Image-based lecture with Tami Liberman

Jean Rouch, an anthropologist and experimental filmmaker, has made several films since the 1950s that have challenged the existing distinctions between art and science, between “Western” and “non-Western” culture, between researcher and researched, and between truth and fiction. Via creative collaborations with West African and French youth he addressed the key questions brought to the fore by the “crisis of representation” in anthropology in the 1980s, influencing the French New Wave and formulating some of the principles that would underpin participatory art practices prevalent in contemporary art. The lecture will include excerpts from his films; it will analysis of the unique work techniques he has developed, and place his work within the discussion of post-colonialism, documentation, and participation.

Tami Liberman is a scholar and lecturer in ethnographic and documentary cinema and a video editor. She has taught at Freie Universität Berlin, as well as at Tel Aviv University, the Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and the Arts, The College of Management, and Sapir Academic College in Israel. Her short ethnographic films have been screened in various festivals, including Festival Dei Popoli, and won awards.