"Any understanding has its being in an act of understanding" (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p.118-19)
The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) is an experimental laboratory based at Harvard University that promotes innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography. SEL projects encourage “attention to the many dimensions of the world” […] “taking as their subject the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human and animal existence”.
In recent years the academic lab has produced a number of experimental films that challenge the anthropocentric and linguistic-based conventions of traditional approaches to ethnography and documentary filmmaking. Lab director Lucien Castaing-Taylor describes these works as:
“attempts to use filmmaking, not as a way of illustrating written ethnography, but rather to evoke the sensory experiences of certain kinds of lives in particular places.”
In the article The Flesh of The Perceptible: The New Materialism of Leviathan author Max Bowens draws a comparison between the film practices of the ethnographic lab and the New Materialism of philosopher Jane Bennet. He writes:
“The philosophical origins of both Sensory Ethnography and New Materialism bare enticing similarities to each other, most acutely in their advocacy for Nature's intrinsic vitality, the necessity for humans to have a more sensorial engagement with it, and for a relational, systems-based phenomenology […] Lived experience becomes a necessity for the filmmakers to endure and to capture simultaneously.”
De Humani Corporis Fabrica [2022] dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel • Levaithan [2012] dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel
This interest in the sensorial aspect of experience is particularly notable in such film works as Leviathan (2012), Expedition Content (2020) and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), each of which explores perspectives on a new type of immersive ethnographic cinema through innovative approaches to filmmaking technology. In an overview of the lab for the 2016 Porto/Post/Doc festival retrospective, Daniel Ribas writes:
“There is, therefore, a technological side to the films produced by SEL: smaller, portable digital cameras, more effective and “invisible” audio capture systems allow a close monitoring of ritual practices or certain locations and their communities.”
In Leviathan and De Humani Corporis Fabrica, small, portable camera and microphone technology facilitate a highly dynamic capture of reality from unusual angles and physical perspectives - underwater, airborne, inside the body.
Unlike choices of cinematography that efface the presence of the filmmaker’s camera, these films do not attempt to conceal the use of the filmmaking technology in motion. Instead the spectator feels the operation of camera and microphone, probing with intent into tiny crevices, strikingly close, in and out of focus, roaming into odd angles, revealing hidden sounds and textures. This calls to mind the handheld, running-camera approach pioneered by film diarist Jonas Mekas who in 1959 wrote:
“There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.”
Such derangement of the senses is produced by the probing film apparatus, revealing a unique sensorial experience of an all too familiar, and overlooked, reality.
Cow (2021) dir. Andrea Arnold
This particular approach to location filming emphasises the unique role that innovative production sound techniques perform in the sensorial realisation of the total audiovisual work. The use of experimental microphone techniques in films like De Humani Corporis Fabrica highlight a rare point of contact between the domains of sound art - under the rubric of 20th century experimental music and sound practices - and that of film sound. Such interaction emphasises how an explorative and inventive approach to production sound can yield exciting new possibilities for creating a unique type of deep sonic cinema.
Film Selection:
De Humani Corporis Fabrica [2022] dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel
Cow (2021) dir. Andrea Arnold
Expedition Content (2020) dir. Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati
Levaithan [2012] dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel
Sweetgrass [2009] dir. Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor
References:
In Search of the Sensory Experience: The Sensory Ethnography Lab / Focus SEL by Daniel Ribas
The Flesh of the Perceptible: The New Materialism of Leviathan by Max Bowens
Vibrant Matter, 2009, Jane Bennet