Nomadic Cinema

In Nomadic Cinema, Alison Griffiths takes us on an epic tour of expedition filmmaking from the silent era to virtual reality, with her usual great rigor and insight. Her expansive approach keeps close eye on the role of the Indigenous peoples who populate early films on the sidelines, and the adventure proves that the archive of colonial cinema remains a rich vein of cultural encounter and reinvention. -- Catherine Russell, author of <i>Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices</i> In this broad-ranging study, readers will journey across the globe with one of the premier interpreters of ethnographic images and rediscover the institutions and people who made them. Griffiths unpacks fascinating archival materials and successfully offers a rich visual archaeology of expedition films made a century ago about places such as Mount Everest, Borneo, and the Silk Road while also relocating images of distant places in our own time. Part study of images born as salvage anthropology, Griffiths creatively salvages the images themselves, returning them to the descendants of the Indigenous communities depicted, breathing new life into them through current decolonial perspectives. A history of the production and reception of the anthropological image and a thoughtful consideration of the structures of the expedition film genre, under Griffiths's bold revisionist take, Nomadic Cinema also surprises by morphing into a work of ethnography. -- Vanessa R. Schwartz, director of the Visual Studies Research Institute, University of Southern California