Observational Filmmaking for Education

Digital Video Practices for Researchers, Teachers and Children

Nigel Meager

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783319906263
• Categoría: Didattica
• Categoría: Didattica nell'arte e nelle discipline umanistiche

This book places observational filmmaking in the context of the rapidly developing landscape of creativity and arts based research in education. The author uses observational filmmaking as a lens to address debates surrounding video based and arts based research. Utilising the work of Dewey and Deleuze as the theoretical underpinnings of the volume, this is combined with numerous practical examples of observational filmmaking in schools. The author argues that observational video camera and editing techniques combine careful observation with rigorous visual analysis: they place sensory, affectual and aesthetic qualities in experience centre stage. While observational filmmaking in itself has enormous potential as a methodology for education research, it may also become a fulcrum for children's learning. Children record their experiences in the world around them as they look carefully with a video camera. This pioneering yet practical book will be of interest and value to students and scholars of creativity, learning, and education research methods, as well as constituting a useful guide for teachers, arts practitioners and education policy makers.

© The Author(s) 2019

Nigel MeagerObservational Filmmaking for Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90626-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introducing Observational Film

Nigel Meager¹

(1)

King’s College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Nigel Meager

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Mayank was eleven years old when he learnt to use a video camera in an observational style. He was part of a small group of children who worked with the ethnographic filmmaker and social anthropologist, David MacDougall, in a series of workshops at his state primary school in Delwara. Mayank asked if could take the high definition video camera home to film his father’s working day. An extract from his film, which he shot independently and then co-edited with MacDougall, is available by following the link below. The password for access is 951159. The Childhood and Modernity project, of which Mayank’s film was a part, is discussed more fully in Chapter 2.

In the centre frame of Fig. 1.1, Mayank is visible, reflected in the mirror of his father’s shop. He is wearing a yellow ‘T’ shirt and leaning against the doorframe to help steady the camera. A careful look at the characteristics and the circumstances of this extract from Mayank’s film will help draw out qualities in the observational style of filming.

Fig. 1.1

Mayank’s Family—still from a film by Mayank Ved (MacDougall, 2014)

(https://​vimeo.​com/​139964383)

In his pioneering 1975 essay about observational cinema, Colin Young stressed a camera could be used subjectively and embedded within a setting in a way that allows “a viewer elsewhere to have a sense of experiencing the event” (p. 104). Mayank is sharing with us what he experienced as he used the video camera. This is what he wanted to film, first at home, as his father prepares for the day, and then later on in his father’s barbershop. So, there is nothing objective about what we see. The film sequences are so embedded in Mayank’s experience that it is impossible to imagine another person filming in the same places at the same time in the same way. Such overt subjectivity places observational filming in stark contrast to the apparent (and even covert) objectivity of an apparently scientific or fly-on-the-wall use of a video camera. For example, rather than a static camera pre-positioned and left to record whatever passes across the frame, Mayank’s camera is within and part of the scenes he films. Therefore Mayank’s presence with his camera and his particular relationships and interactions with others in the film are vital to what viewers of the film see. He is a single and identifiable author of the shots he films and a co-author, with his adult guide, of the edited sequences he presents for public viewing.

A characteristic of Mayank’s film is that there is no narrative voice-over from a filmmaker who is telling us what to notice or who wants to expand on the implications of what is shown to develop an argument or make a point. Nor is there an attempt to construct performances or present us with scenes for entertainment. Mayank mostly follows what interests him as it happens. He cares about his father and so what his father does interests him. What happens has not been pre-planned or set-up. Mayank is able to patiently show us ordinary kinds of events as they spontaneously unfold around him. There is a naturalistic narrative element in how the film is structured as it follows, sequentially, how events unfold through time. But Mayank is not attempting to present a didactic narrative; he is simply looking thoughtfully. He is observing from his position, which is clearly visible and at the centre of his film. Others share something of his experience when they view the film.

There are conversations in Mayank’s film, including conversations between him with those around him as he films. These are spontaneous interactions and cement our understanding that Mayank is at the core of the setting he is recording. This is quite different from filmmakers and researchers who conduct interviews or record what people say with discreetly placed microphones to listen in on afterwards. The hugely influential ethnographic filmmaker, John Rouch (1917–2004) described collaborations between the filmmaker and those filmed as a shared anthropology. It is in the spirit of collaboration that Mayank’s mother and father at home and the customers in the barbershop are happy for the boy to be there and seem to get on with what is at hand, accepting he has a video camera and is recording what is going on. Clearly they are sharing the circumstances they are all part of and collaborating with Mayank as he films.

What can be learnt from the extract of Mayank’s film? There is no attempt to explain what we see. Mayank has no special thesis he is trying to convince us of by presenting his film as evidence; neither did he construct his film as a form of argument. We are, however, able to appreciate qualities he is experiencing in ways that other kinds of accounts, especially accounts reliant on words and analyses of data, would simply fail to render. For example, we have a material and aesthetic sense of the sounds together with the size, positioning, colours and forms of the home shrine, as his father completes his morning religious ritual. Also, we have a strong consciousness of the combination of sensuality and forcefulness as soap is lathered onto the customers face preparing for the razor blade that scrapes the beard before a powerful face massage completes the shave. Therefore, even in such a short extract we are learning there are material and aesthetic qualities that are an essential part of Mayank’s experience of himself, his home and his parents. We learn these through his filmmaking encounters whose process is visible to us in the raw film material, which, however it is edited, cannot be rewritten. The decisions Mayank makes in the way he films and what he chooses to film offer us his contingent, subjective and experiential analysis of the circumstances he filmed, which is able to convey, as his teacher David MacDougall puts it, “the multiple features of social events, not through dissociating them from one another or in the abstract, but in the simultaneity and their material and sensory dimensions” (2018).

It may be tempting to argue that Mayank’s film comes close to an unmediated record of his experience whist filming—purer somehow. But he is still the author of what we see, as he makes so many decisions about what and how to film. He may only be eleven but he is still very much in control. Mayank is therefore consciously mediating what we see through his use of the camera. After filming, and together with MacDougall, an anthropologist, he took part in negotiating how what he shot was edited into a finished film. Thus, the final filmic sequences have a refined anthropological quality in their editing, which Mayank alone would not have contemplated.

The whole process may leave viewers with an uncomfortable sensation of voyeurism, even manipulation, as we look in on the boy’s life (and his family’s life) from afar. Even more so as we know what this involved. This necessarily puts both Mayank’s observation with camera and our observation of his film under some reflective scrutiny. There is a tension couched in such a voyeuristic implication, especially when adult researchers and children are working together. For example, there is an aesthetic tenor in play, which has been valorised by adults. This becomes part of what the boy senses he should be doing. This aesthetic is part of the nature of the specific craft skills of video camera work that Mayank learnt and practiced during the observational filmmaking workshops at his school. It appears adults may not have told Mayank what to film but by they have suggested how he should film. However, that same particular approach to filming and the associated practical skills Mayank needed, empowered him to film and share with us parts of his experience he values highly. The boy was tutored by adults and learnt what to do, but he clearly has benefitted from their knowledge and is able to share his experiences in a coherent and useful way because of that pedagogical relationship.

In terms of research, Mayank collaborated with social anthropologists, and learnt from them a way of filming. As he instigated his own inquiry through his independent filmmaking at home and at his father’s shop, Mayank become integral to the academically orientated adults’ research process. This was designed to open pathways to knowing and understanding more about the individual children’s lives and how their lives are lived in contemporary India by placing children’s own knowledge and experience centre stage. There are procedural, methodological and ethical challenges in considering this kind of observational filmmaking as research, especially if children are camera operators and editors. This book, which is centred on observational filmmaking for education, will take up those challenges because the benefits to children both directly as participants and indirectly through the outcomes of such research are substantial.

The Observational Style in Film

Doing ethnography is naturally and ubiquitously associated with observing others. During the twentieth century, the continual technological changes in audio and visual recording technologies meant that using cameras to record became increasingly available to all ethnographic researchers as a way and a means to observe and hold onto the raw material of observations. At one end of a wide spectrum of possible methods, a passive camera can be left running in a fixed (or even from a hidden) position, on predetermined settings, to observe and record whatever humans are doing or saying as they pass across the frame. The resulting material usually becomes data for subsequent analysis. Somewhere in the middle of this spectrum a camera can be deliberately used to document the customs and conventions of people (including children) as they get on with what is at hand. In this situation the camera is active, specifically targeted by the filmmaker, who responds as events unfold, in order to record elements that help address whatever questions are being asked in the research or demanded by the objectives of the intended film. Although data can be extracted from such material for qualitative analysis using any number of possible conceptual frameworks, often the filmmaker produces an explanatory or expressive documentary film, which presents, or contributes to, a particular viewpoint or argument.

However, as Mayank’s film shows, the observational filmmaking style, which is the focus of this book, is further along the spectrum of ways of using a camera to observe. This is also a highly active and engaged technique, which takes the camera into the centre of a situation but without the overtly didactic or explanatory aims of documentary filmmaking. The camera documents with the material, aesthetic and affective subjectivity of the camera user in the foreground, rather than a didactic or explicatory intention. These qualities are amplified because the user observes by responding intuitively and naturally to what is going on. Thus, the camera becomes an extension of the filmmaker’s sensations, perceptions and thoughts. The filmmaker seems more physically present in the resulting filmic material.

Academic writers, notably Roger Sandall (1972), Colin Young (1975), David MacDougall (1998, 1999, 2006, together with Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz (2009) have each critically documented elements of the history of observational cinema, where the term ‘cinema’ refers to the production of films. This book focuses on the theory and practice of observational filmmaking as an educative process, be that for research or for classroom pedagogy, rather than on observational cinema, which suggests an imperative to produce finished films as an end product. This is an important distinction, as I will argue this places the accent on using cameras and editing software as a form of thinking, before it becomes a form of representation. This process is valuable to education in and of itself whether or not filmic material is highly crafted and released as a film. Therefore, the focus in this book is different than that of the anthropologists cited above. However, from the very first cinematic experiments, it is contextually useful to render something of the emergence of an observational style through a social anthropologic filter.

The Lumière brothers shot some of the earliest examples of film using their invention, the Cinématographe, in 1895. They quickly amassed a collection of short films, which they presented at public screenings. These cinematic illusions of real life were a triumph of a science and showmanship (North, 2001). To early audiences films were an entertaining and beguiling magical technological trick. They demonstrated how a deliberately placed camera, which continuously records what is happening in its field of view, could simply reveal humans getting on with what they are doing without obvious comment or manipulation. Although, the Lumières quickly discovered that a humorous set up, L’ Arroseur arrose made in 1895, and technological manipulation, Démolition d’un mur, made a year later in 1896, bought entertaining drama to scenes a camera might observe. Many of these early Lumière films can be viewed on YouTube.

In 1898, Alfred Hadden, who led the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straights, demonstrated that a camera might be a useful, if cumbersome and troublesome, tool to help capture more information about society in its context (Quiggin, 1942). For many anthropologists, however, as the twentieth century progressed, the temptation to create a kind of visual catalogue of how societies looked missed more conceptual and revealing aspects of social life, such as kinship, friendship and beliefs. Nevertheless, certain qualities of social interaction simply could not be recorded or represented fully by writing. A film camera could be a tool to help an anthropologist capture, for later analysis and reflection, different kinds of information that written notes could not hope to capture alone. As an example of this, in the 1930s, anthropologist Margaret Mead decided a camera would help research. However the ways film cameras might be used had changed significantly since the Lumière brothers’ early experiments. This resulted in theoretical and practical tensions in filmmaking as a research method.

Mead had a view that the ideal camera should be a neutral tool and si...