Dog eats dog (not)

"The Forest of Bliss" (1986) by Robert Gardner 

a holy city
a passage
a pyre

stunning visual work (or is it the world depicted that is beautiful, how its aesthetic reception is constructed, how an awe is possible if what I see is dirt and death (but also celebration, adoration, passage of time, social relations and routines))

offering a possibility to look without "reading" (which is a relief until I engage with the critical gazing) - is such way of looking even possible? I am thinking about film about people posing for a photograph we watched in the class, the bliss is on the side of the viewer, it (possibly) absolves me from reasoning or work of interpretation, it allows me to drift, as if the world was passing in front of my eyes (trying to forget how curated this experience is)

but it also generates longing for bodily engagement
vicerality of footage and proximity of the camera to it create a paradoxical distance (in part, at least)

presence without engagement contemplation disembodied (?) observation of the world of flesh

immersion without obligation
or... is the lack of contextualization, description, subtitle engendering space of confrontation with limits of one's understanding, an open visual text (possible?)
or... is such a lack reinforcing ways of seeing grounded in racial, civilizational, cultural bias

Is the role of filmmaker to give words to images so their reception doesn't slip off the intended meaning/mode of representation? do words (always) fixate meaning, do they "humanize" what we see?

How is filmmaking rendering the fragments of the world intelligible?

Gardner's approach produces (to me) an ambiguity: it seems to transgress a boundary of conventional ethnographic documentation (by its reduction to image? wasn't it in fact always there to some extent - an image/a photograph/ a video showing the world in more truthful and complete way than human eye alone can perceive, a visual representation "speaking for itself" - with the circumstances and ideologies invested in its production obscured)

​but it also is "1920s movie in the 1986" (Moore) - which leads me to "Leviathan"..

Still from the "Forest of Bliss" overwritten with critique by Jonathan P. Parry

"Leviathan" (2012) by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel

another stunning visual work but it produced some questions (also in line with Faye Ginsburg's "mild polemic")- possible answers in progress:

- how visual immersion can produce an estrangement and mask the positionally of the filmmakers (when the camera blends with the viewer's eye in such intense way, it made me think of Mosley brothers and camera as an extension of a body)
- how more-than-human perspective is constructed - f.ex. diving into the water (is it a modern version of camera under the train in the early cinema?), how such perspective is always an approximation, a sensorial fantasy (still very appealing)

​- what is constituted as subject, a terrain of encounter and ethnographic learning when any dialogical component is erased, filmmaker becomes a ghost (a dizzying range of perspectives and angles of looking) but emerges as an "author" 

- how an anthropological inquiry merges with an aesthetic concern and construction - this is particularly relevant to me thinking of my own practice and possible methodologies at the intersection of disciplines - how does such documentary filmmaking enter a contemporary art market, how does it exist within its infrastructure, how (if) it negotiates values and principles with the ideologies of art-making and art-viewing? how (if) the responsibility of the researcher/filmmaker and their objectives are transformed?

​- what does it mean for anthropology/ethnography to reclaim seeing (multi sensorial immersion, a form of "writing" which produces a feeling of "really being there"?), what's new, what's old (including the self-positioning of a researcher as virtuous and with special insights and access - to technology and ways of engagement and reality-framing)

- what do we learn from sensorial engagement with the world of others, what is there to "sense"?

What all this work neglects to stress, however, is any sense of accountability for the ethical/political relationships that ethnographic and other documentary filmmakers co-construct with the subjects whose lives are central to their films. I think of this relational documentary practice as the fundamental act for visual/audio nonfiction media makers who take seriously the accountability that, ideally, accompanies the privilege of making films about other people’s lives; this includes the  often unanticipated consequences that the photographic and/ or film image can carry for documentary subjects. (Ginsburg, 42-3)


shared anthropology as proposed by Jean Rouch
how to decolonize documentary filmmaking? what are the traditions/methods of indigenous cinema? what form can indiginous-ness take today?

Source: https://www.lightwork.org/archive/lucien-castaing-taylor-verena-paravelleviathan/