Academic filmmaking and its discontents: In between videographic criticism and visual anthropology

Abstract | Abstract

Working with the same filmed material from the perspective of anthropology and screen studies, the authors discuss their disciplines’ different approaches to academic filmmaking. This article presents two videos, Filming Out Loud and Whose Stories, made from the same raw footage shot by the two authors together at the garage Cedric Motors, situated close to Manchester University, UK, where they were taking a summer course in ethnographic filmmaking at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology in June 2022. After spending seven days at the garage, filming the workdays of the owner Pat Rafter and his main employee (who wishes to remain unnamed), this raw material was then edited separately by each author. Producing points of methodological comparison between videographic criticism working with “an archive of moving images and sounds” (Keathley and Mittell 2019) and the culturally situated “encounters with alterity” enacted through ethnographic filmmaking (Cox et al. 2016), the authors engage with the methodological differences and commonalities between their two disciplines and filmmaking practices. By focusing on how the unpredictability of ethnographic fieldwork generated a rethinking of received conventions, interdisciplinary collaboration in visual research is here framed as an opportunity for a “transmutation of sensibilities” (Csordas 2007) bringing into question both videographic criticism’s imperative of critical thinking articulated audiovisually (generally on archival material) and visual anthropology’s observational legacy. Scraping at the weld between disciplinary received knowledge, the authors reflect on the positionality and ethics of their research and on the task of elaborating a filmic narrative while accounting for different social or cultural worlds