Films

The second in the ‘Forum Follies’ series, ‘Counterpoint Two’ pitches the ethnographic filmmaker Richard Werbner into debate with audiences for his film ‘Encountering Eloyi’ (2008), from a rough to a final cut. Along with the interest in ethnographic knowledge, there is the fun and cross-play of argument about the making and eventual reception of a film. First comes the feedback for the rough cut, during the research and fieldwork seminar in the University of Manchester’s Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology. Final clips illuminate responses by Werbner and editor Andy Lawrence there and later in discussing a much revised version for At First Sight, the University’s publicly open screenings of research films. Next are very different audiences for ‘Encountering Eloyi’ in London, Oslo and Kyoto. Of what use can narration be in establishing a film’s ethnographic context and its authorship? What issues arise for spectators when the filmmaker as ethnographer has many parts, including fieldworker, interlocutor, awkward character and friend of the subjects, analyst in voice-overs, and even mirrored cameraman? In the light of ‘Encountering Eloyi’, the arguments between the filmmaker and his audiences open out these and other questions of belief and scepticism, of faith and the very activity of believing, of filmic collaboration, of improvisation and the limits on the documentary and the magical realism.