David MacDougall

{{about||the Hong Kong colonial secretary|David Mercer MacDougall}}

{{Infobox scientist

| name = David MacDougall

| image = 150px

| alt =

| caption =

| birth_name =

| education = Harvard University
University of California, Los Angeles

| birth_date = {{birth date and age|1939|11|12}}

| birth_place = New Hampshire, United States

| spouse = Judith MacDougall

| death_date =

| death_place =

| workplaces = Rice University
New York University
Australian National University

| nationality = American-Australian

| fields = Visual anthropology, Social anthropology, Documentary films

| awards = Grand Prix "Venezia Genti," Venice Film Festival, 1972

First Prize, Cinéma du Réel, 1979
Lifetime Achievement Award, Royal Anthropological Institute, 2013

| known_for = The Doon School Quintet
The Wedding Camels
Ethnographic films in Africa, India and Australia

}}

David MacDougall (born November 12, 1939) is an American-Australian visual anthropologist, academic, and documentary filmmaker, who is known for his ethnographic film work in Africa, Australia, Europe and India. For much of his career he co-produced and co-directed films with his wife, fellow filmmaker Judith MacDougall. In 1972, his first film, To Live with Herds was awarded the Grand Prix "Venezia Genti" at the Venice Film Festival.{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/28/movies/film-anthropologists-focus-on-tribal-patriarch-in-kenya.html|title=Film: Anthropologists Focus on Tribal Patriarch in Kenya|first1=Janet|last1=Maslin|work=The New York Times |date=October 28, 1981|via=NYTimes.com}}{{cite book |last1=Strecker |first1=Ivo |date=2013 |title=Writing in the Field |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=HCBkAgAAQBAJ |publisher=LIT Verlag |page=225 |isbn=9783643904249|quote=David MacDougall...his first feature-length film, To Live with Herds, won the Grand Prix 'Venezia Genti' at the Venice Film Festival in 1972.}} He has lived in Australia since 1975, and is currently a professor in the Research School of Humanities & the Arts at Australian National University.

MacDougall has produced films covering a wide range of subjects, be it the semi-nomadic Turkana people of Kenya in The Wedding Camels or an elite North Indian boys' boarding school in The Doon School Quintet. Influenced by cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema in the 1960s, he is considered to be one of the pioneers of observational cinema, films that present the observations of an individual filmmaker, whose perspective is shared with the viewer.Grimshaw, Anna; Ravetz, Amanda (2009). Observational Cinema. Indiana University Press. {{ISBN|9780253354242}}.

He has advocated “participatory cinema” in which the subjects of documentary films are more fully involved in their creation. He was one of the first ethnographic filmmakers to eschew explanatory narration and employ longer takes, using subtitles to translate the speech of people in other cultures.Loizos, Peter (1993). Innovation in Ethnographic Film: From Innocence to Self-Consciousness 1955-1985. University of Chicago Press. {{ISBN|0226492273}}. His films have also explored what he has termed “social aesthetics,” the combination of manners, everyday rituals, textures, colors, architectural forms, and material objects that create the distinctive character of a community.Fahey, Johannah; Prosser, Howard; Shaw, Matthew, eds (2016). In the Realm of the Senses: Social Aesthetics and the Sensory Dynamics of Privilege. Springer Verlag. DOI: 10.1007/978-981-287-350-7 {{ISBN|9789811013454}}.

MacDougall is considered one of the most prominent theorists in visual anthropology.{{Cite book|chapter=MacDougall, David (b. 1939) and Judith (b. 1938)|first1=Lorenzo|last1=Ferrarini|title = The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology|date=May 10, 2018|publisher=American Cancer Society|pages=1–3|doi=10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1874|isbn = 9780470657225|s2cid=193140605 }} Both Judith and David are considered to be among the most significant anthropological filmmakers in the English-speaking world.{{cite book|chapter-url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/ethnographers-eye/anthropological-cinema-of-david-and-judith-macdougall/6154654EED141B0BCBEC9F131046491B|chapter=The anthropological cinema of David and Judith MacDougall|first1=Anna|last1=Grimshaw|title=The Ethnographer's Eye|date=April 10, 2001|publisher=Cambridge University Press|pages=121–148|doi=10.1017/CBO9780511817670.009|isbn=9780521773102}}{{cite web|url=http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/macdougalbio.html|title=David & Judith MacDougall bio|website=subsol.c3.hu}}{{Cite journal|title=Reframing Ethnographic Film: A "Conversation" with David MacDougall and Judith MacDougall|author1=Barbash, Ilisa|author2=MacDougall, David|author3=Taylor, Lucien|author4=MacDougall, Judith|year=1996|journal=American Anthropologist|volume=98|issue=2|pages=371–387|doi = 10.1525/aa.1996.98.2.02a00120|jstor = 682894}} In 2013, MacDougall received the Life Achievement Award from the Royal Anthropological Institute in London.

Early life and education

MacDougall was born on November 12, 1939, in New Hampshire, United States, to a Canadian father and an American mother. He attended Dalton School in New York City until the eighth grade and then The Putney School in Vermont. He went to Harvard University, where he received a bachelor's degree magna cum laude in English literature in 1961.{{Cite web|url=https://filmstudycenter.org/fellows-works/david-macdougall/|title=David MacDougall|access-date=May 7, 2020|archive-date=May 8, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200508205002/http://filmstudycenter.org/fellows-works/david-macdougall/|url-status=dead}} After Harvard, he enrolled in the film program at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he participated in the Ethnographic Film Program and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1970.{{cite web|url=https://bampfa.org/program/ethnographic-cinema-david-and-judith-macdougall|title=The Ethnographic Cinema of David and Judith MacDougall | BAMPFA|website=bampfa.org|date=December 21, 2014 }}{{Cite journal|title=Reframing Ethnographic Film: A "Conversation" with David MacDougall and Judith MacDougall|first1=Ilisa|last1=Barbash|first2=Lucien|last2=Taylor|date=May 7, 1996|journal=American Anthropologist|volume=98|issue=2|pages=371–387|doi=10.1525/aa.1996.98.2.02a00120}}

Career

MacDougall began his career in 1972 when he made his first film To Live with Herds about the semi-nomadic pastoral Jie people in Uganda.{{cite web |url=https://raifilm.org.uk/films/to-live-with-herds/ |title=Film : 'To Live with Herds' |date=September 23, 2022 |publisher=RAI Ethnographic Film Catalogue}} It won the Grand Prix "Venezia Genti" at the 1972 Venice Film Festival.{{cite web|url=https://www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/464/live-with-herds.html|title=TO LIVE WITH HERDS - Ronin Films - Educational DVD Sales|first1=Chirp|last1=Internet|website=www.roninfilms.com.au}} After this, MacDougall, along with his work partner and wife, Judith MacDougall, worked on the Turkana Conversations Trilogy.{{Cite journal|title=Turkana Conversations Trilogy. 3 color films by David MacDougall and Judith MacDougall|first1=Ben G.|last1=Blount|date=May 10, 1984|journal=American Anthropologist|volume=86|issue=3|pages=803–806|doi=10.1525/aa.1984.86.3.02a01050}} The series investigated the lives of the Turkana people, semi-nomadic camel herders in Kenya.{{cite web|url=https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/mrcvault/videographies/turkana-conversations-trilogy|title=Turkana Conversations Trilogy | UC Berkeley Library|website=www.lib.berkeley.edu}} Lorang's Way, released in 1979, was a portrait of a senior man of the Turkana, and won the first prize at the Cinéma du Réel in Paris in 1979.{{cite web|url=http://www.film-documentaire.fr/4DACTION/w_fiche_film/45663_1|title=film-documentaire.fr - Portail du film documentaire|website=www.film-documentaire.fr}} The second film, The Wedding Camels, looks at the marriage of one of Lorang's daughters, and was awarded the Film Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1980.{{cite web|url=https://www.therai.org.uk/awards/past-awards/royal-anthropological-institute-film-prize-past-recipients|title=Royal Anthropological Institute Film Prize Past Recipients|website=www.therai.org.uk|date=November 3, 2008 }} After Africa, MacDougall's focus shifted to Australia, where he directed, or co-directed with his wife, ten films on Aboriginal Australian communities for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. These include Goodbye Old Man (1977), Takeover (1980), Stockman's Strategy (1984), and Link-Up Diary (1987).{{Cite journal|title=From Ethnography to Metaphor: Recent Films from David and Judith MacDougall|author=Myers, Fred R.|year=1988|journal=Cultural Anthropology|volume=3|issue=2|pages=205–220|doi = 10.1525/can.1988.3.2.02a00050|jstor = 656351}}{{Cite web|url=https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/112441/3/02whole.pdf|title=Digital Library Adelaide, MacDougall}}

After Australia, MacDougall made Photo Wallahs in India in 1991 with Judith. The subject was photographers and photography in the Indian hill town of Mussoorie.{{Cite web|url=https://www.berkeleymedia.com/product/photo_wallahs/,%20https://www.berkeleymedia.com/product/photo_wallahs/|title=Photo Wallahs | Berkeley Media}}{{Dead link|date=January 2024 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} MacDougall said in an interview, "Our first plan for the film was to look for a place where one photographer served a small community - a town with a resident photographer...Perhaps we were naive in thinking such photographers actually existed. If a town was big enough to have a photographer at all, it had twenty...We ended up making the film in one of the most heterogeneous towns one could imagine, a hill station called Mussoorie."{{Cite journal|title='Photo wallahs:' An Encounter with Photography|first1=David|last1=MacDougall|date=May 10, 1992|journal=Visual Anthropology Review|volume=8|issue=2|pages=96–100|doi=10.1525/var.1992.8.2.96}} In 1993 he made Tempus de Baristas about mountain shepherds in Sardinia, produced by the Instituto Superiore Regionale Etnografico and the BBC, and awarded the 1995 Earthwatch Film Award. In 2009, his film Gandhi's Children was nominated for Best Documentary Feature Film at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards.{{Cite web|url=https://www.asiapacificscreenawards.com/films/ghandis-children|title=Gandhi's Children}} The setting of the documentary was a shelter for abandoned, runaway, or orphaned children on the outskirts of New Delhi, where MacDougall lived for several months.{{Cite web|url=https://raifilm.org.uk/films/gandhis-children/|title=Film : "Gandhi's Children" – RAI Ethnographic Film Catalogue|date=September 23, 2022 }}

=''The Doon School Quintet''=

Between 1996 and 2003, MacDougall worked on one of his most ambitious projects, The Doon School Quintet, a five-part ethnographic film series that was a long-term visual study of The Doon School, a boys' boarding school in the North Indian town of Dehradun. The then headmaster, John Mason, gave MacDougall unprecedented access for filming, and he stayed on campus with the boys between 1997 and 2000. From over eighty-five hours of collected material, he produced five documentary films, edited and released between 2000 and 2004. They studied the daily lives of the boys, the social aesthetics of the school, its rituals, traditions, material culture and language. "My primary interest in the school was as a crossing place for people from different backgrounds, how they got on with each other across class lines," MacDougall said in an interview. "But in the process of working on it, I actually became much more interested in the school as a kind of social organism, a micro-society with its own rules and rituals, and the films ended up being about the experience of students growing up in this kind of institution where they had to learn a whole new game plan, different from their previous lives which had been living within their family."{{cite web|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVWXcBT4V4E |title=Children in India: Three Places of Learning by David MacDougall |date=May 3, 2014 |publisher=YouTube |access-date=May 15, 2020}}

MacDougall went on to make film studies of two further institutions for children in India, the Rishi Valley School in South India and the Prayas Children’s Home for Boys in New Delhi. From 2011 to 2017 he directed the 6-year “Childhood and Modernity” project in India in which different groups of children conducted research in their own communities using video cameras. It produced over 20 short films, 12 of which are presented in the DVD production, The Child’s Eye (2018).

Honours

In 2013, MacDougall was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Royal Anthropological Institute for his contributions in the field of ethnographic and documentary filmmaking.{{Cite web|url=https://www.therai.org.uk/awards/past-awards/film-committee-lifetime-achievement-award|title=Film Committee Lifetime Achievement Award|website=Royal Anthropological Institute|date=July 7, 2015 }} In Australia, he has held a Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship and a Professorial Fellowship awarded by the Australian Research Council. From 1997 to 2007, he was a Research Fellow at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University, and is currently a professor in the Research School of Humanities & Arts.{{cite web|url=https://cdhr.cass.anu.edu.au/professor-david-macdougall|title=Professor David MacDougall|date=November 7, 2016|website=ANU Centre for Digital Humanities Research}}

Books

{{cite book |last1=MacDougall |first1=David |date=1999 |title=Transcultural Cinema

|url=https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691012346/transcultural-cinema |publisher=Princeton University Press |isbn=9780691012346}}

{{cite book |last1=MacDougall |first1=David |date=2006 |title=The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses |url=https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691121567/the-corporeal-image |publisher=Princeton University Press |isbn=9780691121567}}
{{cite book |last1=MacDougall |first1=David |date=2019 |title=The Looking Machine: Essays on Cinema, Anthropology and Documentary Filmmaking |url=https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526134110/ |publisher=Manchester University Press |isbn=978-1526134110}}
MacDougall, David (2022). The Art of the Observer . Manchester University Press. {{ISBN|978-152616535-0}}

Filmography

To Live with Herds (1972){{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1973/11/17/archives/screen-2-documentaries-film-forum-program-solid-achievement-the.html |title=Screen: 2 Documentaries - The New York Times |work=The New York Times |date=November 17, 1973 |access-date=May 7, 2020}}
Kenya Boran (1974) (co-directed with James Blue)
Goodbye Old Man (1977)
The Wedding Camels (1977) (co-directed with Judith MacDougall)
Lorang's Way (1979) (co-directed with Judith MacDougall)
Takeover (1980) (co-directed with Judith MacDougall)
A Wife Among Wives (1981) (co-directed with Judith MacDougall)
Stockman's Strategy (1984)
Link-Up Diary (1987)
Photo Wallahs (1991) (co-directed with Judith MacDougall)
Tempus de Baristas (1993)
The Doon School Quintet: