Paper short abstract:

The contribution is about the making of a "modern" documentary from a rediscovered ethnographic footage. It explores the hermeneutic effort between the original author's views, approaches and purposes and the editors' ones, and between past and present theories, languages and technologies.

Paper long abstract:

In 1962, Danish anthropologist A.F.W. Bentzon borrowed a spring-wind Agfa Movex camera without any connection to the tape recorder and he went to Sardinia where he shot a series of scenes showing the world of the launeddas players, the religious rites their music accompanied, the socioeconomic situation and the way of life of local people.

The existence of this footage was unknown until 1981 when the ethnomusicologist Dante Olianas visited the Archives in Copenhagen checking through recordings, still photos and diaries left by the Danish anthropologist, prematurely passed away in 1971. Listening to a recording of a woman singing he noticed a camera noise which alerted to the possible existence of film footage. He finally found a tin containing 20 rolls of 16 mm B/W film with a total running time of 50 minutes.

Having recognised places, persons, instruments and tunes played, the problem was to produce, out of this scientific footage, a documentary that could reach a contemporary and wider audience than just the experts. The production of the film -between 1993 and 1998- had to face lots of problems: no correspondence between image and sound, no number on the negatives, varying speed in films and in tapes etc. A truly "archaeological work" had to be performed on the ethnographic films, in a hermeneutic tension between original author's views, approaches and purposes and the editors' ones, and between past and present theories, languages and technologies.

It is a B/W film of 39min length