The Practice of Filmmaking Research, with Catherine Grant and Christian Suhr

everyone and welcome back to our view on Zoom also um we're delighted now to introduce the second session and

introduce our two discussions and Crystal sewer and Catherine grantual presented a moment and I just want to

double check that everything's going to be there on Zoom before I continue okay thank you so I'll introduce the two speakers first I'll just express my

gratitude to both because I don't know how often it is that you get such a high-powered conversation across the disciplines or across the different

um uh areas of activity so it's great to have Professor Christian song who's a filmmaker and professor of visual and multi-modal anthropology at oros at this

University he's the pi of the at a European research Council funded projects heart openings the experience and cultivation of love and Buddhism

Christianity and Islam and he's author of the film monograph I already mentioned this morning the fascinating uh film monograph combination of a book

and a film descending with angels on the invisible dynamics of gin possession and psychosis among uh Danish Muslims he's co-editor of the important collection

trans cultural Montage the edited about it which I really recommend and his films have been shown widely including our festivals including Copenhagen dance

uh Chasm Grant uh is one of the world's foremost researched filmmakers and video essayists uh renowned for her work on the audio visual essay in film and

moving image studies as I was saying yesterday to the students when Katie was kind enough to come and teach a class it's not given to many of us to have influence at all when Casey has a global

influence in terms of the model she has offers uh for the kind of work that we do those but at least in that certain area she's invented a number of forms that have

become widely used and like the epigraph film and writes brilliantly about her own filmmaking that of others as one of the organizers of the annual scholarship and solid and image workshops at

Military College he's helped to train what we might call a generation of videographic critics um including babarzeki here in the room and including myself I did this Workshop

in 2018 which was the best year no and she is the phone one of the the funding editors of in transition the Innovative Journal of videography so when moving image studies that we mentioned already

this month so what I proposed as or sort of uh the topic to lead off the discussion sorry

but I asked someone to close the doors thank you um what I proposed was the overarching

point of departure of practice as a kind of team or as I say a Point of Departure the reason for this is that my impression was that filming and film

making and editing are for both of these uh makers and Scholars um our regular our constant activities

uh it's a a form of investigation and this is one of Casey's key terms actually and material thinking that goes well beyond the production of outputs

so I thought it would be very interesting to hear uh these two highly esteemed makers um uh compare how in their different

ways they integrate practice into their work and indeed into their lives and how the practice in turn guides their concerns and insights um and just before I go on I should say

I forgot to mention that Professor Catherine Grant is currently our honorary Professor here at the University of August just in case I I did mention that earlier I think but I wanted to repeat that as well as a

number of other affiliations uh so I think what I'd like to do now is to invite you both to describe your work and to say uh

what practice means to you so perhaps I can ask Katie would you like okay thank you very much and thank you Alan and Matthias for the invitation uh to this uh wonderful event uh with

the marvelous group of people in the in the room and the invisible masses possibly Beyond um who we cannot visualize but we'll be

terrified by the thought of nonetheless um the practice in our lives decrease don't tell me that um uh I mean I started I suppose I'm

talking with a kind of slightly historical uh perspective um I started because of curiosity about what was happening online so I was seeing other people's practice

um in particular I mean there are a number of influences but Kevin B Lee was is the one I was single out today and somebody um who uh who was diversifying uh our

field from the beginning and both in his own person but also in his choice of the films he made video essays about which were truly Global and enormous number the films on East Asian Cinema so I kind

of wanted to just put that out there um and Kevin made a lot of work and he would just be posting it at his blog and then if there was one influence I haven't necessarily really thought of as

such in that way it was his blogging activity that was perhaps the most inspirational aspect he wasn't sort of singling out filmmaking he was writing blog posts as well and I was running a

Blog as many as many people in the room will know who've come across film City for free um trying to kind of take to an academic sphere what Kevin was doing for a film critical sphere um and so this practice of making lots

of videos and not kind of worrying too much about whether they were going to be World leading works or you know kind of award-winning or published even I mean I like the idea of practice not making perfect

um uh you know I think was very much part of Kevin's contribution uh to my way of thinking and to many others as well so that's what I do I mean I I my first video tried to be quite polished it has to be said I was still a

fundamentally an academic at that point I had to have I didn't quite have footnotes but it was 13 minutes long and had a voiceover which I rarely used since um but since then my model has just been

feeling an urge to make which I actually do feel most days and trying to make something um not really thinking about what that might be in the in the first instance

and so you know my work is often led by enthused ziasms or passions or a particular state of mind and a feeling that I want to make

um and so that's where constraints come in for me because if you feel you want to make but you don't really know where to begin which is you know even after many years is how I feel um then starting with something

rule-based is a great exercise so the Petra exercise that Jason Mattel and Christine Keithley invented for the Middlebury workshops where you take one minute of continuous audio from a media

an audio visual media object and you choose 10 six seconds clips from that object and you put this the Clips in order and you in any audio you like and

you put the audio over the top um it's just such a wonderful place to start when you're feeling that urge which I luckily still feel even after all of these years so I think that kind of not quite daily practice

um but but you know I made hundreds of videos most of which are very forgettable um but they weren't the forgettable in the moment that I made them they were a mode of thinking so I like Ben Ben

sparks's video way of thinking um I did sort of ground my own thinking about this in Barbara Boltz understanding of heidgarian practice which I won't go into too much but um material thinking she as she called

it following other people writing on practice research um and she you know because it was really quite a true heidgarian so I think that was the superiority of the idea really appealed to me which was

this uh three-way conjunction between a maker obviously an artist or a crafts person um uh the materials from which an object

might be made under Tools which are made which are used to make it um that works better than limiting it to video where you're thinking for me because in a way it connects it to lots of other artistic practices not just

video but also sometimes the tools for our videographic practices vary a lot they may indeed include our own bodies they don't really usually my work keep my body

um out of it so far I'm changing that though thanks to Johannes spinato inspiring us and Chloe girlie bear along with Kevin putting our bodies in our films so that kind of materiality of the

process for me was formed by the tools it was really just suddenly being able to conceive of teaching myself um using editing tools sometime around

2009 um that you know led to this so I can really see how a kind of non-human element which I will you know kind of put into the frame along with the material which might be another

non-human element interacts with me as a nonetheless subjected subjectivity um to produce the work I do so although it feels very personal I think the

frequency of it and the materiality of it remove I think some of that personality must stop there but perhaps I should just say for the you know 1.25 people who are online who don't know of

your work you probably should say what sort of material you're actually working on this yes uh I mean it's material from uh uh film existing films uh television

and other audio visual media objects and we will see some recent examples yeah um so uh I will bring normally the whole media object into my video editing

program I rarely make something Clips to start with and I don't work with Adobe Premiere partly because of this fight I use Final Cut Pro sorry no browsing but because it's much much easier to work

fast yeah so the instrument doesn't get in your way and also that you can bring the whole thing in you don't have to worry about you know kind of it just operates to work with quite large amounts of film

and because in a way they having to decide what you're going to use before you bring it into your video editing program is a is a limiter on what you might do so I don't like that limit

um so I then take my Clips down into the timeline as you'll see it in a way the way that my videos often look really represents the mode of working I often use multiple screens

um so that's a sort of built if you kind of visualize a timeline multiple screens are built by building layers of timelines above one another and then resizing screens it's a very it's not

physical at all it's completely virtual uh apart from the touch of the touch screen or the mouse but it's very um like forming a puzzle or playing

around with shapes it's very graphic and it's also very immersive with sound and so those are the kinds of conditions of working for me but thank you for asking me to specify what I actually do as I say just for everyone here and for the

people on Zoom we will see some examples of both of these Scholars uh films later on yeah so yeah I'd also like to to just

thank for the invitation to to come here already this morning I I think it was a real gift to for me anyway to to have this walk through one of these really

exciting uh emergencies of different ways of working with these media which I think it speaks to

it's good to remind ourselves how how young this medium is like it's it's a bit more than 100 years and uh and there's just so much

happening and so many new possibilities that will that will yeah luckily we have the possibility to witness now and be part of yeah

what we usually compare ourselves to is writing which has been going on for many more years so it's it's exciting to be and for me it was very exciting to to

have this walkthrough of how you see this film developing and thanks to to my my tires and and sister and it's

good to be back we have have had a good collaboration for many years with the visual and poly program and your work um

yeah and lovely to be able to sit with you uh and I I remember I think the first time I encountered your work with at a moment where I was trying to read a

difficult book a really amazing and beautiful book called The Skin of the film by Laura Marx and uh and then I I

discovered a video which which I could see and it wasn't too long but it was excellent it was really actually opening up the possibility to read this work in

a different way so so is that touching feelings touching film objects yeah it did include a voiceover but uh you know um

there's a version with text and then there's a an audio commentary version with my voice but anyway so it's very nice to to be able to be here

um what the the question was about practice practice Yeah yeah so and you asked me to uh reply to this question just think about what it

means to you I mean that could be what you said to me when I wrote you about this and as a prompt you said for me it's not always clear how to separate practice from things that are not

practice Yeah and uh you said talked about how writing a theoretical argument or reading or discussing it are also forms of practice

I'm often reacting like this when I hear this word practice based something which is often used and and that I have really had difficulties to find out if I'm I

can do something which wouldn't be a practice like like drink this coffee it's the kind of practice so I I'm I'm wondering what this concept covers [Music]

um um but but we can discuss that whether it's possible to do something that's not a practice maybe it is sleeping I was thinking about sleeping

whether that's a not a practice but then you can cultivate ways of dreaming so that would then be a kind of practice but it's an interesting

question to see if it's possible to to not practice uh but but the the way I practice uh uh of

the film came into to my way of working um so I began uh I was really interested in photography and uh

for several years I thought this was this could be a path for me and then I discovered anthropology and I got really fascinated with it early and ended up

applying for to I started studying into poly and that was also exciting but it was also including reading lots of books

um and a certain point we I just uh we had the opportunity to go to Egypt with a small scholarship to do a documentary

from I didn't I didn't think of that as anthropology I really thought about that as a way to come back to my original creative interest in photography

um but then it just turned out really amazing it was we worked with the interactions between tourists and Camera drivers at the Giza plateau and all of

these different kinds of stereotypes that are played out in the immediate savings interaction um where where camera drivers use the

desires and fantasies of tourists to to make their business and it was wonderful to work with the film in that context

both for the ability of films who get really close to it to the um it was very direct immediate small exchanges that are happening that are

words but they're definitely also bodily movements and and uh so there was one part that was exciting and and I didn't realize how

exciting it was but I ended up writing lots of essays about things like that to think about uh the different um practices of orientalism and you could

say um but um what was also really exciting and perhaps the most important was also the way the film could be used to as a way to

to talk in a deeper way with the people I work with uh both the camera drivers that I work with and the tourists and

other audiences as well um so the way um some can work to to facilitate dialogue and reflection I think is this

um yeah maybe the the yeah a very valuable thing as well for an anthropologists so so that kind of put me on a track and I discovered that there was something

called ethnographic filmmaking NX we have a very rich discussion of films and experiments with films and um Reflections about what what can film

do and other media than so on as well so um that became my what I did and uh and uh

I am I in all my work I use from uh and uh but I also use writing I think they are

very complementary I haven't been through any film or most at least the films I do would contain words to people say things

um uh but I don't usually add like text on top of that or or voiceover for that

matter though I actually I think they're beautiful possibilities of VoiceOver as Barbara just pointed out uh I just don't do that uh so much but

it's just because of lack of skill or something but um but I love um I love the complementarity of film and Tech and text in a way that in a

text I can be very precise uh I can make a very explicit conclusion this um

um Scholar's name is uh Catherine Catherine Russell or or you know I can be explicit in that kind

of way this is uh this is Denmark this is uh old University or something like that um whereas the film would show that but

in a different way in a kind of analog way that always sort of points in other directions as well there's always a before and after open image there is

always something uh on the other side of the frame or outside of the the frame of the image

um if I see a picture of you you will have a background that I'm that this image of you will also uh will

always sort of alert me too in a way that I don't think text is always so good at so the destabilization of this uh X this

you could say that film always carries with with it in any shot I really think it's helpful for for writing so that we

sort of can lose the conceptual grasp that we sometimes uh approach the world with and which sometimes I think great great problems for us

someone talked about the politics of representation and uh but in the field I work in with I've worked a lot on the relationship and

these very long and ongoing and quite toxic debates about integration and radicalization and Muslims and immigration and which fills quite a lot

in public media now it seems that the Russians are taking over but but for some time it has been that topic and uh uh and the the

media debates are often structured around a lot of people who think they know uh and have a lot of conclusions about what's up and what's done and I I think

uh just an image or a little piece of footage of a person or a couple of people who is able to destabilize that

sometimes in a very in very efficient ways so I think that's for me as an anthropologist that's that's a great value of of using film to

sort of always be linked to uh to uh to the fact that the social reality is is bigger than we can put

into a very strict conclusion yeah yeah thank you and actually this whole question of the I suppose you should say the excessive character of the image or that's probably the wrong word but that

was one of the themes of the one of the video essays that Matthias chose for the uh the screening we had last night um so you've talked actually you've kind

of answered the current answer that the next question I had which is what does uh filmmaking as a scholarly practice give you that other practices in this case writing

do not I want to ask the same question to you Casey and just sorry just before us feel free to suggest when we might show a clip or a film at the appropriate

moment we have them queued up already to to so we can press play on your command um I'm fascinated talk about how

how the your filmmaking it kind of allows facilitates a proximity I think you were kind of saying that towards the beginning um and that was the thing that was most striking

um about my encounter with your work as well was this all at the proximity of filming um in an anthropological context I haven't seen lots of anthropological

ethnographic filmmaking but I've seen a fair bit I guess and um in a sense what I found removed from at least the a lot of your filming

technique was uh distance some kind of positionality of you as a filmmaker felt very at ease across a range of different distances from your subjects

um you know in particularly talk about descending with angels um with you know how it begins is so near to what uh we're watching which is so traumatizing and traumatic both of

the people being pictured and I suppose it's an unaware viewer but then kind of you also have to be kind of retreating and watching Talking Heads at a table or

talking bodies so I mean I I was just absolutely astounded by that and I'm really um excited to hear you describe that uh as part of a process of

enabling us both as the filmmaking or the filmmakers as well as the viewers to lose the conceptual grasp with which we problematically approach the world and

although yeah I do I just work on found footage filmmaking it's a very different feel I think that losing the conceptual grasp is pretty Central to what video essays have helped us with

um it's shaken us up in a kind of external World sense of institutionally pedagogically um uh publishing wise but it but in terms of like that kind of Moment by

moment practice that's also how I experience it and I write about this a lot so um I uh my PR my practice my my daily practice or my kind of my frequent

practice is making the damn videos but I'm also uh often left with a at a later stage with the desire to return to the work uh and write about it so that

that's a kind of after work for me and so having gone through a process of losing a conceptual grasp I'm often struck by how Central that is to the methodology I'm articulating in writing

and that's linked to a project that you know people were doing a long time ago in the early days of film uh work of the formalists in Soviet Union and the notion of de-familiarization

um and I can see that you know it's a kind of strand of your work as well um so I think that yeah for me videos is in a kind of uh a global sense where a

de-familiarizing um bath of fire to walk through um and there's metaphors coming up there um and uh and yeah so just completely

transforming the way I work I mean maybe if I've been a trained filmmaker to start with I wouldn't have experienced it like that but because I wasn't and had never had that dream or desire um for me I did experience that shock of

the new um methodology uh I don't know if that helps answer your question but um so what are you doing when you write about

your work would you say uh I mean I don't know that you write about your films necessarily it's rather that the work is complementary the prose is

complementary to the film rather than necessarily of both his but uh I'd be interested to know what it is you're doing when you're writing in relation to the films that you made

um well that's that's which I am entering the re-entering the academic domain um and because if I'm writing it's because I've got to publish it

um or I want to push it sometimes it's more positive um so I get asked to you know I get asked I get people commissioning work from me and so at that stage I might look back at my recent video practice and think oh well like what would I like

to write about um but rarely do I start a video thinking about the writing or whether it will be written up and like and a couple of examples I mean maybe it's a good time to show one I don't know but it

might take us away from writers I'll say a tiny bit more um but my work much of my I have commission projects which may be paid as well and it's increasingly happening I'm really available

um and I've had some really interesting turns in my work because of that process but otherwise through the kind of practice I was talking about before these can be really very very ephemeral

things that I end up making you know not like in any kind of recognizable genre that could be anything other than totally abject in the online video World they may be really tiny I mean I did

make a seven minute long a seven second long one once 30 seconds you know um but I've also made 40 minute long ones so um you know sometimes I'm joining works up

that I made that I want to write about because I can see a thing happening in them which is definitely the case of the work that I'll uh maybe show

um and for me it's uh as I said we entry into an academic domain because I do then take up the conceptual frame or grasp

um of my train training as a scholar uh you know it's often the work can be um shorter because it doesn't have to be the whole thing it's it's a

supplementary or complementary work um um but usually it'll have footnotes and it'll have a demonstration of scholarship and a contextualizing of the work so that it kind of enters into a

discussion which is verbal and searchable in a way that my video essays aren't necessarily um so it's a yeah without that work would uh anybody be inviting me to speak

without the written component I don't know I mean that's an interesting one but I because I think it is partly because I have thought a lot about what I've done and what others have done

um and tried to articulate um something about that uh in a scholarly comprehensible way that maybe uh you know um I get asked to talk about

it a bit but um but I but I don't have to write about everything I make in fact I really think that would be horrifying because although I still find I find it much

easier and much more compelling to write about my video processes a business kind of Storytelling in a way my other writing never was um I I really don't find writing easy

still so for me video essays have just been a complete saving as well so I was born playing the first video of give Christian a chance to speak to the

team yeah I um I I also uh I I as much as I love film I really also enjoyed the the possibility of writing and the

the what words can afford and what it means to try to then sit and explicate what is going on

um or um I think that's that's that's very helpful and it's very helpful also for with film practice

um I am I love what you you were saying something that sounded like uh would authorship is like I don't recall

the exact words but um but this this thing that um when you work with film and I guess especially when you work with soundford it says as you do but but I think any

film um one of the fascinating things that happen is of course that authorship is very complicated of course if you work

with films that were authored by others in the new remix them and and that that's one thing but um but even if you work with a

documentary or a fiction film and you might be directing the camera or um or angling it in a certain way but

um lots of other things are happening uh of course the people that might be in the frame might do other things then and

you were expecting or but also the tape of standing there impacts in ways and and even if you're very aware and you

try to try your best to to control that situation there is something really uncontrollable about it so that it becomes a kind of multi-author thing

um and there is a resistance in in this these these other voices even if it's a taper or or an or another person or the dress of this person they will they will

continue speaking you might be able to color grade or I don't know do some stuff but uh but I really find those uh those qualities of co-authorship that

are inherent to some really valuable I think the same is true of writing it's just less visible I I I guess sometimes when we ride

I mean I have sometimes the experience of even hearing the voices of it's not necessarily a pathological

Factor not necessary but you you sort of tune into a theoretician if you work a lot with the theoretician the the ways of thinking and it kind of can there's a

way that writing is also embodied in that sense and co-author but it's it's it's just less visible um so a way I love to write which is

also a uh an easy way of writing is to write out a scene in a film uh this is very meticulously like you

transcribe an interview but we transcribe it really well with everything uh so one of the qualities of that is that it fills a lot of pages very

quickly so if you need to to do that but but the other thing uh is that that you really uh pay attention to a lot of things and pay attention to those other

voices that we're speaking at different parts and imaging uh um or sounds or right now there is a hiss of a air condition you know you

when you pay attention to those things and write it down it becomes Vivid to you when you you start discover I feel like this is that discovering other things through that process of writing

and um and a different kind of written analysis can flow from that process right so this practice of writing I really enjoy a lot and then coming from

that space into into the space of theory or the conversations with with the literature that's relevant for those other people who have thought about such

things this is something I really like working like that not only just to produce a lot of pages quickly but I actually find a really valuable

crossover between those those registers of film and writing thank you I mean uh I'll just mention this as something to remind myself to maybe pick it up later but in several

places in your work you mentioned zika vartov you know the great Soviet filmmaker who talked about the notion of The Kino eye the kind of merging of the filmmaker with the apparatus of

filmmaking uh and in that sense then complicating the notion of authorship and I think it links to what you say about material thinking is highly Gary and notion of

the you know the tool itself as being something you're in collaboration with yeah rather than you know brutally deploying and but I think you know might be a good moment to take a look at some work

um Katie which which film would you like to show uh first and talk about to introduce it maybe maybe semblance as a sort of more technical example uh than

the other one although the other one yeah um so semblance is a four and a half minute long video that I made in December and then you'll see at the end

the date appears in in the video because I finally I had a sense of finally nailing something um I do work very quickly but in fact with that video I tried to make it about two years before

um also and um I kind of did quite a lot of the Montage as you see it's a split screen video which uses sequences from two films which are very precisely arranged

and I did actually arrive at some of the precise Arrangements in the first go at this uh and then I had a sense of oh a kind of um this is a phrase that I talk about a lot and that Barbara and I have

discussed as well it's the so what um you know like it was all look it's okay but you know it's a what is it like is it anything um so there's sort of like a loss of confidence although I feel as I sound

like a very confident person about my work sometimes I am but actually most of the time I I can be ridden with doubts that are not uh crushed by the joy of working

um but anyway for some reason I went back to it I made in the meantime another video essay about one of the films

um these are Celine Siamese uh film portrait of a young a young um lady on fire uh yeah portrait of a lady on fire

sorry and um so I kind of thought I'd finished working on that film but then I realized I actually wanted to return to this this work uh and uh and what made

it happen was the music um in the earlier playings around I wasn't conceiving necessarily of using an external music track and then I found one I thought would work really well and

it was literally that uh choice that made all of these pieces of the puzzle kind of fall into place thank you just before we start um can I ask you is it can people see

the screen okay even whenever somebody get home [Music] um foreign and was it [Music]

foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music]

foreign [Music] [Music]

[Music] do you see a portrait no if I could just find the key in the beginning and put it

together [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign

[Music] foreign

[Music] [Music]

[Music] foreign [Music]

[Music] foreign

[Music] so I mean not even watching it now I'm I'm already beginning to think I'm nearly ready to start writing about this

one which I never felt when I made it um so uh and what I'm um so the context of this work it's daily practice it comes out of enthusiasms

but I'm also a scholar and by one of my abiding interests uh as an academic is authorship and questions of influence intertextuality illusionism adaptation

remake sequels so a lot of my work naturally somehow kind of gravitates towards those questions and for me the split screen has just been like this amazing device for simultaneous

comparison which is a kind of an affordance that you know as Scholars of influence and delusionism we could only dreamed of how great it would be

um as Christina Alvarez Lopez said about piece of work she made back in 2011 called Double Life Second Chances a study of the convergences between kishlovsky's um which one is it again

and uh David Lynch's uh not so famous film in London Empire and she made an amazing video about that but she's talked about how she made that

comparison which also uses split screens in her head before she made it in video now I'm not as gifted a Visionary as she is I couldn't make all of that in my

head but it comes out of an act of exactly that ever that conjuration while watching uh uh see I was filming the cinema for the first time and it wasn't like I was constantly thinking oh my God

vertigo where to go vertigo but there were so many ways in which it made me think that that I knew I had to go and explore it and so what I find there is of course much more than it occurred to

me in the viewing but also then the music helped me limited because there are many more Illusions but in fact like who wants to sit and watch a video every single one I mean well maybe some people do because YouTube is filled with videos

like that but instead why not just make a four and a half minute long one that uses the duration of the music as the guiding principle and the Beats of the music obviously as the guiding principle

for what you include and how you include it so the process of making is precisely material thinking it's the music and the film as limited the films as a material

uh it's a kind of also I think the genre of the split screen video as a form of that media materiality than the tools and then me um and as we now this person who's made

lots of these and um and and so on but I wanted maybe to conclude just what I'm saying about this uh by this um with two comments one is the writing is

coming to me now because of Orpheus so I this film is called semblance a particular choice of word I didn't say resemblance semblance is an archaic English word

that conveys resemblance but also conveys pretense and and fantasy uh a semblance of something it sort of hints at it but is it really it

um that was it in the choice I didn't need to prove that CMR had said I love vertigo and portrait of the lady on fire is uh you know my homage to Vertical

um it doesn't really matter in one way uh I think though the Precision of the Illusions would hint that she's very aware especially like the use of vertical shots the the kind of like in

her in her film the key moments of illusionism with Hitchcock um but yeah Orpheus is the thing that links a vertigo and portrait of a lady on fire and so all of these turnings of

heads it's not just siama imitating Hitchcock it's both of them referring back to a story that turns on turning and so the final words of uh Siamese

film and the final loss of the love object in Vertigo uh are all connected in the kind of massively long history of reworkings about this

which I need to write to explore a little bit more I guess thank you uh Christian we'll put this over to you we'd like to invite you to suggest a clip and to introduce it for

us yeah it just me uh according to you there so I I I really think it's an extraordinary piece

this one and um and I I'm I'm glad I'm not having to write the final analysis about or something like that but um just

um um so I liked hearing this comment um and also your reflection on the word semblance that it's sort of a taste of

resemble a sort of just before resentments but it's this and uh and hearing you talking about how you because that was what I felt and it

this was not there providing a definitive conclusion or the reason that about women and some or

it's just it was this um um this uh

just emergence of of understanding or seeing seeing things that are um

somehow connected uh and uh and and diving into it so and not not not

um which is I I think is a really uh important part of of what film can do for us also in relationship to

to writing uh that it sort of allows us into this space that's the emergence of thinking it's not not uh of course we can make if if we are at

that point where we know exactly exact conclusion we could add it at the end or something like that but but but maybe um more important is is this way that we

can actually be there just at this moment of of of certain understandings that are emerging in the encounter in in a cinema apparently but also in the time in the timeline

uh yeah like for me it feels a little bit like being invited on on field work with someone who knows in this case it's it's not the

fieldwork uh at a particular location but it's in the archive of of films that uh where

this person has met these other people and and your your case is somehow part of this um

I think I I have the sense of someone who is looking at the hair the particular way the hair is made on the back and and

you talked about the familiarization before which which for me also is a very important concept and maybe we're talking about how we can sometimes use

sperms to defamiliarize ourselves from our conceptual grasp and and maybe sometimes writing can do it in a different way to the way we make them

um but there's also something uh maybe like an undercurrent of this uh of uh of commonality or that we are

in This Together somehow you know uh like uh which is of course split screen is quite an amazing way of showing us

we are we are there there is a link between uh different times and spaces there's uh yeah anyway it's not very precise but I

love it I think one thing because I forgot my second thing which was actually about um a connection with Christian's work as well which is I'm a bit more team eisenstein than team vertov um so for me

um I mean you'll write brilliantly about Montage in your what amazing 2013 book covered calls the book transcultural Montage which I highly recommend that anybody working on on Montage it's superb

um but it's obviously the two things that produce a third thing um normally in sequential editing it will be one shot followed by a second shot and conjunction again the kind of

juxtaposition of those produces a third virtual thing and here we have a you know two screens producing a virtual thing um but but really not the controlled one

um you know very much kind of open to um a viewer to kind of look where they they will of course there's some directing but for me the decamiliarizing ACT is is the split screen it's it's

what Roger Cardinal uh in his uh early work on on the Mosaic way of looking talks about uh and he's obviously somebody hugely important about ethnographic practices

um he caused peripheralized attention so it's a very specific form of defameric defamiliarization it removes our gaze from the center of the screen and forces

us to look around and I found that such a powerful thing I've written about that but for me it kind of connected with your notion of invisibility because what is the message of this video it's a kind

of invisibility it's the in-between of these things yeah thank you but but I I I assure you don't want to be on the team but no sorry

because for me no eisenstein to me this is and I I it's not that I don't want to be

on the team eisenstein but uh but it seems to me that at least sometimes the Montage you know the intellectual Montage that he was proposing was actually uh

quite um uh maybe I'm wrong you would know much more about that than I but uh providing clear

uh clear messages maybe not but you know this uh these two shots together go and make a revolution

I don't like and and we're well maybe Roberto was also in that business but in a less strict yeah

which I feel this is teamwork okay okay you're on anybody's team I think we're all on the same side but I guess the one

just to um uh Isis having me conceived of spatial montage and clearly this is spatial Montage so from that perspective I'm certainly not into this plus this

equals this but but instead looking at how meaning is is created potentially beautiful Christian over to you would you like to

uh suggest a kid to introduce it um yeah um uh so I was just thinking about whether there

would be a particular thing that would fit with this um um I no I let's just watch the in the order that I suggested and we'll take the

discussion from there so the there was this uh four minute uh scene and uh a film called descending with angels can I just say two words for

introduction so it's it's uh you're going to watch uh assist and Esther uh in a in a situation it's like a it's a meeting in

in a psychiatric hospital where uh where the patient comes to um to receive his medicine and to also to receive

the practice of uh psychiatric education and uh uh I will and I need to say that both of

the people that you're going to it's it's a difficult scene actually at least for me it's a difficult but both of the people that you're going to see in the film agreed uh very much

agreed and actually wanted this scene to be like this in the film um uh so that's just important to to say

when you when you watch people um and uh and it actually means uh a lot especially for the patient uh this particular film where he features uh so

um and the film overall is is a moving in and out of religious practices of healing and psychiatric practices of healing

um and um I guess I shouldn't say more but it's it's just one scene yeah yeah um one thing would it be okay if we open uh

get a little air in for people over there thank you and just let us know when it's too Lighty also online

no just open that up we can also because foreign so just to say again that this is from descending with angels and it

was originally 2013 and published as a film monograph in 2019.

what do you want this is foreign foreign all right I'm just invested team yeah

due to Blue to Blue clothes single rose foreign foreign [Music] [ __ ] tomorrow

[Music] and his blood slips yeah foreign [Music] scene from a from a film which of course

is given in the context of other scenes um um but uh just to link it to

um to what we have talked about um so this is this is uh I've known uh is the the man you see in

the film for 12 years and [Music] and this is what it looks like more or less every day that he every Monday when

he he meets Now esther is not in the hospital anymore but but that's that's the procedure that you go through

um and uh for Esther uh and it's maybe it's can I can connect it to the discussion of co-authorship or the collaborative aspects of working like that so because when you make a

documentary film It's always important to figure out what's the unless you work with candidate cameras or something like that you need to figure out what how can we come together with some sort of mutual interest in

this project um which might not be the same interests I can have my scholarly interests um so for for Esther the scene

um was important to have in the film uh at this length as a way of showing um

a form of criticism of how she she feels reduced to uh sort of a secretary of the biomedical industry and that's how he faced it

um and um and that some of the types of care sometimes are diluted in in her world where she feels that he would she would

she feels that you know the times he's able the even the amount of time that she's able to be with the patient and to actually attend to the paciness is

reduced to to performing this operation of of giving these pillows and doing this from a educational

uh thing for for assists um the scene and the film as a whole in the book I think um it was a way for him to show uh who

he is to A system that is not always acknowledging it the I think he shows his tie at a certain point and some of those things you can say but also to tell the story from his point of view

and also in relationship to his community where there are also some Prejudice around his condition uh the being ill

experiencing possession uh uh or psychosis or what you um whatever vocabulary you would like to use

um so so there are these different interests in that and for me uh I was interested in exploring this um for for personal reasons and for

scholarly reasons but what it gave me uh was also uh something in addition to that so so filming those things I think really

and I also found healing Encounters in the religious settings where uh assists and other people would would attend to which is where he would feel that he got

healing through prayer and those things so some of what he's saying here like he's he's so what he needs to do is to show compliance and he needs to take this box in order to get to the next

patient that's really important and so they have this convention it's a very much a ritual performance you could say they do this every Monday uh so so he testifies to the efficacy of the

medicines by for example saying enthusiastic uh she asked for him do they help or think a thing like that and

then he says yeah they but they made me and then he talks about how they make him sleep so he can sleep but but also says how it makes him sleep

from I don't remember if he says 10 to 10 or something but it's another way of saying that it makes him unable to perform the prayers that he really feels

or is healing so he's the only these implicit messages that are going on in this in this conversation and which she knows all about

but they need they need to find a way to ignore that to continue their interaction and to find this kind of compromise that can be livable for for both of them

so it shows all of those complexities it also shows our situation being a nurse and being Psychiatry but also wearing a

a little what you call this uh bracelet which is uh uh she's when she's not a nurse he's also practicing Buddhist and

when she gets in a like a lot of nurses and there was an epidemic of depressing anxiety and stress among nurses so when when when

she also suffered from stress she she went to Nepal to stay in a monastery for some time and eat a purple things and uh

active started importing it and serving it to her colleagues so the result of that like that's another little thing in an image like this

um but then there is the the the the filming of this and the work with the filming with the material in the in the editing and the juxtaposition and that

to the exorcism uh that I also worked on uh alerted me to um the ritual aspects of of what she's

doing as well in um the way both these religious healings uh even if they are very different and operate in different ways so the

exorcism really focusing on on kind of amplifying the symptom getting the Gin

to speak to to uh to to cry to to the all of this invisible stuff to to to

Really and uh get it and get it to speak get it to express it so and this the psychiatric

medicines are are more focused around the dampening of those kinds of emotional outbursts so they're they're very different and yet the way they both

of these interventions are are uh really uh also interventions that that that in a ritual uh way through repetition the

ongoing repetition and repetition of speak speak Jackson and um and also material Acts [Music]

um seek to cultivate and reconfigure um the sense of self and what is

considered to be a healthy sense of self to cultivate different way of perceiving

yourself and your environment and so so it was a very um that was a very interesting for me as a and obvious to

sort of and which I think came through the work with film to to to start noticing that um and and any extension of that maybe

also to think about the the interesting parallels that that that's film also itself shares with virtual as also being

a medium that's that really works in our perceptual and conceptual dispositions and you know answers them so I'd like to

to take you both I'd like our rather you to invite us into your activity of material thinking when you're putting this stuff together I think this is a question for both of you actually there

was a moment in in semblance Katie where is he called Scotty he jumps into the water underneath the the Golden Gate bridge and then the character from

portrait of the lady on fire jumps into the water from the boat but it's not synced and the Temptation there I can imagine would be to sink it and I'm I so that

activity of material thinking where you make a decision like that I'd be interested to know about and similarly with this you talked about the comparison with these other scenes that if you see the film as a whole you you

are implicitly compared in terms of their ritualistic aspects and so on and their different emphasis on forms of cure but you also have this images at the beginning of this scene where you

see the outside of the hospital and some of them are very formal so almost abstract uh form and image of the windows of the hospital and I'd like to

invite you to tell us about that sort of choice uh yes um so yeah experience I suppose

leads you to understand that how best to show what the ways you might show a rhyme is not always by reproducing a rhyme of the Rhymes

um because if you show them together in a peripheralized attention situation the viewer may not actually be able to see the Run in a way that I want them to see the

rhyme she'll notice around but to be able to see the rhyme to really be able to recognize it it happens with music too so in the other the film I showed last that Matthias curated last night

um in as part of the screening which is a new film not yet published perhaps not even quite finished called drill team it shows a lot of sonoric rhyming

between two two films and there was one moment where I had to choose not to not to just play them together as tempting as that would be for the rhythm of my film which is quite compelling I needed

to actually stagger them and risk a lack of Rhythm or the Rhythm being disrupted in order to show that the the later film was re was alluding to the rhythm of the earlier film

um so yeah so it's just yeah kind of an experience but sometimes it'll only work like that's an abstract decision that feels very thought through it doesn't feel like that when I'm editing and because the music is also there and how

do I make things fit with the music but yeah so so sometimes it really like that uncanniness I want to reproduce and sometimes I don't want to reproduce the uncanniness I want us to see the

mechanism of the uncanniness more clearly so you're talking you're taking necklace in the case of that particular decision about the experience of the viewer absolutely yeah yeah

but you know but in such a fast way it's like quite habitualized now I'm not kind of having to worry about that sort of or you know it's all like I don't really think of the Cure in a way because the

the process of thinking of the viewer is so automatic for me I am the viewer it's The Spectator in the text as Nick Brown would put it in his early work on John Ford's films

um yeah so I I don't think I wrote the chapter about that that particular frame but uh but it's true it's there it's uh

and it it is resonating with other images of other Urban environments uh it's a residential environments and and I I guess um

um so um so I'm also filming this so and I think the in the process of filming it's

a it's a strange combination of being like you're expressing in your work um which is then happening in the editing but in a way you're also filming or

you're you're taking uh paying attention to the different things and it's uh and there is um of course there are

conscious aspects of that process but but there has to be some some playfulness allowed as well you have to allow yourself to to to to just

kind of be there and to um with a certain sort of openness well

well you you may not necessarily know exactly why you are filming this or choosing them please so um I I really like the way you talk about this experience you had in the

cinema that says what something so I think that something like that comes like this uh just something breaks the attention

um and um and then eventually it also ends up with the in the on the in the editing uh in on a timeline and it and and

sometimes it will disappear if it doesn't continue to resonate um and sometimes sometimes you then

become conscious of possible meanings it could have or you or you elaborate that so I do think those shots will will uh will be pointing to resemblances or semblances

um between these different Urban environments and I guess now that you're asking me I think there's also something about the square boxes that are uh really if you

like I haven't thought about it like that but but there's a lot of square boxes and there's a lot of opinions strong

opinions a lot of knowledge that's quite solid around these encounters about what's right and wrong about uh

who is in and out and who's who is part of the community who's not part of the community those kinds of things so so I guess you can you can

if you like you can they the open environments is sort of inviting that kind of uh uh and then the people are

disrupting that and the interactions are definitely disrupting those uh um those borderlines yeah so let me pick up on what you said there about cleverness and the kind of you said

there needs to be some playfulness and this is certainly a feature of your own yeah uh form of working the reason I mentioned this is that I mean I feel the whole process of getting a PhD is having

any sense of player beaten out of you like as rigorously as possible uh I I certainly that was mine and so I mean I even used to have jokes in my footnotes that I put there just so that my

supervisor could take them out and then so I'm wondering what then you know given that you are two very senior Scholars what is the role and purpose

and power of playfulness in your work um the kind of cognitive charge or epistemological uh Power of us uh-huh

well I mean it's here I kind of feel it's necessary to point out that I'm not a very senior scholar in one very straightforces I'm not really employed um and I wasn't when I started this so I think it's actually really important to

point out that I didn't develop this kind of work or gain these enthusiasms um when I was in a job I actually was in a period of two two years out I kind of self-funded sabbatical I didn't even

know if I would go back in actually I kind of like now I'm out again so um thankfully and very luxuriously and I'm very very lucky um but I don't know if I would ever have

done this work in the academy so um and I you know and it wasn't people in the academy particularly who were inspiring me with this work either so it didn't come from there for me didn't come from practice research even though I was really familiar with that having run a

department with a practice research satisfaction um so the play came from being in a position where I could play and where I wasn't being beaten up because we still are people are in an ongoing sense about

the norms and the normativity of our profession and our disciplines um the conceptual grasps that we need to lose to make some of the this work

um you know and artists developing a lot of practice research also came from outside of the academy into it for good reasons um and and you know have struggled in a way to hold on to their their space

where they could experiment and play so I mean playing experiment is the same thing for me but you're absolutely right it's fun um you know it is it's a much less anxious process it is one where you can

allow yourself the luxury of of humor or a mess um you know kind of like or something not being coherent in a conventional

academic way but my feeling is that it's it's here is not it's not the luxury it's the very method yeah so it's the kind of principle of Prayer in this rather than playfulness being the

Surplus to be removed yeah it that's right how could you remove the playfulness of my work there will be nothing left um and yeah so maybe that's it's it's uh its value and I write about this as well

because I am very attached to the theories of DW winicot who is one of the foremost object relations theorists of play and creative um space and potential space as he saw

it which actually maps onto that material thinking triangulation really well as well because there's all of those theories have this in between space which allows us to play and for

Whitaker talking about mental health which are films so eloquent about you know it's it's when we are ill that we don't have uh that mental that space

that potential space if people are brought up in not good enough because he's very modest man surroundings of Parental care that's when these spaces

do not develop whereas in good enough uh parental care that potential space is allowed to thrive and it's from that potential space on a sort of social level where

um you know these creative forms which link to religion because for when it got they come from religion and play are associated interestingly

um you know so for me these these things are kind of definitely something I know I wouldn't have done I mean I started in my 40s I don't think I would have had the wherewithal by which I mean all

sorts of different things put psychological economic academic uh professional um to be able to play and uh I know that

let other people in in different stages all the different conditions of precarity uh uh you know that's an unaffordable luxury for many

um if I should add something I um yeah I think I had the luxury of of being uh I I still don't I don't know I

guess I am established now I have a proper position finally but I still feel very much like a petite sometimes but I

have to get over that but I was also very lucky to have supervisors who would not be who would allow a space for

experiment uh and um and and being um being appreciating of experiments and and not conforming to a very strict ideals of what should be

um part of a PhD thesis for example and so I I really think that's uh important I I also think it's important with

discipline and to actually read things or words things or or do a spelling check or things like that is is

useful also and and also because I I think playfulness comes with actually I wrote a chapter about I seen in this film where it definitely was playful

maybe a bit too playful and the wife of another patient alerted me to that and she thought it should be found in a different way he was a professional photographer as well so he gave me some

filming lessons afterwards about how to film an exorcism and with the with a more steady hand-holding

operations something about how you so so is it disciplined me and she also offered a tripod to use sometimes so

and that's a long story which actually is interesting also uh not only because of the playfulness

but also because so I think playfulness like we cannot uh it's important to have the possibility of having an openness but of

course uh discipline and red View and the feedback from colleagues and the people we work with uh it's important to also make sure that

we don't just fall back into predatise uh I think it's that's so it's it's a I I don't know if playfulness is uh I I

maybe playfulness as an aspect of heartfulness if you want to use that word to because

um I think sometimes the the tricky thing of of uh doctrines uh whether they're theoretical or representational

in terms of what should be part of a PhD thesis uh uh is that uh then it will be about fulfilling those

boxes which yeah they don't have any value in themselves they're just forms that that they should be helpful like they should be used to the extent that they are

helpful um uh but it's it's important that that there is a way in which the the work um

is linked to um to to something Beyond those boxes which uh uh to to me uh playfulness is is in that

direction or heartfulness if you want or something like that the sense uh to come back to your Cinema experience this this self-centered

something is here I think that's important so I always have this sort of link to to that experience yeah

so at this point I'd like to go to the room and I'll also take a look at the comments in the uh chat just to see if there's anything that needs to be pulled out there but we were sort of at the end of our time but we have plenty of time

for lunch so we can go on for another few minutes so if anyone has any questions or comments yeah please Mom I'd like to take you on the comment that you just made about

um documentary and paper lesson about how the um how that plays out with your participants because they may not be very willing to um to have their image

played with in a way so I was wondering how you deal with those relationship of being an ethnographic filmmaker and at

the same time making uh more video essay style or or like a critical kind of perspective

yeah thanks for this question and maybe that was also why I tried to just add something to this concept of faithfulness because I think actually

this word stands in a tricky relationship to to let's say a scene like this which is also filled with a

large history of suffering of multiple displacements he's a refugee from from Liberal Lebanon and his family with

refugees from Palestine and he you know and lots of so and then come in comes the PHD student who wants to be playful

with the camera so I like your question for that reason uh so so so but but let's say uh playfulness and in the sense of a certain form of openness and

or let's say heartfulness I don't know if that's just the word that popped up but but uh something that's not going out there to

replicate or to fill certain boxes but that actually is there to to listen and pay attention and allow the world or

the people to to impact uh uh I think that sort of a tune which I think is very um we can say lots of critical things of

observational Cinema which is a big tradition in the field that I work in but we can also say some good things and I think really this conservation of an

of an awareness of um of um of those people that you're with of that that world that situation

you are including yourself as if you're filming um oh uh yeah and so if you work with people who uh don't like being part of

your work I would suggest stopping uh I mean unless uh I was just at the school of Journalism yesterday we

were actually discussing the same thing so so I think at least for an anthropologists I uh unless I work with very uh powerful

figures uh who who accesses part X access excerpt power over others uh I think it's very important to work from a

position of consent uh and and not just consent in the sense that you sign some form before doing an interview or something but as a continuous process

that that involves you know a long-term engagement with people to to go back and figure out are we still okay with this do we do

what's important for you so so I would for example show this scenes to people multiple times we'll discuss the project and we'll discuss our different interests in this project

and the value of it um and I remember my anxiety for sharing this to Esther and her Superior

um colleagues and um because of course this this scene was I thought it was a striking scene that

captulated what I had seen many many times and I thought it would be nice to have that it would be important to have in the film but uh but you know sees a

person with a life and uh life that needs to continue so so she needed to improve approve uh

approve that NC was crying when she was watching it the first time and um and then she just wanted you she wanted

to have it exactly like this uh um Superior wanted it to be shortened a little bit um

so uh and so it's important to to be carrying people through the process like that I think um of course then eventually you need to

stop because you need to publish it right so that's that's I think the important Point that's where it's really important to show the whole thing make sure that they people are still

comfortable with it to talk about what could be be the possible implications that you could imagine of such a firm

uh so right now we're we're we have a Premiere in Cairo for a new film um and there are some I think two uh to people here if you saw that film it's

about religious experiences of life in in um there are some scenes uh well I think if you guys see it you won't detect that

there is a political significance of some of it but there are certain scenes that are actually really for some audiences they would be very it would be very tricky for them and it will produce

some discussions in Cairo when we have the premiere um so it's important when you can foresee that kind of situation to really

discuss it and discuss whether why do we want that we could also edit it now uh and so if you find out that you're working with people that are not

comfortable in front of the camera you need to uh either either stop or take a discussion about what why are we note that should we do

something else and um yeah and uh maybe except if you were with very powerful people that doesn't

deserve that that form of uh attention but uh yeah is that an answer yes [Music]

and I'd like for you to be interesting for me to try YouTube you can try these two together and I could imagine that because uh

embedded theoretical tradition of looking into positionality in the camera or the subject of the Observer and all those kinds of issues that are attached

to it within videographic research it's uh I mean maybe we have to become more accustomed to how we negotiate and

conceive a position element and but I just like to hear both of you reflect on I mean to what extent you see yourself as being able to

perform play foreign also across the the film particularly your case question that they say the positionality

of one particular scene shifts to a different kinds of personality in a different scene uh you know I mean as I

remember recently a filmmaking uh the discussion about the female release of the male bases at least in terms of how we you know

conceived of the way that it works with special Energy across differences so that the in fact very difficult to solve

one at least gender positionality but it was potentially also more political and the could you

tell us a bit more about how you try how to consider this way this is the potential to work with well I mean when you started to ask that

question I was thinking of positionality of authorship and um so I'm going to say a little bit about that before I I move on to what you were asking um so because that's just that's that's

a very uh important question for us it always has been but I guess when you start out making work and you don't think anybody's watching it and it's all playful and you're just messing around and you're putting your work on Vimeo

there's I didn't feel a huge need to frame my work with a statement about where who I was and where I was coming from in a kind of Auto ethnographic um process but obviously I've been making work for

a long time now and I do engage with that process a lot more I think I always did with my written work because I I was I am a Latin americanist I'm still that that's my training and as a a white

European northern European uh Latin americanist um I think thinking about positionality has this has always been required of me and then also something I've been interested in doing in

different ways um I so I haven't made too many explicit statements about my authorship but often when I'm writing about the work I will

um you know kind of contextualize some of it um and I think you know there's a certain amount of my positionality as it all that comes through my work I mean I made a lot of stuff maybe most people

haven't seen a majority of it even I'm I'm sure that's the case um but uh but I think a lot of it's very obviously queer for example it's very

obviously uh you know interested in what to me as an anglophone person is foreign language Cinema um it's actually rarely on American Cinema for example or Australian Cinema

or Canadian Cinema um so I think those kinds of things about my general positionality as a person there but in the increasingly important uh and pressing debate about

diversification of our disciplines you know I'm very aware of my positionality and I'm very drawn to working on filmmakers who are as well so I have I think really in the last years I've been

a long admirer and the student of the work of Lucrezia Martel the Argentine filmmaker um and I'm interested in her work in this positionality of the white woman

for example as an oppressive Force but as a as also you know the conditionality of uh lucrecia martel's life as a you know somebody coming from very privileged background so those sorts of

things I think are things I'm working through at the same time as trying to ensure that the spaces I occupy and in part co-manage respond to these pressing

questions but you actually asked an even more um new question for me about the positionality of the work and the Gaze of the work maybe um the kind of way that the work will place a viewer and I think that that's

fascinating I I think that's what semblance is also about um and maybe when I write about it I can make that more uh I can kind of comment on the what I hope is the eloquence of

the work um you know what we're dealing with in the couple uh Narrative of some of uh portrait of a lady on fire is very different from the couple we're seeing

in the other screen or is it um because in fact there's a lot of people who write about the queerness of Hitchcock bar which I do not mean particularly the queerness of Alfred Hitchcock but the queerness of the spaces of Hitchcock films and Laura

mulby has made more progress than anyone else in problematizing her earlier understanding of the male gaze she's way ahead of anybody who might say it's just sophisticated enough

um because it's very very sophisticated now but and also I kind of reminded of the work of Jackie Stacy uh who has also looked at that kind of question of subject positions in work um to inquire about the mobility of them

so I think that's a really interesting question with video essays and for me that's one reason why voiceover is something I often avoid because voice over at its worst

plasters over something like that but by which I don't mean the kind of whitewashing but I mean like producing a kind of weight it's sort of like covers something and uh

homogenizes and monologizes uh to neologize there um the work in ways that I prefer to avoid I'd rather have a much more open space for viewing

Christian we need to go Resort but I want to give you the chance to have a friend of art unless being the white male foreign [Music]

[Music] of course positionality has been hugely important to discuss and I think actually from graphic filmmaking began very early with

these discussions because it it's so this is in in in the in the interactions that you would see

the filmmaker whoever it is is visible in any kind of footage even if they are not having a voiceover or in the reactions at least

and of course there are I think if so people like Sean Roose and Edgar Morin and have been important in establishing a space for thinking about authorship and

positionality in different ways and and also in terms of how to destabilize [Music] um uh but different kinds of positions so

so it has been a part of thinking and ethnographic filmmaking but not enough and it I think it's uh

definitely um lots to uh to do my own way of um um I I

but when one thing is to just pay attention to the fact that other people than white male professors are making infographic films and and maybe

highlighting that sometimes and maybe stepping back sometimes to allow others and there is actually amazing uh the things I I was just mentioning some

of the work that colleagues in Cairo are doing that I'm really enjoying a lot um for me uh

I think it's also important to establish collaborations which also can be formal

collaborations so I I my latest film is is produced with an Egyptian producer uh

had a lot fee it was a really amazing filmmaker as well and um and Mohammed Mustafa who is a great Egyptian

filmmaker and uh an editor as well and and uh Amira Matata who's doing some of this cinematography and also contributed

to the story and uh and uh I I think that kind of um

uh that's at least very helpful for me to be pushed around with my particular perspective and we have have that counted and I hope that it's also

interesting I think it's interesting for them as well it's been a really wonderful way of working so and we hope to continue with it

with this process so so that's that's one way and uh and then you talk about process positionality across scenes uh in a in a single film

um so um so I like um it's a slightly different uh thing than but

um I right but it's wonderful how a film can sort of uh transform our our bodies and we

can't help living with the people we meet in the film and the environments that we meet in the film we hear somebody's breath and immediately

it's in us and transforming us right and and uh and this amazing thing that that this

and Wild Thing uh which takes it close to Ritual actually that you can have that and be there and be impacted that and then cut

um what my colleagues in Cairo calls a European Court then cut and you're somewhere where else living uh living differently we got you

you have you may have a different skin and a certain positionality and a certain uh [Music] um

certain perceptual and emotional and conceptual disposition dispositions but they are being reworked through uh through you becoming possessed by what's

happening on the screen in a way so I think that's a fascinating possibility of brown to actually destabilize our uh

yeah our motor being in the in the world yeah we need to be back promptly because we have uh speechers tuning in from the states so we don't want to keep them

lazy so could we just thank uh Christian sewer and Catherine Grant