Experimental Film and Anthropology urges a new dialogue between two seemingly separate fields. The book explores the practical and theoretical challenges arising from experimental film for anthropology, and vice versa, through a number of contact zones: trance, emotions and the senses, materiality and time, non-narrative content and montage. Experimental film and cinema are understood in this book as broad, inclusive categories covering many technical formats and historical traditions, to investigate the potential for new common practices.

An international range of renowned anthropologists, film scholars and experimental film-makers engage in vibrant discussion and offer important new insights for all students and scholars involved in producing their own films. This will be indispensable reading for students and scholars in a range of disciplines including anthropology, visual anthropology, visual culture and film and media studies.

This collection of essays by Peter Gidal includes “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film” and other texts on metaphor, narrative, and against sexual representation. Also discussed in their specificity are works by Samuel Beckett, Thérèse Oulton, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol. Throughout, Gidal’s writing attempts a political aesthetics, polemical as well as theoretical. One of the foremost experimental film-makers in Britain since the late 1960s, Peter Gidal was a central figure at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, and taught advanced film theory at the Royal College of Art. His previous books include Andy Warhol: Films and Paintings (1971), Understanding Beckett (1986) and Materialist Film (1989).