For almost a century ethnographic filmmakers liked to think of their work as the radical alternative to a hidebound textual anthropology. Such claims are now increasingly challenged. On the one hand, the rise of “experimental’ or “multimodal” scholarship has changed the existing terms of debate about alternative modes of anthropological practice. On the other hand, debates about the decolonization (or decanonization) of the discipline have served to underline long-standing problems in conventional narratives of the tradition of ethnographic film. What is the future for ethnographic film? Is it now an obsolete form, superseded or absorbed into the broader and more diverse category of multimodal anthropology? Or is there a case to be made for retaining its distinctiveness as a mode of inquiry?

近一个世纪以来，民族志电影制作人都喜欢将他们的作品视为对死板的文本人类学的激进替代品。这种说法现在受到越来越多的挑战。一方面，“实验”或“多模式”学术的兴起改变了关于人类学实践替代模式的现有争论。另一方面，关于该学科的非殖民化（或非正统化）的辩论有助于强调民族志电影传统的传统叙事中长期存在的问题。民族志电影的未来是什么？它现在是不是一种过时的形式，被取代或吸收到更广泛和更多样化的多模式人类学类别中？或者是否有理由保留其作为一种探究方式的独特性？