Documentary | MUSEUM FATIGUE

Midway Conversations 2015: Neighborhood Documentary Projects Premiere

May 19, 2015 by Museum Fatigue

“We aren’t training to be filmmakers, but use our cameras to learn. Our neighbors have taught us so much.” This past Sunday afternoon our Visual Anthropology class hosted its fourth annual public screening and “thank you” party for our neighborhood—The Hamline Midway. While in previous years we had an early evening slot, this year the only time available was a late weekend afternoon. Despite this, however, we were very pleased to see nearly one hundred people in attendance. We ate […]

Categories: Anthropology, Assignments, Documentary, Visual Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: Hamline Midway, Hamline University, Hamline University Anthropology Department, Hamline-Midway Neighborhood, Midway Conversations, neighborhood, neighborhood research

Midway Conversations 2014: Neighborhood Documentary Projects Premiere

May 21, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

On May 20th from 5:30-7:30pm at a local neighborhood venue, the Turf Club, this spring’s Visual Anthropology class premiered their final mini-documentary projects to a packed house of 100-120 people. This was the second such public event (the first was written about here) and the first to actually be pulled off during finals week at the end of the semester. Together the students, their collaborators and other interested neighbors, friends and family came together to enjoy the documentaries along with bags […]

Categories: Anthropology, Assignments, Documentary, Visual Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: Hamline Midway, Hamline University, Hamline-Midway Neighborhood, Midway Conversations, neighborhood, neighborhood research

University Avenue: One Street, A Thousand Dreams

January 15, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

This morning, while doing some preparing for this spring semester’s visual anthropology class, I located an online posting of the locally produced documentary, University Avenue: One Street, A Thousand Dreams. The documentary, which premiered on our local Public Television Station in late 2012, provides a nice historical context for the area in which the Hamline-Midway neighborhood is located. Once again this semester, my students are going to do short video ethnographies of everyday life in the Hamline-Midway. I’m going to have them […]

Categories: Documentary, Urban, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: documentary, Hamline-Midway Neighborhood, Minnesota, Public Television Station, Saint Paul, TPT, University Avenue, Visual Anthropology Class

Cannibal Tours

May 17, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

A year ago a student borrowed our university library’s copy of Dennis O’Rourke’s classic film, Cannibal Tours, and never returned. The film is out of print and it has been tough to find a replacement—a big inconvenience because this film is so well done. I know of few films that so effectively make viewers aware of their own spectatorship—and offer a teachable and discussable critique of the tourist industry. I regularly give students a first taste of this film in my […]

Categories: Documentary, Representation, Tourism • Tags: Cannibal Tours, Dennis O'Rourke, Papua New Guinea

Some Mao Era Ethnographic Films

March 3, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Clearly massive hard drives are becoming like attics—places where forgotten things wait to be rediscovered. Yesterday while talking with a friend about the Oroqen people in China, I vaguely remembered that six or seven years ago a visual anthropologist in China had shared with me an old Communist-era ethnological film about them. I had saved it on my laptop, and then when I returned home I transferred it to my desktop. Two computer swaps later I wasn’t even sure it […]

Categories: China, Documentary, Visual Anthropology • Tags: 纳西族, ethnology, 鄂伦春族, media, naxi, Oroqen

Midway Conversations: A Neighborhood Documentary

October 27, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

Last Wednesday night, Midway Conversations premiered at the Turf Club. The film was the final project of a collaborative neighborhood-based research project done by the Spring 2012 anthropology senior seminar at Hamline University. The premiere wasn’t without a few last-minute snafus—not least of which was a missing segment in the final copy of the film—but by about 5:45 the popcorn popper was full of hot popcorn and we had a high stack of Checkerboard Pizzas ready to serve. Following a brief introduction, the lights […]

Categories: Documentary, Teaching, Video clips, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: Anthropology, Hamline Midway, Hamline University, Saint Paul, senior seminar, teaching film

“Never Seen Before”: A Senior Documentary Project

May 18, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

The film begins with a bit of disorientation—an institutional building, a cacophonous crowd, a group of men in soldier uniforms. Was that man carrying a giant sword? A woman with striking blue raspberry hair walks past, as the camera weaves through the crowd following a group of three young Hmong women up an escalator to a room where they transform themselves. In the next scene they emerge as a trio of characters from a Japanese animation, or anime. The mini documentary, Never Seen […]

Categories: Documentary, Popular Culture, Teaching • Tags: student projects