Video Ethnography

David Redmon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429557019
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Recherche et méthodologie en psychologie

Video Ethnography provides a thought-provoking, guided framework to ethnographic filmmaking. It examines how this kind of filmmaking can be a means of approximating, mediating and evoking lived experience. Functioning as a kind of sensory extension of the videographer, video ethnography arises directly out of lived experience as a process of dynamic encounters, mobile situations, and embodied approaches that include senses and choices of the videographer, and the participants of the ethnography. The book will help describe and develop students' sensibility and awareness of this crucial aspect of video ethnography, so they can craft their own video ethnographies with a fully conscious awareness of how certain skilled and attuned approaches to audiovisual techniques can help facilitate the fullest and most dynamic encounters possible. This book is suitable for classes in ethnographic filmmaking, video ethnography and visual anthropology / sociology.

1

PHENOMENOLOGY OF CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE

Chapter 1 contextualizes the philosophical precursors that inform a methodology of video ethnography, with its special focus on evoking lived experiences in sensorious ways, reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty’s (1965) notion of “perception.” Perception, as Merleau-Ponty defines it, is not limited to vision, but occurs through various bodily encounters

before it has been reduced to a set of manageable, disposable significations; … it addresses itself to that compound of the world and of ourselves that precedes reflection, because the examination of the significations in themselves would give us the world reduced to our idealizations and our syntax.

1965, p. 102

Merleau-Ponty’s writings on experience, or “the flesh of the world,” serve as a useful philosophical, methodological guide in all video ethnography work. Sensuousness is a way of relating in the world through the body as a way of knowing and understanding.

Bodies are inseparable from the flesh of the world since corporeality is woven into lived experience. The body inhabits lived experience and, inherently, experience infuses our bodies and allows them to sense aromas, winds, sights, sounds, and flavors. The flesh of the world produces ongoing experiences that bring bodies into contact with others and with environments through sensory encounters. The sound of a dog barking, the braying of a donkey, the shooting of a gun, the sounds of domestic abuse, the falling of rocks, the violence of a thunderstorm – all these experiences bring bodies into the world’s sensuous encounter. Sensuousness provides an awareness of our existence in relation to the other, and therefore enlivens our bodies and our consciousness through the magnitude of wonder. Merleau-Ponty (2012, pp. 351–354) states:

If I experience this inhering of my consciousness in its body and in its world, the perception of other people and the plurality of consciousness no longer present any difficulty … [It] is precisely my body which perceives the body of another, and discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world.

The flesh of the world subsumes and envelops consciousness by orientating experiences through the body. Consciousness, movements, and experience all occur through expressive embodied encounters. Mutually intertwined, we sense the flesh of the world sensing us. We are sensible and sentient, and exist at the intersection of these two qualities through what Merleau-Ponty calls the “chiasm of wild being.”

Wild being

The sensible and sentient reside in experiential conditions that Merleau-Ponty describes as “Brute Being” (1965, p. 110) and “Wild Being” (1965, pp. 169–170). “[We] must find again in their wild state what answers to our essences and our significations” (Merleau-Ponty 1965, p. 110).

The effective, present, ultimate and primary being, the thing itself, are in principle apprehended in transparency through their perspectives, offer themselves therefore only to someone who wishes not to have them but to see them, not to hold them as with forceps, or to immobilize them as under the objective of a microscope, but to let them be and to witness their continued being – to someone who therefore limits himself to giving them the hollow, the free space they ask for in return, the resonance they require, who follows their own movement, who is therefore not a nothingness the full being would come to stop up, but a question consonant with the porous being which it questions and from which it obtains not an answer, but a confirmation of its astonishment.

Merleau-Ponty 1965, pp. 101–102

Video ethnography as a methodology seeks to amplify this seam that connects chiasm and directly lived sensuousness. An experiential approach acknowledges the researcher’s corporeality as part of the flesh (experience) and therefore does not start from a general theory or external position to survey it. Rather, video ethnographers attempt to refract, record, and evoke experiential phenomena inside a field of sensed-sentience. Video ethnography recouples sentience with the sensory, what Merleau-Ponty called “Brute Being” with nature, and, like more-than-representational theory, assuming that subject and object are sensorially interconnected. In this subject-object blended field of sensorial relations, video ethnographers record lived experiences, erratic movements, and object relations with intuitive reflexivity, attunement, and sensible skills, using audiovisual technology. These lived experiences can be described as “Brute” encounters.

Our discussion of the negative announces to us another paradox of philosophy, which distinguishes it from every problem of cognition and forbids us to speak in a philosophy of a solution: as an approach to the far-off as far-off, it is also a question put to what does not speak. It asks of our experience of the world what the world is before it is a thing one speaks of and which is taken for granted, before it has been reduced to a set of manageable, disposable significations; it directs this question to our mute life, it addresses itself to that compound of the world and of ourselves that precedes reflection, because the examination of the significations in themselves would give us the world reduced to our idealizations and our syntax … Hence it is a question whether philosophy as reconquest of brute or wild being can be accomplished by the resources of the eloquent language, or whether it would not be necessary for philosophy to use language in a way that takes from its power of immediate or direct signification in order to equal it with what it wishes all the same to say.

Merleau-Ponty 1965, pp. 102–103

Video ethnography is therefore a methodology that recognizes interwoven sensible sentience in all intermixed “Brute” phenomena – people, places, objects, and animals – gathering up in its path all the ranges and textures of experience and relationships between all these aspects of lived experience. Video ethnography tends to avoid hierarchies of sense and tends not to rely on traditional scholarly forms of discursive explanation or ordering of material.

Aiming at the real: the language of experience

As a methodology, video ethnography does not set out to represent experience, but is instead dedicated to evoking raw experience from an embodied starting point (i.e., in the body of the filmmaker). It’s not only audiovisual technology that records and transmits experience through a multisensory and interactive process, but the filmmaker’s body and those who he or she meets through encounters. As Merleau-Ponty describes, we are best able to understand and experience “the flesh of the world” by immersing ourselves within its sensuous, expressive, and perceptive properties. We grasp at and are grasped by its ever-shifting refractions by evoking encounters. Video ethnographers soak themselves in “the universe of brute being and … coexistence” (Merleau-Ponty 1965, p. 101).

Merleau-Ponty’s critique of essentialism is relevant here: “One practices an ‘essentialist’ thought which refers to significations beyond experience” (Merleau-Ponty 1965, p. 186). A methodology of video ethnography aims to reassemble experience while being “abound in the sensible world” (Merleau-Ponty 1965, pp. 92–95). “Brute” or “Wild Being” is about embedding practice in lived experiences.

It is to experience therefore that the ultimate ontological power belongs … Significations or essences do not suffice themselves, they overtly refer to our acts of ideation which have lifted them from a brute being, wherein we must find again in their wild state what answers to our essences and our significations.

Merleau-Ponty 1965, pp. 100–110

The type of video ethnography I advocate for as a methodology is attentive to “Wild” or “Brute” experience. For example, when filming video ethnographers inhabit all their senses to relate to the open-ended situation.

Unlike traditional approaches to ethnographies that include interviews, survey research, quantitative analysis, or content analysis, video ethnographies tend to place themselves directly into raw experience, gathering it whole and without framing questions or narrowing its plenitude. Video ethnographers do not place themselves above or outside of experience, or stand apart from experience as an all-seeing eye. Experience is always fluid, unfolding, and transforming, and therefore cannot be generalized.

In other words, video ethnographers adhere to Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about experience as irreducible by representational methods. Experience is not easily quantifiable because it is always in flux and continuously changing its sensory variations. It is on the move and it is felt in different ways as it shifts. These porous encounters form the fabric of experience where the sensible meets the sensed. Merleau-Ponty refers to this cohesiveness of touch as chiasm, a “unique space which separates and reunites, which sustains every cohesion” (1965, p. 187).

For Merleau-Ponty, the sounds of our environment – waves, forests, ant rustlings, thunder, the mechanical rumbling of machines, and so on – are facets of acoustic language that register through the body as perception and expression. “Language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests” (Merleau-Ponty 1965, p. 155). Video ethnography records and transfigures the physical acoustics of lived experience. Video ethnography records the motions, sounds, shapes, and colors as a language of sensuousness that touches the living body. The ethnographic documentary refracts traces of lived experience. As a methodology, video ethnography evokes lived experiences using technology, assembles it aesthetically, and depicts it as sensuous knowledge that is aesthetic, or “felt”– it is relational and shared.

John Dewey: art as experience

Another useful methodological frame stems from Dewey’s chapter in his book Art as Experience (1934), Chapter 2.2 “The Live Creature and ‘Etherial Things’” which focuses on sensory knowledge and on uncertainty, or knowledge that can’t be explained through reason or fact – a kind of knowledge that video ethnography fosters. Dewey adopts Keats’ interpretation of Shakespeare’s “negative capability” to frame his argument. If negative capability is when a writer or thinker is “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without irritable reaching after fact and reason,” then video ethnography, which incorporates intuition, doubt, uncertainty, and mystery in its sensuousness approach to experience, is also related to the idea of imaginative space. The imaginative space that the sensuousness of video ethnography fosters opens up the possibility of what James Agee calls the “cruel radiance of what is.” Dewey argues that this vexing feeling of not knowing or being forced to reside in uncertainty can be an intense form of perception, that merges uncertainty, doubt, half-knowledge, and lived experience to turn “experience upon itself to deepen and intensify its own qualities – to imagination and art” (Dewey 1934, p. 35) Dewey refers to this sensuous process as “having an experience.”

Having an experience

An experience, according to Dewey, is a continuous unbroken duration that takes place in time and space with a beginning, middle, and end. A methodological tactic often used by video ethnographers to record and understand “an experience” is the long-take or extended sequence. An extended sequence is a continuous unbroken shot, recorded over a prolonged duration of time, which captures part of an experience. Experience consists of sensorial interactions – sounds, motions, activities – that fluctuate as amorphous encounters between subject and object, the seen and unseen, the heard and unheard. These engrossing encounters involve rapid metamorphoses that form part of the excitement and dynamism of aesthetic experience.

Dewey’s ideas form a crucial underpinning to the methodological evolution of ideas and practices that inform video ethnography as I present it in this book. Reading and thinking about Dewey’s ideas greatly helps to single out and identify some of the capacities of video ethnography that make it so different to traditional forms and media for ethnography. By reimagining experience in aesthetic terms – a living fabric that people, objects, and animals expressively enact – video ethnographers are able to use their own bodies and technology to evoke what Dewey refers to here:

Experience in this vital sense is defined by those situations and episodes that we spontaneously refer to as being “real experiences”; those things of which we say in recalling them, “that was an experience.” It may have been something of tremendous importance – a quarrel with one who was once an intimate, a catastrophe finally averted by a hair’s breadth … In such experiences, every successive part flows freely, without seam and without unfilled blanks, into what ensues … There are pauses, places of rest, but they punctuate and define the quality of movement. They sum up what has been undergone and prevent its dissipation and idle evaporation. Continued acceleration is breathless and prevents parts from gaining distinction. In a work of art, different acts, episodes, occurrences melt and fuse into unity, and yet do not disappear and lose their own character as they do so.

Dewey 1934, p. 36

Sniadecki (2014, p. 27) has also cited Dewey’s approach to lived experience as a facet of video ethnography. He argues that Dewey

expands aesthetics beyond the confines of the highly specialized, and commodified, realm of fine art and its cultivated appreciation by an educated few, and locates it within the rhythms and activities of the everyday, thereby investing aesthetic experience with new, broader significance and relevance beyond galleries, museums, and universities.

Aesthetic experience is part of the dynamic routine of everyday living and, according to Dewey, “one must begin with it in the raw” (Dewey 1934, p. 4). Examples include “the sights that hold the crowd: the fire-engine rushing by; the machines excavating enormous holes in the earth; the human-fly climbing the steeple-side; the men perched high in the air on girders, throwing and catching red-hot bolts” (Dewey 1934, p. 5). The indexicality of everyday raw and immediate sensorial experience in everyday spaces, for example, a factory, a trawler, a junkyard, or a festival, accumulate as aesthetic experience that sensuously expands the imagination (Sniadecki 2014, p. 27).

As Dewey (1934, p. 267) writes:

aesthetic experience is imaginative … It is what happens when varied materials of sense quality, emotion, and meaning come together in a union that marks a new birth in the world … When old and familiar things are made new in experience, there is imagination. When the new is created, the far and strange become the most natural inevitable things in the world. There is always some measure of adventure in the meeting of mind and universe, and this adventure is, in its measure, imagination.

Video ethnography plunges into aesthetic experience in ways that can make the familiar unfamiliar, the unfamiliar familiar, and the familiar strange – approaches that allow audiences and the filmmaker to see and hear experience anew. When filmed and edited with this kind of immersive intent, video ethnographies demonstrate Dewey’s ideas about imagination and aesthetic experience and support Dewey’s theory of aesthetics.

It is also worth noting Dewey’s idea that sensuousness is ripe with what he calls “vital organization” (Dewey 1934, p. 57). Video ethnography works with lived experience as a material by shaping (editing) it with vital intimacy. When video ethnographers choose to inhabit lived sensuous experience in all its ambiguity and flux they fulfill Dewey’s idea that “In such an experience, every successive part flows freely, without seam and without unfilled blanks, into what ensues” (Dewey 1934, p. 37). If experience consists of a continuous merging of interactions, events, and activities, with rest and ruptures that mark the push and pull rhythms of lived experience then video ethnographers explore “an experience” as a series of continuous movements, with dynamic change as “a consummation of a movement” (Dewey 1934, p. 39). There are numerous examples of video ethnographies that illustrate these ideas of merged continuous movement. Sheep and humans move together across mountains (Sweetgrass); sea creatures and nets are caught up together inside a deep ocean (Leviathan); donkeys interact and comingle day after day together (Sanctuary). These examples amply demonstrate that vide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Phenomenology of cinematic experience
• 2. The wild lab: sensory ethnography
• 3. Sweetgrass and Leviathan: case studies in video ethnography
• 4. Video ethnography: Sanctuary as a case study
• 5. Girl Model: a case study in the methods and ethics of video ethnography1
• 6. Film festivals, the public sphere, and the ethics of video ethnography: Kamp Katrina as a case study
• References
• Index