Paper short abstract:

She is slightly older than I am. We know each other since years. She worked, did pottery, raised her children, migrated, worked and looked after her family again. I worked, did research, filmed, and taught. I filmed her family; she grasped that my filmic records turned into being her family history.

Paper long abstract:

Mexico 1980: I wanted to write a dissertation on pottery in the context of developmental anthropology. I arrived at a village, at a potter family house, and stayed. They kindly accepted me, we shared our time, and I managed to stay in contact with them till today. 1989: We (my cameraman and I) started an ethnographic film project portraying the potter family. I wanted to show the manifold activities of the women, the daily life, and the economic implications. Later I asked the main protagonist to comment the film. She did it, but she was not feeling very comfortable with it. She was a modest person and she was not sure of the usefulness of the film - till her grandchildren from the US visited her. Suddenly the film became a piece of family history. 2000: She moved to Florida to look after her grandchildren. 2001: We visited her, and she started to use our video camera to record her life there and her reflections on living in the US. I visited her once in a while and the people in the sending village, recording changes here and there. We used the little time we had together to discuss the difficulties she was encountering - very often off camera. Through her I got deep insights in a migrant family life, the worries and hopes. I gathered a lot of visual material, but I still search for a way to make sense out of it without compromising the protagonist's family.

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Paper short abstract:

Looking back at my own history as an anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker, I will reflect on the issue of gender inequality, and the qualms and quandaries it raises when an anthropologist makes films about women.

Paper long abstract:

In the early 1970s, when the Women's Liberation Movement got under way, I tried to make sense of gender inequalities while doing fieldwork in Hamar, Southern Ethiopia. In the same period Robert Gardner made Rivers of Sand, an unashamedly biased view of gender relations in Hamar (in an interview Gardner admitted he "especially disliked Hamer men"). As an anthropologist I was not happy with this film and faced the following quandary: gender relations in Hamar seemed unfair to me, and yet women were the ones who most vigorously endorsed gender inequality. When I came to make my own films (the Hamar Trilogy and Duka's Dilemma), I was determined not to be judgemental, but to ask Hamar women to explain the whys and wherefores of their gender relations. Through filming I came to appreciate the advantages Hamar women gain from a gender division of labour, reproduction, defence, etc. and why they foster gender inequality as a way of gaining sway over their menfolk. Now I face another quandary: my films may shed light on gender relations, but they also provide fuel for governmental and nongovernmental organizations to intervene in the name of gender inequality, and oblige women to abandon their traditional practices. This undermines their time-honoured mode of sustainable subsistence, and leaves the women with no way of harnessing the support of their menfolk to cope with the exigencies of life. But if I advocate that women should decide themselves what kind of gender relations they cultivate, am I anti-feminist?

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Paper short abstract:

Kim Longinotto’ internationally acclaimed documentaries are well recognised within ethnographic film festival circles. From a distributor’s perspective we like to position the impact of her documentaries within visual anthropology and compare with feedbacks from women’s filmmaker networks such as Woman Make Movies.

Paper long abstract:

Kim Longinotto' internationally acclaimed documentaries are well recognised in anthropological circles, are regularly screened at ethnographic film festivals and used in teaching. All but one of her last 14 documentaries take a female perspective, portraying women and addressing topics such as FGM, domestic abuse, divorce or woman's rights with sensitivity and compassion. Using interviews with the filmmaker and citations of her films this contribution will analyse her approach to her female subjects and her practice. From a distributor's perspective we like to position the impact of her documentaries within visual anthropology and compare with feedbacks from women's filmmaker networks such as Woman Make Movies.

Paper short abstract:

What are the specificities and consequences of being a woman when you decided to dedicate your life to Visual Anthropology?

Paper long abstract:

What are the specificities and consequences of being a woman when you decided to dedicate your life to Visual Anthropology?

We could start from the training as a cameraperson in order to avoid the "power relationship" with technicians, to the fieldwork shared with women colleagues, to the decision of dedicating your work to the women daily life in the Dogon country.

My choices permitted to better understand the ways the Dogon society could be perceived by Dogon men, the crucial importance of men rituals and that daily life was probably one of the most difficult aspect of the society to render. Also, I clearly understood it was not "the cup of tea" for festivals and in the French cultural surrounding. The last exhibit at Quai Branly Museum was exemplar by presenting 330 exceptional "pieces" from international collections without giving any explanation regarding the social surrounding of the population. Women were still in the backstage waiting for the next century to be allowed to have their own existence, rights and proper beliefs.

As I'm starting, with a woman colleague of mine, a new fieldwork on the biggest French maternity in Mayotte island, where 6.000 to 8000 babies are born every year, during this presentation I will describe precisely the reasons, consequences, specificities and the evolution of a woman' eye behind the viewfinder.

Paper short abstract:

A sensory anthropology could allow us to rethink approaches to the female ethnographic subject, aligning point-of-view and optics with a deliberate porosity and diversity in feminist reflexive filmmaking. We can take a lead from new studies of female experimental artist filmmakers which evidence an aesthetics of affect and visual hapticity.

Paper long abstract:

Seeking a vivid 'synthesis of Vertov's cine-eye and Flaherty's participating camera', Rouch compares camerawork with 'the improvisation of the bullfighter in front of the bull' (The Camera and Man, 1973). Capturing and framing the image whilst habituating the subject assume the ubiquitous apparatus of the camera, yet we can rethink point-of-view and the optics of focus and light, aligning them with a deliberate porosity and diversity in feminist reflexive filmmaking. Luce Irigaray, arguing with Nietzsche on the nature of water (1991), suggests it is feminine because it encompasses equal multiple points-of-view; 'she undoes all perspective'. The sensory turn in anthropology (eg: Pink, 2009) allows a reclaimed historiography of womens' approaches to the ethnographic subject. In particular, we can review uses of an aesthetics of affect and visual hapticity (Marks, 2000), in womens' film work and indigenous media collaboration (Deger, 2006); perhaps taking a lead from claims in new studies of female experimental artist filmmakers (Best, 2011; Levitin et al, 2003; Minh-Ha, 1989, 2011; Petrolle and Wexman, 2005). Does a sensory approach recast notions of documentary reflexivity, visual and aural engagement and female subjectivity (Lebow, 2011; Ellis, 2012)? This paper is influenced by ethnographic work with cinematographers and my interviews with female professionals, and by my own practice as a filmmaker using cinematography as ethnography in approaches to material culture, time, place, memory and female point-of-view. I will show clips, where women are the subject, which seem to amplify a "female eye" (Minh-Ha, Longinotto, Greenhalgh).