Filming Real People

Abstract

Filming Real People: Ethnographies of “On Demand” Films is an edited book bringing together authors of ethnographic video working in diverse regions of the world. It attends to the practices of visual ethnography in family, individual, group, and place videos. The book’s subject matter touches on productions of weddings, music, football, festival, activism, and ritual videos. In general the book’s concern is to criticize the optimal position of the visual ethnographer in the production of these videos; which the book posits as dynamic and flexible. From the discussions which inform the volume’s three-part structure, one notes an effort to theorize, or at least interrogate, the still controversial frontiers of ethnographic cinema. Notably, the book entreats various canonical discussions in the field of visual ethnography; for instance the discussion by Hockings et al. (2014), all of whom criticize the theoretical underpinnings of visual anthropology. Some of the ideas borrowed from these scholars include Hockings’ idea of visual anthropology as an encounter of media studies and sociocultural anthropology or vice versa (436), and the conjunction of emic and etic imagery in visual anthropology (437). Vailati and Villarreal’s book explores these dimensions of images by presenting the visual ethnographer in various meaning-searching roles—which I discuss below. Further, the methodological approaches within their book can be understood through Tomaselli’s theory of production of images and image analyses; and the visual ethnographer’s role as a decoder (textual analysis) and encoder (441). This is most apparent in the elaborate textual analysis and descriptive reportage used by various authors in Vailati and Villarreal’s book. Similarly, MacDougall’s theory of ontology of images, co-existing methodology, and epistemology of anthropological images gathered from “sensory, emotional, kinesic, performative, aesthetic, interpersonal, and subjective perspectives” (445), is reflected in the methodological approaches deployed by various authors in Filming Real People. For this reason, it is prudent to approach this book as an implementation of various existing theories in visual anthropology to the on-demand video genre. The theories noted above are useful in understanding both the essence and frontiers of Vailati and Villarreal’s 1