People and Sounds: Filming African Music Between Visual Anthropology and Television Documentary

Watching music, and not only listening to or writing about it, is a priority for deepening the knowledge of traditional music both in Europe and elsewhere. Since visual anthropology was born, there have been different ways to convey this idea. Through a review of the documentary films produced from the 1950s until the present time, D'Amico shows the historical changes in film industry priorities with regard to world music portrayals. The dialectal tension between fictional and ethnographic approaches has been a constant. D'Amico supports the premise that auteur films can reach ethnomusicological level, although not being scientific, and have an added poetical value of great help in this field.