In Love with My Footage: Desirous Undercurrents in the Making of an Essay Film on Candomblé

Abstract

What underlies the choices anthropologists make when opting for a pen or a camera, or for "the observational style" or "video experimentation"? In this essay, I look at anthropology as a practice of mediation. I take this practice to be driven by the desire to arrive at a full account of fieldwork experiences, and to be informed by the fantasmatic promises with which particular media have been endowed. You might think of the possibilities promised by the linear clarity of your word-processing environment; of the possibilities promised by the sensuousness of Forest of Bliss; of the way you found yourself seduced by such promises, moving in one direction, rather than another. To arrive at the details of the dynamics of anthropological mediations, I reflect on the making of my film about Brazilian Candomblé. I describe how I moved from writing about this religion to filming it, and how my initial attempts to make a film reminiscent of the "delinguified" sensory films coming out of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab made way for the reintroduction of the word as proposed in the genre of the essay film. [Candomblé, desire, essay film, fantasy, mediation process]

Tuning ourselves into place: Enhancing multivocality with video

“…But this must not be understood as a proposal that filming is a separatemediatingpart of our research process. Instead, in line with Van de Port (2018), we argue that the camera and its audio-visual technology cannot be disentangled from what we are encountering in our exploration of the tourist route. Our experiences at the stops on the road to Havøysundwhen Beate brings a camcorder along with herthen become close to what Pink describes:…”

“…It enables us to highlight the smaller coincidences and intertwine them into our narratives. In line with Van de Port (2018), we do not see editing as something separate from our research; rather, it is part of the sensuous exploration of the tourist route, yet another way the camcorder takes part in discussing the issues and experiences all of us encountered when at the three field sites on the route to Havøysund.…”

“…But this must not be understood as a proposal that filming is a separate – mediating – part of our research process. Instead, in line with Van de Port (2018), we argue that the camera and its audio-visual technology cannot be disentangled from what we are encountering in our exploration of the tourist route. Our experiences at the stops on the road to Havøysund – when Beate brings a camcorder along with her – then become close to what Pink describes:The process of walking with video is one of going forward through rather than mapping onto an environment; it offers a very particular way of creating a permanent trace of the routes we take through both the ground and the air.…”

Crafting Essays on Life

“…He suggests approaching anthropology as a creative practice and proposes a common ground 'from where anthropologists can engage with ethnographies made in different media' (2015: 366). My own work then follows Cubero and others such as Grossman (2013) and Van de Port (2018), who argue for the shared potential of textual and visual presentation, as well as those who emphasize the need for more artistically informed experimentation (Favero 2018;Irving 2011;Pink and Salazar 2017). Whether a story that mirrors what we have experienced in the field is created through text or film, or an amalgamation of different forms, is secondary to me.…”

Touching heritage: embodied politics in children’s photography

“…In all cases too, the images and the accompanying stories that children told about them, moved their audiences -the other children, the authors, other researchers who have heard this paper presented, and later the exhibition audiences in Athens and in London 4 (Nolas et al, 2017c), through the conversations and thinking they have generated. In Van de Port's (2018) words we, as researchers, as well as many who attended the final exhibition of the children's photo-stories, fell 'in love' with the images and were recruited into their idiomatic political worlds (Nolas, 2021;Varvantakis and Nolas, 2019), an upending that challenges dominant representations of apolitical children as well as serious historical narratives. Photographs matter to people and photography plays an important role in communicating cultural identity, heritage and national belonging (Campt, 2012: 5-6).…”