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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Resource for Understanding/Making Documentaries
Review: A folklore film or video is a documentary about folklore. Because folklore consists of the traditional expressive culture of various communities, a folklore documentary is designed to represent how people within various social groups express themselves. Sherman provides an excellent history of ethnographic documentaries that relate to folklife studies, and she demonstrates how unique contributions by folklorists have advanced the techniques and styles of filmmaking in general. This fine book is useful for learning about filmmaking and thus is a good resource for anyone who wants to make or understand media representations of culture.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Resource for Understanding/Making Documentaries
Review: A folklore film or video is a documentary about folklore. Because folklore consists of the traditional expressive culture of various communities, a folklore documentary is designed to represent how people within various social groups express themselves. Sherman provides an excellent history of ethnographic documentaries that relate to folklife studies, and she demonstrates how unique contributions by folklorists have advanced the techniques and styles of filmmaking in general. This fine book is useful for learning about filmmaking and thus is a good resource for anyone who wants to make or understand media representations of culture.
Rating: 
Summary: nice text for visual anthropology courses
Review: Sharon Sherman's book is a very useful primer for visual anthropology courses which include production as a main component. This book provides readers a nice history of the genre as well as lessons in the politics and poetics of documentary film production. Most unique, maybe, is her structure based on analysing the work of great documentary filmmakers such as the amazing director Les Blank (if you don't know his movies, check out his website for sure).The only shortcoming of this book is that since Sherman views anthropological filmmaking from the paradigm of her field, Folklore, her analysis demands that the docs she look at be Folklore Documentaries - a perspective that can be as limiting as the idea of "reading" movies as "texts." Movies should be watched as just what they are, moving pictures, and I much prefer the holistic label of anthropological films to encompass most docs and many fictional films. Folklore docs just doesn't have the theoretical range to fully study the anthropological aspects of the cinematic medium and documentary genre. Still, well worth reading.
Rating: 
Summary: films and folkloric analysis? Is that an oxymoron?
Review: The author cannot be serious. Films and documentaries are the stuff of elite (eg, Fellini) and popular culture (eg, Spielberg). Folklore, on the other hand, is something that certainly can be documented and even the folklore performance can be captured (perhaps) with hidden cameras and directors unseen. But isn't folklore the stuff of tradition that is generally untainted by the majority culture? So why even try to apply the folklore science "analysis" to the world of films and videos in the first place. I don't get it. Do other readers get it?
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