Chaiqian/Demolition: Reflections on Media Practice

Abstract

In 2008, I spent three weeks filming a demolition site in the center of Chengdu, the capital of China's Sichuan province. I collaborated with migrant workers, site managers, and city dwellers to produce the feature‐length film Chaiqian (Demolition), which offers a sensual and open‐ended portrait of migrant labor, urban space, and ephemerality. This essay presents a set of reflections on the production process and aesthetic choices of the film, and draws on sensory ethnography, phenomenology, and the concept of cinephilia to explore the ontological differences between written ethnography and film. I observe that the conventional approach to media production in anthropology has tended to limit the multitude of meaning inherent in images and sound by reducing them to mere illustrations of an argument and/or cultural data. While this dominant approach has its specific uses, especially in terms of pedagogy, I argue that equal value ought to be placed on an approach to media anthropology that not only embraces sensuality and ambiguity but also appreciates the multivalent powers peculiar to sound and image, and refrains from constraining visuality and aurality to the wholly linguistic and propositional. The essay concludes with a meditation on the value that such an approach—with its accommodation of multiple interpretations of the image—possesses for historiography and the construction of alternative archives.

Video Methods, Green Cultural Criminology, and the Anthropocene: SANCTUARY as a Case Study

“…Methodologically, the four techniques I will outline assist in evoking an "order of things," (Bennett 2009) a structure of an experience (Sniadecki 2014), and atmospheric drama in the mundane experiences of situational care work . Learning to attend requires a sensibility of openness, which in turn allows one to construct sensuousness through cinematic immersion in flux (Ferrell 2013: 265).…”

Enactive Filmmaking: Rethinking Ethnographic Cinema in the First Person

“…While external reflexivity, as a device external to the ethnography, tends to downplay the involvement of the author in the genesis of the work, deep reflexivity is retraceable within the work itself, showing how “subject and object define one another through the work, and the ‘author’ is in fact in many ways an artifact of the work” (MacDougall , 89). Accordingly, I never introduce myself as a researcher, nor show myself with the camera in hand—almost an orthodoxy in many recent ethnographic films (see Sniadecki , 33).…”

“…The work of filmmakers associated with Harvard University's Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) has employed more experimental approaches, including long takes, to achieve similar objectives (Castaing‐Taylor and Barbash ; Cohn and Sniadecki ; Paravel and Sniadecki ; Spray and Velez ). Most SEL films have in common a refusal of an explicit narrative, foregrounding their sensory and experiential qualities and remaining open to multiple readings (Sniadecki ). Leviathan , directed by Castaing‐Taylor and Paravel (), takes this approach in a radical direction, offering an immersive portrayal of life on a trawler off the Massachusetts coast through highly experimental camerawork and editing.…”

Documentary Criminology: Expanding the Criminological Imagination with “Mardi Gras—Made in China” as a Case Study (23 Minutes)

“…As in cultural criminology, in documentary criminology meaning is not "the outcome of reflection on experience but necessarily includes the experience. In part, then, the experience is the knowledge" [34]; [35] (pp. 27,79).…”

“…An experience, according to Dewey, is the continuous duration of unbroken activities in time and space punctuated by a beginning, middle, and end. Sniadecki [35] (p. 27) points out that the expansive potential of Dewey's approach to lived experience makes it readily adaptable to documentary filmmaking. Dewey "expands aesthetics beyond the confines of the highly specialized 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" [35] (p. 27).…”