Download Final paper-proposal

VES 189 & Anth 2835
Guidelines for the Final Paper
EITHER:
— A Proposal for A Non-fiction or Ethnographic Film/Video
Your final paper is a proposal for an ethnographic video or film which you would like to
make. Those of you who would like to do this at some point, either on your own or else in a
future VES or other class, can use proposal this as an opportunity to get a jump start on it.
(Therefore there are certain advantages to choosing a project that can be produced locally.)
Your proposal should include a thorough investigation into a particular subject and
should indicate its cinematic possibilities and empirical or substantive or ethnographic content
(What is the relationship between the individuals you will be focussing on and the wider (sub)culture or society? How might factors of class, gender, politics, sexuality, sexual orientation,
ethnicity, and/or “race” impact your subject? How is your subject mediated by power, culture,
and history? What anthropological themes will your film implicitly explore?). In addition, you
will be expected to address the major theoretical and ethical issues we have covered in class. In
order to complete this project successfully, you should observe the following guidelines:
Picking a topic: Choose a topic that particularly engages you — a population (a person,
a dyad, a triad, a group of people, an institution, a relationship, an ethos, a structure of feeling, a
process, a sub-culture, conceivably even an “event”...) you are particularly intrigued with and a
theme, or quality you want to explore within or around that population (or person). If you are
working on a local subject, you are expected to do some preliminary fieldwork — participant
observation, perhaps (should it be your style) one or two (preferably informal) interviews, as well
as considerable background reading. If your field site is not local, you must do extensive
research, preferably by reading at least one monograph or ethnography. You will find much of
the information you need to complete this project in Chapters 2 and 6 of Cross-Cultural
Filmmaking. Remember that the style of filming you envisage should suit the subject: Do NOT
be formulaic or prescriptive in your approach. Think about explored and unexplored affinities
between the non-fiction film and the novel, poetry, even music; rather than the 6 o’clock news or
a theoretical treatise. This is non-fiction, not broadcast journalism or fiction: you do not know
what you will shoot until you shoot it. That said, you need to be as well prepared and as
informed about your subject as possible, so that you can anticipate the sorts of scenes you
MIGHT shoot.
Writing the paper: This proposal should consist of three parts:
1. The first section of your project should be a 5-6 page research paper about the themes, or the
population, people, institution, or subject you are looking at and the theoretical issues you will be
exploring. Remember that, contrary to popular misopinion, theory is the precise opposite of
abstraction. Greek theoria, theorein, means to gaze, to inspect intently: contemplation as an
essentially scopic act and process. I.e. Theory is radically empirical. Look into ethnographies,
theoretical and historical, sociological, journalistic and/ or popular writing on your topic. Use
any oral histories you may have access to. Have any other films or television shows been
produced on the topic or on related topics? Would you want to use any of this as stock footage?
This section (4-5 pages) should be followed by a one-page annotated bibliography and
annotated filmography.
2. The second section of your proposal should be a 5-6 page treatment for your project. Identify
the theme, subject, population, person, or people you want to work with, their history, the
specific situation that intrigues you, and your personal motivation for being attracted to the
subject and the point of view you imagine you might take vis-à-vis the subject.
Your proposal should also contain a discussion of and justification for the style and
methodology you anticipate possible using. Will this be primarily expository, impressionistic,
observational or reflexive cinema? A combination of styles? Will you foreground narrative, or
montage? Or something else entirely? Please explain your choices. Will you do participant
observation? Interviews? Formal or informal? (If you anticipate shooting talking heads, or
formal interviews, this will need particular justification, in view of just how limited a style they
are.) Might you deploy archival footage or photographs? How will you use them? To what
extent will you involve the subjects of your film in its production? Will you seek to be fully
collaborative? Even handing over the camera, and giving them control over the editing? Why or
why not? Whose story(ies), if any, might you be telling, and how?
Remember that some topics that are effective on paper do not translate easily into film.
How will you make your project at once cinematic and anthropological? (Try to think about
what you might show rather than what you would wish to say.) How might you structure the
film? Will you take an historical or biographical approach? Or a synchronic slice-of-life? How
might you contextualise your scenes? Will you use a straight narrative (story) format? Why or
why not? Will your film have plot or character development? Why or why not? Who are you
making your film for, and why? How will you best reach them? If you envisage deploying an
“experimental” style, describe what you have in mind as specifically as possible, justifying your
stylistic choices epistemologically, aesthetically, and ethically.
What will the film look like? Will you use long takes like (some) observational
filmmakers? Will you/ the filmmaker intrude ostensibly or reflexively into the pro-filmic world
you will be recording? Why or why not? How – visually, aurally, or otherwise? Will you
experiment with shooting and/ or editing? Why? Along what lines? What will your film sound
like? Will you use location sound? Will you use voice-over narration? Music (“the opium of
the cinema”—Jean Rouch)? What quality will it have? Who will speak in your film? And what
is that person's (those people's) role?
3. A reasonable budget. Use that in chapter 6 of Cross-Cultural Filmmaking as a guide.
Proposals must be typed, double-spaced, in 12-pt size font. You are encouraged to
include photographs and legends if you have any.
OR:
A final Essay: This paper should be 12-16 double-spaced pages. Choose from one of the
following three subjects. The body of the paper (approx. 10 pps.) should be followed by a
complete bibliography and a complete filmography for all your references.
(1) How May Culture Be Explored Through Film and Text? You are expected to display
your deep knowledge of the films and reading for this class, and to consider both the possibilities
and problems of representing or evoking (or depicting or describing) culture in the multi-sensory
medium of film/video, and to compare them with the possibilities and problems of representing
or evoking culture through writing (and particularly, but not necessarily exclusively, the
expository prose of anthropologists). (You may even interrogate such core anthropological
concepts as culture itself, as David MacDougall does in his essay “Transcultural Cinema,” in
Transcultural Cinema.)
(2) Barbash and Taylor (in “Documentary Styles” (CCF)) distinguish between
expository, impressionistic, observational, and reflexives non-fiction film styles. However, the
array of films we have seen in class show this stylistic taxonomy to be woefully inadequate.
Improve upon it, with a stylistic taxonomy of your own. In doing so, you must refer at length and
in depth to the films and reading of the course, discuss the relationship between style and
substance, content and methodology, and ethics and epistemology. Consider the advantages and
disadvantages of each for non-fiction filmmaking, or for anthropology, or for transcultural
representation more broadly. Or else, rubbish the whole concept and presumption of coming up
with a taxonomy in the first place.
(3) Many of the films we have seen in class deliberately blur the boundaries between fact
and fiction. Others do so unwittingly. Consider the relationship between (1) fact and fiction, and
(2) subjectivity and objectivity [by no means one and the same] in the films we have seen this
semester, with a view towards formulating a conclusion about “documentary”’ or “non-fiction
film”’s relationship to reality.
(4) Paul Ricoeur has written:
“When we discover that there are several cultures instead of just one and
consequently at the time when we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural
monopoly, be it illusory or real, we are threatened with the destruction of our own
discovery. Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we
ourselves are an 'other' among others. All meaning and every goal having
disappeared, it becomes possible to wander through civilisations as if through
vestiges and ruins. The whole of mankind becomes an imaginary museum:
where shall we go this weekend — visit the Angkor ruins or take a stroll in Tivoli
of Copenhagen? (“Civilizations and National Cultures,” in his History and Truth)
How have the kinds of cultural configurations you have you encountered in the films we
have screened this semester affected your sense of your identity — your sense of self and
also your sense of otherness (both your relationship to the various Others you have gazed
at on the screen, but also any sensation you may have had of yourself as Other)? Please
be sure to discuss your different responses to at least three films in some depth, and how
you feel the films have affected who you are.
All these essays will involve further reading beyond that assigned for the course,
including the following recommended books:
Anna Grimshaw, The Ethnographer’s Eye
Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World
Howard Morphy and Marcus Banks, Rethinking Visual Anthropology (esp. Intro and
essays by David MacDougall and Elizabeth Edwards)
Devereaux and Hillman, Fields of Vision
Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary
Fatimah Rony, The Third Eye
Laura Marks, Experimental Ethnography
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality
Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries
Carl Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Non-Fiction Film
Brian Winston, Lies, Damn Lies, and Documentaries
Brian Winston, Technologies of Seeing
Brian Winston, Claiming the Real
Dai Vaughan, For Documentary
David MacDougall, The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses
Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Knowledge: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture
Jay Ruby, Picturing Culture
GOOD LUCK!