Paper short abstract:

I explore collaborative filmmaking as a means to centre unorthodox or outsider knowledge, to challenge conventions of meaning and value. While film allows novel forms of communicative encounter, what generative possibilities may be silenced due to disciplinary epistemic and aesthetic parameters.

Paper long abstract:

An interlocutor and I created a series of speculative ethnofiction films we called ethnographic B movies. Though poor in quality and absurdist in content, they provided an opportunity for my interlocutor to share his philosophical, sociopolitical and cosmological system called the Musicality of Reality. He has a PhD in sociology and had once taught at a Turkish university but for various reasons had ended up back in Toronto, Canada unhoused living in and out of shelters. As a self-professed failed academic, he maintains a desire to generate and share knowledge though an outsider to both the academy and contemporary mainstream. It is this knowledge that's centered in our films.

I present several filmic fragments that document his ideas as a way to bring them into an academic space. As a kind of decolonial practice, it is his own imagination and ideas, as he desired to present them, that are on display as opposed to my version of him rendered in an imposed ethnographic frame. Too often anthropologists render their interlocutors as specific kinds of subjects that fit neatly into disciplinary "slots" for the sake of communicability and epistemological relevancy. In a contemporary moment of weak attention and near infinite content, what space remains for multimodal ethnography that's off beat, requires deep audience investment or contains subject matter outside accepted contexts of inquiry. Within this media context and the need to be current what kinds of unique experiences and imaginative worlds go unnoticed?