Of course, Nanook is a poetic ethnographic film, as 'Nanook' was a semi-fictional character, demonstrating old ways of the Inuit, still remembered by the adults who appear in the film, though their actual practices had morphed toward more modern tools.
City symphony films like Man With a Move Camera and Berlin aren't what we typically think of as ethnographic, but they do explore urban life in a poetic form. Night Mail's sound track is an actual poem by W.H. Auden. I'd say an anthropologist who only knows mainstream film MUST check out Sol Worth generally and read Through Navajo Eyes specifically. Within the accepted genre of "ethnographic film", a couple examples noted for artistry are The Axe Fight and Dead Birds. For other suggestions, you can look at the films mentioned in David Macdougal's essay in Movies and Methods v.1 (Nichols, ed) and the various chapters of Documenting the Documentary (Grant and Sloniowski, eds) including one devoted to a Brakhage film! Finally, not necessarily poetic or experimental, but for me a must-see film documenting a particular culture is Seventeen (sometimes listed as "Middletown: Seventeen") by Joel DeMott and longtime Frameworks commenter Jeff Kreines. It was intended for public broadcasting. but was suppressed. It may be hard to find (if you have an academic affiliation, try interlibrary loan), but it's worth the effort.
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