The Feast (1970; 29 min) and The Ax Fight (1975; 30 min) by Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chignon
Shot in 1968 and 1971 respectively, in southern Venezuela, these two films are part of the Yanomamo series. The Feast chronicles the ceremonial, social, economic, and political nature of communal feasting, while The Axe Fight examines a violent conflict from a variety of angles.
The Ax Fight was preserved with a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation. Both films are distributed by Documentary Educational Resources and archived in the NAFC.
This is the fifth screening in the fall session of the bi-annual Recovering Voices Ethnographic Film Series
Founded in 1975, the National Anthropological Film Collection (NAFC) forms part of the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives (NAA), and is devoted to preserving, documenting, and providing access to anthropological moving image materials. The NAFC collections are a unique repository for anthropological films and video that document cultural and linguistic diversity, as well as the history of ethnographic filmmaking and related amateur expeditionary and travel filmmaking in the 20th century. Drawing on NAFC’s extensive archival film collection we will be screening the following historic ethnographic films, and will have time for discussion following each film.
