- Convenors:
-
Andy Lawrence
(University of Manchester)
Martha-Cecilia Dietrich (University of Amsterdam)
Angélica Cabezas-Pino (Universidad de La Frontera)
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- Chair:
-
Peter Ian Crawford
(UiT - The Arctic University of Norway)
- Format:
- Panel Discussion
- Start time:
- 25 March, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel looks at the modes and impacts of ethnographic filmmaking across the disciplines. We seek to explore how methodological approaches and filmmaking techniques create interpretative spaces through which audiences actively contribute to re-imaginations of complex realities.
Long Abstract:
This panel looks at the modes and impacts of 'filmmaking for fieldwork' techniques across the disciplines. It takes ethnographic filmmaking to be an 'empirical art' that is informed by re-significations of sensory experience and good practice while mediating and exploring relationships between self and other. We consider the unique potential of filmmaking in creating interpretative spaces within the disciplines of social anthropology, politics, history, memory studies, development, international relations and psychology. The four critical areas of documentary practice we will address are: 1) politics and ethics of engagement, 2) negotiating ambiguity, controversy and conflict, 3) narrative approaches in between description and analysis, and 4) transformative potentials in the production and reception of a film. We seek to explore how methodological approaches and filmmaking techniques allow audiences to actively contribute to re-imaginations of complex realities. What balance can be struck between expression and analysis in an era of interdisciplinary and multimodal approaches to ethnography? And what can filmmaking contribute to the making and unmaking of contemporary lifeworlds in times of crisis? Invited practitioners will reflect on completed documentary film projects concerning one of the key areas mentioned above. Contributions will be considered for a forthcoming publication with Manchester University Press.
Session 3: Between description and analysis
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
How do we capture and understand the ephemeral, transformational and often painful experience of becoming a mother for the first time? 'Bearing' (2020), a visual autoethnography of motherhood, explores the 'emotional' in both ethnographic film practice and maternal experience.
Paper long abstract:
How do we capture and understand the ephemeral, transformational and often painful experience of becoming a mother for the first time? Sharing excerpts from 'Bearing' (2020), my autoethnographic film, photography and fieldnotes, I will examine the process of filmmaking in order to build a case for the concept of an emotional thick description. This presentation will draw on debates discussing film's capacity for thin or thick description (Hastrup, 1992; MacDougall, 1996; Favero, 2018) by detailing my process of using feminist autoethnography to explore the sensory experience of early motherhood.
I will discuss the challenges of finding a form and approach to authentically express and further understand the embodied and unwieldy experience of motherhood. Strategies included deconstructing the component parts of the film, the use of vignettes and repetitive motifs. The research and filming process at times generated burn out and were sometimes emotionally overwhelming. I discuss how the process of making the film and related media brought me to address emotion work and emotional knowledge making. More specifically, I used emotion within both the process and content of my research to grow the filmmaking into its final iteration, and to reveal important knowledge around the 'emotional' in both ethnographic film practices and maternal experience. This in turn allowed for new understandings, such as furthering knowledge on sensory experience of loneliness and its interrelationship with maternal identity and maternal experience of place.
Paper short abstract:
Reflecting on my audio-visual explorations of the state-sponsored performance of love and desire at the annual group wedding celebrations on the Chinese-Russian border, this paper explores the role of national and personal vulnerabilities in identity politics.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2011 an annual 'International group wedding ceremony' takes place in the Jiayin town on the Chinese side of the Heilongjiang river that marks the international border between China and Russia. Held on the Chinese lunar 'St Valentine's Day' (qixi jie) that falls on a date in August, the event's official goal is to promote closer relations between the Chinese and Russian people and to create opportunities for informal contacts across the border. In my attempt to understand what motivates this curious lavish event in a remote part of China, I embarked on a visual ethnographic journey to observe and document this occasion in 2018.
In this paper I reflect on my position as a native Russian speaker and filmmaking researcher making sense of the International group-wedding event. The ceremony reflected deep-seated Chinese national insecurities and a sense of racial inferiority, which became tangible through the contrasting moments of performativity in front of the camera and moments of confidence and silence when the camera was put to the side. I argue that the international group wedding celebrations mask and express Chinese national vulnerabilities shaped by the enduring collective memory of 'national humiliation'. Navigating my filmed footage and a life trajectory as a UK-based researcher of China coming of age in the post-Soviet era, I ponder whether my personal and Chinese national vulnerabilities and desires have something in common?
Paper short abstract:
In our film "Tarantism Revisited" (forth. 2021) we make use of the potentiality of the essayistic form as an empirical artistic ethnographic research practice that multimodally explores the fascination of an ›exotic‹ spider-possession cult in Southern Italy.
Paper long abstract:
The essay film has been an established genre since the 1940s but its approaches have not been taken aboard in ethnographic filmmaking (except in recent films by Mattijs van de Port; see also van de Port 2018). This is puzzling considering the explicit intention of the essay film to critically assess the relationship between textual and audio-visual forms of knowing. In our feature-length film "Tarantism Revisited" (forth. 2021) we make use of the potentiality of the essayistic form as an empirical artistic ethnographic research practice that multimodally explores the fascination that an ›exotic‹ Italian spider-possession cult has had on scientists, artists, filmmakers and tourists for centuries.
The film approaches the phenomenon of Apulian tarantism from the perspective of Anna, an illiterate farm worker. In touching letters written between 1959 and 1965 to anthropologist Annabella Rossi, Anna describes her personal experiences of illness, suffering and healing through tarantism. These letters are a unique historic document and constitute the dramaturgical backbone of our film. Anna's descriptions are juxtaposed with archival audio-visual materials from post-war Italy (films, TV shows, photographs, music) as well as footage from our own ethnographic research (i.e. through tableaux vivants, photographic series, drawings and experimental ambient sound montages).
As filmmakers and ethnographers we revisit - hence the title - the sites, landscapes and archival materials related to the phenomenon of Apulian tarantism and analyse the survival and utilization of these iconic images through audio-visual montage and an open narrative form that is constitutive of the essay film.