In the meantime

  #VisualAnthro Diaries 7 (Week 9) In the discussions in my visual anthropology class so far, we have been engaging with the topic of filmmaking and anthropology’s relationship to social ‘reality’ from different perspectives. Week 9 continued these discussions, focusing on the position from which reality is shown. Here, the questions were no longer only how images are constructed , but who is speaking, from where, and with what consequences . If observational cinema tried to step back, and montage revealed construction, the subjective turn, which started with cinema verité and the focus on participation (week 7), brought the filmmaker decisively back into the frame. At first, this might seem like a solution, because if the problem of documentary was its claim to objectivity, then doesn’t making the author visible, acknowledging subjectivity, voice, and position, appear as an ethical and methodological correction? In class, we had quite a lively discussion, especially regardin...

  #VisualAnthro Diaries 6 You need to tell lies to tell the truth. A thought that began with last week’s discussion on observational cinema and became even clearer with this week discussion on Dziga Vertov’s legacy, among which Man with a Movie Camera (1929). If in observational cinema the problem was how to see without imposing too much, here the question becomes what if film does not simply observe reality, but actively produces it? What if the “real” on screen is always already constructed? And what if, most importantly, the camera sees better than the ethnographic gaze alone – not only in what it captures, but in how it makes reality visible. The lie of documentaries As Vaughan discusses, what defines documentary is a set of conventions that persuade us to accept what we see is truthful, even though its meaning is always constructed.  In "The Aesthetics of Ambiguity," (1999) he explores the fundamental tension in documentary filmmaking between film as a photograph...

  #VisualAnthro Diaries 5 Week 5’s focus on observational cinema added another layer to the discussions on the different claims to “reality” we have been having so far in the visual anthropology class. Again, the central questions were: how do we see, and what are the most appropriate ways of seeing and observing? Is mere observation, without explicit interpretation, a passive act, or does it already come with specific arguments and assumptions? These questions are clearly connected to older debates in anthropology and cinema around “objectivity,” and to the idea that social life can be observed and made comprehensible through the camera, with the camera imagined as a particularly powerful, almost objective observer. However, the observational turn in cinema complicated these questions because, in the 1960s, it made specific claims about how ‘reality’ should be approached. With lighter cameras and synchronous sound, filmmakers could leave the fixed position of earlier documen...