An upate: my partner and I both had busy weekends, so we worked mostly independently. I came in for a few hours and did very little actual work in premier. Mostly, I just had the clips open and jotted down a ton of notes/ideas about how to fit all the different pieces together. I grouped […]

Our rough cut was very rough, because of our crunched timeline: we did our interview on Friday, quickly reviewed the footage on Saturday, shot the liturgy on Sunday, edited on Monday, and screened the rough cut on Tuesday for our class. My partner and I have quite different working styles: he meticulously crafts scenes bit […]

Our film proposal was largely based on a certain method for trying to capture “subjective religious experience.” Our plan, from the proposal, is to begin with an interview, and then develop the insights from that interview into an understanding of our subject’s experience of her religion.  We hope our interviews will, in turn, inform our […]

This week we explored Jean Rouch’s Cinema-verité. I’m not going to focus on that topic explicitly (though I may link to it a bit at the end), but instead reflect on my own response process so far, and why I’m not convinced it has been productive. I also recognize the irony of my response the […]

This week, I returned to my previous approach: I focused on one film, and one filmmaker. I didn’t have as much time to incorporate the readings of the week, so my notes are mostly just based on the film, and my own responses and observations about filming techniques. In particular, because I was beginning to […]

Gardner’s “Forest of Bliss”–reflection We screened Gardner’s film with our class, so I watched it without taking notes or doing any sketches (of course, I could have done both, but I didn’t plan for it). I’m actually glad I watched the film without any distractions—part of what is so striking about it is how immersive […]

This week, again, I focused (for my response) on one filmmaker, and, in fact, one film–Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera.” I chose to sketch a few scenes from the film, and then reflect on how they relate to certain element’s of Vertov’s “Variant of a Manifesto.” Mostly, my reflections relate to cuts between scenes […]

This week I chose to focus on just one of the films that we saw–this is mostly because I watched “Nanook of the North” (our other film for the week) before I started my ‘diary’. However, the composition of “Snail Opera” also lent itself to note-taking and drawing. It is a hybrid piece, combining sounds, […]

This blog is the compilation of a semester’s worth of reflections (“diary” entries, one might say) for the course “Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic Filmmaking.” We were instructed to create fairly regular responses to the material in the course, and to share those responses with our classmates on our blogs. I was slow getting started, and realized […]