IMAGES, DOCUMENTATION, AND IMAGINED ETHNOGRAPHY

The challenge of documentary film boils down to the conundrum of how to marry cinematic goals to those of documentation. Here, Askew relates her experiences as an ethnographer and her involvement in numerous film productions--spanning music videos, a Hollywood feature film, a foreign-language art house film, and several documentary films--that lead her to concur with Robert Coles idea that imagination enters documentary work. She presents a series of recollections that expose the documentary encounter for what it so often is a conflict between documentary and narrative and expressive desires.