1. Additional notes on ethnography: experimental ethnography SM4134 Visual Ethnography & Creative Intervention September 28, 2007 Linda Lai

2. Experimental ethnography Surrealist ethnography Resisting the closuresof realist representation e.g. Luis Bunuel’s portrayal of the horror of colonial culture

3. Documentary before documentary Body as main attraction Eadweard Muybridge Visibility / sensations / commodification of the body transformed by new technology Ethnotopias of Early Cinema Notions of travel in early actuality films Playing primitive Returning to early cinema works to build linkage with contemporary society

4. The undisciplined gaze Zoology, pornography, ethnography Challenging and breaking down the “techniques of mastery” Containment Voyeurism e.g. Su Friedrich’s Hide and Seek (1996) Framing people: structural film revisited Formal minimalism Fixed Stare Panopticonic effects Tension created between viewer and viewed e.g. Chantel Akerman

5. Other realities Ecstatic ethnography: filming possession rituals Maya Deren, Jean Rouch, Bill Viola Trance dance Pure visual knowledge Discourse of the subjectivity of others Found footage as ethnography Bruce Conner, the Archive Project, Abigail Child Historiography of radical memory Focus on single image, single bodies, single gestures A sign/index of cultural loss of memory (amnesia)

6. Auto-ethnography: journeys of the self Predecessor: Personal cinema Diary filmmaking (Jonas Mekas, Chris Marker) Trajectories: Auto-biography  self-representation  “politicizing the personal” ***emphasis on the micropolitics of everyday life; subjectivity is inscribed representation   subjectivity ↓↑ ↓↑ experience   cultural history

7. Trajectories From: a paradigm of lost and ‘vanishing’ cultures Representation of other cultures To: a paradigm of cultural transformation Discourse of culture in representation Video’s fast dissemination Video’s capability for preserving and restoring, Fragmentation, recombination, colorization Video’s accessibility (home, public…)

8. 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)

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