The film Forest of Bliss to me looked very professional. I wonder how this effect is created. Is it just a result of a multiplicity of various perspectives, from which we see the scenes, as if there are many cameras working in the field? Or is it because there are no interactions between the cameraman and the subjects? Or is it because aesthetics seem to be more prominent than other topics, such as a narrative about particular event or a ritual?

Does this effect or image of visual professionalism changes in time? For example, various digital special effects are now almost inevitable part of professional films produced by the industry. Does it mean that in some time ethnographic films will need to use same effects or animation to look updated and professional themselves?

Even ethnographers are doing their film for the audience, and this means that if audience is changing, getting accustomed to particular visual standards, than ethnographic films have to absorb these standards. For example, many contemporary ethnographic films use short cuts, with fast changing images, so to look familiar to the audience trained to watch advertising clips and action films.

The debate around the Forest of Bliss seems to be preoccupied with the autonomy of anthropology from the surrounding environments, including film industry. Such autonomy seems to me impossible, and that is why I am not worried about the penetration of new visual technics.  I am worried about the demand for professionalization that such absence of autonomy creates. We cannot pretend that our amateurish film-making is enough for the purposes of the anthropological discipline. We have to develop professionally looking films, otherwise nobody will watch them. Does that mean that we have to work in collaboration with professional film makers? How can we integrate such collaborations with our fieldworks and difficult ethical problems connected with them? 

Thoughts about the possible visual project

I want to do a photographic essay, but the one that would combine visual images produced by people and those taken by my collaborator and me. There is a web that represents the project of a golf-club, intended to be built in the vicinity of one Hungarian village. The project started before the Global Financial crisis in 2008 and after the bankruptcy left the unfinished landscape of the golf club. The territory is fenced and abandoned. The web site shows photos of the construction as evidence of the potential of the project to attract investments and sell apartments that were planned to build nearby. Through reconstructing the photographic process by trying to produce photos that would be a double to the authentic initial ones we do not only create the classical pair of before and after, but also would analyze how project presentation is built up, and what constitutes the world of dreaming about neoliberal projects, such as international golf-clubs in Hungarian countryside. 

Bad Photos, Moments of Resistance

During our fieldwork among Evenki we had an interesting problem. There were moments that we desperately wanted to document and make a photo, because we knew in advance that we will write something about them and it would be nice to have a picture to put into text as illustration. But we constantly failed to make such pictures. For example, every morning in the Evenki camp started with sprinkling fresh tea into the fire. I planned to make a picture of this everyday ceremony for almost a month, and although I got the opportunity to make it every day, I never managed. Somehow, this simple act was to such an extent part of awakening process of the whole family including us that I was never prepared to use a camera. I lived in a same rhythm with other members and never could step outside this flow to document it. I always remembered about the camera, when the ceremony was already in progress. It was systematically unremarkable event, routine and not pompous at all. Finally, once the same ritual was conducted for other purposes and in other time. But now this was not about starting a day, the same sequence of actions was conducted before sending hunters on their trip. So although, actions were the same but surrounding elements differed, the context was different. The light was bright and the contrast of the picture was harsh. No any trait of those mystic twilights in which this was usually done in the morning. There was snow melting on the stove, when usually there is a pot there in the morning. It was already warm, and you cannot see the stiff figure of the praying woman. From this photo you do not have the impression of how cold it is in the morning, how anticipated is this fresh warm tea is. So on a close inspection, although this photo provides all the formal resemblance with what I intended to document, it showed a totally different mood. And was a bad photo, a wrong one. Perhaps, sometimes we need to accept that some moments are impossible to make a photo about. ‘Reality’ shows its resistance.