Out of words: The æsthesodic cine‐eye of Robert Gardner:An Exegesis and Interview

In Love with My Footage: Desirous Undercurrents in the Making of an Essay Film on Candomblé

“…I read how other scholars had sought to use the medium of film to report on spirits and spirit mediumship (Mollona ; Russell ). I was especially inspired by the work done by SEL filmmakers, and in particular Sweetgrass (Castaing‐Taylor and Barbash ) and Leviathan (Castaing‐Taylor and Paravel ), which self‐consciously exhibit “a retreat from language, and a withdrawal from the verbal and the denotive in favor of the visual and the connotative” (Barbash , 370; see also Grimshaw , 256). Concerning this approach, Lucien Castaing‐Taylor has argued against the “linguification” of documentary film, explaining that he seeks to exhibit “a deficiency of authorial intelligence” and show “an ambiguity that is at the heart of human experience itself” (, 86).…”