Text detail

In last decade, the Experimental Laboratory at Harvard University, Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), became a phenomenon in both anthropology as well as in cinema. Their work resonate among international social science community, their films were awarded at prestigious film festivals and they are taken as an influential tendency of contemporary cinema. In this paper, SEL methods and films are approached as an intersection of social sciences and arts, anthropology and film. The text argues that SEL changes our usual patterns of perception and actualizes our experience with the world. Therefore, special attention is paid to the phenomena of presence and aspects of performativity of documentary practice instead of just observation and recording. Finally, SEL documentaries are approached as artworks that transform trivial encounters into a method and that shift the attention from singularities (artifacts, personas, sounds, practices) to a situation in its irreducible and dynamic complexity. The importance is founded in the way uncertainty is accepted as a human condition.

Biograf themes:

Methodology of qualitative research; Everyday life and the ordinary; Anthropology and ethnography; Ethical and legal aspects of research; Visuality, visual media and research

Citation:

BERNÁTKOVÁ, T. (2018): Naučit se pohybovat v neurčitosti: Filmy Sensory Ethnography Lab a etika zírání[Learn to live in uncertainty: SEL documentaries and the ethics of staring]. Biograf, 67-68: 3-28. Available at http://www.biograf.org/clanek.html?id=1029 [last access25. 09. 2020]

Acknowledgement:

Tato studie vznikla na Akademii múzických umění v Praze v rámci projektu „Etika zírání, o pohledu v etnografickém filmu“, podpořeného z prostředků účelové podpory na specifický vysokoškolský výzkum, kterou poskytlo MŠMT v roce 2017. Za vedení práce děkuji Janu Gogolovi ml.