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Paper Short Abstract:

My interlocutor and I made what we called ethnographic B movies. We didn't take the content and aesthetic of filmmaking too seriously; what mattered was having fun together. How can our outsider approach to multimodality fit within a filmic anthropology that demands clarity of concept and context?

Paper Abstract:

My friend, interlocutor and collaborator David Ross and I called our approach to speculative ethno-fiction filmmaking the ethnographic B movie. Not taking ourselves or the content and aesthetic of our films too seriously afforded a novel fieldwork encounter based on playful absurdity. In this paper I propose the ethnographic B movie as a legitimate approach to multimodal anthropology that others could use. Through this gesture to share, I highlight the tension between legitimacy and novelty within a multimodal mainstream. David has a PhD in sociology yet for various reasons has ended up living precariously on the social and economic margins in Toronto, Canada. Despite his circumstances, he remains committed to generating and sharing knowledge. He writes dense and singular texts about his concept 'the musicality of reality' only to receive an endless stream of rejection letters. Our filmmaking provided space to manifest his vision - in it's unique and confusing singularity - beyond writing and an opportunity to project a version of himself beyond his marginality. Although David strives for mainstream recognition, he remains steadfast to his vision and way of communicating it; even as he acknowledge it keeps his thinking on the margins. We encounter this negotiation through David's performances in the films. Does sharing our approach beyond it's novel origins undermine David's struggles against and criticism of conventional knowledge production? Perhaps, much like David's ideas, the ethnographic B movie doesn't translate to the centre. If so, along what paths can absurdist and outsider multimodal anthropology travel towards legitimacy?