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SUMMARY:Filming Fore\, shooting scientists: medical research and documenta
 ry film - Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney)
DTSTART:20150514T143000Z
DTEND:20150514T160000Z
UID:TALK58789@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Richard Staley
DESCRIPTION:During the Cold War\, the research film became instrumental in
  medical science and cultural anthropology\, especially in the surveillanc
 e and analysis of non-recurring events in isolated or primitive communitie
 s. Inspired by the informational cinema studies of Mead and Bateson on Bal
 i and Gesell in New Haven\, Gajdusek and Sorenson in the 1960s sought to a
 ccumulate a global film archive of primitive communities\, focusing on cli
 nical disorders\, such as kuru among the Fore people of New Guinea\, and p
 atterns of child health and development. Ostensibly objective\, the camera
  was for them a desiring machine\, thus relating their archival project to
  the contemporary experimental film of Warhol and others in New York. Rese
 arch film should be distinguished from formal documentary film\, which flo
 urished in this period\, with its emphasis on editorial selection\, themat
 ic coherence\, and narrative closure. Ironically\, and somewhat disappoint
 ingly\, Gajdusek's and Sorensen's research film archive is now used mostly
  to provide ornamentation and verisimilitude to 21st-century documentary f
 ilms about the supposed heroics or presumed priapism of modern scientists.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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