Anthropologists and other scholars have long reflected upon the various authorial strategies employed in the construction of written ethnographic texts (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1988). Similar questions of authorship and voice have been raised in relation to the making of ethnographic and documentary films (e.g. Ruby 1992; MacDougall 1998). Filmmakers frequently face intractable dilemmas of both ethics and aesthetics, when deciding what to include and what to sacrifice from hours of footage of complex socio-cultural practices and performances. We too have grappled with these dilemmas in the making of An Extraordinary Wedding, a film about brideprice transactions in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In this paper we reflect upon the authorial strategies we have employed in this work-inprogress. We consider issues of authorship and authority and discuss our attempts to work with some of the 'characters' in the film to create an audiovisual narrative that can be understood and appreciated by a broader audience without diminishing the integrity of the lifeworld represented. An invitation In December 2012, one of the authors of this paper, Rosita Henry, was invited to Papua New Guinea to attend the brideprice exchange of the daughter of an old school friend from the Western Highlands. It was a poignant visit for her, as her friend, Magdaline (Maggie) Wilson, had passed away suddenly and unexpectedly three years earlier. Customarily, Maggie would have played a significant part in organizing the event, but her English husband Keith Wilson, and their children Bernadine, Olivia, Maki, and Nadia now had to shoulder the responsibility for working with their Highlands kin to arrange this complex ceremonial gift exchange between intermarrying clans and their allies.
