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There are obvious advantages in using film as an ethnographic tool. In ethnographic films you can see the facial expressions of the people speaking. This is especially apparent in the film Impressions of South Africa Today: A Stellenbosch Perspective in which students of Stellenbosch University were asked about racial segregation in South Africa after Apartheid. You can see the way people react to their urban surroundings in ethnographic films like Future Suspended, a film about public space in Athens during the financial crisis. And in ethnographic films, more than in ethnographic writing, you can really walk in the footsteps of the ethnographer. As becomes clear in What Keeps Them Going, a film in which we witness a day in the life of three Dutch truck drivers.
However, it is hard to ignore a camera. Ethnographic filming is not exactly a ‘fly on the wall’-approach; it is bound to affect the behaviour of the respondents. And due to the public character of films respondents can hardly remain anonymous. It was interesting to see how the filmmakers navigated these pitfalls. Some made films explicitly dealing with societal concerns like We Don’t Want the Coal Mine. Others opted for letting the images speak for themselves, as is the case in Smell of Freedom about Estonian SS-soldiers. In the end it was a day full of visual anthropology, be it activist or ethnographic.
Matthias Teeuwen is student-assistant at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. He studies Social and Cultural Anthropology, as well as Theology.
A list of the films that were screened:
Last Minute Weeshuis by Karin van Mullem
Impressions of South Africa Today: A Stellenbosch Perspective by Hanaen Fati
Smell of Freedom by Inge Melchior
Future Suspended by Dimitris Dalakoglou
We Don’t Want the Coal Mine by Nasrin Siraj Annie
Time to Look at Girls by Marina de Regt
Emerging Women of Burma by Ursula Cats
What Keeps Them Going by Fedor Ikelaar
Leven, Liefde en HIV by Nadia Moussaid
Hallelujah Amsterdam by Rachel Visscher