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The film festival and conference of the Royal Anthropological Institute in the UK just ended. I was invited to present my master’s thesis in the panel Empirical Art, but my film was not part of the programme. So for the past ten days I watched loads of films, some talks, and also participated in a few discussions. I’m exhausted and inspired!

Main competition

• One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (2019), 1h 53m – Canada
• Ayouni (2020), 1h 15m – Syria
• A Colombian Family (2020), 1h 20m – Colombia
• Half Elf (2020), 1h 4m – Iceland
• Oyate (2019), 1h 12m – USA
• Persistence (2019), 54 min – Mexico
• Survivors (2018), 1h 24m – Sierra Leone
• The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019), 1h 27m – China

Already watched The Body Won’t Close (2020), 1h 14m – Brazil. Skipped the remaining five films.

Werbner Award

• Broken Gods (2019), 42 min – India
• Suspension (2019), 1h 13m – Colombia

Already watched A New Era (2019), 1h 11m – China. Skipped the remaining five films.

Shorts

Shorts 01 – Creative lives

• Making Worlds Otherwise | 2020 | 28 min – Australia
• (The Daring Young Girl on the Flying Trapeze | 2020 | 27 min – UK – already watched)
• Nobody’s Metaphor | 2020 | 30 min – UK
• IntranQu’îllités | 2019 | 20 min – Haiti

Shorts 03 – Pleasure

• Come Here Come Here | 2019 | 28 min – UK/Netherlands
• (Motels | 2020 | 27 min – Colombia – already watched)
• Oink! | 2020 | 22 min – UK/Germany

Shorts 05 – Migration at the crossroads 2

• Skrana | 2019 | 13 min – USA
• Unwritten Letters | 2020 | 59 min – Italy/Syria

Shorts 06 – Animals | Humans | Ritual

• Lives and Deaths Between Ebbs and Flows | 2019 | 14 min – Taiwan
• Tajen | 2017 | 30 min – Indonesia (West Bali)
• (Okinami | 2019 | 24 min – Japan – already watched)
• Wild Honey: Caring for bees in a divided land | 2019 | 30 min – Indonesia (Timor)

Shorts 10 – Environmental crisis

• Mountain of Trash | 2020 | 20 min – Thailand
• The People Next to Coal Power Plant | 2019 | 23 min – South Korea
• Don’t Let the sunny weather fool you | 2019 | 27 min – Philippines

Global Racialisations shorts

• The Changing Same | 2018 | 22 min – USA
• (Emails to My Little Sister | 2018 | 35 min – Germany/Ethiopia – already watched)
• Cry Out Loud | 2019 | 43 min – India

Decolonising the Archive

• VHS Diaries (2020), 1h 12m – Iran

Decolonising the Archive shorts

• A New England Document | 2020 | 16 min – USA (Namibia)
• New York Just Another City | 2019 | 18 min – USA (Brazil)
• Faces Voices | 2019 | 18 min – USA (Nigeria, Sierra Leone)
• Sight Unseen | 2019 | 20 min – Italy/Libya
• This Is A Majlis: A Sound Essay | 2020 | 17 min – Pakistan

Talks

• Global racialisations – Q&A with directors
• The Visual Scholarship Initiative Emory University
• Interview with André Singer
• Filmmaking for Fieldwork
• Honouring Professor Marcus Banks

Panels

• P12a – Immersive Ethnography, 1h 1m
• P21 – Crisis through comics: a roundtable discussion on graphic anthropology, 25 min
• P26a – Empirical art, 54 min
• P26b – Empirical art, 1h 12m
• P26c – Empirical art, 60 min
• P26d – Empirical art, 50 min

Bonus

In the middle of the festival I attended a very interesting seminar on dōjinshi culture at the University of Vienna:

• u:japan lectures: Transcultural Potentials of dōjinshi Culture

Despite the screen fatigue, I must say that it’s so nice that important events like the RAI conference (and previously EASA and later SIEF) and the Japan lecture go online, so that more people can participate. I think we’ll have to rethink what a conference presentation and discussion should be like, though. Some of them were so hard to follow – they need to be shorter and clearer when online, in my opinion.

I went all in and watched all the films at DEF 2021. Except the two I had already seen (The Chateau and A New Era), and my own film Unreal Boys of course. So 17 films in total:

• China In Ethiopia (Paul Zhou, 30 min)
• Congo Calling (Stephan Hilpert, 90 min)
• Flox (Hady Mahmoud, 45 min)
• Her Family (Elizabeta Koneska, 49 min)
• Keeping Track (Hugo Chávez Carvajal, 15 min)
• Moving Towards Visibility (Laura Molsbergen, 32 min)
• Talamanca (Davide Marino, 22 min)
• Talking Dreams (Bruno Rocchi, 37 min)
• The Body Won’t Close. (Mattijs Van de Port, 74 min)
• The Daring Young Girl on the Flying Trapeze (Nina Ross, 27 min)
• The Days After (Jérémie Grojnowski, 72 min)
• The Fantastic (Maija Blåfield, 30 min)
• The Life We Know (Cláudia Ribeiro, 82 min)
• To Save a Language (Liivo Niglas, 74 min)
• Tobacco Memories (Manca Filak, 31 min)
• Trabolsi (Ina Schebler, 55 min)
• Zagros (Ariane Lorrain & Shahab Mihandoust, 58 min)

I was touched the most by The Daring Young Girl on the Flying Trapeze, a sensitive film about a woman with muscular dystrophy, who in a way frees herself through her art. She regretted some choices she had made earlier in life because she didn’t think she would live past 20. Now she’s 65. I think I will always remember these moments.

My favourite was probably Flox, which put me right in the middle of the chaos of a minibus station in Cairo.

China in Ethiopia was interesting and gave me a detailed view, from a Chinese perspective, of a larger development in Ethiopia and other parts of Africa. Tobacco Memories and Zagros also captured larger systems by showing us otherwise unseen parts of the production and manufacturing of tobacco and carpets in Bulgaria and Iran respectively. Likewise, The Days After was ostensibly about alternative farming in France, but captured so much more in terms of suspicion of what diverges from the normal.

To Save a Language surprised in becoming a portrait of a passionate linguist. And I loved the mixture of art and anthropology in The Fantastic – fantastic visuals!

All in all an interesting and inspiring mix of films. I think my film fit well in that it “brought us some variety” (as the organiser said) and showed how one can research a sensitive topic.

The organisers were kind to send us the Q&A’s for our personal use, so here is mine:

It was a very active and study-focused week.

I’m quite excited about phenomenology, which was the theme of this week’s unit in Qualitative Methods. In the always perfectly curated window display of The Berlin Book Nook I found Robert Anton Wilson’s Reality Is What You Can Get Away With from 1993/1996. I didn’t know that book of his, but have read many of his other works. Since the theme of phenomenology is that reality is always subjective, it was a nobrainer to grab it (God has a plan for you!) despite its relatively hefty price of 36 euro, apparently it’s a rarity.

Digital Anthropology Unit 8 had an art focus and included a discussion on works by Hito Steyerl. Incidentally she would have a talk at HKW this very week, so I went there to see her. Berlin delivers. The whole event was like a mini-Re:publica full of interesting talks and an interested audience – the auditorium was full.

For Digital Anthropology Unit 9 next week we got an assignment which I loved, it played right into where I was in my research right now and the lecturer’s attitude made me very inspired. I therefore started working on it immediately and was finished the next day, but I will post it in next week’s study diary since it belongs to Unit 9. I was also quite taken by Brian Larkin’s text, which was dense and hard to get through, but at the same time gave me a totally new perspective on the concept of infrastructure.

Ethnographic Film Unit 8 was about observational cinema and Frederick Wiseman’s first film Titicut Follies from 1967. By accident I checked the calendar of Arsenal Cinema and saw that they screened his latest film Monrovia, Indiana from 2018 this week, as part of an American independent film festival. I didn’t know the guy was still alive. He’s 89 now. The film was brilliant in many ways, mainly in its idea: Here is finally a guy who treats Americans in the same way that American anthropologists have treated people from various places in Africa. Again, Berlin delivers. I was excited to have found two amazing complements to this week’s studies.

I finished the first season of Dogs of Berlin. The series feels groundbreaking in a way, although I don’t watch many TV series. It feels like a turn driven by new technology. I can’t speficy exactly what it is, but the series feels so fresh, the feeling is like “so this is how it can be done”. The Netflix era. I had a similar feeling when I first watched 24: Not the idea of making each episode an actual hour (minus commercials) – that I considered mainly a gimmick – but the dramaturgy of having important characters suddenly turn on you, be revealed to be traitors. And then turn again. That trope was used extensively over the next decade or so until we viewers couldn’t care less. So something new had to be done. Dogs of Berlin is one of those things. It’s local, brutal and as exaggerated as a comic. Perfect entertainment. The letterbox on my 16:9 TV made me read up on the 2:1 (or 18:9) aspect ratio that Dogs of Berlin and several other high profile TV series are apparently filmed in.

I’m also rewatching season 2 of Mr Robot, which also felt groundbreaking now that I think of it. Maybe it’s just that I’m not used to watching TV series and they’re always this good nowadays! But Mr Robot also makes use of spectacular camera work which breaks the traditional cinematic rules in order to convey the feelings of Elliot. I’m watching on Amazon Prime on my old PS3 since I got Prime for free for a year as a student.

I finally reviewed WordPress’ new Gutenberg editor, which I must admit I hate. If anything looks strange, especially in terms of extra space where there should be no extra space – stuff like that – Gutenberg is to blame:

• Gutenberg review: Slows down my writing severely

Study

Digital Anthropology Unit 8

Artistic Practice in the Virtual Age // Post-internet Art

• Olson, Marisa (2008): Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture. In Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 159-166.
• Henrot, Camille (2013): “Grosse Fatigue”
• Tortum, Deniz (2016): September 1955
• Mecca Kaaba Masjid 360° 3D VR Video 4K HD BEST QUALITY (Makkah/UMRA/HAJ/TAWAF Walk) SaudiArabia 2018

Digital Anthropology Unit 9

Aesthetics of Infrastructure : Practise-led-(Re)Search between the Virtual and Material Worlds

• Larkin, Brian (2013): The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. In Annual Review of Anthropology 42, pp. 327-349.
• Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2014): Visualising the Anthropocene. In Public Culture, pp. 213-232.

Other

HKW: Stop Making Sense

• The Language of Broken Glass. Hito Steyerl (filmmaker), Bernd Scherer
• Language is a Slippery Thing. Luc Steels (AI scientist and opera composer)
• Language Agents. Luc Steels in conversation with Giulia Bruno (artist) and Armin Linke (artist) 
• If Everything is True—Knowledge and Manipulation. Felix Stalder (media and cultural theorist)
• Datafication of Science. Kate Crawford (Distinguished AI Scholar) and Trevor Paglen (artist)

Articles

• BBC: Kevin Fret: Gay rapper shot dead in Puerto Rico aged 24
• Vashivisuals: The Aspect Ratio of 2.00 : 1 is Everywhere
• Lithub/Kim Liao: WHY YOU SHOULD AIM FOR 100 REJECTIONS A YEAR

Film & video

• Frederick Wiseman: Monrovia, Indiana (2018, 143 min)
• Kevin Fret – Soy Asi
• Netflix: Dogs of Berlin
• Amazon Prime: Mr Robot

I mostly relaxed this week, and started reading the texts for the next units of Ethnographic Film and Digital Anthropology.

Next week school will start again, and I’m also super excited to do some proper work as well. That feeling of January, start of the year and all. Yes, the days are dark and Berlin is miserable. But I see it as just another reason to increase my screentime.

Study

Ethnographic Film Unit 8

Observational Film and Beyond

• Young, Colin (1974): Observational Cinema. In Hockings, Paul, ed. (2003): ​Principles of Visual Anthropology​, pp. 99-113.
• MacDougall, David (1974, 1994): Beyond Observational Cinema. In Hockings, Paul, ed. (2003): ​Principles of Visual Anthropology​, pp. 115-132.

Digital Anthropology Unit 8

Artistic Practice in the Virtual Age // Post-internet Art

• Ascott, R. and Edward A. Shanken (1995, 2003): Back to Nature II: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century. In Telematic embrace: visionary theories of art, technology, and consciousness, pp. 327-339.
• Jon Rafman: 9-eyes.com
• Spencer, Stuart (2013): The Readymade Moment: The Theory and Practice Behind Jon Rafman’s Nine Eyes of Google Street View Project
• Steyerl, Hito (2013): How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File
• Henrot, Camille (2016): Office of Unreplied Emails

Other

Book

• Roberto Saviano: La paranza dei bambini (2016, 367 pages, in Swedish translation: “Blodsleken”)

Articles

• The Economist: Mini-mafiosi run amok in Naples in Roberto Saviano’s novel
• The Economist: Disney goes back to the future
• Gay Star News: Germany’s law recognizing a third gender comes into effect
• Metro UK: Porn sites ‘will all require proof of age from April 2019’ – here’s how it’ll work

Film & video

• Marques Brownlee: My YouTube REWIND 2018!
• Marques Brownlee: HP Pavilion dv7t Media Center Remote Overview (2009)
• The Verge: The tech MKBHD is bringing to CES 2019
• Pewdiepie: YouTube Rewind 2018 but it’s actually good
• Pewdiepie: I read 721 books in 2018
• Netflix: Dogs of Berlin, S01 E05-08

Podcast

• Alexandre Enkerli: Rapport: The Informal Ethnographer Podcast 4: Preparing for the field (2009, 96 min)
• Alexandre Enkerli: Rapport: The Informal Ethnographer Podcast 5: Ethnography and The Ivory Tower (2009, 53 min)
• Anthropod 46: Roundtable Discussion: Reading List for a Progressive Environmental Anthropology (2018, 42 min)
• Bögministeriet: Det med analsexförtvivlan och faggot-tweets (2018, 90 min)
• Nemo Möter En Vän: 212. Alexander Bard (2018, 99 min)

Last week of school this year! Almost three months of intense studies lie behind me: This week we finished unit 7 of both Classics and Varieties of Ethnographic Film and Digital Anthropology, where I was one of the presenters:

Study

Ethnographic Film Unit 7

Towards a shared Anthropology: Jean Rouch and Cinéma-Vérité

• Rouch, Jean (2003): The Camera and Man. In ​Paul Hockings (ed.): Principles of Visual Anthropology, pp.79-98.
• Grimshaw, Anna (2001): The anthropological cinema of Jean Rouch. In ​The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of seeing in Modern Anthropology, pp. 112-120.

Films to this unit:

• Michel Brault and Gilles Groulx: Les Raquetteurs​ (1958, 15 min.)
• Jean Rouch: Chronicle of a Summer​ (1961, 87 min.)

Digital Anthropology Unit 7

Online Celebrities: Social media as a marketing tool.

• Seaver, Nick (2017): Algorithms as culture: Some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems. In Big Data & Society 4, no. 2, pp. 1-12.
• Related film: The American Meme (2018, 98 min)

Other

Articles

• The Economist: How to think about data in 2019
• The Economist: Inevitably, France’s gilets jaunes protesters debate the metaphysics of roundabouts
• Geek.com: ‘The American Meme’ Plumbs the Dark Side of Internet Fame
• The New York Times: How Peter Jackson Made WWI Footage Seem Astonishingly New With ‘They Shall Not Grow Old’

Film & video

• Mowgli (2018, 104 min)
• Flushed Away (2006, 85 min)
• Dogs of Berlin, S1 E3-E4
• Linus Tech Tips: Apple Killed the Mac Mini
• MyTechLiving: Colorgrading SLog in Final Cut Pro
• DemocracyNow: You Are Stealing Our Future: Greta Thunberg, 15, Condemns the World’s Inaction on Climate Change