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Last Updated Nov 21, 2023
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Academic Video OnlineThis link opens in a new windowAcademic 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. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
Ethnographic Video Online, Volume I-II: Foundational FilmsThis link opens in a new windowEthnographic Video Online, Vol. I-II: Foundational Films 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.
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 (BULS)This link opens in a new windowBU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of academic material provided by the library. The material covered by the search includes books, journals, scores, video and audio recordings, and other physical items held by the library. The search also covers ebooks and ejournals owned by the library, as well as online material provided by the library from a variety of sources.
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Dead Birds (streaming, Academic Video Online)"A cinematographic interpretation of the life of a group of Grand Valley Dani, who are mountain Papuans in West New Guinea (Irian Barat, Indonesia), studied by the Harvard-Peabody Expedition (1961-1963). This film was made by Gardner in 1961, before the area was pacified by the Dutch government. The film focuses on Weyak, the farmer and warrior, and on Pua, the young swineherd, following them through the events of Dani life: sweet potato horticulture, pig keeping, salt winning, battles, raids, and ceremonies." Karl G. Heider
Red Moon : Menstruation, Culture & the Politics of Gender (streaming, Kanopy)Red Moon confronts one the world's oldest and most pervasive taboo subjects. With humor and refreshing candor, the documentary provides a fascinating, often ironic, take on the absurd and frequently dangerous cultural stigmas and superstitions surrounding women's menstruation. As educational as it is liberating, the film functions as both a myth-busting overview of the realties of menstruation, and a piercing cultural analysis of the ways in which struggles over meaning and power have played out through history on the terrain of women's bodies.
A Kalahari Family: Part Five - Death by Myth (dvd)Part Five of John Marshall's series documenting 50 years in the lives of the Ju/'hoansi of southern Africa, from 1951 to 2000. "Death by Myth" is an expose of the devastating effect of international aid that the Ju'/hoansi have been the subjects of since independence. Lately making their land a "wildlife preserve" for cultural tourism, in which the wildlife includes the people themselves, foundation aid is predicated on the "bushmen myth" -the happy bushmen seen in The Gods Must Be Crazy; the belief that bushmen are born to hunt and gather... ultimately, to starve.
Time Indefinite (dvd)TIME INDEFINITE is a sequel to Ross McElwee's comic documentary SHERMAN'S MARCH. When McElwee announces at the family gathering in South Carolina that he is going to marry a nice Jewish girl from Boston, the results are memorable.
First Person Plural (dvd)In 1966, at the age of nine, Deann Borshay Liem came to the U.S. from South Korea as one of tens of thousands of children adopted by white American families after the Korean War. In this personal documentary, she chronicles her struggle to reconcile the demands of two families, two cultures, and two nations. This entry to the Sundance Festival explores not only the particular nuances of international and trans-racial adoption but the broader cultural landscape of American society over the past several decades.
Thin (dvd)The HBO documentary, THIN, by Lauren Greenfield, takes one inside the walls of Renfrew Center, a residential facility for the treatment of women with eating disorders, closely following four young women (ages 15 - 30) who have spent much of their lives starving themselves - often to the verge of death. The film chronicles the pervasiveness of our current health-insurance industry to address its clients' needs, while never shifting focus from the women themselves.
Chronicle of a Summer (dvd)Few films can claim as much influence on the course of cinema history as Chronicle of a summer. The fascinating result of a collaboration between filmmaker-anthropologist Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, this vanguard work of what Morin termed cinèma- vèritè is a brilliantly conceived and realized sociopolitical diagnosis of the early sixties in France. Simply by interviewing a group of Paris residents in the summer of 1960, beginning with the provocative and eternal question Are you happy? and expanding to political issues, including the ongoing Algerian War, Rouch and Morin reveal the hopes and dreams of a wide array of people, from artists to factory workers, from an Italian èmigrè to an African student. Chronicle of a summer's penetrative approach gives us a document of a time and place with extraordinary emotional depth.
Trance and Dance in Bali (dvd)Records a performance of the Balinese ceremonial kris (dagger) dance-drama, which depicts the never-ending struggle between witch (death-dealing) and dragon (life-protecting), as it was given in the village of Pagoetan in the late 1930s. The dancers experience violent trance seizures, turn their krises against their breasts without injury, and are restored to consciousness with incense and holy water. Narrated by Margaret Mead against a background of Balinese music. From the Character Formation in Different Cultures series. Produced by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead.
The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (dvd)This absorbing documentary follows Kenzo Okuzaki--a veteran of Japan's WWII campaign in New Guinea--as he searches out those responsible for the mysterious deaths of several soldiers in his unit. Director Kazua Hara's subtle cinema verite not only captures the zeal of Okuzaki's lifelong mission but also exposes the atrocities committed by the Japanese military against its own soldiers. The film created such controversy in Japan upon release that no major distributor would touch it.