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invest them in their culture.
　　In Curtis’s film In the land of the War Canoes (1914), he portrays the Kwakiutls in British Columbia, this film documents a dramatised version of the culture, its values and practices, in a feature length piece. “After 1910 a few films about non-European societies appeared that suggested a dawning interest in an indigenous point of view.” (MacDougall 1995: 228-9). Curtis’s film was instrumental in setting out a template for a style of ethnographic narrative which was taken up and used by Flaherty some years later. Again he has been criticised for romanticising a culture in his depiction of a tale of tribal love and revenge. As suggested above, critics have noted that in his photographic work he has removed signs of contemporary life from the images, and In the land of the War Canoes is considered by some to freeze a culture, setting it apart from the wider community and depicting it as unchanging when in fact it was altering. Similarly, his work has been seen as too simplistic, resisting a more complex reading of a people, as even “the simplest human events unfold in a tangle of attendant activities, emotions, [and] motivations” (Weinberger 1994: 12). Despite these and other criticisms, the film is considered by many as a primary example of an ethnographic film, meticulously portraying a rich and vibrant culture. Curtis used a storyline to explicate to a wider audience Kwakiutl culture and practice, providing dramatic tension to convey the participant’s experiences and trials in a way that would enable an audience to understand and empathise with them. Thus, from its earliest days, “the filmic forms of knowledge produced in… ethnographic film are necessarily entwined with the fictional cinematic forms of Hollywood” (Devereaux 1995: 4).
　　The issues of representation and validity persist, from the early ethnographic films to present, and notionally, more informed ones. In Curtis’s work, which was groundbreaking in its depiction of a people, despite using emerging techniques of story telling, the aims of ethnographic films are evident as “a form intended to mediate across cultural boundaries” (Ginsburg 1995: 259). His dedication to detail and photographic sense of scene-setting convey, albeit in a fictionalised way, more perhaps than some ethnographic films that have had access to much more sophisticated technology. In part this could be because of his ignorance, given the nascent form of his craft at the time, of academic arguments for and against ethnographic filming of cultures and customs. Working as a pioneer, he took the stylised forms of story-telling and mythology to record the practices and beliefs of a culture that would have been unknown to most audiences. However earnest these representations, however, they can only ever reveal a portion of the truth, as in all ethnographic fieldwork, “records can never be exhaustive. They remain selective accounts of what actually happened… frozen images” (Hastrup 1992: 15). Despite the fact that any film can only bring remnants of the truth, Curtis’s work would appear to have stood the test of time, he brought a culture to the attention of his audience and although those images are inevitably consumed by the dominant culture, in part merely for the pleasure of watching, his work remains valid and pertinent.
　　Set against quite a different backdrop, the work of Dziga Vertov inhabits an urban setting and embraces and appears to celebrate tec本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。