After attending Black Mountain College, working with Buckminster Fuller on Geodesic dome testing, and professionally racing motorcycles for Moto Guzzi, Carroll opened a film production company, Zia Cine, in New York. In the early 1960s, he worked with several prominent documentary filmmakers, including George Stoney, Bob Young, and Adam Giffard. It was during these years that Carroll participated in the development of the wireless synchronous sound 16mm film technology today associated with the birth of the cinema-verite film genre.

In 1965 Carroll moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico and with Joan Swayze Williams established the Anthropology Film Center. There he taught the new techniques of portable 16mm filmmaking, developing unique intensive production courses for small classes. His student base was always broad, with artists and scholars of all sorts, many of whom went on to significant roles as independents and film industry professionals.

From the time they moved to New Mexico Carroll and Joan recognized the importance of training Native American filmmakers. George Burdeau, Larrry LittleBird (both principals in Circle Film, the first Native American film production company), Pete Bird, Larry Cesspooch, Beverly Singer, Rain Parrish, Ava Hamilton and Marcus Amerman are among the Native media artists and producers who went to the AFC. As Beverly Singer has written: "Carroll was a quiet revolutionary by providing his knowledge about film to a generation of Native people whom otherwise would have had no other venue to study the rudiments of filmmaking.� Had he and Joan not been so courageous as to open their school to Native Americans and treat us with the same respect as any other student that went through their program, it would have taken much longer for the Native American film movement to begin when it did in the 1970s." Carroll also aided Gloria Bird in the research and production of A Filmography for Native American Education, an important early resource guide published by the AFC in 1973.

Throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s, numerous projects originating from New Mexico artists, museums, and institutions were technically aided by production support from Carroll and the AFC facilities. Carroll's extraordinary ability to repair, customize, and invent just about any kind of device necessary to a filmmaker became local legend. In terms of the development of visual anthropology in North America, the AFC also hosted the 1972 NSF-sponsored Summer Institute for Visual Anthropology, organized and taught by Jay Ruby, Sol Worth, Karl Heider, and Carroll. In later years, students in the Temple University visual anthropology graduate program took Carroll's production classes, and Carroll's technical teaching touched many professional anthropologists and institutions, including the Human Studies Film Center at the Smithsonian Institution.

Steven Feld
Prof. of Anthropology and Music, University of New Mexico

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