Find Films
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume I-II: Foundational Films This link opens in a new window Contains classic and contemporary ethnographies, documentaries and shorts from every continent, providing teachers visual support to introduce and contextualize hundreds of cultural groups and practices around the world.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume III: Indigenous Voices This link opens in a new window Contains documentaries, feature films and shorts made by and for indigenous people and communities. Topics are simultaneously local and global, with particular emphasis on the human effects of climate change, sustainability, indigenous and local ways of interpreting history, cultural change, and traditional knowledge and storytelling.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume IV: Festivals and Archives This link opens in a new window Contains award-winning titles from contemporary ethnographic film festivals. The collection also includes field recordings and edited films by students and faculty from universities and institutions around the world, including Berkeley Media and Manchester's Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Royal Anthropological Institute Teaching Edition This link opens in a new window Contains a curriculum-aligned collection of videos and segments curated to support the teaching of introductory anthropology courses. Each video and segment within this collection are accompanied by a teaching guide providing background information, lesson plans, and classroom exercises and activities.
- Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window Academic Video Online delivers more than 67,000 titles spanning a range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more. It includes documentaries, films, demonstrations, and other content types.
- Kanopy This link opens in a new window Kanopy is a provider of documentaries, training films, and theatrical releases available as streaming video. Clips from the videos can be embedded in presentations or shown in class. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
- BU Libraries Search This link opens in a new window BU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of research material provided by the library. Resources covered by the search includes books and eBooks, journals, scores and sheet music, video and audio recordings, and other physical and electronic items held by the library. Coverage encompasses materials relating to the prehistoric and antique world through to the present.
Browse Films
- Q2P (streaming, Academic Video Online) "Q2P is a film about toilets and the city. It sifts through the dream of Mumbai as a future Shanghai and searches for public toilets, watching who has to queue to pee. As the film observes who has access to toilets and who doesn't, we begin to also see the imagination of gender that underlies the city's shape, the constantly shifting boundaries between public and private space; we learn of small acts of survival that people in the city's bottom half cobble together and quixotic ideas of social change that thrive with mixed results; we hear the silence that surrounds toilets and sense how similar it is to the silence that surrounds inequality.
- Raju and His Friends (streaming, Ethnographic Video Online) Raju's friendships with different people provide a map of contemporary Indian urban life in Jamnagar, western India.
- "Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican?" Claire Andrade-Watkins s indie documentary portrays the fate of the Cape Verdean community from the Providence neighborhood Fox Point. The Emerson College professor and filmmaker navigates well between her own nostalgia of growing up in Fox Point and the larger history of immigration and urban gentrification. Close-knit and thriving through the 1950s, the Cape Verdean Americans were displaced by urban renewal projects and the extension of I-95 through the heart of their residential area. The colorful, engaging interviewees intimate larger themes of racism and social change with wisps of tales about zoot suits and South Main Street strolls.
- La Haine (dvd) Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with LA HAINE, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieue districts on Paris's outskirts.
- Blocul (streaming, Ethnographic Video Online) From neighbourly disputes over garlic-heavy cooking to memories of Ceaușescu’s heatless winters, "The Block" explores the rich social and material universe of a Romanian apartment building.
- Living in America: A Hundred Years of Ybor City (streaming, Academic Video Online) This film celebrates the long and rich tradition of Latin culture in this country in its vivid portrayal of Ybor City, Florida. This multicultural community was founded in the 1880s, when Cuban, Spanish and Italian immigrants arrived to work in the thriving cigar factories. It flourished until World War II when the effects of assimilation, urban renewal and the decline in the cigar industry led to its demise.
- Urban Garden (streaming, Academic Video Online) Many U.S. urban centers were in the deep trouble during the early 1970s. New York City's housing stock and infrastructure were crumbling, crime skyrocketed, and the treasury was bare. There were more than 20,000 abandoned. City owned lots, many used as garbage dumps, drug-shooting galleries and place to abandon cards. In 1973 an artist named Liz Christy founder of the Green Guerillas, got some friends together and reclaimed as garden space an abandoned lot of Manhattan's Lower East Side...
- My Brooklyn (streaming, Kanopy) My Brooklyn follows director Kelly Anderson's journey, as a Brooklyn gentrifier, to understand the forces reshaping her neighborhood. The film documents the redevelopment of Fulton Mall, a bustling African-American and Caribbean commercial district that - despite its status as the third most profitable shopping area in New York City - is maligned for its inability to appeal to the affluent residents who have come to live around it. As a hundred small businesses are replaced by high rise
- Kotla Walks: Performing Locality (streaming,Ethnographic Video Online) This engaging documentary explores the changing urban life of a contemporary India caught between local tradition and the effects of globalization.
- Smell The Roses (streaming, Academic Video Online) Christiania is a self-governing community in the heart of Copenhagen set up by squatters at the height of 1970s idealism. Faced with extinction or urban redevelopment, current residents struggle to redefine a fading ideology.
- The Vanishing Village (streaming, Ethnographic Video Online The Vanishing Village is a short documentary, shot in 2015 around the village of La Tinh that currently lies in the outskirts of greater Hanoi, the capital of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Because of the rapid urbanization it is probably a matter of time before the city will take over the village.
- The Stranger (Academic Video Online) An indigenous character of a village which gets alienated in the city, where he encounters strange language and culture. He loses his head a midst the concrete jungle replete with indifference.
- City Lights are Calling: Urbanisation in the Pacific Islands (streaming, Academic Video Online) This video, directed by Larry Thomas, is the challenges Pacific island nations are facing due to rapid urbanization.
- Monti Moments: Men's Memories in the Heart of Rome (streaming, Ethnographic Video Online) This rich and revelatory documentary provides a uniquely intimate portrait of social change in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Rome. Told through thoroughly engaging informal conversations with local inhabitants, the film speaks to important issues at the heart of contemporary social science — issues of history, memory, and voice — as well as to the effects of rapid socioeconomic change in urban neighborhoods.
- Gaining Ground : Building Community on Dudley Street (streaming, Kanopy) In the midst of the economic meltdown, Gaining Ground explores the innovative, grassroots organizing efforts of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) in Boston. DSNI was created 25 years ago when the community had been devastated by bank redlining, arson-for-profit and illegal dumping, and has become one of the preeminent models for community-based change. Over the course of two years, we watch a new generation of leaders working to prevent foreclosures and bring jobs and
- Paris is Burning (dvd) A behind-the-scenes documentary of the young men of Harlem who originated "voguing" - stylized dance competitions mixed with the fantasy world of high fashion. Jennie Livingston tells a story of streetwise urban survival, gay self-affirmation and their pursuit of a desperate dream.
Browse Podcasts
- There Goes the Neighborhood An in-depth look at gentrification and how it’s changing our cities.
- AnthroPod: Teresa Caldeira on Urban Practices and Ethnographic Intimacy In this episode, AnthroPod brings you a discussion about urban ethnography with Teresa Caldeira, Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Caldeira has conducted extensive research on violence and processes of urbanization in the global South. More recently, she has been examining a range of urban practices and forms of cultural production from the peripheries of São Paulo that are reshaping public space, including rap music, graffiti, ostentation funk, and pixação (a Portuguese word for tagging done in a cryptic style, often in high, dangerous, and noteworthy places).
Reference & Instruction Librarian
Dorice Moylan
She/Her/Hers
Contact:
Pardee Library
dmoylan@bu.edu
Room 318F
Pardee Library
dmoylan@bu.edu
Room 318F
Pardee Library
617-353-4310
Subjects: Business & Management