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The looking machine calls for the redemption of documentary cinema, exploring the potential and promise of the genre at a time when it appears under increasing threat from reality television, historical re-enactments, designer packaging and corporate authorship. The book consists of a set of essays, each focused on a particular theme derived from the author’s own experience as a filmmaker. It provides a practice-based, critical perspective on the history of documentary, how films evoke space, time and physical sensations, questions of aesthetics, and the intellectual and emotional relationships between filmmakers and their subjects. It is especially concerned with the potential of film to broaden the base of human knowledge, distinct from its expression in written texts. Among its underlying concerns are the political and ethical implications of how films are actually made, and the constraints that may prevent filmmakers from honestly showing what they have seen. While defending the importance of the documentary idea, MacDougall urges us to consider how the form can become a ‘cinema of consciousness’ that more accurately represents the sensory and everyday aspects of human life. Building on his experience bridging anthropology and cinema, he argues that this means resisting the inherent ethnocentrism of both our own society and the societies we film.
cleans the path. That’s what I feel; I confirm my dear mother’s theory. (Elisa Del Carmen Avendaño Curaqueo) 3 It is curious to think that the material for spiritual protection of the people of Wallmapu comes from their invader and is what gives them strength. It is an act of rebellion against the oppressor to take their most precious good – the silver of their coins – and transmute it into something with a very different, almost opposing, spiritual
notions of objectivity or truthfulness. Ian Hacking (1990) reports that, in the Renaissance period, people who played with dice and coin flips began noticing the intriguing regularities that would later become Gaussian probability theory. Yet their forays were largely considered suspect. Chance was considered dicey; proper, rational thinkers believed in universal natural laws that controlled all things including whether a coin would flip heads or tails at a particular moment. It took a few hundred years for cultural assumptions to form that true and false could be not
Sassen's “before method,” geologists and petroleum engineers take porosity seriously as they try to measure the internal voids and pores of a rock, and how liquid or other matter will pass through these formations. The trains, the mines, the tourists, shopping- or beauty-driven travel represent both the pores and deposits within and across the border that require similar ethnographic precision but also sound theoretical and epistemological sensitivity. I coined different qualifications of porosity to let me move through the chapters and tell the
3 . It can also serve as a marker of local identities, as in the case of the sounds of a rural world of the past described in chapter 4 , or the recordings of the sounds of the home village made for the migrant communities in the USA ( chapter 5 ). The concept of soundmark, coined by Schafer to refer to ‘a community sound which is unique or possesses qualities which make it specially regarded or noticed by the people in that community’ ( 1977 : 10), can be usefully expanded and applied to all these examples. Interestingly, in recent years definitions of
feeling with my grandmother, and we all had it, that … she had something hidden, something that was just locked away … to which there was no possible access, ever . Rodrigo: This bombilla … I don’t know if she actually bought it, but my grandmother – my kuku – got it before coming to Santiago. It is a silver bombilla, and is made with coins fused by a kütxal, in Makehue. You can still see the design of the coins; it was restored by a rütxafe here in Santiago. I thought it
of reality that re-configures social relations between people, objects and materials. Debord developed his ideas in tandem with other scholars of the time, most notably those associated with the Frankfurt School, who coined the term ‘culture industry’ to denote the industrialisation of mass-produced culture (music, television, radio, etc.) and its role in the reification of capitalist society. During this stage, subjects of the spectacle were conceived of as passive spectators who watched and consumed rather than actively participated. Today, however, with the
thirty years from academia to the media and then everywhere else’, ultimately taking the form that ‘there are no facts, only interpretations, to mean that every version of events is just another narrative, where lies can be excused as “an alternative point of view” or “an opinion”, because “it’s all relative” and “everyone has their own truth”’ (Pomerantsev 2016). Such notions perhaps reached their zenith in recent times in the United States with the Trump administration’s infamous coining of the term ‘alternative facts’. Much of this has undoubtedly been driven, as I
rhythms heard for the first time, coloured light bulbs, Sunday strolls in the Quinta Normal Park, gente morena (people of colour) dancing in old dark houses on Matucana Avenue, it is from these rhythms and lights, from those dance halls and meadows, that I ask myself a simple question: how do we understand ourselves from joy? How did we live through that past, on the flip side of a coin that so often sealed our fate by showing us the face of suffering? To seek an understanding from a place of joy is to
the 1980s–1990s nationalist movement. It was the nation-state promise that he invoked and that, he felt, had now been betrayed. Echoing a similar sentiment of betrayal, Silva suddenly threw this barrage of questions at me during one of our conversations: Latvian people from the US, from abroad, from Latvia donated their silver Lats, gold, everything else [at the beginning of the 1990s]. Where is it all? Where are the paintings? Where is all the silverware? Where is all the money? Thousands! Where is it? … Those 5 Lats [silver] coins, gold, silverware, people donated