The Ethnographic Optic

"The Ethnographic Optic provides ways of seeing and thinking about a moment of French cinema we might otherwise mistake as settled. Sharpening focus on the inward turn of the ethnographic gaze in nonfiction and narrative cinema, Astourian meticulously examines the contradictions and turbulent energies of historical traumas, colonialist legacies, existential crises, and political possibilities at play in the work of Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and their broader media ecologies. This is not just a significant contribution to cinema studies, but a brilliant work of cultural and intellectual history."

~James Leo Cahill, author of Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé

"While early cinematic ethnographers travelled to distant colonies or to the French rural hinterlands, film-makers like Rouch, Resnais, Marker, and, to a lesser extent, Varda, turned their lenses inward and made of the urban French themselves for the first time a properly ethnographic subject. Impeccably researched, The Ethnographic Optic captures and boldly reconfigures this moment in mid-century French film-making, offering striking insights into the profound effects on both cultural production and national identity of the end of empire."

~Kristin Ross, author of The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life

"This book, in the company of Rouch, Marker, and Resnais, makes us rediscover an incredibly daring moment in cinema. Laure Astourian captures all the spicy, subtle flavor of this encounter between ethnography and politics, between a cinema made by a few and a Parisian public opinion that was passionate about concepts like cinéma vérité and direct cinema. Fascinating and invigorating."

~Antoine de Baecque, author of Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema

"The Ethnographic Optic is a significant text. Astourian's scholarship builds upon solid historical and critical sources and then applies a productive ethnographic perspective to reinvigorate the study of these important directors and their cultural contexts. Her approach connects larger issues of colonialism and the dissolution of the empire with shifts within documentary and fiction filmmaking alike during this era. The book also confronts issues of trauma, torture, and consumerism within a cluster of films that have never been examined together, much less from this perspective... This should be a very useful and even intriguing book."

~Richard Neupert, author of French Film History, 1895-1946

"Laure Astourian's The Ethnographic Optic is an interdisciplinary delight tailored especially to scholars of film and media history, ethnography, and French and Francophone studies. In each engaging chapter, Astourian turns her attention to a different cinematic object, showing how Rouch, Marker, Resnais, and other French directors of the 1960s used the medium to probe France's relation to itself and to its colonies. By situating them in a global context, this exciting study invites us to reconsider the legacies of these filmmakers and offers fresh readings of films so familiar, they had become paradoxically less visible. Astourian sees them clearly and invites us to rewatch them with eyes wide open."

~Christy Wampole, author of Degenerative Realism: Novel and Nation in Twenty-First-Century France