A daring, deep investigation into ethnographic cinema that challenges standard ways of writing film history and breaks important new ground in understanding archives.

Bad Film Histories is a vital work that unsettles the authority of the archive, examining the imprecisions and absences that define film history and its archives. Taking ethnographic cinema as a crucial case study, Katherine Groo challenges standard ways of thinking and writing about film history and questions widespread assumptions about what film artifacts are and what makes them meaningful