It’s wonderful when coming across a piece of writing that’s so timely, you want to grab the person nearest you and go – listen to this, no, really, LISTEN. Fortunately, I’m not given to doing this.

Such a piece of writing is David MacDougall’s Introduction to his collection Film, Ethnography and the Senses (2006), subtitled Meaning and Being. I’ve come across MacDougall in the context of documentary and for some reason it didn’t chime with me. I suspect, had I come across it again while making Strands, I would have had a similar response. MacDougall is an ethnographic filmmaker deeply embedded in questions of agency for the ethnographic subject, the role of filmmaker, and the distinctive function of film as a form of ethnographic research. In his introduction, MacDougall largely speaks of filmmaking, but speaks for the most part about the function of a camera in producing knowledge, and in this he often equates filmmaking with photography, while noting their very different qualities, especially with regards to time.

I’ve highlighted nearly the entire introduction, so summarising it and responding to it all is more than I’m prepared to do here as yet. What MacDougall explores so thoroughly is that knowledge is constituted not just by interpretative, categorical and analytical meaning,  but by being, the immediacy of experience which is provided by the senses. He argues that academic study eschews the latter, despite its putative function of aggregating and developing knowledge. The camera is powerfully placed to provide both kinds of knowledge – even in photographs or films which are deeply analytical, such as those of Wall, a trace of being is retained such that meaning is always provisional and incomplete. Meaning, however self-consciously or unselfconsciously, can be created by framing, mise en scene, instance, colour and so on, but the camera always captures a surplus to any meaning, including the trace of the camera and the photographer or filmmaker’s being in the world (I’m assuming MacDougall is referring obliquely to Heidegger here). This surplus, he argues, is not incidental or accidental, but communicates a surplus of experience, the act of looking as well as what has been seen and utilised to create meaning. This tension between the two forms of knowledge is a strength for both media, as it is creative productive.

MacDougall goes on to argue that while disciplines such as anthropology make use of being-knowledge, they incorporate it into meaning-knowledge in the form of essays, papers and books, at a higher level of abstraction. They do not use it as a tool or form of expression. His understanding of looking is neither passive seeing nor concerted seeking, but aware and open observation, a form of thinking.

This is EXACTLY what I had been engaging with during the making of my last two films – using the lens as a form of analysis and engagement, informed by research but not enacting it as such, not looking for proof or evidence but what Rascaroli (2017) calls a ‘thinking-through’ found in the essay film. It’s really interesting that MacDougall equates film with photography, as that’s what I’d come to understand too, and it was important for me to leave that surplus in. It’s a specific kind of looking.

How this equates to sensory ethnography is something I’ll have to return to, but I look forward to reading this book further.

MacDougall, D. 2006. Film, Ethnography, and the senses. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rascaroli, L. 2017. How The Essay Film Thinks. Oxford: Oxford University Press.