American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary is a critical history of American filmmakers crucial to the development of ethnographic film and personal documentary. The Boston and Cambridge area is notable for nurturing these approaches to documentary film via institutions such as the MIT Film Section and the Film Study Center, the Carpenter Center and the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard. Scott MacDonald uses pragmatism’s focus on empirical experience as a basis for measuring the groundbreaking achievements of such influential filmmakers as John Marshall, Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch, Ed Pincus, Miriam Weinstein, Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee, Robb Moss, Nina Davenport, Steve Ascher and Jeanne Jordan, Michel Negroponte, John Gianvito, Alexander Olch, Amie Siegel, Ilisa Barbash, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. By exploring the cinematic, personal, and professional relationships between these accomplished filmmakers, MacDonald shows how a pioneering, engaged, and uniquely cosmopolitan approach to documentary developed over the past half century.

Scott MacDonald teaches film history at Hamilton College and Harvard University and in 2011 was named an Academy Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He is the author of many books for UC Press, most recently Adventures in Perception: Cinema as Exploration (2009).

“How does Scott MacDonald do it? Every couple of years he produces a work so significant that it would have taken any other scholar at least a decade to produce. This, his newest opus, extends the spatial approach to cinema he pioneered in The Garden in the Machine, but does so by focusing on documentary rather the avant-garde. His exploration of the interlaced traditions of ethnographic and personal documentary filmmaking in the Boston area in the light of American Pragmatism’s commitment to the examination of lived experience is a remarkable addition to his already remarkable oeuvre.” – David E. James, author of The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles

"[American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary] is a superbly original and informative work that takes as its project the creation of a cognitive map of a significant and geographically specific area within the larger field of independent documentary filmmaking. It is fascinating to follow the book's careful articulation of the network of teachers and students, and the institutions where they and their films flourished. This book establishes a new path for documentary studies within a cultural landscape that widens to spatial media studies and beyond.”– Janet Walker, author of Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust