Observational cinema is one of several closely related approaches to documentary filmmaking that emerged in the 1960s, encouraged by the introduction of new, lightweight cameras and sound recorders. Since then it has had a significant influence on ethnographic filmmaking and visual anthropology. While initially perceived by some critics as aspiring to detachment and scientific objectivity, it is now more often understood as a highly authored form of cinema involving close relations between filmmaker and subject and representing the perspectives of individual observers. It marked a shift away from documentary films as authoritative pronouncements toward an approach that gave the audience a sense of the filmmaker's presence in the situations filmed, paralleling the participant observer's role in anthropological fieldwork. It has proven increasingly relevant to many of the newly developing interests of anthropology in material and visual culture, aesthetics, performance, individual agency, and the role of the senses and emotions in social life.