COMING TO TERMS WITH MADANG'S DEATH Watching and experience in anthropological teaching Richard Davis How ethnographic film might take a greater role than it has done in teaching anthropology is an issue which is located within wider concerns about the constructing effects of visual representation. The deployment of images for the purposes of teaching is a potentially problematic one and this paper attempts to explore one aspect of the filmic process; the politics of watching. The possible contexts and experiences of watching have important consequences for the ways in which students might respond to a deep incorporation of film into anthropological teaching. As a form of representation films need to be seen as products of the integration of image and spectator. They are sites, fields, and productions which create their audience at the same time as their audience creates them. In this sense films are continously 'created' as they take on the burden of the context within which they are viewed. Rather than consider the range of viewing acts a viewer experiences, I will narrow my focus to a consideration of the reactions of students to a film shown during an anthropology course at The Australian National University during 1994. In watching Robin Anderson and Bob Connolly's film Black harvest, set in the New Guinea Highlands, students reacted strongly to the death of Madang, also a central figure throughout the two earlier films, First contact and Black harvest. A number of intersecting areas are at play in students' reactions which in part refer to Bill Nichols's distinction between the filmic and pro-filmic in ethnographic film, but also involve more fundamental questions about the viewer's fascination with the film subject. We can point to the problematic this raises in Black harvest as a question located at the interaction between audience and film. Is Madang's death presented for our viewing pleasure? More generally, are the representations implicit in ethnographic film and the relationships generated by viewers to film appropriate in an educational context? University learning in anthropology is dependent on courses which are structured by regular lectures, tutorials and readings. The core of most Canberra Anthropology 17(2) 1994:97-102