High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! An ethnographic film is a documentary film related to the methods of ethnology. It emerged in the 1960s as an important tool for research in the domain of visual anthropology, when filming human groups in society. There are two main types of ethnographic films: those created specifically by ethnographers in the course of their professional work and those created by others, but used in the study of culture. Programs in visual anthropology train professionals to make the first kind of film; Hollywood movies, documentaries by non-anthropologists and even home movies and Youtube fall into the second category. While the actual medium of "film" is strongly associated with early ethnographic attempts, today ethnographic films are made in video and digital media as well, and may contain elements of text and animation.