Filmmaking for Fieldwork

Abstract

Doing the MA in Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester a decade ago trained my vision to look for appealing images, the perfect camera angle and beautiful light conditions. But that year at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology was not only an intense year of visual enskillment: it also changed my anthropological gaze toward the people and topics that I work with. Needless to say that given this history, I was extremely happy to learn that the person teaching documentary film practice at Manchester, Andy Lawrence, had finally transformed his many years of teaching experience into an illustrated handbook that integrates the practical, theoretical and technical sides of doing audiovisual research. If you are thinking about documentary filmmaking, whether ethnographic or not, this is the book you need on your desk, and with you in the field. But I would not only recommend it for practitioners and people curious about working with the camera, both in and outside academia. It should also be available in libraries for the teaching of (visual) anthropology. Despite a lingering assumption that visual anthropology lacks theory, this is exactly a practical handbook which teaches the core skills in camera use, sound recording and editing that were missing so far. Within anthropology, the act of image-making is still too often reduced to the technical aspect of pressing a button (p. x). Lawrence's focus on “exploration through practice” shows that there is much to learn. Divided into five sections, the book includes useful exercises for every stage of film production, starting from the very first considerations about the decision to make a film at all (which, thankfully, the author does not see as something to be set against writing but as a complementary practice), to preparation, recording images and sound, editing and finally distribution – an intrinsic part of film production that is too easily forgotten when launching a project. After all, it is giving research outcomes a life beyond the academy and on diverse screens that also renders visual anthropology so important. As the author himself writes, this handbook is not only for anthropologists but for anybody who wants to use ethnographic documentary for filmmaking projects. And indeed the detailed yet easily comprehensible explanations of technical principles show that the processes of making films and doing anthropological research are similar in many ways. Both start with an idea or