Dance on Film: Strategy and Serendipity

Abstract

As soon as moving cameras were invented, film-makers began to capture dance on film. And yet, 100 years on, the use of visual methods in dance research continues to be neglected in favour of representational systems such as dance notation. Against a background of debates about the contribution of visual methodologies to the development of cross-cultural understanding in social anthropology, this chapter argues for the value of film as a research tool in dance studies. Visual anthropology has a dual aspect. It is both ‘the use of visual material in anthropological research’ and ‘the study of visual systems and visible culture’ (Morphy and Banks, 1997, p. 1). The most lucid writer on anthropology and film is the film-maker David MacDougall who, as far back as 1973, suggested that we think of a film as ‘an arena of inquiry’, rather than as an aesthetic or scientific performance (1995, p. 128). MacDougall’s arguments have contributed to my two film projects on Javanese dance, which have been part of ongoing research over nearly 20 years and which provide the focus of this chapter.1

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