Cultural Encounters

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Cultural Encounters
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Nickols on Ethnography

• People as central issue
• Pro-filmic actuality vs representation
• Ethical issues re people
• Today, signification how images of people coded
  by systems of signification
• Ethnographic films

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Semiotics Review

• Symbolic
• Iconic
• indexical

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Symbolic Signs

• Symbolic
• signifier does not resemble the signified but is
  fundamentally arbitrary or purely conventional
• linguistic signs clearly arbitrary symbolic
• tree doesnt look or sound like a tree
• Other symbolic signs

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Iconic Signs

• signifier resembles referent
• Still understand them through convention
• Learn to read iconic signs too

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Indexical Signs

• signifier not arbitrary but directly connected in
  some way (physically or causally) to the referent
• indexical nature of cinematic sign

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• Authentication evidence depends on indexical
  relation
• Vs fiction, simulation
• Paradox

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Replicated uniqueness

• Paradox
• historically singular but represented for us
  magic
• forget were dealing w sign system rather than
  unmediated depiction of reality

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Duplication of reality vs reality of duplication

• all representational art transports us to other
  realms
• relies on transport mechanisms we comprehend
• but impression of transport can overshadow
  transport mechanisms

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Paradox of documentary

• what you see is what there was
• what there was is what there would have been
• illusion that we see original event
• indexical aspect of cin sign

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Documentary as mode of discourse

• Not magic
• deploys systems of signs (albeit indexical)
• indexical sign splays attention bet discourse
  unimpeded referentiality

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Modes of Explanation

• Narrative
• Exposition
• Essentialism proposes transparency
• Family of man myth
• Correlation to visible
• bullfight syndrome

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New models?