In John L. Jackson Jr.'s essay, An Ethnographic Filmflam, he discusses about how digital video technology during fieldwork opens up empirical and theoretical space for the relationship between anthropologists and the viewers. This article highlights the culture and society in Harlem, which he studies a local tenant activist and follows her around with a camera. He metions using ethnographric fieldwork, which is a genre of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of a specific culture. He says that in order to thoroughly understand life-ways of a specific cultures, it would have to be as though one were looking through the natives' own eyes. I agree because i think you have to study that culture and lifestyle for a long time before truly and completely understand that culture. And when you fully understand, you would feel like you were one of the natives.
"It is this secondary impulse, the move from emic to etic comprehension, which grounds anthropological claims about scientific knowledge production" Studying a culture from being on the outside is totally different from being the inside. When being on the outside you comprehend what you see and judge on what your lifestyle is like. But being on the inside you view it and understand what is going on.
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When a filmmaker gets behind a camera and is going to shoot something, be it a fictional film or a docuementary, he has to know something about the subject that he/she is shooting. The more the filmmaker knows, the more truthful the film will turn out to be. If the docuementary that someone is shooting is about the place that the filmmaker is from, the point that the film is portrying is only going to be that much more truthful. Jackson uses Flahertys "Nanook of the North" as an example of a truthful docuementary. Flaherty made a film about an Innuit tribe in Alaska, but created a ficticious family to base the story around. Flahery lived with families in Alaska to film the movie, and therefore got a firsthand look at their lives. However, the film is still flawed and shows a very biased, false portrayal of the Innuit people. If Flaherty had made a film about something he knew, like his hometown, the film would have been that much more truthful then the film he ended up making about the Innuit tribe.
People always say "write what you know." And the same should probably go for filmmakers. If you film what you know, then yuou will have a much more truthful depiction of what you are trying to create,
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