Ethnographies of ‘On Demand’ Films: Anthropological Explorations of Commissioned Audiovisual Productions

290 Pages·2021·4.259 MB·English

by  Alex Vailati, Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal

Ethnographies of
‘On Demand’ Films
Anthropological Explorations of
Commissioned Audiovisual Productions
Edited by
Alex Vailati
Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal
Ethnographies of ‘On Demand’ Films
“This proposed volume would fill a much-needed gap in media anthropology and
media studies, and the individual chapters would also be relevant to courses and
research on ethnographic methods, globalization, migration, and gender studies.”
—Keyan G. Tomaselli, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
“As a subfield largely dependent on portraying cultural Otherness—an impulse
revived by the emergence of indigenous cinema over the last four decades—this
volume paves new paths to take vernacular productions seriously.”
—Xavier Andrade, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia
Alex Vailati • Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal
Editors
Ethnographies of
‘On Demand’ Films
Anthropological Explorations of Commissioned
Audiovisual Productions
Editors
Alex Vailati Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal
Departamento de Antropologia Centro de Estudios Antropológicos
e Museologia El Colegio de Michoacán
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco Michoacán, Mexico
Recife, Brazil
ISBN 978-3-030-78910-7 ISBN 978-3-030-78911-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78911-4
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P
reface
“The chapters in this book explore the intertwined relations among infra-
structure, technology, and modernity.” This opening statement by the
editors reminded me of the history of film and video technologies, and
how they have changed through the last 130 years. As a child I grew up
with ordinary 8 mm, used by my father as an amateur filmmaker. Our cat
used to intensely watch these films projected onto a white wall in the living
room. As a university student and lecturer, I worked professionally with
Super 8, 16 mm, and later U-matic, VHS, and newer digital formats, often
serving exactly the single-event wedding and home markets discussed in
this volume.
In late 2020, on moving house and cities, I found most of my film foot-
age that had been stored in my Durban office, a hot, humid, and inappro-
priate place to have kept them. Somewhat degraded, a Johannesburg
media laboratory digitized my father-in-law’s 8 mm and my own better
preserved Super 8 and 16 mm films and footage. On touring Vic Media’s
studios in an apartment complex, I observed the floor to ceiling stacked
with obsolete equipment that was being dismantled and reassembled into
hybrid machines as the lab’s engineers tried to cobble together projectors,
video recorders, and other audio visual equipment no longer available.
Carcasses of projectors, tape recorders, viewers, and other pieces of techni-
cal equipment even lined the bathroom cupboards, and we logged what
was to be digitized on what was once used as a dining room table. Such
moviemaking was always a home-based operation. I donated to this lab
ten boxes of vinyl record needles my wife, Ruth, had retrieved from her
v
vi PREFACE
deceased father’s junk-filled double garage, stacked with obsolete elec-
tronic components that he had hoarded when he had been an electronics
components importer.
Hoarding, foraging off eBay and associated online sites, is the only way
to find the parts needed to keep the film telecines and obsolete video
equipment operating. Even so, much of the world’s visual record has been
lost because the technologies on which they were originally exposed or
recorded no longer exist.
Nowadays, obsolete technology has value for museums, history books,
and collectors’ archives, as technology changes by the minute and becomes
outmoded almost immediately. The uses of technology, whether obsolete
or new, however, tend to remain the same: wedding and bar mitzvah mov-
ies, birthdays and baptisms, all home movies, with many of the outlandish
examples now screened on YouTube, America’s Funniest Home Movies
and Ridiculousness, amongst thousands of internet sites. The advent of
VHS saw the tawdry tsunami of self-generated pornography as amongst
the new uses, later with Web 2.0 made public by their shameless “actors”
on seemingly beguilingly named sites like “homeclip.com,” amongst oth-
ers that leave nothing to the imagination. Since browsers are expected to
subscribe and pay for such sites, is this not also a kind of “on-demand”
service? But, in contrast to the conventional use of family-orientated home
movies, and those made on demand, the shamateur purveyors of porn
never identify those represented, or who exposed them. Anonymity and
voyeurism in the latter are contrasted with identification and inclusion of
the former.
On viewing what I had digitized from my 1970s’ Super 8 productions,
some commissioned, my filmmaker son, Damien, recognized the symbolic
value of the footage, and in character with the postmodern condition, he
wanted to recut my movie, Wits Protest, about University of Witwatersrand
student opposition to apartheid (1970–1974), as a music video. My surf-
ing movies from the early 1970s, I am told, image then aspirant world
champions and others, now too dope addled to remember their own
names. I found a copy of my sister’s wedding movie that I had made and
sent her the digital version via Dropbox. Also, was the interminable hon-
eymoon 8 mm movie made by my father-in-law, mainly, it seems, from a
moving car as the couple toured the country as newly-wed tourists. This
landscape footage is historically priceless.
This edited volume addresses the significantly understudied and over-
looked arena of media production that is produced by commission,
PREFACE vii
including wedding/baptism/other family life event videos, small-scale
music videos, as well as media made by researchers upon request by
research interlocutors. Commissioned movies result from negotiation
between producer and produced. They are usually made for private pur-
poses, though often they are widely circulated through digital platforms
and social networks. Commissioned media rarely fit within the established
disciplinary conventions of “cinema” or “film” studies (rooted in institu-
tionally financed systems of production and distribution). Nor does this
sector necessarily engage in the political work of indigenous media.
Nevertheless, as Vailati and Zamorano observe, and as the chapters below
demonstrate, “on-demand” media constitute a vast proportion of quotid-
ian media practice (in terms of production, distribution, and consump-
tion). As such, the study and theorization of on-demand media is well
overdue. Ethnographies of ‘On Demand’ Films thus fills a gap in media
anthropology and media studies, amongst other disciplines.
This innovative anthology aims to examine videos, some amateur, some
commissioned, of family events and rituals, and to extend early studies of
amateur films and film-making practices into the contemporary digital
context. These are personal, nonprofessional hobby movies. As George
Gerbner once remarked: “who tells the stories of a culture really governs
human behaviour.” It used to be the parent, the school, the church, and
the community. Now it’s a handful of global conglomerates that have
nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell. On-demand imaging offers one
way to replace “stories that sell” with “stories that tell,” and though com-
missioned, they help to restore the function of storytelling to a noncorpo-
rate cultural, community, and domestic domains. The short-lived People’s
Communication Charter aimed at restoring the right to TV viewers—par-
ents and children in particular—to reclaim the right to take control of
their cultural environment and shape it to meet human—rather than cor-
porate—needs. The Charter would require fundamental updating to
address the surveillance imposed by the digital and Internet age. Though
the internet did put agency in the hands of self-creators, small media orga-
nizations, and individuals, the underlying principle of the market and elec-
tronically targeted advertising has been massively enhanced. In effect, we
pay when we wash, not when we watch. The price of soap includes money
for the “soap opera” (Tomaselli and Gerbner 1997). We may or may not
watch it, but we have no choice. We pay the levy in the price of every
advertised good we buy. And, we pay for the way of life it promotes
viii PREFACE
whether we like it or not. Every act of encoding enables multiple acts of
voyeuristic decoding, re-creating, and re-publishing.
The manuscript is embedded within the broad field of visual anthropol-
ogy, one that draws on some early pioneering studies offered by Sol Worth
and John Adair (the self-generated Navajo films), and Dick Chalfen and
Patty Zimmerman (amateur films). A special issue on amateur films was
published by the Journal of Film and Video (1986, vol 38) some decades
ago, which first mapped out the topic. Despite the innovative nature of all
these early studies, little follow-up occurred until very recently, with the
advent of what is called cellphilms (MacEntee, et al, 2016).
The present study is part of a progression that was punctuated by
Chalfen’s and Zimmerman’s 1980s’ work. The availability of cameras and
computerized desktop editing to anyone now means that the topic will
always be current and expand, especially in a post-Covid 19 world that will
truncate much physically interactive ritual activity until a vaccine is found.
Video will provide one kind of virtual antidote.
Both editors bring to bear multiple holistic skills and conceptual exper-
tise to the topic: analysis of representation, production, and curating.
While these multitasking skills are quite common amongst visual anthro-
pologists, these two scholars appear to be exceptionally well placed in
this regard.
Commissioned wedding videos and the like existed long before the
concept of “on demand.” Anthropologists have studied commissioned
media, but “One of the reasons why on-demand movies tend to remain
invisible is because they are usually produced for private consumption and
because their value is often associated with a single event or moment.”
This sector remains to be better studied and explained, so this volume
could really shape future directions of such activity.
In visual anthropology, the idea of “on-demand” movies, like Les
Maîtres Fous by Jean Rouch and also John Marshall’s A Kalahari Family,
takes on a new significance. The breakthrough in this volume is the “on-
demand” characteristic that directly questions the implacable critics of
both of these pioneering directors, who historically have been subjected to
all sorts of allegations against their films. Les Maitres Fous, for example,
was considered “racist” by many educated Africans, but it was made at the
behest of Rouch’s West African hosts. The “demand” came from below,
from these filmmakers’ respective hosts who intentionally bared for the
camera, their innermost feelings, and their most private social and liminal
moments, in order to achieve the greater objectives of colonial negotiation
PREFACE ix
and social cultural resistance. If the subjects of videos, commissioned or
not, actively participate in such decision making, then Vailati and Zamorano
offer a new lens through which to evaluate such texts (as controversial as
they may be), from the personal to societal.
Johannesburg, South Africa Keyan G. Tomaselli
18 January 2020
references
MacEntee, K., Burkholder, C., & Schwab-Cartas, J. (eds.). (2016). What’s a
Cellphilm? Integrating Mobile Phone Technology into Participatory Visual
Research and Activism. Sense Publishers.
Tomaselli, K. G., & Gerbner, G. (1997). The Viewers’ Declaration of Independence:
A Manifesto of the Cultural Environment Movement. A Commentary.
Communicatio: South African Journal for Communication Theory and Research,
23(1): 73–78. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0250016
9708537820
a
cknowledgements
This book is the result of a long path through visual anthropology and film
production. Moreover, the editing processes took place during pandem-
ics. For this reason, first, we are grateful to all colleagues that, despite dif-
ficulties, have completed their contributions for this volume.
The editors are also indebted to a huge network of persons and institu-
tions that made possible this transnational collaboration. First, we would
like to thank Cornelia Eckert, Ana Luiza Rocha, Mariano Baez, and
Margarita Dalton, organizers of VI Encontro Internacional de Cinema e
Vídeo Etnográfico e Testemunhal [4th International Encounter of
Ethnographic and Testimonial Cinema and Video] in 2014, which
brought together a network of Brazilian and Mexican researchers and film
directors. This event was the starting point of editors’ collaboration. We
are intimately grateful to all members of the following research institu-
tions: Laboratorio de Antropologia Visual, of the Federal of the Federal
University of Pernambuco, Brazil; Festival do Filme Etnográfico de Recife,
Brazil; Núcleo de Antropologia Visual of the Federal University of Rio
Grande do Sul, Brazil; Núcleo de Antropologia Visual e estudo das
Imagens of the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil; ARANDU—
Laboratório de Antropologia Visual of Federal University of Paraiba; The
Centre for Communication, Media & Society of University of KwaZulu-
Natal, South Africa; Museu da Imagem e Som de Pernambuco, Brazil; and
the Centro de Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social CIESAS, El
Colegio de Michoacán and Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología
CONACYT in Mexico; Instituto Ricardo Brennand, Brazil.
xi