Paper short abstract:

The making of three films documenting cultural embodied practices – singing, cookery and ritual – will be here thought as new dialogical approaches to recapture those traditional gestures, and as anthropological works reassembling multiple visual dimensions to render those (un)seen present.

Paper long abstract:

Three ethnographic films using innovative approaches, withdrawing from experimental video techniques (Pasqualino and Schneider 2014) and observational cinema methods, will be thought as means to reframe old community making practices. Using a 'polifonic' (Clifford 1988) approach the film Fado Tropical (Catarina Faria 2013) traces the life stories of Fado singers in Brazil, re-presenting voicing-diasporas jarring the nationally branded Portuguese 'authentic' Fado. The film Luís da Rocha (Inês Mestre 2013) shows the production and degustation of sweets, using "asynchronicity" modes (Heuson and Allen 2014) of enhancing and enchanting audio-visually, techniques used in the confection of receipts that flavor the local identity. Divino, Ferido e Chagado (Pedro Antunes 2015) documenting a folk ritual re-enactment of Christ's Last Supper, shows a local conflict triggered by its re-mediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999) for a TV show, trying to render them 'traditional', in line with the show-real aesthetics. In a context where cultural expressions are often curt-circuited by politics of heritage-making or (un)seen as "spurious" forms, this communication will reflect on how the creative gestures of their 'actors' and their ways of making sense of those practices, were dialectically used in the crafting of the films; will also outlook its 'corporal images' (MacDougal 2005) as a means to unravel the intimacies and morosely engagements in their practices, being pastry, ritual, fado or film making; and how its screening contributed to the production of "regimes of visibility" in the contemporary uses of their 'unofficial heritages' (Harrison 2013).