- 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 4: Transformative potentials
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
How do I end up in the places I study, seeing the things I see, asking the questions I ask? If anthropology is the study of encounters with others, transparency on one's self is being called for. Yet how does the call for transparency sit with the performance of the ethical anthropologist?
Paper long abstract:
In a close reading of one scene of my film, The Body Won’t Close, I will address the issue of transparency, focussing on the homo-eroticism that several commentators have found to be present in the scene (and throughout the film).
The nightly scene shows some young men in small town Bahia, hanging out at a shooting gallery. They aim their shotguns at lolly-pops, chewing gum and candies. Painted decorative panels show busty ladies in tiny bikinis. The loud music is full of sexual innuendos. The camera registers my interactions with my research assistant, a guy called Rigne. You hear me instructing him how to go about shooting, so I can make a better shot. In voice over, I wonder what it is that makes me end up in such all-male venues – and more broadly, in rough places like small town Bahia.
Much of what goes into the scene – the footage, my editorial choices, the voice-over text -- has been produced intuitively. Both fieldwork and filmmaking, I feel, gain by giving up control, allowing my soul to wander. Back in academic mode, I will seize the opportunity of this panel to scrutinize the dynamic interplay between myself and the others; between what is being said, what is being heard and what is being silenced; between the world of ‘the field’ and the world of the editing room; between the drives that move the ethnographer and the drives that move the larger assemblage that is me.
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on the possibilities and constraints of observational filmmaking and the use of emerging technology, such as immersive storytelling, as a response to my experience of personal and empirical limitations of the observational approach in evoking the oppressiveness of prison spaces.
Paper long abstract:
Social anthropologists have often highlighted the challenges in carrying out participant observation within difficult contexts like prisons (Rhodes 2001, Wacquant 2002, Drake et al. 2015). Observational filmmaking works as and through human experience with the affective dimension at its core. In prison, this approach allows for precious opportunities but it also has its limitations.
In this paper, I reflect on the production of my feature length observational film "Imprisoned Lullaby" (2016) about mothers who live in prison with their children. More specifically, I focus on the position of the researcher as a filmmaker and the necessity to develop an 'attentive distance' that is characterised by respect and care for the people, but also preserving the author from an overwhelming emotional engagement. I also discuss the limitations of observational filmmaking in this context that have inspired me to look at other modes of storytelling. I will therefore also discuss a second project made in prison that combines photography, animation, and ethnofiction in an immersive filmmaking approach. This, more collaborative mode of engagement, forced me to think more deeply about ideas of 'being there', the illusion of 'presence' and 'feeling' the prison space, which may have changed my relationship with the inmates as well as the viewing experience.
Paper short abstract:
Ethnographic fieldwork involves uncomfortable, unfamiliar and confusing situations that require a filmmaker to employ creative pragmatism. How might the ideas that extend from cinematic research praxis contribute to knowledge about one's self and others through the documentary imagination?
Paper long abstract:
This paper describes techniques in my filmmaking that led to ethnographic and personal discoveries about the productivity of failure. Failure inspires aversion in social environments driven by the continual production of material success and ideas of exponential growth. Haraway has argued that possibilities afforded by other formulations of success may lead humans to a less damaging relationship with their environment (Haraway, 2016). To assess the potential of failure we must also consider risk, which acts as a pivot point in human action, mediating between emotion, strategic thinking and awareness of impact. Such pivots interest filmmaking anthropologists because they offer an empirical lens onto the unfolding of human experience as it is being formed, rather than how it is narrated. Central to my practice is a cinematic method that I call the 'triangle of action' (Lawrence, 2020), useful for the exploration of human experience in real-time fieldwork environments that are difficult to comprehend. Here, the crafting of empirical art acts as a proxy in the field for understanding that later develops during editing. Paul Henley (2004, 2020) has written about documentary filmmaking as 'ethnographic discovery'. I will consider the transformative potential of my own relationship with failure during the making of One Long Journey (Lawrence, 2016) - a film about the successes hidden within an apparent failure. To conclude, I look at transformative potentials held within a network of experience between filmmaker, protagonist and audience and ask what this contributes to the production of anthropological knowledge.