Encountering vulnerabilities through ‘filmmaking for fieldwork’
Elena Barabantseva and Andy Lawrence
University of Manchester
Accepted for publication in Millennium: Journal of International Studies
Abstract
In this article we discuss the potential of observational and participatory filmmaking methods to both explore and represent a research subject through a documentary film. We position our project ‘British Born Chinese’ about the experiences of the second generation of Chinese migrants in relation to other recent audio-visual interventions in IR, and present our methodological approach of observational and dialogical engagement with participants and the ethics of representation related to it. In doing this, we explore the potential of audio-visual research to go beyond identity-based forms of inquiries concerning, in particular, migrant and diasporic experiences. Our aim is to develop a situated and contextualized understanding of how and under what conditions individuals resort to racialized forms of belonging. We consider the promise and limitations of observational filmmaking to depart from the structures of representation to evoke alternative solidarities around vulnerability.
Key words: documentary film, research methods, diaspora, vulnerabilities, everyday, IR
Introduction
This article considers the potential of observational and participatory filmmaking research methods for International Relations (IR). We discuss what audio-visual encounters with the everyday can bring to our understanding of how politics works in the seemingly apolitical instances of everyday interactions. Drawing on primary research from our project ‘British Born Chinese’ this article discusses the promise and limitations of a documentary film as a form of research practice and an aesthetic output to expose the arbitrariness, limitations, and epistemic violence of the textual identity-driven research concerns in IR. Reflecting on the documentary film as a methodological practice of doing and presenting research, and thus generating new kinds of knowledge and understanding, we discuss the extent this method fulfils the promise of ‘a critical project of IR’ with particular reference to the politics of belonging.[1] Our contention is that ‘filming for fieldwork’ is a valuable research method for IR, because it is effective at exposing arbitrariness and limitations of identity-driven research practices, and highlighting the vulnerable nature of all those involved in the research experience, including the audience.
Our research project is part of a growing body of scholarly work advocating the practice of ‘transdisciplinarity’,[2] ‘undisciplinarity’,[3] and ‘cross-disciplinary translation’[4] calling for curiosity-driven[5] and experimental research methods in IR and social sciences research more broadly. These kinds of research point to the impossibility of divorcing thick descriptions of the practice-oriented and theory-generating forms of scholarship from the socio-philosophical position held by the interpreters and producers of knowledge.[6] In addition to the indivisibility of theory and practice, image-based research practices such as photography and filmmaking expose and explicitly face ethical concerns, particularly those related to the issues of consent, duty of care, and problems of representation.[7] Our ethical stance in pursuing a filmmaking project concerned with mundane observations of daily life has stemmed from the belief that expressions and manifestations of everyday life present us with a more ethical potential to depart from the structures of representation and epistemic violence associated with them and help to evoke multiple interpretations and alternative solidarities. Such a project speaks directly to the critically-minded and experimental forms of research in IR concerned with exposing new perspectives on how the international and personal intertwine, and shape the way we engage with politics and go about our daily lives.[8]
We first locate our project in the recent audio-visual interventions in IR by introducing several prominent documentary films made or produced by IR scholars and discuss their methodological positions, contributions, and limitations. Then we provide an overview of the methodological and ethical positions which our own ‘filmmaking for fieldwork’ method posits in particular and its critical potential for IR. We discuss our project and highlight how our work on a documentary film exploring the everyday lives of two British boys of Chinese backgrounds goes against the grain of the assumptions in some prominent IR research on diaspora and migrant groups. We consider the performative and disruptive potential of observational and participatory filmmaking as an innovative research practice to shift the analytical focus from identities to generating proximity and shared understanding of vulnerabilities. Rather than focusing on difference as a defining factor driving identity politics, we highlight the extent to which the racialised forms of categorisation condition how our research participants articulate their positions in the British society and develop their responses and strategies to cope with everyday racism.
Audio-visual experimentation in IR
Since the IR aesthetic turn of the early 2000s, scholars have not only considered the role and power of aesthetics as a source of academic knowledge of the international, but also contributed to the production of new forms of knowledge about it.[9] In recent years, IR scholars have turned to audio-visual technologies to produce their own non-textual analyses of IR and made distinctive contributions to public and scholarly debates. This section engages with some of these audio-visual interventions.
Cynthia Weber’s ‘I am an American’ project is a daring political engagement with the terms of the US citizenship debates in the post 9/11 context. Weber unpacks the patriotic message of the American nation epitomized in the Advertising council ‘Out of Many One’ public service announcement through a powerful filmic deconstruction of the advert and its celebration of ‘diversity patriotism’.[10] Her video portraits mimic the official advert in such ways that they undermine the voiceless, anonymous, and impersonal formulations of the American citizenship in the original advert. Her project is attentive to contradictions and incoherencies in how citizenship is obtained, enacted, and performed. The effectiveness and power of the videos lie in their representational style directly confronting the limited and problematic message of the Ad Council’s production. Yet, the project is less effective in conveying the everyday, less pronounced and obvious experiences of citizenship, and what being American means for the project participants when they do not have to say it explicitly.[11] The films do not reference any ethical issues encountered in the production or post-production stages. The struggles, power position and vulnerability of Weber as a scholar-filmmaker are not alluded to from within the films. Consequently, we are left wondering how power relations played out in the project. The vulnerable nature of a project such as this was revealed when the very aim of the project was compromised by Phil Simcox, the founder of the Minuteman project, who attempted to use his video portrait from Weber’s project in his electoral campaign.
Der Derian’s films, Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic and Project Z are informed by his long-tem research into the ‘military-industrial-media-entertainment network’.[12] Like Weber’s ‘I am an American Project’, Human Terrain also tells a personal story, this time of the American PhD student Michael Bhatia who joins the Human Terrain programme and is killed during one of the operations aimed to negotiate an inter-tribal argument. Through a juxtaposition of the rationale of the programme and the human costs of counterinsurgency, Der Derian exposes the ill-conceived aims and tragic consequences of the programme. We get a strong sense of Bhatia’s confusion against a feeling that the filmmaker and the authoritative interviewees know exactly what is going on, and that gives a feeling of omniscience to the viewer. Project Z features world leading policy makers, military strategists, and scholars drawing attention to a series of seemingly unrelated events which he refers to as ‘a cascading series of related dates’ leading to ‘the final global event’. The documentary postulates that the consumers of the events through mass media are zombified into complicity of the waged war on terror. Informed by Jean Baudrillard’s ideas of simulacra, Der Derian’s films are a carefully crafted simulation, explicitly exposing the poverty and shortsightedness of the Human Terrain project and the zombified and depoliticized nature of the military-industrial complex’s engagement with the post-Cold War events. The films are expository, and highly analytical products engaging with the central concerns in International Politics: war, security, militarization, and terrorism. There is no doubt that the Human Terrain programme was flawed or that we are all potentially zombified objects of the military-industrial-media-entertainment network. Der Derian places himself in the film as an interviewee and his role as a filmmaker, negotiator of the situations, and interviewer is not exposed. The two films are outward rather than inward looking. They expose problems with world politics, tell the viewers what is wrong with the dominant discourses, policies, and institutions around us. Weber, on the other hand, draws the viewer close to the complex realities of citizenship experiences of her subjects and she allows the ambiguities that they engender to ‘speak’ through the film. However, because the film is essentially a ‘set-up’ to prove a point, rather than an open-ended exploration, we begin to doubt the authenticity of the testimonies and the complicity of the subjects.
William A. Callahan’s ‘Uncle Chuck: the Shanghailander’ is an autobiographical exploration of the Western presence and life style in early twentieth century Shanghai. Through a series of archival encounters and family interviews, his film is a personal journey to discover the past in the present, not only in his family, but in the history of the Western colonial presence in China, and its legacies today. Callahan’s documentary film is subtle and very carefully touches on the legacies of colonialism, the ‘century of humiliation’ in China, and his own family’s role and complicity in this history. Searching for the house owned by his great-great uncle in Shanghai, he interrogates the ‘extra-territorial’ rights of colonial powers on Chinese soil, which made them exempt from Chinese law and sovereignty. Callahan’s own struggles in finding his familial house in Shanghai show that even well-connected Western professors can’t go everywhere they would like to in China. His humble and clumsy appearances in the film, akin to Michael Moore’s self-references in his productions, are well choreographed attempts to reveal the difficulties, searches and struggles encountered in any research undertaking. Although a very personal and intimate journey, the film recounts the history of China’s violent opening-up, semi-colonial dependence on the West, and the establishment of the free trade order and the modern international system in Asia.
Callahan’s more recent film ‘Toilet Adventures’ is a series of audio-visual testimonials recounting the experiences of Western and Chinese people using toilets on their first trips abroad. Part of a larger project exploring first encounters with the Other in China and the West, this film more than the others poses explicit ethical questions arising from the filmmakers examination of the subject matter. Callahan directs himself sitting on a toilet and introduces his film in a particularly effective ‘breaking the ice’ moment that enables him to engage the audience with his ideas of how people make sense of personal encounters with the uncomfortable in a foreign context, and their implications for international politics. On another level, the film narrates many unique historical details about the ‘politics of shit’ in China, and the ideological role that toilets play in modern societies.
What distinguishes the filmic interventions above is that these films exploit audio-visual technologies as a form of representation and a powerful medium to communicate scholarly interventions in new and creative ways. However, they do not consider and make explicit the role of the camera as a primary research tool, and the role of the researcher/filmmaker in navigating this research process. The films are heavily reliant on interviews, which are guided and directed by the researcher/director with the intention to lead answers to specific questions around their research agenda. Aspects of the research process, including self-reflexivity, doubt, open-endedness, and the confusion of the researcher/filmmaker are less apparent in these projects.
Yet, what would be the potential of a filmmaking method if it were employed not only as a means of representing the outcomes of the work, but also as a critical research tool representing the ethico-political positions of all those occupying the filmed space? We outline some of the ways that we have attempted this in our recent research film project ‘British Born Chinese’. We argue that the potential for a self-reflexive, participatory and observational approach to filmmaking for fieldwork in IR is in its ability to divert attention from the problems attributed to institutional structures, identities, cultures, and beliefs, to the realm of shared experiences of vulnerability. Our filmic intervention, in particular, seeks to convey how the categories of identity which we operate with are imbued with meaning, performed, problematized, confused, rejected and then taken on again and again are limited sources of knowledge. In this way our film is made “sensuously and sensibly manifest as the the expression of experience by experience.[13] In particular, we draw attention to the unique ability of a filmmaking method to articulate moments of confusion and ambiguity in human action and in how we formulate structures of meaning and perform our identities. Our approach does not aim to transform the filmed material into a coherent visual narrative, but primarily seeks a contextualised, personal account which speaks not only to the experiences of the filmmakers and research participants, but also aims to evoke related experiences in the audience.
‘Filmmaking for fieldwork’ as a research method
The ‘British Born Chinese’ documentary film project was informed by ideas developed in the observational school of visual anthropology[14] alongside elements from more interactive and reflexive modes of filmmaking.[15] One of the leading proponents of this type of filmmaking, David MacDougall, summarises it as, ‘observational film-making was founded on the assumption that things happen in the world which are worth watching, and that their own distinctive spatial and temporal configurations are part of what is worth watching about them’.[16] This approach holds that care should be taken not to overtly direct action nor to use any technique that may obscure activities as experienced by the research participants.[17] In developing the idea for a film about Chinese migrant experiences in Manchester we wanted to develop a method that would allow us to get close to our subject and emphasise their narratives over the ideas that we ourselves brought to the project as researchers and filmmakers. We adapted this method to ensure that we were well represented in the film also as agents in the creation of the story.