11-1-2019, Amsterdam
Urban Cultivators
A written reflection on my ethnographic film
Chris Hellwig (chrisjenahellwig@gmail.com) 10374779
Master Cultural and Social Anthropology
Graduate School of Social Sciences, University of Amsterdam Prof. dr. M.P.J. van de Port & dr. O.G.A. Verkaaik
Second readers: Dr. K. Kristine Krause & dr. C.H. Harris Report for Visual Anthropology
[Rejected voice-over]
Looking at images of soil being raked
This film is not about nature.
This film is about relationships that sprouted during my summer at Loughborough Farm. This film is not about what nature means.
This film is about looking for those meanings: Seeding, growing, cultivating, culture.
Content Introduction 3 The Set-up 4 The Research 8 Filming Poetry 12 Tour 15 Relationship 18
Montage & Reflection 22
Conclusion 27
Bibliography 29
Link to film: https://vimeo.com/301806781 Password: energy
Introduction
In this report I would like to elaborate on the visual research that I did by contemplating the visual language of continuity film versus visual anthropology, and expanding on certain considerations that have played a role in shaping the film into what it looks like now. I will divide these matters between the set-up in which I discuss the ideas I had previous to doing fieldwork, the research itself and how these ideas changed, the filming, the montage process in which I analysed my material, and debates in visual anthropology that are relevant to my thesis film. I will try to compare reciting poetry to cultivating one’s environment to see if this connects outside of the film. It is important to keep in mind that the overall question that I would like to answer with this report is different than the question that I tried to answer with my film.
The research question of the film was: What are interpretations of natural
environments to urban farm dwellers? I used film to research this question and to visualise what they indicated as a natural environment, and capture the encounters I had with them. By incorporating the look, sound, and feeling of an environment, I emphasize the
human-non-human interaction between a space and a dweller. Farm dwellers in this context are the people I met at Loughborough Farm, and the farm is one of the interpretations of a natural environment in the film. I use the term dwellers as I used it in my proposal: How people make themselves at home in a certain landscape through dwelling in it. By being in an environment whilst rooting there, you will start to see it as something you can develop by evaluating its current state and building on that (Ingold 2000, 186). This is where my title Urban Cultivators comes from, as the people of Loughborough Farm are literally cultivating their environment into an inclusive community space, and rooting there at the same time by investing in the environment. As it is the main location that I wandered around this summer, I use it as a base for my film by starting and ending there and coming back between the trips subjects took me on. Words that were often used to describe the farm revolved around community, getting (back) in touch with nature, and letting go of the control that rules the urban world.
Besides these themes, the environment of Loughborough Farm is the place in my film where people are closer to being, as far as that is possible with a camera present, than
performing an aspect of their lives for me, which is more evident more during the tours. I will get back to this further on. The level of performativity during the film goes up and down, varying from being in the garden to more performative during the tours. The level of performativity has a positive correlation with the level of intimacy between the subject, the researcher, and the viewer. As the subject starts explaining their motivations for wanting to be in a certain environment, the viewer might start to understand it and gets directed towards feeling it too. In this sense, I see the subject taking the researcher and the camera to a place that is personally important to them, as a tour guide and the anthropologist a translator.
The question that guides this report stems less from the content of the film, but more from the relationship between the content, the montage process, and a little from the ethical questions that visual anthropologists need to ask themselves. When does footage turn into visual anthropology? How does this film relate to visual anthropological theory? By writing this report, I hope to get a clearer view of what visual anthropology is: Is it a mode of doing research or is it a way of interpreting film? In other words, does visual anthropology happen during the making of the film, or when it gets interpreted by a visual anthropologist?
The Set-up
In times of increased racism, displacement, war, and the loss of hospitable environments for both humans and nonhumans, engagements with urban materialities face the challenge of more explicitly mapping the mechanisms that shape what lives come to flourish amid the disturbed environments of our time.
Stoetzer 2018, 314.
My research revolved around the events that I witnessed predominantly during the volunteering sessions at Loughborough Farm in London. My appeal to this community growing space stems from having developed an affinity for cultivation and integration that I first encountered in a horticultural therapy project for refugees in London. By going back to London, I intended on doing research at multiple projects that all worked with integration and growing on different levels. This proved difficult as the camera was often not welcomed and I
shifted my attention mainly towards Loughborough Farm where they had a more open attitude towards my plans.
This openness stems from the ideology of Loughborough Junction Action Group (LJAG), the overarching charity that started in 2008 to build a resilient community in their disadvantaged neighbourhood and to maintain liveability in a time of fast-paced
gentrification. Turning derelict land into a community growing space was only one of their 1 projects, others are: a playground, a community cafe, a monthly market stall, and so on. The community growing space is a reflection of this ideology; the atmosphere is very welcoming and new ideas are always greeted with enthusiasm such as movie nights, DIY workshops, laughter yoga sessions, a magnet workshop, and winter salad window box workshop which were all advertised in the three months I was there. I perceive these events as ways to get more out of the space, include and unite more people by providing alternatives for people that are not so interested in planting. This culture where the space is created together and ideas are welcomed was an important motivation for me to suggest a poetry event to celebrate the farm’s fifth birthday, which I will get back to later on.
My intention for a research was to use a camera to visualise expressions of nostalgia in London migrants. I defined nostalgia in my research proposal as a response to rapid changes in the social environment of the subject, originating from processes such as globalisation and the alienated feelings that follow it to the direct physical and cultural changes that someone experiences when migrating to a different country (Duyvendak 2011, 23). I viewed nostalgia as a way of coping with these changes by relating back to one’s childhood, to a period when life was simpler and the future held more certainties. This was confirmed by Creighton who states that: “[nostalgia] is a combination of a remembered, an imagined, and a recreated past, which in the nostalgic mind-set seems much better – more benevolent, loving, and
problem-free – than the past actually was” (2015, 34). My goal would be to take my camera and ask people to show me objects, actions, environments that held an intrinsic nostalgic value for them and ask them why. The camera would be a catalyst for nostalgia as it invites people to perform their nostalgia when they tell their story or show their environment.
What I was expecting when asking about nostalgia were stories about migrants’ relationships to natural environments, having met them as a volunteer in a project where cultivating plants was the main preoccupation. On the notion of homophily, in which
like-minded people get attracted to the same spaces, I assumed that this urban farm would attract urban farm dwellers who were appealed to come there because they had already developed a relationship to cultivating nature earlier on in their lives (Longhurst 2013, 2110). My hypothesis was based on what I had encountered before whilst doing the volunteering that inspired this research, as I noticed that often migrants’ stories about home relate to the natural environment there. This is why I started wondering about the link between nostalgia and cultivation and how becoming an urban dweller at Loughborough Farm may have been a product of looking for a connection to the environment that someone is trying to root in. My hypothesis led me to researching motivations for wanting a relationship with a natural environment. Assuming that there was an element of change that initiated someone to respond nostalgically by looking for a way to cultivate nature and finding Loughborough Farm, I interpreted this change as migration. On one hand because I had been volunteering with exclusively migrants before. On the other hand because to migrants, the change in their environment has been transnational and this would help me determine when someone would be speaking nostalgically. In order for the nature-related nostalgia to start affecting behaviour and make a migrant into an urban farm dweller, the migrant needs to have had a relationship with natural environments and needs to have a certain discontent with other environments, otherwise they would not have had to look for a space to express their nostalgia to natural environments. When asking urban farm dweller Clo in an interview about the difference between the place where she grew up, in France, and where she lives now in London, she mentions the feeling of being part of a community as a distinction and a motivator to come to the farm:
Cl: Because I think mostly for me but as well I think for a lot of people, community reminds you that you’re not... you’re not by yourself, alone and when you’re living in this society in a big city like London, you tend to forget it sometimes because of like, you know, you’re really concerned about your own situation which is normal because you got bills to... you’ve got to care about work, about money coming in, about survival in the city.
Excerpt from interview with Clo (08-09-2018).
She expresses the importance of community to avoid feelings of alienation, which is more prone to happen in a densely populated area than a village, as she told me. During my
research I found that a natural environment is often brought up as the counterweight to the ‘urban other’ and all the bad feelings that get ascribed to this concept. Natural environments on the other hand hold an almost spiritual, undefinable essence that make them a tabula rasa where people can project what they lack elsewhere. Homan talked about the interpretation of and motivation for being in a natural environment but being able to come back to it another time and getting a completely different feeling:
H: Yeah, I get a similar feeling. It’s like a really beautiful feeling being up mountains or in water, and then you can overthink it, or put layers of romanticism on it and like, or put different filters on. And then you come back to it, it’s like a clean slate. It’s different with mountains, mountains are kind of like this impersonal aspect of it that I really like. Which connects you with something a bit wilder, and wild swimming is just like a joy.
Excerpt from interview with Homan (19-07-2018).
The reason I let go of nostalgia as the main concept is that I noticed in conversations that it was more an etic term than an emic one. Even though people are aware of what it means, it is not triggered on demand with a camera present. Quite the opposite was true, people often related to their childhood on moments that I was most quiet and they could let their train of thoughts run. In consequence, nostalgia was not ruled out of my research but my angle of approach needed to change. My research shifted to looking for interpretations of natural environments, trying to define them and find out what they can mean to urban dwellers. The camera would be a tool to put image and sound to the stories that subjects want to tell me but could also be a reason to ask subjects to take me on trips that would elicit this interaction with a natural environment.
This made sense as I was drawing on the notions that subjects have of what a camera means. It being used as a research method and tool for anthropology is almost exclusively more of a stretch to relate to for subjects than a camera being used for familiar things such as news reportages, travel programmes, or documentaries. In these genres, there is the divided role of presenter and topic who together create the story, with a level of acting present. I noticed this when I was filming Katie and Devon have a chat as the garage where he works is next to the community cafe. He had interpreted me filming as an official occasion with official questions and was surprised at the kind of questions she was asking on my behalf:
De: Is that it, you done? What kind of questionnaire is that? You know what I mean, she never asked my no proper question.
K: Well what question do you want?
De: Ah nah nothing, it’s alright. Where’s my cake, where’s my free cake? K: It’s in there [the cafe]. Ehm, what about…
De: What about what?
Excerpt from interview Devon (01-08-2018).
Afterwards he and I had a really nice and meaningful chat, but in this moment the confusion is very present. I am assuming he did not expect so much of a conversation, but more a question-and-answer format. In the absence of me posing as an obvious presenter most of the time, subjects put themselves in this role, which changed the interplay between us
considerably. An example of this is when I try to film Jimmy planting basil and he takes on the role of a teacher but when I try to ask him about the reason for putting the basil next to the tomato plant, he does not seem to know and kind of freestyles his answer. 2
In short, by persisting on doing visual research, I had to let go of nostalgia as my main concept. The role of the camera was questioned by me and people in front of it from the start but embracing the visibility of performativity and going on trips helped me to start seeing a story that I could tell. In the next section, I will elaborate on my time at Loughborough Farm and the process of convincing people in appear front of my camera.
The Research
When moving away from my initial research spread over four different projects that all work with migrants in different forms: an advice drop-in for refugees, a centre offering activities for female migrants, a horticultural therapy project for refugees, and the community growing space of Loughborough Farm, I started seeing film as an obstruction. Even though I am happy with the research that I did, I also envisioned a written thesis that would have been able to include these four projects and the conversations that I overheard there as a volunteer.
Besides accessibility, another obstruction that I encountered by bringing a camera was that not everybody wants to be filmed. One woman told me that she was too depressed to appear in front of a camera but agreed to be filmed during tea time. When tea time had ended she came up to me and asked to see the footage. I showed it to her and gave her lots of compliments on the way she had articulated herself. Besides her, most people agreed to be
filmed but were hesitant about talking about other things than cultivation, or went into a joking mode and avoided giving me more profound answers. For instance, when I asked Ophelia about planting sprouting turnips, she replied jokingly to most questions that she did not know why and was just following Oli’s orders. However, I know that she is one of the 3 grow leaders, who lead the sessions, so she would have basic knowledge about cultivation. I was not expecting to find out what stirs her soul by asking about turnips, but her immediate resistance to giving me access to her knowledge discouraged me from pursuing to interview her further. She also joked after the poetry event that I would cut out the part where she chokes up because the poem she is reading is reminding her of the grief she feels for her late grandfather. This was another signal for me that she was not too comfortable with being vulnerable in front of the camera.
What became clear to me was that the camera was quite the disruption on the harmonious status quo at the farm. The way I experienced it was that people were not
constantly thinking about what constitutes a natural environment to them, although they were happy to think and talk about it once I asked them to. It is possible that part of the
everybody-is-welcome atmosphere requires that not too often opinions are shared that could create a separation, so the determined topics of the day that are discussed during tea times are mostly harmless topics such as: What is your favourite cake or describe your first encounter with a fox. Møhl writes about how the “glance at the camera suddenly installs reflexivity, self-consciousness and also the spectators’ impression that something out of the ordinary is taking place” (2011, 233-234). It is important to reflect on the fact that the camera demands someone to take a stance, which is not always, as I optimistically wrote in my proposal, a burning story that they need to share. What we see in the film is much more subtle and more of a joint quest towards the answer of what can be the meaning of a natural environment.
The people that I ended up filming were not only selected because they were willing to be in front of the camera. They had more or less a combination of charisma with a
philosophical depth and a face that evokes a feeling of authenticity or realness. The fact that I look for these traits stems from what is most likely a mixture of the people that I admire on and off screen, and current trends that influenced me and this research. Some people might not have the photogenicity (filmgenicity?) that gives me the nerve to ask to film them, however I did chat to almost everybody that volunteered and these conversations shaped my
research as well. This attraction to capture I had very strongly with Heather, with Clo, and with Femi, the poet in the red shirt. I also had it with another woman who I could not film because we had met through a mental health project. Lincoln, and Homan to a certain extent, chose me by showing me a lot of interest and enthusiasm to be part of my thesis film. Lincoln did so by giving me the note that I ended up putting in the film after what I saw Jip van Steenis do in her thesis film Between Accursed Mountains (2017) when she showed objects in her hands that were relevant to her storyline. Homan and I had been chatting after a mutual friend suggested I would send him a message. We met up and went tree climbing at
Hampstead Heath and talked a lot about nostalgia, poetry, cities, and mountains. He had just returned from three months of educating and writing poetry with refugee girls that live in a squat in Athens. I realised that the way his perception on current affairs is not far from anthropology. We met up a few more times before I came to Wales where he was spending time away from London in his campervan. This is where he became interesting for my research, as now he showed me what we had been talking about all along.
The reasons that drive people towards a camera are something to be guessed. With Homan and Lincoln I had the feeling that an air of vanity, and a lack of an audience drove them towards me. For Femi, James, who is part of the construction team at Loughborough Farm, and Selvan, who is a guy that I met in one of the other projects, seemed the fact that they wanted to be involved in my life in one way or another to be the reason for their interest. At points it was difficult for me to differentiate between the role of volunteer, friend,
researcher, and filmmaker. This showed itself at times when I found it hard to keep in touch with people after I had filmed them as they assumed we were now friends, or when I felt awkward when they saw me film someone else as if that would almost render the encounter I had with them less special. One of the pitfalls of doing visual anthropological research is that the researcher has to try to make someone feel comfortable in front of the camera through being overly nice and interested, which can sometimes be mistaken for genuine friendship. In return it is hard for me to build a bond, knowing that I am only there for a short amount of time.
Besides being focused on finding people to film, I spend a lot of time at
Loughborough Farm without my camera. Those quiet afternoons really helped me feel the energy and attraction of the place, which in return helped me direct the research. For instance, I met Lincoln on a quiet afternoon and he told me he had been writing a poem in the morning.
I met Femi when he stumbled into the farm drunk and started reciting his poems during tea time, much to grow leader Karen’s dismay. However, Femi and I had our most significant conversation on a random day when we ran into each other on the street. He told me about his loneliness and his struggle with depression. He told me he gets disappointed a lot by people and had a feeling that I was not going to disappoint him. This made me feel slightly
uncomfortable and I decided not to interview him at his house. However I did insist that he would come to the poetry event and recite his poems, which he wholeheartedly did. He even wrote one for the occasion.
During the volunteering sessions, the gates at Loughborough Farm are wide open and the grow leader puts plants that are for sale on the pavement in front of them. When you peek inside, you see volunteers watering the bags that hold the plants (as the soil underneath contains lead) and people walking around with wheelbarrows. There is a big white board that lists things to do: What can be sown, what can be harvested for people to take home, and not to touch the Japanese knotweed. The grow leader walks around, giving instructions on how to sow, repot, fertilise, prune, harvest, and propagate specific plants. Everything that is harvested needs to be weighed and the numbers need to be written in the harvest log. Around a quarter to tea time, someone would start setting up the table with cups and milk and hot water from the community cafe across the road, and Anthea (the chair of LJAG) would come by with a home baked cake. Slowly people put down their activities until someone declares it tea time at which point everybody takes seat around the wooden table in the middle of the farm. During tea time, everybody introduces themselves and tells a little story around a specific topic. Also upcoming events, news about the construction and other developments around the farm are mentioned. After tea most people take some harvest and leave and some stay to finish what they were doing, or help clear up. On Saturdays a core group usually lingers to form a procession to Clarkshaws, the local organic mini brewery under the arches.
Some people come to the farm to chat. Others come to garden. Everybody would always greet each other and ask you how you were doing. There is a shared feeling of
responsibility when a newcomer walks into the farm to invite him/her to come back regularly. Bypassers seem to be drawn to the makeshift look of the farm and even more so on a hot summer's day. Working with plants helped me keep my mental peace when at moments I felt like my research had no direction. So I let the farm work its magic on me whilst digging through some roots.
Filming Poetry
Throughout the research, I realised that asking people how they interpret natural environments had led to these threefold findings: first, the urban farm dwellers negotiate their environment by conceptualising it and adding to it (dwelling and cultivating if you will), secondly, to understand this I needed to invite them to perform this for me by taking me on a tour outside the farm, and thirdly, the film deeply explores the relationship between the anthropologist and the subject. The first point I found through the way people talk about the farm. The way it is described follows the ideology of an open space where members of the community can come to participate in gardening sessions or just for a cup of tea and a conversation.
This openness has lead to a culture that embraces ideas for other intentions of the space. With the same level of enthusiasm my poetry night was received when I introduced it at one of the farm’s monthly meetings. The suggestion to add a haiku workshop was made (which we ended up not having time for on the day of the event) and one of the grow leaders, Oli, offered to arrange sound. The reason I suggested a poetry event was because it was the farm’s fifth birthday and I wanted to do something for the people that had helped me with my research, but also because I had already run into three people at the farm who had told me they wrote poetry and I kept meeting more people who said they liked poetry or used it in working with youth. It sparked my interest and I wondered if there was a connection between having an interest in growing and poetry. The event became the ideal opportunity to film and analyse art of poetry to gain insight into the way people experience their lifeworlds and perform it. In that sense poetry has similarities with anthropology as it looks for ways in which people give meaning to their lifeworld by putting it into words (or film).
Michael Jackson writes about Husserl’s concept lifeworlds, or an individual's
phenomenological experience of his/her environment (2002, 88). A lifeworld consists of the beholder’s meaningful experiences and determines the perception of the environment. By using this concept, I approach the environment that someone dwells in and builds upon as being constantly negotiated and subjected to the perception that the dweller of it has, how he/she gives meaning to it. What Jackson calls lifeworld, Schama calls landscape which is a “work of the mind”as it is "our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw
matter and landscape" (Schama 1995, 7-10 in Santos-Granero 1998, 139). This is where nostalgia comes back in, as the desire to garden could come from experiencing the
environment as a lifeworld in which the act of migration led to the need to attach a nostalgic activity to the lifeworld. So changing the lifeworld that is alien at first through doing
something familiar, might make it better.
Through writing poetry, the cultivation of the environment happens as well when the environment and daily life is examined and turned into a work of performative art. Poetry emphasizes certain elements of the environment and looks for moments that deserve to be highlighted. Friedrich calls poetry “the gist of culture” as it tries to capture the essence of it (1996, 39 in Maynard 2008, 68). Poetry as an art form follows certain rules, which according to Maynard are a reflection of culture (2008: 76). Although it holds the illusion of creative freedom, a poet restricts itself to words and often makes use of rhyme, repetition,
parallelisms, alliteration, and so on, to add emphasis and emotion. This way the carefully selected words relating to carefully selected objects get even more meaning. To understand this process of creativity, we need to understand the relationship between words, the environment, and the self. McLean writes:
[B]oth nature and culture can be seen as products of an open-ended movement of becoming and self-differentiation engendering and traversing diverse terrains, agents, and entities. It is this process itself that I wish to identify as a primary locus of creativity, a creativity prior to the differentiation of culture and nature, subject and object, reality and representation. McLean 2009, 233.
This process of creating a poem about one’s environment is the process of creating your identity and encompassing culture and nature. By uniting them, you deny that anyone could look at nature without looking through cultural glasses so our perception of nature is
influenced by our culture and because humans have “socialised” nature (Tovey 2003, 196). Therefore nature does not need to mean the same thing to everybody as cultures differ. By accepting that the way we perceive the environment is created in accordance to our culture, when we cultivate or the poetry we write, one loses the ability to ever really see nature without the cultural filter. Although we will keep trying to get as close as possible to the true form of nature by sharing our interpretations of it with others, and so spreading this specific cultural object across cultures.
Abu-Lughod writes that “poetic productions are directed towards an audience (...) reciting poems to particular individuals communicates, and even creates, closeness. Poetic recitation is this a strategy for bridging social distance” (1988, 241). So sharing a poem can bridge a cultural gap as the listener tries to understand the perception of the writer, and it is an important side of writing poetry. Lincoln told me one day at Loughborough Farm about his shyness that he suffered from when he was little. Even though he had an aptitude for language, he was too afraid to perform on stage and eventually found poetry as a way to express himself. Is asked whether he writes poetry to deal with inspiration, or whether sharing it is the point of writing it, he confirmed the latter:
C: Are you still afraid of letting other people hear it?
L: No, no, by all means, I don’t see the point of writing it if other people can’t hear or see it, that’s the whole idea, to be out there, to broadcast it and let the world know what you’re thinking.
Excerpt from interview with Lincoln (28-08-2018).
Lincoln views poetry as a medium to share his interpretation of his lifeworld. He gains this interpretation by dwelling in his lifeworld and putting it in to words. In accordance to this perception of dwelling, critiquing, negotiating, and conceptualising one’s lifeworld, the urban farm dwellers started the farm, cultivating an environment through the artificial selection of plants into a space that they deem important (Ingold 2000, 77; Scott 1998, 13). Miglė talked to me about cultivating the environment which becomes possible once we have dwelt in it:
M: We can rely on our environment and then we can actually start to create our environment so instead of just taking whatever is given to you, you actually start to change your
environment and go like: You know this is how I want to see it. and then you talk to someone and then they go like: This is how I want to see it. And you go like: Okay, together we can decide to change it, rather then like just take you know a building block in a street and whatever and just like live in it and just do what you’re told you get to influence your own world and create your own world.
Excerpt from interview Miglė (15-09-2018).
The process of adapting our environment is a process of making something your own. The paradox of cultivation is that it is controlling the plants but at the same time it is regarded as letting go of control:
I was an architect and I really didn’t understand the concept of not controlling things, like everything had to be planned and controlled but here, people would say things like: Oh just you know, let that vegetable grow even though, see a tomato or something like that, or kale when it’s finished and we harvested it, they’d say: Oh just leave it and see what happens. And it’s not a proactive vegetable anymore because of flowers and it has a completely different physical appearance in or then what you want, and people would say: Just enjoy it.
Excerpt from interview Miglė (15-09-2018).
The paradox between controlling and being inspired by the environment is also seen in poetry, as it is a product of the environment as much as an attempt to make it your own/attach it to your identity in the same way that taking a picture can as Sontag describes in On Photography (1977). However poetry needs to be shared before it reaches the ability to create change in an environment by appealing to the people that dwell in it. So poetry is a negotiation of an environment but only when shared can it create change in the experience of its dwellers, and cultivating plants is a more tactile and interactive way to negotiate and change one’s
environment.
The mechanism behind cultivation and poetry is similar in my research, and that is why I decided to alternate them in the film. On top of that is the narrative of the poetry often related to nature, celebrating it, comparing it, or commenting on it, which brings it back to the motivation for the film: Exploring different interpretations that urban farm dwellers have of natural environments. To summarise: The openness of the farm has led many people to come there and be part of it, poets included. Nature can be regarded as something holy and
untouchable but turning it into culture, can be an attempt to capture it. By sharing the
experience of poetry during a reading, this feeling of a local interpretation of nature can seem to flow into universality when many people are listening to the same words. Even though the interpretation of the experience will be different for everybody. In the next section, I will elaborate on how sharing knowledge between me and the subject during a tour turns into a relationship.
Tour
The second thing my film is about is the tours that people took me on. During my time at Loughborough Farm I found that observing, participating, and waiting for people to mention something nostalgic relating to the the country they grew up in was not going to get me a lot of footage. Inviting people to take me on a tour somewhere outside Loughborough Farm was
a way to get beyond that and edge toward Pink’s Walking with Camera where the researcher becomes the apprentice to the subject’s senses, trying to experience their lifeworlds as I mentioned in my proposal (2011, 267). I mentioned how I got in touch with Lincoln and Homan already. Heather I boldly asked to film upon meeting her and even though she agreed, our meeting got postponed a few times, giving me the impression that she was a bit hesitant about it. There were other people that I would have liked to do a tour with, because I noticed in conversations we had that they had a specific relationship to natural environments outside the farm project that would have been nice to explore, but they were either too infrequently at the farm for me to pose the follow up question or I started hesitating after getting to know them better, like I did with Femi.
What I realised in the montage process was that (public) transport was very present in these tours, as the destinations all took a while to be reached. This emphasized my idea that a natural environment would have to be away from normal life and the stress and worries of the hectic city. Transport became a metaphor for the big city and its noise and chaos that
disappeared once the quiet destination was reached. The only thing that does not work in this metaphor is that Loughborough Farm is noisy, this noise coming from off-screen planes, plant boxes being constructed, and shouty neighbours. Although the urban is so present in the sound of my film when we are looking at something that should not make any noise only confirms the role of the farm as being an urban cultivation.
Another struggle that arose when I started filming was that the connection between the subjects was not immediately clear. That they were from different countries was one thing, but that their interpretations of cultivation also differed, ranging from having an allotment (Heather) to writing poetry in a park (Lincoln) and losing your ego to the mountains in Wales (Homan). I realised however that relating to one’s environment to want to give a personal meaning to it was enough for visual research. Besides that, if my informants would have had a more homogenous background, I would not have been able to draw a more homogenous conclusion from their behaviour, and neither was this the goal of my research. I wanted to use film to depict the interpretations of natural environments to urban farm dwellers in their variety and therefore highlighting the complexity of the concept and how the interpretation of it relates to the motivations of the subject and the interaction with the environment. These range from being the counterbalance to the noisy, straightforward, controlled or multicultural
cities, to being something nostalgic. Especially Heather emphasises how she need her allotment to deal with cities, relating it back to where she grew up:
He: I think growing up in Africa you get a lot more sense of how big space is and so that’s hard in the city. The proximity of people, your neighbours are just on the other side of that little wall, living their life. And I think when I come out here, I can have a break from that. Excerpt from interview Heather (21-08-2018).
The different interpretations that I encountered are visible in my film. By presenting these findings in a film, preconceptions such as the age, ethnicity, or accent of the subject are featured in as the viewer sees the person. I, the interviewer, have responded to these preconceptions in a conscious or subconscious way and they might have affected the
conversation and the image created. By exposing the viewer to their own preconceived ideas by using film instead of descriptive text, preconceptions can be enforced or refuted. Even though everyone has their own mental structures that create a story around a stranger, it is better to confront them than to pretend they did not influence the research at all. Suhr and Willerslev describe what otherwise would have been “the invisible face of the other”, when “subtle bodily gestures, small nonlinguistic signs, and shifting facial expressions that transcend the cultural explanations” would not have been incorporated into the research without using film (2012, 291). This way visual anthropology can be used towards a
reflection on the preconceived ideas that influence a researcher and the bodily language that a subjects contributes to his/her story. These factors help confront the illusion of objective research in a more in-depth way than a written thesis could have.
Another element that the visual aspect of this research benefits from, is that film is less conclusive than a text, but the “juxtaposition of perspectives through montage (...) evokes the invisible”, meaning that a research captures an ongoing process of which we take a snapshot (Suhr & Willerslev, 285). This film depicts the process of giving meaning to and the
versatility of the interpretations of natural environments among urban farm dwellers by and comparing them by assembling them through montage. MacDougall compares written and visual anthropology and considers that with the subject in the image, the conclusions a film draws have a more ephemeral aspect:
In films the complexity of people and objects implicitly resists the theories and explanations in which the film enlists them, sometimes suggesting other explanations or no explanations at all. In this sense, then, film is always a discourse of risk and indeterminacy. This puts it at odds with most academic writing, which, despite its caution and qualifications, is a discourse that advances always toward conclusions. For all the ways in which photographic images oversimplify and aggressively impose their messages (as they often do in advertising, for example), they are intrinsically tentative, oscillating between meaning and the self-sufficiency of their subjects.
MacDougall 2006, 6.
Without always aiming for people expressing opinions, the film also seeks for moments of rest when the search for a conclusion is paused. The farming and drinking tea together are moments that fit in the film without negotiating much information, and just set the atmosphere that is the base for the ideas that are discussed.
Relationship
The last point that this film shows is the relationship between the anthropologist and the subject. There are several moments in which I make myself present, as a researcher asking the questions but also as the person building a relationship with the people in front of the camera. An example of this is Maria, who in the first moments of the film takes the front stage when she barges into my quiet rake shot to “come and give a big hug to my best friend” Lincoln (Urban Cultivators: minute 2-3). When she finds herself in front of the camera in the next shot in which she ask me conformation that now is the time to “talk”. The surprised tone in which I tell her “Yes” not only fails to hide how much I assume all people know what a camera does, and the type of performativity it ought to evoke, but also that Maria and I admire each other from a distance but do not communicate very well. However she carries on putting on a show and promoting the farm as much as her english allows her to.
As the film progresses, my relationship with subjects get gradually deeper,
respectively from Ibtisam to Miglė, Devon, and Ophelia. I have spend a lot of time with these people and do enjoy being in the garden with them, however asking to film them felt like asking a favour which resulted in the conversations lacking much direction in both senses of the word. They did their own thing and the conversation flowed very naturally but I did not intervene too much. This resulted in images that reflect that relationship and in hindsight I
would have liked to direct more, for instance by asking to turn off the music in the
background, wait for a plane, or cut off an answer when it starts trailing off into a spiral of unrelated thoughts that is preventing a silence. When I entered the montage part of the research, I noticed how hard it was getting the gist of a conversation when sentences are long and uninterrupted, and how much background noise gets in the way of listening to someone talking. On the upside, the urban rustle and bustle of London is very present in the
background noise, which is one of the reasons why I have not made it explicit by using headers and such that we are in London. Another reason is the train announcer’s British accent is the first thing we hear in the film, and the shot out of the train window shows the famous red double deckers.
Besides the fact that I did not make my presence in London explicit, I also did not make the nationality of the subjects explicit through a header. It was a consideration as nationality does play a role in the initial categorisation of people that happens in a viewer’s mind, but I decided that I rather give the viewer a slow reveal so they focus on the content of what is said. Also when nationalities are mentioned in minute 26 it feels more like casual chat than that it means a lot to the volunteers. Another reason not to focus too much on nationality is that, although my initial outline solely focused on migrants, knowing someone’s nationality is not an indication to understanding the question: What is the meaning of a natural
environment in the urban context of London to urban farm dwellers? MacDougall provides a similar point by relating to how images can be too full of information, overly guiding the viewer by appealing to his preconceived ideas until he is not looking at all:
Meaning guides our seeing. Meaning allows us to categorize objects. Meaning is what imbues the image of a person with all we know about them. It is what makes them familiar, bringing them to life each time we see them. But meaning, when we force it on things, can also blind us, causing us to see only what we expect to see or distracting us from seeing very much at all. MacDougall 2006, 2.
I shy away from contributing to the stereotypes that viewers might have such as people from underdeveloped countries are more in touch with nature and so on. The diversity in
backgrounds helps to make the point that there are many ways of interpreting natural environments, and how much it can mean to people, sometimes relating it to the place
someone grew up in and other times to the current environment. Picton adduces the point that “[e]thnographic film needs to adapt to the transnational age where culture is increasingly hybridized and translocal” in his article about doing visual anthropology at home to ourselves (2011, 433). This does not only mean to him that the topics studied should come from closer to ourselves, blurring the lines between visual anthropology and documentary filmmaking, but also to let go of nationalities as they do not mean what they used to mean. This is what I tried to do in my film, letting go of those preconceived ideas within categories, and let the viewer be washed over by the visible diversity that exists within the equilibrium of the farm.
The closest I became to Homan and Heather, who I met with the most and was very comfortable with, hanging out with their friends on several occasions. It gave me the
confidence to direct more, for instance asking Heather to repeat some things we talked about before that I had not recorded. The level of rapport with Homan during our trip in Wales and before was as friends. Once he realised that I was not directing very much, he felt invited to explore the role of being behind the camera, filming me at certain occasions or the
surroundings when he would give his more profound answers. This in return invited me to push the limits between fiction and nonfiction when we made a short film one afternoon called A Dogwalk Gone Sour. The short did not make it into my thesis film but it was nice to 4 make together. Overall, Homan helped me reflect on authorship as the camera changed hands and he diverted questions by asking them back at me, making me realise that I was not the only one being researched. When we reached the peak of Crib Goch, the surprise he
mentioned I would encounter there (I thought there would be llamas) was that this mountain was technically very challenging. I realised then that he was not showing me his perspective on nature by taking me on a walk but he was trying to let me experience it for myself.
By subjugating me to the physical exertion and detachment from a safety net that attracted Homan to the Welsh mountains in the first place, he tried to give me the confidence boost that kept him there. Hereby he was dividing the effect of to be taken on a tour, which balances between viewing someone’s lifeworld as an outsider on one hand and to a certain extent experiencing the environment the way the subject does. On the other hand it is being shown it, meaning that the researcher is the catalyst for this tour and gets it explained in words that form a language between researcher and subject, but are new to both. The latter became also quite clear in another way whilst spending time with Lincoln, as the tour guide
4
side to him took over quite strongly once the camera was on, and there was less being,
viewing, experiencing. He was trying to put everything around us into words that related back to him, to leave as little room for interpretation from my side, which made me understand why he loves Waterlow Park and Highgate as much as he does, but prevented me from experiencing this attraction myself during the tour.
To try and convey what this tour does, a camera is essential so that the journey gets depicted as much as the result, and by taking the time to go through the steps of the tour, seeing, hearing, and feeling the environment, the viewer hopefully will get a hint of the researcher’s experience into the subject’s lifeworld. To visual anthropology, it is important to take other ways of creating a lifeworld into account besides words. Going on the tours
attempted this for my film, engaging in the experience. Ingold describes the way experience can help to explore an environment:
It is not by representing it in the mind that they get to know the world, but rather by moving around in their environment, whether in dreams or waking life, by watching, listening and feeling, actively seeking out the signs by which it is revealed. Experience, here, amounts to a kind of sensory participation, a coupling of the movement of one’s own awareness to the movement of aspects of the world.
Ingold 2000, 99.
According to Ingold, he found in his research among the Ojibwa that knowledge does not necessarily have to be acquired by shaping it into “hypothetical statements” but it can be personal “consisting of an intimate sensitivity to other ways of being, to particular
movements, habits and temperaments” (2000, 99). He compares it to the kind of knowledge a craftsman has on his resources, I compare it to the way people can experience their natural environment. I propose film as a method of getting closer to this type of knowledge in the next section.
So many elements in the film, the sound, the faces, the interaction, shape the atmosphere that I want to portray. In the bit where I show a black screen with text (minute 17), I hope the viewer realises how much they have gotten attached to the surplus of
on the tricks of film and what they evoke and its limitations, to try and help me answer the question when my film turned into visual anthropology.
Montage & Reflection
Images created by an anthropologist and=or her cameraman, on the other hand, have an etic status, and are usually called ethnographic images. (...) theory enters into their interlinkage when a meaning is being sought. We are here constructing the relatedness of an image to all other objects and ideas with which it is associated—in the experience of the social group which produced it and also of the scholars who are interpreting the meaning with the input from their own ethnographic knowledge.
Hockings 2014, 437.
The visual method of researching and storytelling is one way of looking into the process of how people give meaning to their lifeworlds and adding an angle of capturing experience. By looking, filming and sharing, anthropologists can break stereotypes and reveal patterns that can be recognisable to others which can help to understand ourselves and the world around us. By looking at things, concepts, places that people value more than others, anthropologists (and poets) analyse the web of meaning around people, contributing to a slightly more enlightened world by theorising it and breaking down preconceived ideas (Hastrup 1992, 21 in Suhr 2012, 292–293). However, as much as film is a wonderful medium to tell these stories, the limitations of the medium became painstakingly clear in the montage. As I mentioned above, the quality of the image and sound determine whether a shot works and much of the clarity of the film depends on the intuition of the researcher. Relying on intuition is problematic when it is shaped by experience outside anthropology. This applies in the sense that being constantly confronted in daily life with images and film shapes a researcher’s intuition: Where to put the camera, what frame to choose, choosing what (and who) will look good and contribute to the story I want to tell.
Picking and choosing is good when we use it to elevate an image from being a snapshot to using it to show patterns and layers of meaning; make it anthropological. It becomes questionable when the intuition with which we choose our frames is not shaped by experience in doing anthropology per se, but by something like watching fiction continuity style film which gives “the illusion of a smooth flow” (Suhr & Willerslev 2012, 285). Does visual anthropology distinguish itself by using the universal language of what makes a film
good and applying it to research that involves deep hanging out or does it have its own language by being theoretically inspired? MacDougall differentiates between the eye and the camera (2006, 3). The latter is always purposely looking at something, educating the viewer about the relationship between the researcher and his/her image. But how do you look as a researcher? During my fieldwork, I did not feel like an anthropologist all of the time but made peace with the fact that I would convey a clear story by relying on my experience with film. Trying to locate at what point my images started turning into visual anthropology is searching in a grey zone, so I will try to answer it by using Mattijs’ checklist.
When relating back to the checklist, layeredness and experimentation was added (and often removed) to the film only when the montage begun. I understand this as emphasising patterns and connections between the image, sound, text and so on. Adding animated text to the poetry readings, adjusting the speed of shots, and omitting the image to draw attention to the sound or story are examples of layers that were added in the montage process. What I tried to do by adding text and metaphorical images to the poetry readings is highlighting the web of meaning that a poem casts over its environment, showing a direct reference. By web of
meaning I mean the mean the same thing pictures can do, or the streetart does that I filmed outside Loughborough Farm. It simplifies the environment that it took certain items from, and yet adds meaning by choosing those exact words, that angle, or that type of bird to paint. This 5 relates back to the idea that a camera is always looking at something on purpose and is in that sense different than our eyes (Møhl 2011, 230). However, by adding that layer of reference, I am adding a layer of my own interpretation to someone else’s words.
This was an consideration for me regarding the bits of poetry in the film that were not in English. At first, I did not offer a translation as I wanted the viewer to experience to poetry as it was in the garden, and how different languages are embraced there. However, making the poetry understandable by showing the text and translating it, is something that I realised I need to do after showing the first version of the film during the presentations. In the feedback, a lot of desire to read the poems besides hearing them and understanding them was expressed. So I complied and admitted to being the author of the film and therefore my interpretation of other people’s words being all over it.
I played around with superimposition as well during poems, seeing the speaker and the garden simultaneously, and during stories that relate to nostalgic topics but found that mostly
it looks quite artificial which undermines the grassrooty mess that most images of the farm breathe. This was experimentation to me, but I had gotten the idea from seeing a short documentary in the museum of modern art in Malmö by Ahmad Ghossein called The Last Cartographer. Ghossein superimposed images of the cartographer’s hand with those taken from above, showing him work. The feeling that I got from his film was very nostalgic, as the trade of manual cartographer is dying out. This is why I tried to apply it to my film, using the effect that he used. In a more theoretical sense, you could say that my film tried to refer to his film by using the same effect as a concept that we could both relate to, even though we were studying different topics. This is an example of how theory could be used in film, by copying effects and techniques and applying them to your own project, as by doing this you are acknowledging the level of abstraction that a concept has so that it can be applied to different researches. So the filmic equivalent for the theoretical concept of nostalgia could be using superimposition, relating more to the atmosphere that a certain effect brings to a film than that the filmmaker specifically refers to a written theory. The problem is that his film is not
accessible outside the museum, which makes it hard to refer to it now.
Other sources of inspiration to me were Unless the water is safer than the land by Arjan Omrani (2015) in which he uses subtitles without the accompanying image or sound to emphasize the anonymity that refugee minors experience. The effect this had on me as a viewer was that the gravity of the stories was more intensely experienced as the purposely omitting of the image makes you aware of the facelessness that the storyteller experienced. This is why I applied this method to the beginning of Heather’s part of the film. It is the film’s low point after Devon has just told us he does not like London, and this is followed up by Heather’s story about living in a bedsit. By slowly adding sound and then the image of her on a bike being free, I wanted to create the feeling of growth and that things get better.
Theory in film remains a difficult aspect of visual anthropological filmmaking. Besides juxtaposing images and copying methods, it is relevant to realise that the overall storytelling aspect of a film is able to educate a viewer in a very short timespan about the experiences in a field:
Film has a special relationship with experience, which can be theoretically described as a form of empiricism. Ethnographic films establish a dialogue between the anthropological library and experience, the book and life. But they also speak to our imagination and throw light on our personal worlds, both as filmmakers and viewers. Anthropological films invite us to enter into a flow of lived events through the movement of our own lives, just as filmmaking is an exercise that allows us to gain new insights into the lives of others. Every ethno- graphic film is a growth in awareness and a reflection upon experience. Through film our personal responses resonate with the experience of others, and this is what makes visual anthropological methods different from more traditional anthropology. (...) Unlike a text, which presents facts directly, film teaches indirectly, through gradual processes of identification with the film’s subjects.
Silvio Carta in Hockings, 2014 453–454.
This quote emphasizes how important is it for a visual anthropologist to be a good filmmaker as well, as the narrative of the film should portray and appeal on a personal level to the viewer. At certain points during my process of montage I ran into experimentation that added another layer to the film but hindered the story. In this film I have privileged story over theory but I hope to develop myself further as a visual anthropologist so that I can find a finer
balance between the two.
Intersubjectivity and media-awareness are two concepts that are obtained in the filming part of the research. The subject lets you know that they are aware of the camera being present and might comment on how it affects their behaviour. We see this when Homan comments on his own performativity in minute 30 when he says: “This is my not-performing” and stands purposely awkwardly against a fence. On the level of thinking in abstracts,
reflexivity, and camera awareness, Homan stands out from the rest which makes him the most visual anthropologically interesting considering that this field wants to differentiate from mainstream documentary styles and ethnographic narration (or lack thereof). However, when looking at how most of the volunteers at the farm come across on camera, he does not really fit in. I kept him in for being a poet and having an interpretation of a natural environment that lend itself well to the film, and his cheeky mannerism which question authorship. I was told he does not seem as common (in a not offensive way) as the rest, and comes across as a showman that enjoys to be on stage. This could be said of Lincoln as well but his old age has made him humbler. He is also showing a level of media-awareness by posing for pictures and taking a photograph while I am filming him (minute 8). However this fits into his story of being a poet which requires being an observer of one’s environment and it does not matter
whether there is a student with a camera present or not, you are still the same observer, just seeing different things. For Homan however, the mountains are his medium to dignity, as he says: “Mountains are so indifferent, and that’s quite good for the ego, especially if you got a big one.” This statement is either undermined by the fact that he agreed enthusiastically to be part of my film, or it proves that he still has a lot of mountain climbing to do.
The story that binds the subjects in my film together is the story of how they relate to natural environments. It is important to mention that this story is as much their story as it is mine. Although the words are theirs, the main argument is mine as I am the one deciding which sentences make it into the final cut. It is harder to incorporate the general outline of what someone is trying to say when you need to get the gist of it from a few sentences. In that sense visual anthropology is almost like poetry, trying to capture essence with limited
description. Besides that, visual anthropology often refrains from doing life histories in regard to the main argument as this would not keep the viewer’s attention and might be superfluous information, of which we already have enough in image and sound. The ethical problem with this is that by reducing people to their face, the sound of their voice, and a snapshot of their opinions, you might not be doing them justice or be taking stuff out of context.
To rightly interpret somebody’s point is as much the responsibility of the researcher as the speaker but I am finding it difficult to check back with subjects to ask if they agree with how they are depicted due to the distance and time limits. I will go back and show the film to everybody at some point, but in the meanwhile I just have to trust that I am sketching a fair image and that they agree to be part of what is my film now. Looking back on it, I would not have done it another way, by using signed agreements for instance, as this would have put a barrier up even higher for people that are not too familiar with visual anthropology or with me. I did ask everyone that was present on every day that I was filming whether it was okay that I filmed them, but I doubt that most people knew that my film was more focused on the people than Loughborough Farm itself.
Conclusion
Throughout this research process, I have started to understand anthropological film on a deeper level. I have come out of it with a film that classifies as visual anthropology as I have tried to argue in this report, which has made me feel an affinity to the discipline that I would like to explore further. Visual anthropology happens on many levels; it happens through montage, through performativity, by breaking into a harmonious space with a camera, and so on. The most important argument for visual anthropology to me is that there is a depth which can be given to a subject’s story which is created in an interaction between subject’s
storytelling, researcher’s interpretation of it and the layered composition constructed with the visual medium. Though at the same time anthropological films show the ephemeral aspect of the research we do by being less conclusive than a text. This paradox I hope to experience through audience’ reactions when showing the film to the people in London.
On a technical level, I understand that there is more to learn than I could have
imagined but feel skilled to a satisfying extent. In a future project, I will take better care of my sound, perhaps committing to headphones although they do create a distance between me and the subject. Also, I understand better now how to apply metaphorical images into a story, which I did not pay enough attention to in the field when shooting them. On an
anthropological level, I have learned a lot about how to look at visual anthropology and I found that a lot of the articles on visual anthropology resonate to my project. However, on the content of my research, I felt like I did not manage to delve as deep into the topic theoretically as I would have liked to, partially due to time constraints, partially because the way the
discipline analyses data. The benefit of this analysis is that a story can be transferred to a viewer in a much more layered way, playing into the subject’s experience as well as their words by creating a composition that tells the story. The argument that the story in my film tries to make involves noise, silence, poetry, faces, metaphorical images, and many more layers that constitute the total atmosphere. To put this atmosphere into words is
counterproductive, but I have tried to write a reflection on how this atmosphere came about. The relationship between nature, poetry, and nostalgia is not theoretically shown in my film but I tried to cover it in this report. The claim that I tried to make is that being
attracted to natural environments can stem from having experienced a change that would have led a migrant to refer to their roots. I wanted to research whether people’s nostalgia towards cultivation was a reason to come to Loughborough Farm, but instead I researched motivations
for being attracted to natural spaces by going on tours with subjects, the tours turning out to be the most valuable element of my film. Lastly, I have argued for a link between cultivation and poetry, as they both come from experiencing one’s environment and building on it. This research has led me to a film and a report which hopefully will have contributed to the discipline of visual anthropology and how it can be used to research very personal but very universal experiences.
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Appendix
Declaration: I have read and understood the University of Amsterdam plagiarism policy [http://student.uva.nl/mcsa/az/item/plagiarism-and-fraud.html?f=plagiarism]. I declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or any version of it, for assessment in any other paper.
Signed, Chris Hellwig
