The production of ethnographic films, which are recordings and studies of culture using the methods of cinema, has been positioned as a central pursuit of visual anthropology My own activities have been chiefly oriented around the production and presentation ethnographic films dealing with Africa's intangible cultures, especially musical and performative expressions in local Ethiopian communities. The Encyclopedia Cinematographica (EC) films produced by Germany's Institute for Scientific Film (Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film, or IWF) and discussed in this report are well known for an approach that, in service of the comparative study of people and animal behavior, places an emphasis on the thorough observation of subjects without explicitly revealing the presence of the filmmaker. These EC films generated insights in the context of education and the comparative study of culture both in their home country of Germany and around the world (Murao 2006) and were highly influential on the styles of academic films, including twentieth-century ethnographic films. More recently, however, the 16mm film media format and recognizably dated observation-and-recording cinematic style-i.e.. a style that seeks to avoid revealing the position or presence of the filmmaker as much as possible have come to represent barriers. As a result, EC films have attracted less attention and generated fewer opportunities for discussion not only in Germany but also within the academic forums of visual anthropological discussion. The EC films, freed of the contemporary scientific context in which they were produced, have crossed space and time to be imbued with new meaning and values here in Japan. In this paper, I would like to draw on the case of a screening of the EC films to think about the creative use of these archival films.