festival, but it is one
that subsequent editions have found difficult to emulate. This is because in addition to its
sheer novelty value and the general buzz about ethnographic filmmaking that existed in
the UK at that time due to television patronage, the 1990 Festival benefitted from certain
conditions that its successors have not enjoyed, at least not to anything like the same
extent. Most importantly, the 1990 festival received substantial sponsorship from
Granada Television both in the form of cash and in the use of its Studios, and also from the
University of Manchester, partly in the form of cash, but more importantly in the form of
entirely free facilities and excellent technical support. The University of Manchester also
sponsored the event to a major degree in the sense that the three principal local academic
organisers of the event - David Turton, Peter Crawford and myself - all dedicated several
months of our time to the festival and were further supported by the secretarial staff of
the Department of Anthropology. All this was done with the blessing of the then head of
the department, Marilyn Strathern, since the festival was seen as an important way of
putting Manchester ‘on the map’ as far as visual anthropology was concerned. Although
the festival certainly did achieve this aim, it is very unlikely that at the present time when the activities of all UK university academics are overshadowed by the need to
produce outputs for research assessment exercises - that any head of department,
whatever the strategic advantages, could readily agree to so much staff time being
dedicated to the running of a film festival. For, sadly, as far as these research assessment
exercises are concerned, a film festival counts for very little.
But in the early 1990s, research assessment exercises still lay in the future, so in order
to put into practice the lessons that we had learned from the 1990 edition, in 1992 we
again offered to host a festival incorporating the film prize screenings at Manchester,
thereby establishing the biennial rhythm that has persisted, with one brief hiccup, to this
day. As 1992 was the year when the world was marking the 500th anniversary of the
arrival of Columbus in America, films about the Native peoples of the Americas were
prominent in the programme. It also featured two days of presentations and workshops
aimed at a critical evaluation of the way in which Native Americans had been represented
in Western media. A particular innovation of this edition of the festival, and one that has
subsequently become a regular feature, was the offering a Life Achievement Award. In
fact, on this occasion, we made two such awards, one to Timothy Asch and the other to
Brian Moser, both of whom had made distinguished contributions to ethnographic
filmmaking about Native peoples of the Americas.
A high point of this edition was the presence of three Native American filmmakers,
which was made possible by a combination of grants from UNESCO and the Harry Watt
fund. These filmmakers were Noemi Gualinga, a Canelos Quichua from Ecuador, and
Mokuka and Tamok from Central Brazil, both of whom had worked with the late Terry
Turner on the Kayapo Video Project. Turner himself was also present and gave that year’s
Forman Lecture at the festival, using it to attack those who had suggested that the use of
video technology by native peoples was merely another means by which these peoples
were being subjugated to Western values and political control (Turner 1992).
Although the 1992 event also took place over five days and required a great deal of
effort to deliver, it was a significantly smaller event than its predecessor. Attendance was
down by a third, and there were fewer international participants. There were also fewer
films and far fewer conference presentations. As the 1990s progressed, this process of
shrinkage would continue. The television patronage of ethnographic filmmaking in the UK
dwindled over this decade, making it increasingly difficult to get sponsorship for the
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festival from that source. At the same time, as the neo-liberal agenda progressively
invaded the life of universities, the charges that they made for the use of their facilities
increased. Meanwhile, academics themselves became increasingly jealous of their time on
account of the mounting obligation ‘to publish or perish’.
In the face of these pressures, it became very much more of a challenge for the festival
to balance its budget. It was only due to the remarkable self-sacrificing efforts of
colleagues at the University of Kent that the festival was sustained through its fourth and
fifth editions in 1994 and 1996, while in 1998, it was colleagues at Goldsmiths who took
up the challenge (see Fig. X-2). By now the festival had become an event of only three
days, typically spread over a long weekend, with considerably lower attendance than had
been the case in the early 1990s, and with far fewer international participants. At the
same time, however, the number of films submitted for the prizes had increased as a
result of the fact that, with the digital revolution, film production had become much
cheaper. It was therefore getting increasingly difficult to squeeze a representative sample
into the time available.
At the SOAS festival in 2000, there were three concurrent strands of films throughout
the three days, but there was no accompanying conference. In the early years of the
millennium, the festival almost died but after a three-year hiatus, it was rescued from
oblivion by the generosity of colleagues at Durham. (This at least had the beneficial
consequence of putting us out of phase with the equally biennial Göttingen International
Ethnographic Film Festival, which is similar in many regards to the RAI festival). In 2005,
the ninth edition was hosted at Oxford where it was attached to the events celebrating the
centenary of the teaching of anthropology at the university. Here the conference element
of the festival was restored, with a two-day workshop on archives and the history of
visual anthropology preceding the three days of screenings. But attendance at the festival
itself remained relatively modest.
For the tenth edition, in 2007, the festival returned for the third time to Manchester.
Here, with the support of colleagues in the Drama department, we were able to recapture
some of the scale of the earliest festivals with the aid of what was, in effect, the last hurrah
of the sponsorship of ethnographic film by Granada Television. Although the Disappearing
World series had itself disappeared in 1993, Granada Television was still supporting the
Granada Centre in a modest fashion, including funding the Forman Lecture. The festival
opened with what would prove to be the very last Forman Lecture, with Sir Denis himself
sitting in the front row. This ‘lecture’ actually consisted of an interview by Hugh Brody of
the feature film director Kevin MacDonald.
Over four days, some 76 films were screened, including 12 films as part of a ‘China Day’.
The usual range of prizes was assigned, plus a new one, the Intangible Culture Prize for
the best film on music, dance or performance (see Fig. X-3). There were workshops on
such topics as visual anthropology in Latin America, anthropology on television and the
visualization of childhood. The end of the screenings also overlapped with the start of a
major 1½ day conference, Beyond Text, organized by my Manchester colleagues Rupert
Cox and Andrew Irving, in collaboration with Chris Wright of Goldsmiths College. This was
dedicated to the exploration of the relationships between anthropological understanding,
sensory perception and aesthetic practices, including filmmaking. A collection of papers
from this conference, as well as a DVD, has been published very recently (Cox, Irving and
Wright 2016). In the course of the entire five days, over 500 people attended one or more
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sessions of the festival-conference, a figure that dwarfs even the numbers achieved at the
1990 festival.
The RAI festival facing the future
The momentum recaptured by the tenth festival has generally been sustained over the
last four editions at Leeds Metropolitan University in 2009, at University College London
in 2011 (see Bishop 2012), in Edinburgh in 2013 (the first time that the festival had been
held outside England) and, most recently in Bristol in 2015. Both the quality and quantity
of the films submitted for the prizes have improved steadily over this period, resulting in
a progressively more elaborate programme. Several new prizes were added to list,
including an Audience Prize in Leeds (2009) and the Richard Werbner Prize in London
(2011), to be awarded to early career academic anthropologists for films that complement
a textual ethnography. In 2015, as a one-off at Bristol, an Environmental Issues prize was
also awarded.
The continuing vigour of the festival during this period was in large measure due to the
sterling efforts of the RAI Film Officer, Susanne Hammacher. In addition to playing a
leading role in the management of the film prize screenings, she also helped to orchestrate
a series of stimulating workshops that ran in parallel with the screenings and covered
such diverse topics as participatory film-making with street children and community
groups, archives and intellectual property rights, and interwar travelogues and colonial
filmmaking. The Edinburgh edition (2013) also featured Factish Field, an art and
anthropology ‘summer school’ that ran alongside the festival.
Another development during this period represented a welcome return to the
partnership with the Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern
California which had played such an important part in the success of the 1990 festival but
which had subsequently lapsed. Re-established with the 2013 Festival, this partnership
not only allows for the participation of colleagues from USC in the celebration of the
festival in the UK, but afterwards, a selection of films from the festival are screened in Los
Angeles. USC also make a generous contribution to the budget of the festival.
However, with the arguable exception of the 12th Festival at UCL in 2011, which could
draw on the entirely exceptional conditions of London, there was still a tendency during
this period for there to be a mismatch between high quality of the programme and the
size of the audience that the Festival was able to attract. As I write, this is the main
challenge that we are confronting as we make preparations for the 15th RAI Film Festival,
which will again take place at the Watershed in Bristol, in the spring of 2017. However, as
the newly appointed director of the festival, I have every confidence that we will be able
to meet this challenge. Indeed, we are already putting in place a series of formal
Partnerships with anthropology departments and film schools at a regional, national and
international level that will address this challenge directly, aiming to ensure not only a
diverse and high quality programme, but also a substantial audience, a healthy balance
sheet, and an organisational model that will carry the festival forward for at least another
thirty years.
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Bibliography
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Films.” American Anthropologist 114(3): 528-529.
Cox, Rupert, Andrew Irving, and Christopher Wright, eds.. 2016. Beyond Text: Critical
Practices and Sensory Anthropology. Manchester University Press.
Crawford, Peter, and David Turton, eds.. 1992. Film as Ethnography. Manchester
University Press.
de Bromhead, Antoinette. 2014. A Film-maker’s Odyssey: Adventures in Film and
Anthropology. Højbjerg: Intervention Press.
Forman, Denis. 1985. “International Festival of Ethnographic Film: Opening speech, 24
September.” Anthropology Today 1(6): 2-4.
Gardner, Robert. 1988. “Obituary: Basil Wright.” Anthropology Today 4(1): 24.
Heider, Karl. 1976. Ethnographic Film. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Henley, Paul. 1984. “The 1984 RAI Film Prize.” RAIN 62: 9-12.
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