Related Guides
Film Databases
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume I-II: Foundational Films This link opens in a new window Ethnographic 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.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume III: Indigenous Voices This link opens in a new window Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. III: Indigenous Voices 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 Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. IV: Festivals and Archives 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 Ethnographic Video Online, Royal Anthropological Institute Teaching Edition 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. 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 window BU 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.
Browse Films
- 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.
- Monuments Are for Men: Waffles Are for Women: Gender, Permanence and Impermanence (streaming, Academic Video Online) The unwritten rules governing the traditional activities of men and women are sharply but subtly defined.
- The Dickumentary (streaming, Academic Video Online) The story of the penis from its biological evolution in prehistoric fish, to today. Cultures have worshipped it, circumcised it & sought ways to make it larger. Traveling across 14 countries, this is an entertaining, comprehensive tour de phallus.
- Tough Guise: Violence, Media, and the Crisis in Masculinity (streaming, Kanopy) While the social construction of femininity has been widely examined, the dominant role of masculinity has until recently remained largely invisible. Tough Guise is the first educational video to systematically examine the relationship between pop-cultural imagery and the social construction of masculine identities in the U.S. at the dawn of the 21st century.
- The Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Pop Culture (streaming, Kanopy) Communication scholar Sut Jhally applies the late sociologist Erving Goffman's groundbreaking analysis of advertising to the contemporary commercial landscape in this provocative new film about gender as a ritualized cultural performance. Uncovering a remarkable pattern of gender-specific poses, Jhally explores Goffman's central claim that the way the body is displayed in advertising communicates normative ideas about masculinity and femininity.
- Paradise Bent (streaming, Academic Video Online) This is one of the first explorations of the Samoan fa afafines, boys who are raised as girls, fulfilling a traditional role in Samoan culture. The film shows how in the large Samoan family there may be one or two fa afafines who are not only accepted but appreciated. They cheerfully share the women s traditional work of cooking, cleaning and caring for children and the elderly. Today s fa afafines are becoming more westernized and look more like drag queens.
- Transfiction (streaming, Academic Video Online) The film focuses on identity and discrimination in the daily lives of transgendered Brazilians living in São Paulo. It was made as part of a practice-based PhD and in accordance with the norms of 'ethnofiction' - an experimental ethnographic film style, closely associated with twentieth century French filmmaker Jean Rouch, in which the participants collaborate with the filmmaker to act out improvisations of their own life experiences.
- Adventures in The Gender Trade (streaming, Academic Video Online) Kate Bornstein, writer and performer, was born a man. This documentary presents her frank account of her personal journey from unhappy boy child into liberated transsexual lesbian. Intercut with her satiric night club act called "Hidden: A Gender," are the stories of a wide range of people who refused to have their identity defined by whether they were born male or female. We are thus presented with a spectrum of colorful gender anomalies: drag queens, transsexuals, cross dressers, gays and lesbians... and those who refuse to be categorized.
- Muxes : Authentic, Intrepid Seekers of Danger (streaming, Academic Video Online) Among the Zapotec Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico, boy babies who are born in a certain position, or little boys who prefer to play with girls, are raised as women, and are known as Muxes (pronounced "Mooshays"). In the town of Juchitán, in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Muxes have an important role to play in the life of the community. Because they are raised as women, the Muxes prefer to enter into relations with "straight" men.
- Some Women of Marrakech (streaming, Academic Video Online) In Marrakech, traditional attitudes to women prevail perhaps more strongly than in other Moroccan cities. This is especially true for those women who live by the standards of traditional ideals in the Medina, the old city of Marrakech still enclosed by its ancient walls. This film attempts to say something about women such as Aisha and Hajiba – two main characters – who have experienced the hardships of life for women in such a society.
China
- Colonel Jin Xing (streaming, Academic Video Online) Shanghai's principal dancer, 33-year-old Jin Xing, is a big star. She is the first choreographer to have received recognition in over half a century of national communism. But the most amazing thing about Jin Xing is that, up until 1995, this beautiful young woman was a man, a colonel in the People's Liberation Army. This is a richly cinematic film, combining the colorful imagery of Shanghai's dance world, the panoply of the Chinese People's Army, and the heart-felt expressiveness of the young Colonel who turned his longing to be a woman into a reality.
- Looking for China Girl (streaming, Academic Video Online) Since 1980 when China decreed that couples should have just one child, there has been an alarming disproportion of young men over young women. This BBC News documentary explores some of the issues that have arisen due to these circumstances. Some of the subjects chronicled are 24-year-old Xinhau Lu, who leaves his parents rural farm to find a wife 860 miles away in Beijing, a young woman named Qing, only 16 years old when she was snatched and forced to live with a desperate bachelor, and Shao Ying, a young women who against tradition is pursuing a career and enjoying the single life.
- Love and Sex in China (streaming, Academic Video Online) This film explores how rapid industrialization, urbanization and Westernization have impacted traditional relationships between men and women. The guide for this journey is a young journalist, Yang Li Ne, whose parents have just divorced and whose own marriage is unraveling. She speaks about love and sex with young people from Beijing, as well as older couples from the villages. Issues discussed in this film include the role economic concerns play in love relationships, prostitution and homophobia in Chinese society.
- China From the Inside (dvd) This documentary series takes viewers to observe the difficulties of navigating politics and culture in the vast country of China. Episode 2: Women of the Country: Chinese women are beginning to fight for their rights and their futures.
- Lilies' talk (streaming, Academic Video Online) A documentary film about Chinese lesbian girls.
- Soundless wind chime (streaming, Academic Video Online) Ricky leaves Hong Kong for Switzerland to look for the lost soul and the past of his deceased Swiss lover, Pascal. Ricky struggles with the confusion of memories, reality and illusion.
Japan
- Tokyo Gigolos (streaming, Academic Video Online) Kabukicho is Tokyo's famous pleasure quarters. Within a tiny space of 0.5 sq. km, the streets are jam-packed with over 5,000 shops, restaurants and bars, with all types of entertainment parlours, including brothels. Tens of thousands of people work, play and pass by Kabukicho every day. This time, we turn our attention to a special group of people -- the 'Tokyo gigolos'. On average they earn USD $3,000 each month, and as much as USD $30,000 when business is good. Lucrative earnings is the magnet that draws so many young people to this trade.
India
- Eunuchs : India's Third Gender (streaming, Academic Video Online) This extraordinary film explores the twilight world of India's eunuchs who both exploit and bewail their ill-defined status within society. The eunuchs introduce a special world, where for them divinity and daily life alternate in the flash of an exquisitely made-up eye. A 3,600-strong ancient sect who claim to be descended from the gods live in relative luxury. Other Indian men explain why they too underwent painful castration.
- No Man's Land (streaming, Academic Video Online) This fascinating film explores the world of the Hijras. With no present day equivalent anywhere else, the Indian Hijras are held in deep fascination both in India itself, and the world-over. They are sexually ambiguous and socially unintegrated. They are easily recognisable by their masculine features, exaggerated feminine behaviour, and by their trademark clap.
- Harsh Beauty (streaming, Academic Video Online) Existing as they have for centuries, the Eunuchs (or Hijra) are considered the third gender, neither men nor women. Harsh Beauty follows over a period of 3 years the lives of Jyothi, Usha and hira bai, three Eunuchs who live openly as women, and want to be accepted as their true selves. This one hour documentary uses a verite approach, creating intimate and personal accounts of their lives, without presenting an anthropological perspective. Set against the vibrant energy of the Indian metropolis, Harsh Beauty takes a glance into a society rarely seen and often misunderstood.
- Milind Soman Made Me Gay (streaming, Academic Video Online) In 1995, the Indian Government charged Bollywood superstar Milind Soman with "obscenity" for appearing nude in a shoe advertisement. Under the rhetoric of preserving the nation's morality, these charges were carried out using old colonial laws that are still evoked to restrict desire and persecute homosexuality in India today.
