Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the process of finding archive images and creating affective photographic and cinematographic temporalities through the narrative structures of two ethnographic films. It examines various strategies and theories of relation and montage.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the process of finding archive images and combining them with photographic and cinematographic temporalities through the narrative structures of two ethnographic films. Shooting with the new HDSLR cameras which shoot both stills and video changed practices of both film-making and editing for Switch (Greenhalgh, 2013) and Cottonopolis (Greenhalgh, forthcoming, 2014). Both films use archive stills and integrate affective continuities and dissonances, combining still, moving and animated stop frame image sequences. The ethnographic research began with archive material, interviews, drawing, video sketches, photographs, notes and poems. Filming involved a bricolage activity of walking and shooting still, then movie, then animated stills sequences in environments such as Blackpool seafront promenade and old Manchester and Mumbai cotton factories. A process like 'scrying', scanning through immediate replay, and discovering narrative connections evolved as I carried notebooks and Ipad with archive images and audio of memories of participants. Editing is interrupted differently by the accumulation of data rather than changing celluloid canister or film roll. The paper briefly examines the efficacy of themes and strategies of relation, affect, temporality and montage; by way of Manovich (spatial montage), Kristeva (intertextuality), Bourriaud (relational aesthetics), Campany (montage orchestration), Walker Evans (conceptual palimpsest) Cartier-Bresson (decisive moment), Ivakhiv (ecology of images), Manning (relationscapes), Agnes Varda (gleaning) and Stanley Kubrick (contact print archive). It will reveal some of the challenges and pleasures of interdisciplinary approaches, combining the photographic, the cinematographic and the anthropological, in trying to deliver an essayistic ethnographic film from a substantial variety of image sources.