Film and Video in Qualitative Research

A Brief History of Visual Ethnography

Nanook of the North, produced in 1922 by Robert Flaherty, is often considered the first ethnographic film. Flaherty openly staged some scenes in the movie, which worried few and entertained many. Russian Dziga Vertov, a contemporary of Flaherty's, is credited with developing a realistic film style that came to be known as cinéma vérité (filmic truth), which was later popularized by 1950s French documentary maker Jean Roach in his work on the lives of Parisians. Anthropologist Margaret Mead's collaboration with Gregory Bateson during the mid-century was highly influential in the development of visual approaches to ethnography. Today, students and scholars are quick to appreciate her idea that notepad and pencil are not enough and that cameras are important field technologies. For much of the mid- to late century, though, survey methods and quantitative analysis dominated social science data gathering. However, the means and technical capabilities of present-day scholars, combined with the massive technical changes over the past 40 years, have seen a resurgence of audiovisual methods.

Technology and Visual Ethnography

Although technology does not determine social prac-tice, it does provide opportunities and sets constraints. Celluloid film was an expensive medium. Cameras were large and difficult to control. Data collection could not readily be accomplished by a lone ethnographer. It could even be argued that film was not used, in any serious sense, to collect data but only to provide a record of interesting social practices and rare or disappearing cultures. Rapid innovations in technology over the past 2 decades have resulted in four new characteristics of relevance for qualitative research. First, the technology needed to produce audiovisual recordings of extremely high quality has become smaller, lighter, less expensive, and easy to use. Driven by tourists, parents, and the private surveillance industry, manufacturers invested significant resources in innovation that resulted, unintentionally, in arguably the best means of collecting and presenting data on social life. Second, analogue media degrade, if only a little, with each copy, but digital audiovisual records may be reproduced in perpetuity with no loss, facilitating the archiving and sharing of data and results among qualitative researchers. Nonlinear editing systems are the third crucial advance for digital ethnographic research. New generations of ethnographers need not worry about the cumbersome and destructive editing systems used by the editors of anthropological films. Fourth, the internet represents a wealth of information and technical assistance while providing innovative platforms for the storing, viewing, and coding of raw audiovisual data and for editing and the presentation for entertainment, educational, and scholarly purposes.

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