Paper short abstract:

What ethical dilemmas emerge, or are negotiated, when filmmakers show their audiovisual materials to the ethnographic subjects appearing in them? What are the implications—social and aesthetic—in the recording of ethnographic subjects seeing images of their cinematic selves?

Paper long abstract:

What ethical dilemmas emerge, or are negotiated, when filmmakers show their audiovisual materials to the ethnographic subjects appearing in them? Dubbed by Jean Rouch “feed-back screening” or “audio-visual counter-gift,” the phenomenon of ethnographic subjects seeing themselves onscreen has been traditionally considered a collaborative and participatory method in the process of construction of anthropological knowledge.

In this presentation, I track what I call the “screen encounter” as a filmmaking strategy and viewing practice that traverses different historical periods and geographical contexts. I place it within a broader history of film reception practices that has one of its roots in fin-de-siècle local films, actualities that appealed to the audiences’ curiosity at seeing themselves onscreen. Local films conflated on and off-screen individual selves, but they also engaged in collective formations of publics and counter-publics, often holding the potential for complex and multivalent social (re)configurations.

From Sol Worth’s and John Adair’s 1960s audiovisual work with Navajo communities in Arizona to Vincent Carelli’s 1980s project “Video nas Aldeias” in Brazil to the films of contemporary global artists like Filipa César or Mati Diop, the screen encounter has been a generative device for non-fiction filmmakers for a range of different purposes and ends. As some of these projects show, the encounter between ethnographic subjects and their cinematic selves also holds the potential to offer a critique of the screen encounter itself as an operation that reinforces the colonial relations it tries to dissipate.