Paper short abstract:

This paper will talk about experiences of visual ethnography in areas where the newest audio-visual technologies are neither widespread nor available to most of the people. Nevertheless audio-visuals still can play important role favouring interactions otherwise impossible

Paper long abstract:

Visual ethnography can be done in different contexts and most challenging visual technologies, albeit well widespread nowadays, do not reach all over the areas. Electric power, even if solar energy is used for lightening, radio and television broadcasting not everywhere is available to the extent of allowing timeless use of new visual technologies.

This paper will talk about experiences of visual ethnography in areas that can be considered resilient to the use of the newest technologies. Those technologies can be available to filmmakers but less so to subjects of movies or those who would like to make them in less privileged and poorer contexts. Thus, the production of non-fictional cinema that could involve participatory approaches or non-linear representation to redefine the gaze in visual ethnography becomes a very challenging enterprise. It will be presented the relationship with audiovisual means of matrilineal groups of Makhwa who were first displaced from southern Somalia to Tanzania then became refugees, and thereafter, citizens of Tanzania. Their ethnographic case shows the interaction between the different subjects of the audiovisual which becomes an integral part of the ethnographic research.

This paper argues that, in certain conditions, ethnographers may play a special role in eliciting important contents and avoiding exoticization.

Paper short abstract:

Based on the fieldwork experience, the paper seeks to critically reflect on the impact of the contemporary cinematic language on the visual 'habitus' that ethnographers and filmmakers take on in the field.

Paper long abstract:

Starting with the fieldwork experience with a sound-engineering and video maker in Austria, France, and Italy the paper aims to reflect on the different uses of the camera to investigate the practice of beekeeping.

Through the analysis of the footage and related fieldwork's notes, the paper seeks to critically reflect on the impact of the contemporary cinematic language — geared towards a sort of 'festival's visual standard' — on the 'habitus' that ethnographers and filmmakers take on in the fieldwork. Composition, exposure, cinematic style, sound equipment, and type of camera appear often to be arranged to fulfill the viewer's expectations that represent a sort of implicit requirement for producing a 'good movie.' Particularly when the ethnographer works with other expertise connected to film production and TV business, these expectations may produce tensions that could affect the practices of negotiation with the informants. Thus, the paper offers the opportunity to reflect on the challenges for the ethnographer in engaging with the diverse needs and expectations of the actors involved in the film production. The contribution questions the role of film festivals in creating a sort of 'visual standard' that influences the ethnographer-filmmaker in choosing which audio-visual technologies to use and how to introduce them in the field.

Paper short abstract:

David MacDougall's participatory and transcultural cinema placed the ethnographic film at the center of a social exchange. How can current trends, the possibilities of 360°, AR and nonlinear videos connect to this conception of participatory knowledge through film?

Paper long abstract:

The film work and the theoretical reflection of David MacDougall, which began in the late sixties and still in progress, had as their cornerstone the idea that the film should have a relationship of respect and coexistence with the reality of everyday life . The notion of participation, conceived in the sense of a strong social enhancement of the film, a place of "commensalism" between filmmakers, subjects and spectators, as it can dialogue with the current findings of technological enlargement on the one hand and of the trend on the other hand an 'exotic' gaze, which many festivals bear traces of?

The problem arises because the ways and terms of participation and collaboration in producing visual anthropological knowledge are articulated today in very different ways and no longer forced to the conception of the linearity of the film as a communicative object. In them, on the other hand, it is sometimes difficult to find traces of that direct relationship between sensory experience and anthropological knowledge that was the main objective of MacDougall cinema. The paper will try to offer some answers starting from the comparison between MacDougall's film ethnography and some examples taken from the most recent ethno-visual productions.

Paper short abstract:

Through an experimental form of analysis and ethnographic representation based on the screening of moments of silence produced during biographical interviews, the paper aims to rethink the video interviews as a multi-sensorial moment.

Paper long abstract:

The setting of life histories is conceived like a "place of silence", in which technical tools and ethnographer's skills contribute to reducing the background noises. However, in ethnography, "silence" can be read not only as an absence of communication - although that could also be assumed as significant (Basso 1970; Williams 1993) -, but as an aural field to explore, with its soundscapes and corporeal signals.

Arising from a sort of "reaction" to the "textual turn" (Ferrarini 2017), the sensory ethnography does not seem to pay enough attention to the interview, its context, and its methodology. If the use of video makes it possible to bring out the topic of narrative performance in the interview and the camera as a non-human agent of knowledge co-production (Pink 2004), less attention is paid to the aural environment in which it takes place.

Through an experimental form of analysis and ethnographic representation based on the screening of moments of silence produced during biographical interviews collected with former miners in Sardinia (Italy), the paper aims to rethink the video interview as a multi-sensorial moment. This «silence full of noise» (Cage 1977) brings out the "sounds" of the places and the bodies involved in the interview, prodding to rethink in a new way the provocative idea of John Cage's composition '4'33'.

Paper short abstract:

This paper intends to present and analyse the path of realization of the web-documentary in Virtual Reality Babel - The Judgement Day. Thanks to VR, viewers are absorbed in a Babel of languages, images, belongings and dreams intertwined in the characters' lives.

Paper long abstract:

This paper intends to present and analyse the path of realization of the web-documentary in Virtual Reality Babel - The Judgement Day. Born from a workshop of documentary filmmaking with a group of asylum seekers, the project intertwines film writing, ethnographic research, drawing and computer programming in an unprecedented set of languages, aesthetic choices and ethical challenges. The technically and aesthetically innovative nature of such a product, which is based on the centrality of the programming of the work, radically calls into question the role of the author and the ethnographer while redefining the status of the characters themselves and the user. Thanks to VR, viewers are absorbed in a Babel of languages, images, belongings and dreams intertwined in the characters' lives. They can compose their own puzzle of images, see intimate worlds and imagine cities materialize. Building an interactive product in VR requires a new conception of the production process as well as of the invention of narration. In this sense, VR undermines the classic boundaries of narration, editing and documentary direction, shifting the aesthetic effort towards the exploration of new languages, straddling the visible and invisible, document and imaginary. Crafting a virtual universe means building a story that, even if starts from lived worlds and embodied experiences, turns into an unprecedented linguistic game, at the same time concrete and imaginative, documentary and creative. The crafting of such a universe therefore requires new reflections on the role of ethnography in this ethical and aesthetic economy of virtual reality.

Paper short abstract:

Visual technologies should not erase the fact that it is up to the anthropologist to define his or her intellectual positioning regarding its practices. A reasoned justification of his shooting tools choices allow to reposition visual ethnography within a scientific perspective.

Paper long abstract:

The production of exotism, in visual knowledges' circulations, is crossed by many factors. The marketing of ethnographic films in festivals and broadcast networks contributes to producing sensationalist aesthetics themselves source of exotism. This dynamic comes with a concern of industrial competitively in mind, from shooting tools manufacturers. Their main selling point is their ability to come up with a machine capable of reproducing visual perception. However, we can note that the mechanics of the first cameras allowed, in equal measure, to manipulate light and perspective compared to knowledges on visual perception (Crary, 1990). The issue of exotism does not lie in the novelty of shooting objects but rather in the users of those technologies. In my PhD research, my principal interest is the use of shooting tools in French cinema. My fieldwork highlights the fact that objects are invested with representations which condition its uses. Visual technologies constitute work tools which should not erase the fact that it is up to the anthropologist to define his or her intellectual positioning regarding its practices. With the same rigor required when using scientific terms, a demanding training and a reasoned justification of his or her shooting tools choices allow to reposition visual ethnography within a scientific perspective. This approach must be defended within knowledge broadcast networks.

Paper short abstract:

In 2020 Germany will host two ethnographic film festivals. The paper analyses the discourses during these events and to what extend new visual technologies influenced the selected films.

Paper long abstract:

Since 1994 the German International Ethnographic Film Festival takes place every two years. After two interim presentations in 2016 and 2018 in Koblenz, the organisers decided to continue once again in Göttingen (May 2020). In addition, the new Two Rivers Festival of Cross-Cultural Documentary Cinema (June 2020) has emerged in collaboration with the Institute of Cultural Studies at Koblenz University. Both festivals invite for the submission of films produced after 2017 and place special emphasis on students productions. Hence, visitors will see new and contemporary productions. While the Göttingen festival with its long "tradition" invites filmmakers that look at socio-cultural processes in a wide sense of the term, Koblenz intends to explore the possibilities of audio-visual forms of representation beyond conventional formats. Based on participant observation of the two settings the paper will explore the topics and regions, as well as visual styles, forms of narration and discourses on visual ethnography to be found and expressed during these festivals. Using the two events as representations of exemplary current ethnographic filmmaking, the summary aims at clarifying to what extend new visual technologies influenced the outcome of the screened films. Of particular interest is the notion of an "exotic gaze": May it be applied to some - or many? - of the presentations, did it play a role among the criteria for the selection of the productions, and how do viewers experience and discuss the issue?