Context

Most post-war ethnographic and anthropological films have been produced with distribution in mind. They are copied onto convenient media such as videotape, occasionally broadcast on television, screened at one of the many festivals of ethnographic film that are now held world-wide, and included in anthropological film libraries. Although by no means as good as it might be, information concerning these films is not difficult to obtain. Catalogues of the various anthropological film libraries are distributed widely, recent films are reviewed in a number of international journals, and individual films are discussed in a number of readily-available articles and books.

A quite different position exists for the bulk of ethnographic film footage shot in the first 40 years of this century. Much of this material was shot by individual anthropologists, missionaries, colonial officers and travellers as an aid to their research or work. Often it was never intended for wider consumption. In many instances, the footage was never edited and thus never 'packaged' and distributed as a film.

While some unknown quantity of this material has simply been lost or destroyed, much of it remains but is little known. Most of the footage is to be found in the archives of ethnographic museums and similar institutions around the world. The larger museums and archives have documented their holdings, but many smaller institutions lack the skill or resources to do so. The aim of the HADDON project is to draw all this information together into a single catalogue.

While some of the anticipated users of HADDON will be visual anthropologists with a prior interest in archival ethnographic film, it is clear that a growing number of 'non-visual' academics in the humanities and social sciences are beginning to appreciate the value of documentary film archives as a source of data.

It will clearly not be possible to gather data from all ethnographic film archives in the world by October 1996. The initial goal is to cover all the significant archival deposits in the UK, to cover certain key archives in Central and Eastern Europe (particularly Hungary), and to add any other data that are chanced upon.

So far, data has been collected in England and Canada, and we are working on transfering electronic data from the US and Australia.


Go to:

 Back to the HADDON main menu 
 Back to the ISCA Home Page 

This page last updated [date]