American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn – an Academy Film Scholars Lecture

Academy Film Scholar Scott MacDonald gave a presentation on his book American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn,  examining a half-century of pioneering work by such influential documentary filmmakers as John Marshall, Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch, Ed Pincus, Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee, Steve Ascher and Jeanne Jordan, and Robb Moss. While their films are as distinctive and individualistic as Marshall’s The Hunters, Pincus’s Diaries, Guzzetti’s Family Portrait Sittings, and McElwee’s Sherman’s March, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan, their innovative approaches were shaped at the MIT Film Section, Harvard’s Film Study Center and other Cambridge-area institutions where cinematic, personal and professional relationships have come together in a uniquely cosmopolitan nexus of documentary activity.

Scott MacDonald teaches film history at Hamilton College in New York.  He is the author of numerous books on alternative and independent film, including the five-volume series A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (1988, 1992, 1998, 2004, 2005), Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies (1993), Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor (2008), Adventures of Perception: Cinema as Exploration (2009) and Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (2014).  He was named an Academy Film Scholar in 2011.  His book American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn was published in 2013.

This is the 12th in a series of lectures spotlighting recipients of the Academy Film Scholars grant.  Established in 1999, the Academy Film Scholars program is designed to stimulate and support the creation of new and significant works of film scholarship about aesthetic, cultural, educational, historical, theoretical or scientific aspects of theatrical motion pictures.  Tickets are free. 

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