Additional notes on ethnography: experimental ethnography

SM4134 Visual Ethnography & Creative Intervention

September 28, 2007Linda Lai

Experimental ethnography

Surrealist ethnography

Resisting the closuresof realist representatione.g. Luis Bunuel’s portrayal of the horror of colonial culture

Documentary before documentary

Body as main attractionEadweard Muybridge

Visibility / sensations / commodification of the body transformed by new technology

Ethnotopias of Early CinemaNotions of travel in early actuality films

Playing primitiveReturning to early cinema works to build linkage with contemporary society

The undisciplined gaze

Zoology, pornography, ethnographyChallenging and breaking down the “techniques of mastery”

ContainmentVoyeurism

e.g. Su Friedrich’s Hide and Seek (1996)

Framing people: structural film revisitedFormal minimalism

Fixed StarePanopticonic effects

Tension created between viewer and viewede.g. Chantel Akerman

Other realities

Ecstatic ethnography: filming possession ritualsMaya Deren, Jean Rouch, Bill Viola

Trance dancePure visual knowledge

Discourse of the subjectivity of others

Found footage as ethnographyBruce Conner, the Archive Project, Abigail Child

Historiography of radical memoryFocus on single image, single bodies, single gestures

A sign/index of cultural loss of memory (amnesia)

Auto-ethnography: journeys of the self

Predecessor: Personal cinemaDiary filmmaking (Jonas Mekas, Chris Marker)Trajectories:Auto-biography self-representation “politicizing the pe

rsonal”***emphasis on the micropolitics of everyday life; subjectivity is inscribed

representation subjectivity ↓↑ ↓↑

experience cultural history

Trajectories

From:a paradigm of lost and ‘vanishing’ cultures

Representation of other cultures

To:a paradigm of cultural transformationDiscourse of culture in representation

Video’s fast disseminationVideo’s capability for preserving and restoring,

Fragmentation, recombination, colorizationVideo’s accessibility (home, public…)

Experimental Ethnography

“Experimental ethnography involves, above all, dismantling the universalist impulse of realist aesthetics into a clash

of voices, cultures, bodies, and language.” (p. xvii)

Reference:

Russell, Catherine 1999: Experimental Ethnography: the work of film in the age of video. Duke University Press, Durham and London.