Video Ethnography; Theory, Methods, and Ethics; First Edition

VIDEO ETHNOGRAPHY Video Ethnography describes how and why the audiovisual film medium is especially capable of transforming lived experience into vividly relatable forms of ethnographic knowledge. This essential text emphasizes the important role of the filmmaker, the variety of methods used in ethnographic films, and experiential ethics in order to describe how video ethnographies, in their production, are very closely bound up in the world of their subjects. In this thought-provoking book, Redmon considers the complex ethics of video ethnography using case studies to show ethics in practice. The straightforward and concise approach of the text encourages students to craft their own video ethnographies with a fully conscious awareness of how certain skilled and attuned approaches to audiovisual techniques can help facilitate the fullest and most dynamic encounters possible. Redmon’s unique approach effectively delves into theory, methods, and ethics, explaining how this kind of filmmaking can be a means of approximating, mediating, and evoking lived experience. This book is suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate classes in ethnographic filmmaking, video ethnography, and visual anthropology/sociology. David Redmon received his Ph.D. in sociology from SUNY-Albany. His documentaries have premiered at Sundance, Toronto, Museum of Modern Art, Viennale Film Festivals, and other international destinations. Redmon is a former Radcliffe Fellow and Film Studies Fellow at Harvard University. He is currently an independent scholar, filmmaker, and Fellow at the IMéRA Institute for Advanced Study at Univer- sity of Aix-Marseille, France. This page intentionally left blank VIDEO ETHNOGRAPHY Theory, Methods, and Ethics David Redmon First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 David Redmon The right of David Redmon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-17352-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-17353-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-05632-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK CONTENTS Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 1 Phenomenology of cinematic experience 21 2 The wild lab: sensory ethnography 39 3 Sweetgrass and Leviathan: case studies in video ethnography 58 4 Video ethnography: Sanctuary as a case study 74 5 Girl Model: a case study in the methods and ethics of video ethnography 89 6 Film festivals, the public sphere, and the ethics of video ethnography: Kamp Katrina as a case study 100 References 134 Index 139 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to my parents for encouraging me to read as a young child. I wholeheartedly thank the Leverhulme Trust for awarding this project a research grant. This book, and the film Sanctuary cited in it, would not have been possible without your support. I also wish to acknowledge the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for providing a summer Radcliffe Fellowship in the heart of Cambridge where the Sensory Ethnography Lab was born. I would like to provide special thanks to Boris Petric for awarding a Fellowship at La Fabrique in Marseille, France. Your patience and kind support helped me push through the difficulties of completing this project. Thank you Mike Martinez, my students, and especially my loving family Ashley, Magnolia, and Matteo. Thank you Deborah and Dale for your endless friend- ship and support to help make this book – and movies – possible. Finally, thanks to Joanna Rabiger for your reading and assistance in editing this manuscript. INTRODUCTION I began writing this book from beyond the walls of academic institutions or academic employers, as what one might call a “feral” ethnographer, having deliberately strayed from the world of education to make my own documentary films – films that are steeped in ethnographic sensibilities yet not, in any academic or scholarly sense, formally speaking, ethnographic. When I made these films I was operating from far beyond the world of teaching, or learning from students. I had no adminis- trative duties or departmental meetings to pursue. I was free to make documentaries any way I wanted, in ways that drew on lived experience yet weren’t constrained by disciplinary restrictions. I was able to follow my own instincts about my approach to documenting various worlds, subcultures, and subject matter, and I was able to develop my own working methodology and theory of what I was doing and why it was significant. The films I made during this time seemed far too personal, unrestricted, unsuper- vised, and “wild,” to constitute actual, sound, legitimate academic knowledge. Yet, nearly a decade later, academic institutions are beginning to accept and show interest in the kind of work I, and others, were conducting on their own, beyond institution- ality. In the past decade, various departments within academic institutions have begun adopting what is generally called “video ethnography” and, as a result, a new wave of teaching and practice-related institutional theorizing has begun gathering force. The documentary genre has also exploded in popularity, in the wider public world, in the past decade. Academia reflects this new popularity and also helps shape it. Modules and classes on video ethnography have increased; a few journals are starting to publish online digital documentaries and film festivals are becoming spaces to disseminate ethnographic documentaries as public knowledge, up for discussion, through panels and at conferences of all kinds, including social work, critical military studies, and other disciplinary and vocational areas of academia. 2 Introduction In this new age of the rise of documentary film, with more and more documentaries streaming online and commanding vast audiences on television and in cinemas in theatrical release, with reviews, social media commentary, and Q&As at film festivals proliferating, and as public discussion of documentary films increases, the time is ripe for academia to catch up and to apply academic rigor and exploration of documentary films, not merely as finished products, but in terms of their making, craft and impulse. Film festivals and documentary organ- izations have long debated the ethics and methodology of documentary film. In the past some of these films reached only small audiences, and remained within a relatively closed culture of documentary filmmakers and narrow audiences. Today, as documentary films that can be broadly called “video ethnography” circulate widely, attracting diverse and nonspecialist public attention, I believe it is more important than ever for academia to look closely at the authorial, exploratory, and expressive intentions behind process and craft, aspects of ethnographic film that have traditionally been more closely studied within film studies and as part of film production courses. For example, the editing decisions filmmakers make to construct their documentaries or ethnographies, and the out- comes of distributing such films into the public sphere – something that filmmaker, film critic, and scholar David MacDougall has indicated in Transcul- tural Cinema (1998) and The Corporeal Image (2006) – have been omitted in ethnographic film studies. In Transcultural Cinema, MacDougall (1998, p. 1) shares the following statement, about the need to write about his filmmaking process – a statement that struck a deep chord, as I began exploring my own questions while writing this book: Much of this writing was done as a kind of counterweight to the experiences of filmmaking, for making films generates countless questions that films themselves can only address indirectly … Still other [questions] I have struggled for years in filmmaking but that may finally be unanswerable. In addressing them I share Dai Vaughan’s belief that it is important to make the effort, even if one arrives at only an incomplete understanding … These essays sometimes have a similar purpose, in seeing whether certain things can be put into words. They also borrow from my belief that filmmaking should be a process of exploration, rather than a way of stating what you already know. I feel an affinity with MacDougall’s carefully chosen words – especially in his emphasis on filmmaking as a process of exploration, a key idea that I will explore extensively in this book. Video ethnography “Video ethnography” is a cinematic approach to recording ethnographic expres- sions of lived experiences. There are many other ways of evoking lived experience Introduction 3 using other mediums: for example, sound design, painting, musical composition, choreography, and more. In Video Ethnography I am wholly focused on the cinematic approach.

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