C.Konczei (Cluj, Romania)
Who shows who watches: how to pack records about others to reach audience
From the beginning of the film history there is duplicity concerning the audiences of filmed reality. The direction marked by Regnault pointed directly towards dusty archives and that of the Lumiere brothers towards noisy movie halls. Is this dichotomy concerning the audiences still existing? How the archived materials really function, which are their audiences in the present? These are questions, which arise when making a close analysis of the usage of these. The presentation arguments that most of the archived materials on traditional culture are nowadays
used as a raw material for other types of representations - popular or commercial etc. and
that there is a very limited amount of purely scientific study of these understood in traditional
terms. This means that when we take into consideration the diverse ways of representing traditional culture, scientific or artistic , we have to compare in fact the visible, publicly living images and not the abstract forms registered in academic catalogues.
The presentation proposes to analyze some movies representing the culture of a regional community, that from Gyimes, Transylvania, Romania, which became a very favorite local issue in the scientific and media discourses in the last decades. We can see a sample from the film archive of the Institute of Musicology of the Hungarian Academy, which was recorded according to well-standardized rules. Then we can follow a fragment of a video-choreography which
uses the document as a raw material - the most widespread way of utilizing this kind of film records. Finally we watch a totally different approach, that of a young director materialized in an artistic documentary. When making a contextual analysis of these representations, we have to take into consideration the communicational processes of how they reach their audiences in our present days.
Observing that directly or indirectly all of them target a larger audience then that of experts, we can ask, which visual genre is more able to communicate anthropologically thick about other people.
Films and the video materials you let to show and discuss:
1. Filmed field records of traditional dances from Gyimes region, Transylvania, Romania from the archive if the Institute of Musicology of the Hungarian Academy 3-5 minutes;
2. Professional popular dance video based on the field records 3-5 minutes;
3. Artistic documentary shot in the same location: The Kingdom of Silence directed by Lakatos RСbert, 2001, 35 minutes

A.Baliksi (Sofija, Bulgaria)
Sons of Haji Omar
The production and distribution history of "Sons of Haji Omar" can be
analyzed as an interesting case of political-ideological misuse of what was initially purely anthropological material. It is a case about how major film and television companies changed the format and ideological significance of a scientific product and this in the midst of the Afghan war.
Our basic aim was to describe the interconnectedness of the three main
segments of Afghan society, the pastoral, the sedentary-agricultural and the urban (bazar towns). We believed that we could best study this
interconnectedness through the process of sedenterization of a specific
pastoral tribe increasingly involved in agricultural and bazaar activities while still pursuing sheep breeding on a transhumant basis. After several difficult surveys of pastoral groups in Central Afghanistan we located a small tribe, the Lakenkhel, in Baghlan Province in the northeastern part of the country which was suitable for study according to our criteria. Our intention was to first assemble a detailed ethnographic documentation of the tribe and then proceed with anthropological filming following strictly the rules developed by Margaret Mead for this sort of work. Field work started in 1974 and proceeded with interruptions until the spring of 1976. I concentrated on the family of the tribal chief, Haji Omar, who was at the time one of the wealthiest men in that part of the country. My research work was initially sponsored by the National Geographic Society which expected to obtain a popular film for its television series. During early 1976 however the National Geographic lost interest in the project and I was invited to search for a new sponsor for the film part of the project.
Such a sponsor I found with the National Anthropological Film Center at the Smithsonian Institution. By that time I was ready with filming plans
although my ethnographic research was not completed. Tim Asch and Patsy Asch accepted to collaborate on this project as director-camerapersons with equipment provided by the Smithsonian under a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
With the Asches we filmed without interruption for a period of four months during the summer of 1976 exposing close to 70 000 feet of 16 mm film, all with sync sound. We covered best pastoral activities with agriculture and bazaar life coming second. We integrated these economic activities around the personalities of our principal protagonists, Haji Omar and his three sons. During the fall of 1976 the Asches quit the project and moved to Australia.
The National Film Board of Canada then took over and we finished the winter sequences with the help of a Canadian crew. Back at the Smithsonian where all field notes and film materials were deposited a sophisticated annotation procedure was applied. After proper ataloguing a second sound track was produced with the full translation into English of the original Pashto and Farsi dialogue and then a third sound track was developed carrying our detailed ethnographic comments for all film sequences of the totality of the footage with cross references to the ethnographic field notes.
These two additional sound tracks made the footage directly accessible to future investigators.
In 1978 we started editing in the NFB in Montreal. I had prepared plans for a 3 hours series of 3 films, the first on pastoralism, the second on the bazaar town of Narin, the third on agriculture. We started editing and were progressing successfully. Meanwhile the civil war in Afghanistan had already started. In this context the NFB director ordered me to replace the 3 hours anthropological project with a one hour television film. I had no other choice but to comply. The original 3 hour version was destroyed and shortened to an one hour production. That is the present film, "Sons of Haji Omar". This film was highly successful and was broadcast all around the world. That is how the BBC got hold of the film and changed up to 10 minutes of the original, introducing mujahiddin scenes which were totally out of place. That is how the materials of an original scientific project were changed and used for a commercial television show by the NFB and later ideologically falsified by the BBC. I suggested to the director of the NFB to undertake a court action against the BBC with no result. Then I published an article in London (Newsletter of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1982) and the BBC produced a rejoinder. Following this incident I was not motivated to encourage distribution in universities and anthropological institutions. Recently, after the collapse of the Taliban and the increase in interest for Afghan studies our film is being actively distributed in Europe by the Royal Anthropological Institute in London.

SONS OF HAJI OMAR
by Asen Balikci, Tim Asch and Patsy Aschproduced by the National Film Board of Canada and the Smithsonian Institution.Afghanistancolor,58 minutes, rd 1978

Haji Omar and his three sons belong to the Lakankhel, a Pashtoon tribal group in northeastern Afghanistan. The film focuses on his family: Haji Omar, the patriarch; Anwar, the eldest, his father's favorite, a pastoralist and expert horseman; Jannat Gul, cultivator and ambitious rebel; and Ismail, the youngest, attending school with a view to a job as a government official. Filmed over a period of twelve months, it is a record of life at the spring lambing camp, the activities at Narim Bazaar, where the caravan stocks up for the long trek, and the slow ascent to the summer grazing grounds. The spring camp is not far from the provincial center, Baghlan. In May and June they move to mountain pastures in the Hindu Kush. Haji Omar's family home is near the small market town of Narin, sequences show life in the bazaar, classes in the high school and dealings with government officials.The film ends with the fierce Buskashi games, when the nomads are back in their winter home. In concentrating on relations within one family, and through appropriate use of interviews and conversations, the film manages to draw sharp, colorful portraits of the protagonists and their problems. The film is an authentic, evocative and beautiful account of a little known region and way of life.
Distributed by:National Film Board of CanadaInternational ProgramP.O.Box 6100, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3C 3H5Tel: (514) 283-9447Fax: (514) 496-1895Documentary Educational Resources101 Morse Street, Watertown, MA 02172, USATel: (617) 926-0491Fax: (617) 926-9519http://www.der.org/films/sons_of_haji_omar.html

R. Husmann (Gettingen, Germani)
Footage - Research Film - Documentary - Fiction Film - The Importance of Shooting with a Clear Targe
Footage - Research Film - Documentary - Fiction Film -
The Importance of Shooting with a Clear Target
Shooting ethnographic film (the so-called first production)is done for a number of purposes: some researchers just want to use it as a form of visual notebook, others want to shoot a research film (often however used as an educational film), while documentary filmmakers (and anthropologists working in a similar way) will adopt a number of filming strategies with a clear idea of the final film in their mind. Finally fiction film can also have an ethnographic background, and here the circumstances of the first production are again quite different.
The paper will discuss how these different ways of shooting ethnographic film material are guided by the target of what the final film should be like. It will discuss in how far it is possible or impossible to use material shot for one purpose for quite a different type of film.