Filmmaking For Fieldwork - F4F - Empirical Art: F4F in practice

In press at Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2025

Contributors

Elena Barabantseva University of Manchester
Annika Capelàn Aarhus University and University of Cape Town
Martha-Cecilia Dietrich University of Amsterdam & F4F
Anja Dreschke University of Siegen
Steffen Köhn Aarhus University
Andy Lawrence University of Manchester & F4F
Stephen A. Linstead University of York
David MacDougall Australian National University, Canberra
Jón Bjarki Magnússon University of Maynooth
Christine Moderbacher Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle
Erin Moriarty University of Virginia
Rosie Reed Hillman Manchester Metropolitan University
Michaela Schäuble University of Bern
Rossella Schillaci University of Turin
Mattijs van de Port University of Amsterdam
Megha Wadhwa Free University of Berlin

About the book

‘Filmmaking for Fieldwork’ (F4F) began life in 2009 as a two-week practical summer school in ethnographic and documentary filmmaking that extended from the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Five years later, F4F™ left the university to explore various partnerships across the globe and concentrate on broadening the use of ethnographic film as a research method beyond the discipline of anthropology. We chose ‘Filmmaking for Fieldwork’ as the title of this volume to express our principal interest in exploring what filmmaking can bring to empirical research, as it grows through the conception of a project to the field and into the editing suite and screening room. In their majority, our learners were new to the craft of image creation, sound recording and editing or to applying these skill sets in fieldwork locations over prolonged periods of time. Over the past decade and a half, many observational, sensory, co-creative and essayistic films have grown and flourished from those initial encounters, and so has our community of crafters. Works that convincingly laboured their way from practice to theory, some of which you can read about here, inspired us to begin work on this volume and invite a wide range of contributors to reflect on their filmmaking as a way of doing research.

This compilation adds to a reflexive body of works on the sensory, inter-subjective, and narrative aspects of ethnographic filmmaking. It aims to bridge the divide between researchers' personal journeys and their epistemological explorations of other lifeworlds. Following the publication of Filmmaking for Fieldwork: A Practical Handbook (Lawrence, 2020), Empirical Art: Filmmaking for Fieldwork in Practice addresses challenges and realisations that arise from introducing image and sound recording devices, audio-visual archives and editing tools to the research process as practices of relating and narrating. The multiplicity of approaches presented here calls for a re-imagination of the empirical, not as a reflection of reality, but as testaments to the art of crafting connections. In doing so, we hope to offer future practitioners meaningful avenues to approach ethnographic filmmaking and, in contemplating the questions and concerns raised here, deepen the findings of their camera-based research.

List of contents

Preface

Introduction: Crafting connections Martha-Cecilia Dietrich and Andy Lawrence

Part 1. Narrating Experience

1. Bearing: Documenting the self in early motherhood. Rosie Reed Hillman

2. The screen walk method: Exploring the social lifeworlds of digital environments. Steffen Köhn

3. Filming pasts, presents and futures: Bringing the archive to life and seeing the archive in life. Stephen A. Linstead

4. The aesthetics of access: Filmmaking in a Balinese ‘deaf village’. Erin Moriarty

Part 2. The Camera as a Catalyst

5. The magic of a floating stone: Ciné-play in poetic imaginaries of old age. Jón Bjarki Magnússon

6. The potentiality of form: Essayistic modes in making an ethnographic documentary. Anja Dreschke and Michaela Schäuble

7. Beyond the recording button: The role of the camera in post-war memory research. Martha-Cecilia Dietrich

Part 3. At the Edge of the Frame

8. My lustful eye: Filmmaking, ‘empirical excess’ and the limits of being in control of one’s art. Mattijs van de Port

9. Expanding the limits: Observational and VR filmmaking with women and children in prison. Rossella Schillaci

10. The productivity in failure: Filmmaking as transformative practice. Andy Lawrence

Part 4. Taking Position

11. Contesting invisibility: Stories of Indian migrant women in Japan. Megha Wadhwa

12. An international love affair at the Chinese-Russian border: A filmic event ethnography. Elena Barabantseva

13. Losing face: Complicating human subjectivity through multispecies character development. Annika Capelàn

14. The political ‘opponent’ in my lens. Christine Moderbacher

Epilogue: From experience to empirical art. David MacDougall

Notes on contributors

Elena Barabantseva is senior lecturer in Chinese International Politics at the University of Manchester. Her research interest lies at the intersection of borders, identity, migration, and citizenship in the context of globalising China. She experiments with post-positivist forms of inquiry drawing on archival, genealogical, ethnographic and audio-visual methods. Elena trained at the Filmmaking for Fieldwork (F4F) summer school in 2013. Her research has resulted in the production of two documentary films: British Born Chinese (2015 co-produced by F4F) and Border People (2018).

Annika Capelán holds a PhD in social anthropology from Lund University. Her research focuses on historical, environmental, political, and affective aspects of sheep farming and industrial wool production in Patagonian, Australian, South African, and Lesothian grazing regions. Her work explores ethnographic methods, emphasizing participant observation as a capacity for audio-visual, collaborative, multispecies, and transdisciplinary knowledge building. Annika trained in filmmaking with F4F and she is an EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow, jointly hosted by Aarhus University and the University of Cape Town.

Martha-Cecilia Dietrich is assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and co-director of Filmmaking for Fieldwork - F4F™. Her current work focuses on memory activism as well as human and environmental rights in Latin America. As part of her research activities she has made documentary films, including Between Memories(2015) and Horror in the Andes (2019 co-produced by F4F) and published in the fields of history and memory, conflict studies, political and visual anthropology. Her films are distributed by the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Anja Dreschke is a visual and media anthropologist, filmmaker and curator based in Cologne. She is interested in the theory and practice of audiovisual media and digital ethnography at the intersection of experimental ethnography, essayistic film and artistic research. Anja creates films (Tarantism Revisited, 2024; Tribes of Cologne, 2011) photo essays, video installations, exhibitions and hybrid publications based on multimodal ethnographic research. She is a guest professor for media anthropology and innovative methods at the department of media studies at the University of Siegen.

Rosie Reed Hillman is a filmmaker and visual anthropologist. Her research focuses on women’s everyday lives, life stages and feminist explorations of place. Cailleach (2014), a film portrait of an elderly woman living in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, collected awards at international film festivals for its insightful exploration into ageing, death and belonging. Bearing (2021) and Republic (2023) interrogate feminist autoethnographic film practices through the lens of new motherhood. Rosie is lecturer in filmmaking at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Steffen Köhn is a filmmaker and video artist entwining experimental ethnography, science and technology studies and fiction. His work engages with alternative infrastructures and strategies of resistance in today’s uneven sociotechnical landscapes. He is the author of Island in the Net: Emergent Digital Culture and its Social Consequences in Post-Castro Cuba (forthcoming) and Mediating Mobility: Visual Anthropology in the Age of Migration (2016). His films and video installations (Memoria, 2023; Dinamita, 2022; Platform, 2021) have been exhibited internationally. Steffen is associate professor of visual and multimodal anthropology at Aarhus University.

Andy Lawrence is founding director of Filmmaking for Fieldwork - F4F™, where he produces documentary films, writes and teaches ethnographic filmmaking to researchers across the globe. He has made films on subjects of childbirth, death, adolescence, ageing, adventure and Indian tantrism for broadcast and cinema in the UK, India and the Netherlands. His films are distributed by Documentary Educational Resources and the Royal Anthropological Institute and he published Filmmaking for fieldwork: a practical handbook (2020) with Manchester University Press. Andy is senior lecturer at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester.

Stephen A. Linstead is professor of management humanities at the University of York's School for Business and Society, focusing on the humanisation of work and workplaces. Since his grounding in literature and transdisciplinary studies at the University of Keele, he moved into organisational ethnography and developed work from philosophy to live performance and training as a filmmaker with F4F in his sixties. His second film, Black Snow (2017 co-produced by F4F), won the UKRI/AHRC Research in Film Award and is held in the British Film Institute’s Film Forever archive.

David MacDougall is a documentary and ethnographic filmmaker and writer on cinema, having filmed in Africa (To Live with Herds,1972; Turkana Conversations trilogy, 1977-81), Australia, Sardinia and India. His films in India include Photo Wallahs (1991), Under the Palace Wall (2014) and studies of children in institutions, including Doon School Chronicles(2000), SchoolScapes (2007) and Gandhi’s Children (2008). He is the author of Transcultural Cinema (1998), The Corporeal Image (2006), The Looking Machine (2019), and The Art of the Observer (2022). He is Honorary Professor at the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University.

Jón Bjarki Magnússon is a documentary filmmaker and writer living in Iceland. He attended the MA programme in visual and media anthropology at the Freie Universität in Berlin with supervision from Andy Lawrence. His graduation film, Half Elf (2020 co-produced by F4F), screened at international film festivals and was broadcast on Netflix and the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service. Jón received the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Marsh Short Film Prize for ‘Even Asteroids are not Alone’ in 2019. He is currently based at Maynooth University, working on his PhD research about ageing and technology, funded by Science Foundation Ireland.

Christine Moderbacher is an anthropologist and filmmaker. She holds an MA in visual anthropology from the University of Manchester and a PhD in anthropology from the University of Aberdeen. Her films (Letter to Mohamed,2013; Red Earth White Snow, 2018; The World is Blue at its Edges, 2021), texts, video installations and audio features focus on migratory and marginal worlds as visual and textual storytelling. Christine is postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle and a lecturer at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Martin Luther University, Halle Wittenberg.

Erin Moriarty is an anthropologist working at University of Virginia. She is an honorary Research Fellow at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and affiliated faculty with the Schuchman Deaf Documentary Center at Gallaudet University. Erin’s work is situated at the intersection of ethnography and applied linguistics. She studies multimodal languaging practices, language ideologies, and deaf encounters using visual methods. She has conducted ethnographic research in Southeast Asia since 2009; her current research project focuses on deaf tourist mobilities in Indonesia and the mobile semiotic repertoire. Erin trained at the F4F summer school in ethnographic and documentary filmmaking 2018.

Michaela Schäuble is professor of social anthropology with a focus on media anthropology at the University of Bern, where she also co-directs the Ethnographic Mediaspace Bern (EMB). Her research explores apparatuses of belief, specifically the role of embodiment, mediality and remediation in contexts of religious practice, and her fieldwork in southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean addresses the question of what it means to live on a damaged planet. She is the author of Narrating Victimhood (2014/2017), films (Tarantism Revisited, 2024; Mutterstücke, 2006) and video installations.

Rossella Schillaci is a filmmaker and visual anthropologist working with immersive media. She holds an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester and a PhD in Digital Media from the University of Lisbon in collaboration with Austin, Texas. Her VR film, Surfacing (2022), won the Best Practice Research prize from BAFTSS. Schillaci has directed more than twenty films that have been screened at international festivals and broadcast on ARTE, Sky, and Al Jazeera. Her work is distributed by the Royal Anthropological Institute. Rossella is an adjunct professor at New York University.

Mattijs van de Port is an anthropologist and a filmmaker working at the University of Amsterdam and the Free University Amsterdam. His current research is in Bahia (Brazil), where he studies afro-brazilian religions. Mattijs is the author of Ecstatic Encounters (2011), and essay films (The Possibility of Spirits, 2016; Knots and Holes, 2018; The Body Won't Close, 2021). His work explores the tensions – disrupting, frightening, enjoyable, inspiring – that occur when the world does not comply with the human narrations of it.

Megha Wadhwa is an anthropologist, filmmaker, and writer from India based at the Free University of Berlin. She is the author of Indian migrants in Tokyo: A study of socio-cultural, religious and working worlds (2021) and various articles for the Japan Times about the Indian community in Japan. Her research on migration trends, labour market integration and the challenges faced by Indian professionals in Japan and Singapore is supported by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and F4F. Megha is an adjunct professor at Temple University Japan and a visiting scholar at Sophia University Tokyo.