Loizos

The Loizos' chapters focus specifically on what makes an ethnographic film distinct from a documentary. According to Loizos in "Innovation in Ethnographic Film," in some sense all ethnographic films are documentaries in that they provide evidence of some reality, yet only a small number of documentaries are ethnographic films (Loizos 7). In this chapter, Loizos explains how an ethnographic and documentary film differ, citing Jay Ruby's and Karl Heider's guidelines for doing so. Ruby classifies ethnographic films as having four criteria: "they should be films about whole cultures, or definable portions of cultures; informed by explicit or implicit theories of culture; explicit about the research and filming methods they had employed; and using a distinctively anthroplogical lexicon" (Loizos 7). Heider has similar classfications but adds that these films are most informative when they reveal "whole bodies, and whole people, in whole acts" (Loizos 7). Loizos decides that these qualifications are satisfactory enough to use them in later chapters as criteria for judging a number of films.
This is seen in the other Loizos' chapter "For the record: documentation filming from innocent realism to self-consciousness." In this section, he discusses the various film techniques that affected the value of the work as an ethnographic study, like synchronized sound, subtitles, faster film speeds and lighter and smaller cameras. Loizos also looks at films by Timothy Asch, Napoleaon Chagnon, Ian Dunlop and Robert Sandall to name a few. Using Ruby and Heider's guidelines, Loizos analyzes what helped or hurt an anthropological film. For instance, Chagnon's Yanomano films, through the use of synch sound and subtitles, gave viewers a sense of immediacy as if they were actually there. Overuse of commentary, something that Margaret Meade was fond of, could hurt a film by appearing to tell the viewers what they should be seeing. Overall, Loizos gave a proficient analysis of what makes an ethnographic film good and how various developments aided or hindered this. I liked how he wrote about different filmmakers rather than just focusing on one, which gives a broad spectrum of what the process of filming an ethnographic work is like. I would like to know what Loizos's own argument is towards documentary versus ethnographic film, but he does mention in the first chapter that no matter what definition one tries to apply there are always difficulties in making the guidelines clear and concise.