A score of donkeys…gathered about our caravan in the night! The absolutely handsomest cowboy, a man named Jack. Lovely scenes at evening when the horses come to the soakage to drink. More mountains than I ever expected to find; one of them Leichhardt, truly grand. Winsome kiddies in the school. All in all many reasons to think that a very good film indeed is in the offing.
Roger Sandall
This quote opens chapter 5 in Dr Lorraine Mortimer’s new book currently titled, Letting Things Live: Roger Sandall’s Films Meet Contemporary Anthropology. Dr Mortimer would be interested in discussing this work in progress with potential publishers and other researchers.
Dr Mortimer is an Honorary Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Prior to this she lectured in Cinema Studies as well as Sociology and Anthropology at La Trobe University. She is presently researching and writing on the ethnographic films of Roger Sandall. Her recent publications include:
2005 The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man: An Essay in Sociological Anthropology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. This is a translation of Edgar Morin’s Le Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire: essai de sociologie anthropologique, and includes a thirty nine-page introduction for English speakers.
2007 “The Texture of Lives and the Stuff of Dreams: Jean Rouch at the Heart of Film and Anthropology”. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 3.
2009 Terror and Joy: The Films of Dušan Makavejev. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
2010 “Warm Ghosts: Review Essay on Robert Gardner’s Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film”. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 21, Issue 10, August.
An Australian writer living in Sydney, Roger Sandall is the author of The Culture Cult (2001), a study of romantic primitivism and its effects. His work has appeared in a number of places including Commentary, The American Interest, Encounter, The New Criterion, The American, Sight and Sound, Quadrant, Art International, The New Lugano Review, The Salisbury Review, Merkur, Mankind, Visual Anthropology, and Social Science and Modern Society.