Christian Suhr

Can Film Show the Invisible

This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by striving for ever more realistic depictions—a position often associated with observational cinema—but rather by exploiting the artificial means through which human vision can be transcended. Achieved particularly through the use of montage, such disruptions can multiply the perspectives from which filmic subject matter is perceived, thus conveying its invisible and irreducible otherness. This, however, is an argument not to dismiss the realism of much ethnographic filmmaking, but rather to demonstrate how montage can and must be used to break with the mimetic dogma of the “humanized” camera. The effective image, we argue, depends crucially on maintaining a tension between a strong sense of reality and its occasional, and therefore only then effective, disruption through montage.

Camera, Intervention and Cultural Critique: An Introduction

The key questions of the research project Camera as Cultural Critique, in which all contributors to this section of the issue participated, are outlined here. The overall purpose of the project was to explore how the use of audiovisual media in ethnographic research may contribute to sustained cultural critique. Grounding that critique in a certain understanding of the temporality of the present—as always in a state of emergence and involving images of past and future—the researchers explore the potential of audiovisual media for the critical (re)imagining of pasts and futures, in creative collaborations with their interlocutors. To create platforms for such collaboration different interventionist methods are used, including video feedback, the use of film archives in provocative museum installations, and the use of photo archives in intercultural dialogue and collaborative re-enactment. Another focus of attention is the particular affordances of the camera as technology. Here we explore the resistance that the camera, as a mechanical eye, exerts on the filmmakers’ intentions, thus prompting reflection on ways of seeing. The camera can also act as a mediator between people and their different ways of perceiving. Finally, we see the camera as a context-triggering device that can unsettle deep-seated cultural ways of seeing and understanding. In short, we conclude that audiovisual media have great potential for a cultural-critical and collaborative research practice.

Camera Monologue: Cultural Critique beyond Collaboration, Participation and Dialogue

Cameras always seem to capture a little too little and a little too much. In ethnographic films profound insights are often found in the tension between what we are taught socially to perceive and the peculiar non-social perception of the camera. Ethnographic filmmakers study the worlds of humans while leaning on, and sometimes being inspired, obstructed and even directed by the particular non-human and monologic forms of seeing and hearing that a camera can produce. But how would a camera perceive the footage it produces, and what would it think of the various ways we use it? In this textual experiment, I imagine what different cameras might reply to these questions if they could speak. In doing so, I call attention to ethnographic filmmaking as a more-than-human, more-than-collaborative and more-than-dialogical mode of cultural critique.

Faith in anthropology

Response to rejoinders to Willerslev, Rane , and Christian Suhr . 2018 “Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer’s divine revelation.” Hau : Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1): 65–78.

Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer’s divine revelation*

Anthropological insights are not produced or constructed through reasoned discourse alone. Often they appear to be given in “leaps of faith” as the anthropologist’s conceptual grasp upon the world is lost. To understand these peculiar moments, we adopt the Kierkegaardian concept of religious faith, not as certitude in some transcendental principle, but as a deeply paradoxical mode of knowing, whose paths bend and twist through glimpses of understanding, doubt, and existential resignation. Pointing to the ways in which such revelatory and disruptive experiences have influenced the work of many anthropologists, we argue that anthropology is not simply a social science, but also a theology of sorts, whose ultimate foundation might not simply be reason but faith.