The Nature Drawings of Peter Karklins

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The authoring of Observational Cinema: conversations with Colin Young

Based on a series of conversations with Colin Young that have taken place over a period of more than thirty years, this article explores how a certain set of practical and institutional circumstances, operating in combination with a series of philosophical and aesthetic ideas about the nature of cinema, first led to the emergence over the late 1960s and early 1970s of the approach to ethnographic filmmaking that would eventually become known as “Observational Cinema”. Although it was those whom Colin Young trained, inspired or simply influenced who worked out the practical filmmaking applications of his ideas, it was he who first formulated the foundational concepts underpining this approach to ethnographic filmmaking. As such, although he has been a “filmmaker-maker” rather than a filmmaker himself, Colin Young has a rightful claim to be considered, in the sense defined by Roland Barthes, the original “author” of Observational Cinema

Asphodel, White Wine, and Enriched Thunderbolts

In the spring of 1950 my wife and I took part in an archaeological dig at Cosa, on the Tuscan coast ninety miles above Rome. Anyone who has travelled by train in daylight on the coastal line to or from Genoa and the Riviera has seen the site: the great grey polygonal walls looming up as high as a four-story building on a 370-foot hill that rises out of the reclaimed swamp-lands of the Maremma. During the war the Fascists had built at Orbetello, the nearest town to Cosa, a dynamite factory which became the target of the air-photographers of our Strategic Bombing Command. These air photographs appeared to reveal on the hill of Malabarba, just inland from Cosa, the characteristic large mounds which mark the site of Etruscan tombs; these mounds, which later turned out, on prosaic terrestrial examination, to be sanddunes, were the bait which attracted the archaeologists of the American Academy in Rome to the site.</jats:p