Poetic documentary as visual ethnography: Liwaa Yazji’s Haunted (Maskoon) (2014)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Syrian documentary filmmaker, poet, playwright and translator Liwaa Yazji’s long-form documentary ‘Haunted’ (2014) follows nine individuals’ experiences of home, including a couple in Damascus that remain trapped in their house surrounded by snipers, a Syrian of Palestinian descent who fled from Syria to Lebanon and a Syrian refugee family temporarily inhabiting a former prison. Similar to a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, George. 1995. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117), Yazji guides viewers through multiple digital, geographical and affective spaces. This article demonstrates Yazji’s documentary as concerned with longstanding anthropological questions about possession, kinship, remains, the everyday and the temporal and as a work of ‘accented cinema’ (Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press) that emerges from the filmmaker’s personal experience of displacement and migration, and focuses on journeying, home-seeking, homelessness, rootedness and dislocation. It argues her film’s ethnographic way of seeing and sensing problematizes categories of poetic documentary and visual and sensory ethnography. The article explains its importance for scholars of forced migration, conflict and the after-effects of violence and for problematizing the definition of ethnographic film and its power in conveying the plurality of the world (Hastrup, Kirsten. 1992. “Anthropological Visions: Some Notes on Visual and Textual Authority.” In Film as Ethnography, edited by Film as Ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press), one currently largely inaccessible to ethnographers, filmmakers and journalists.