It is with great pleasure that Visual Anthropology reprints excerpts from one of the major texts in our field, Luc de Heusch's monograph, “The Cinema and Social Science: A Survey of Ethnographic and Sociological Films.” First published in English in 1962 in UNESCO's series on the social sciences, the monograph has been out of print and difficult to locate for a number of years. It is being reprinted here so that we might better understand the historical development of visual anthropology by again having access to this classic. The editor would like to thank Professor de Heusch and the rights and permissions unit of the Unesco Press for allowing us to make this work again available. We have omitted Chapter 5, “Brief Outline of the History of the Ethnographic and Sociological Film,” and Chapter 6, “Use of the Film in Ethno‐Sociological Research and the University Teaching of Social Sciences.”