Transdisciplinary Networks of Media Knowledge: Educational and Research Films at the Intersection of Art, Visual Anthropology, and Film Studies in the US from the 1950s to the 1970s

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Henning Engelke
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies ; Art History
• Term: from 2017 to 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 356848724

• Final Report Year: 2025

Final Report Abstract

This project considered the little studied interrelations between research and educational films with documentary and experimental film cultures in the US from the 1950s to the 1970s. It looked into the intersections of academic research on alterity and media knowledge in the disciplines of visual anthropology, communication science and film and media studies with uses of film in social work, political activism, and experimental film aesthetics. The focus was on three interrelated aspects: participatory filmmaking in film pedagogy and visual anthropology; media apparatuses of filmic microanalysis of body motion interaction; the media ecological implications of “acoustic space”. The three areas opened up complementary media historical and science historical perspectives. The focus on media participation revealed how film theory and visual anthropology were entangled in contexts of film pedagogy, communications research, the social politics of the „War on Poverty“, media activism, and policies of the civil rights movement. The focus on microanalysis demonstrated how practice theoretical methods and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft procedures of film analysis shaped epistemological and aesthetic conceptions of film. The third focus traced how the media ecological concept of acoustic space traveled from ethnographic research into media studies and then into experimental film, expanded arts and film pedagogy. Considered together, the three areas open up a perspective on networks of media knowledge in the US during the 1950s to 1970s that reveals how empirical and theoretical research on media, communication, and cognition was entangled in social practices and political processes as well as technological and aesthetic developments. The project thus contributes to research on cinematic epistemologies, media archaeologies, and aesthetic knowledge. At the same time it reveals the importance of nontheatrical modes of filmmaking for the formation of the disciplines of film and media studies, and visual anthropology.

Publications

• Cultural Ecologies and Media Ecology: Allison Jablonko’s Microanalysis of Maring Motion Behavior. Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Toronto März 2018
  Henning Engelke
  
• „Ein Monster, versteckt in der Zeit“ – Wechselbeziehungen von Fotografie und Film. In: Christina Leber: Fotofinish: Siegeszug der Fotografie. Köln: Snoeck 2018
  Henning Engelke
  
• Acoustic Space. Workshop: Medienökologien des Ästhetischen, Universität Regensburg, Februar 2019
  Henning Engelke
  
• Gastvortrag: City Symphonies. Seminar: The City in Film/Media (Roy Grundmann). Boston University, September 2019
  Henning Engelke
  
• Sharing Difference/Understanding Media: Cinematic Research, Visual Anthropology and Ecologies of Communication in the 1960s. Konferenz: Creating Shared Experience – Sensory Ethnography and Collaborative Filmmaking, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Februar 2019
  Henning Engelke
  
• Sol Worth, Film Studies, and Inner-City Youth Filmmaking. NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Mai 2019
  Henning Engelke
  
• Three Surrealist Films by Ilya Bolotowsky. Washburn Gallery New York, Januar 2019
  Henning Engelke & Andrew Bolotowsky
  
• “Let’s hear what we can see”: Arctic Sounds and Media Anthropology in Edmund Carpenter’s Films. Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Seattle März 2019
  Henning Engelke
  
• Experimentalfilm, Filmexperiment und Medienwissenschaft. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (GfM), September 2020 (online)
  Henning Engelke
  
• Filmeinführung: La Coquille et le clergyman (1927) und Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Mai 2020 (online)
  Henning Engelke
  
• Hollis Framptons (nostalgia) (1971). Vortragsreihe: Von der Leinwand zum Bildschirm. Bewegtbilder in künstlerischen Kontexten, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, Januar 2020
  Henning Engelke
  
• Neoplasticism and cinema: Ilya Bolotowsky’s experimental films on art. Art in the Cinema, 201-220. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
  Engelke, Henning
  
• Anticipation of the Night. Filmvortrag im Rahmen der Reihe „The gatekeepers exist to be overthrown.“ 
Amos Vogel – Repeats und Responses. Arsenal, Berlin, November 2021
  Henning Engelke
  
• Exploding the Canon: Anthology Film Archives in 1973. Roundtable: Preserving Experimental History: Avant-Garde Media, Institutional Politics and Archival Practice. SCMS Conference, März 2021 (online)
  Henning Engelke
  
• Gastvortrag: Interaction Films. Seminar: Body, Gesture, Cinema (Seth Watter), Sarah Lawrence College, Yonkers, New York, September 2021 (online)
  Henning Engelke
  
• Perception, Awareness, and Film Practice: A Natural History of the “Doris-Film”. In: James McElvenny/Andrea Ploder (Hg.), Holisms of Communication: The Early History of Audio- Visual Sequence Analysis. Berlin: Language Science Press 2021, S. 105–138
  Henning Engelke
  
• Teaching Film and Studying Visual Communication: Sol Worth’s Documentary Film Workshop. Visible Evidence Conference, Frankfurt, Dezember 2021
  Henning Engelke
  
• Acoustic Pedagogies, Ecological Anthropology, and the Politics of Ethnographic Sounds, Workshop: Acoustic Space and Cinematic Ecologies, Philipps University Marburg and Goethe University Frankfurt, November 2022
  Henning Engelke
  
• Filmeinführung und Podiumsdiskussion Indiens steinerne Wunder (1934). Institut für Kunst-und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Mai 2022
  Henning Engelke, Habiba Insaf & Eva Ehninger
  
• Incarcerated Youth: The Otisville Film Club, 1969-1972, Orphan Film Symposium, Montreal, Juni 2022
  Henning Engelke & DeeDee Halleck
  
• Metaphors of Another Film History: American Experimental Film 1940-1960. Virtual Book Talk, SCMS Experimental Film and Media Scholar Interest Group, Mai 2022 (online)
  Henning Engelke & Christopher Horak
  
• Screens, Sites, and Historiographies of Experimental Film, Workshop on “Historiographies of Experimental Film”, Stockholm University, April 2022
  Henning Engelke
  
• Sol Worth, Film Theory, and the Politics of the Bio-Documentary. Grey Room(89), 42-77.
  Engelke, Henning
  
• Young Filmmakers, Sociology, and the Avant-Garde, SCMS Conference, April 2022 (online)
  Henning Engelke
  
• Brakhages Dispositiv und die Historiografie des Experimentalfilms. Mode, 115-138. Schüren Verlag.
  Engelke, Henning
  
• Countering Coercive Care from Within: Filmmaking at the Otisville School for Boys. European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) Conference, Oslo, Juni 2023
  Henning Engelke
  
• Filmmaking and Ethnographic Sound Archives. Panel zu Expedition Content. Visible Evidence Conference, Udine, September 2023
  Henning Engelke
  
• “The Drama of Difference”: Microhistories of Youth Filmmaking in Total Institutions. Society for Cinema And Media Studies (SCMS) Conference, Denver, April 2023
  Henning Engelke
  
• Bewusstsein, Wahrnehmung und Filmpraxis. Der «Doris-Film» und die Geschichte der Mikroanalyse. Mikroanalyse, 11-33. Schüren Verlag.
  Engelke, Henning