Film short abstract:

Experimenting with “unwriting ethnography,” this short documentary, filmed during the initial phase of fieldwork for my master’s thesis, offers a springboard to discuss: What changes when visual media is part of both analysis and presentation of ethnographic fieldwork?

Film long abstract:

This documentary experiments with “unwriting ethnography,” as a part of the initial fieldwork for my master’s thesis in Applied Cultural Analysis at Lund University. The film was made during a few intense weeks while I was conducting semi-structured interviews with walkers along the 27 km long nature trail, the Amarmino, in Copenhagen. Expanding on the premise that transcription is a form of analysis, I employed the film medium to invite the viewer into my listening to this interview, for the first time. The film tries to capture the images that played out in my mind during the interview. Offering the viewer a glimpse into both the mind of the interviewer, and the interviewee, orchestrates an experience of being in the park with my interlocutor, walking beside him. Filmmaking was intertwined with my then unwritten analytical process, rather than an aftermath. The film was made in medias res and affected the following fieldwork, and the themes that played a central part in the analytical chapters of the thesis. Immersion in audio-visual content shaped my primary analysis differently than working with a selection of written quotes on paper; forcing me to work out a whole different narrative structure with the potential to open dialogue with other than academics, inviting them to see the trail and hear the interview sound files that are normally hidden away, transcribed into text and presented as quotes in the written thesis. What changes when visual media is part of both analysis and presentation of ethnographic fieldwork?