Over the last two decades, the advent of cheap, user-friendly video technologies has contributed to a revolution in representational agency. Videos are now made by production units that are at times composed of families, churches, musical groups, community associations or other institutions. Thus, on-demand videos produced and distributed within local and atypical networks profoundly shape contemporary urban imaginaries. This book explores the intertwined relations among infrastructure, technology, and modernity through an ordinary, yet little studied field of "on-demand" audiovisual production, which involves processes of negotiation and interaction between clients and commissioned video makers. On-demand films are considered as a space of collaboration and self-representation, that allows to reflect on the potential of fiction, artifice, and montage to render material desires, aspirations, and ideas of the future.
Author(s): Alex Vailati, Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 304
City: Cham
Preface
References
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Mapping Liminal Fields
Grasping On-Demand Movies
Invisible Cinema
Between Public and Private
The Authority of Infrastructure
On-Demand Visual Economies
References
Part I: On-Demand Ethnographers
Chapter 2: The Ethnographer as Merchant. Making Commissioned Home Movies in Postsocialist Romania
Filming on Demand: Reversal of the Filmmaker’s Authority
Diversity of Vernacular Filmic Forms
The Social Life of Videotapes
Conclusion
Chapter 3: Walking Shadows Rap: The Enchantment of Video and the Anthropologist as an Audiovisual Mediator
Technology of Words: Arranging a Research Project
Shadow Walk: Filming as an Ethnographic Place
Scraps of Time: Thinking Through Editing
As a Methodology Analysis
As Political Regulator
As Captivation Technology
Indigenizing Hip-Hop: Final Considerations
References
Chapter 4: Between Institutional Policies and Ethnographic Gazes: Reflections on Audiovisual Practices in a Brazilian Cultural Heritage Registration Process
Registration of Intangible Heritage: Heritage Amidst Dichotomies, Hierarchies, and Reification
Audiovisual Material in the Registration of Intangible Heritage
The Registration Process and Making of the Documentary “Campina Grande Street Market: Brazilian Cultural Heritage”
Brief History of the Street Market Registration
Accompanying the Production of the Street Market Registration Documentary
The Editing of the Street Market Registration Documentary
Final Considerations: A Video Between Institutional Policies and Ethnographic Gazes
References
Part II: Producers and Produced
Chapter 5: Videoclips of Prestes as New Forms of Ostentation and Exchange in La Paz, Bolivia
Gran Poder: Waste, Abundance, and Emerging Wealthy Classes
On-Demand Video Studios: Local Economies and Esthetic Appropriations
Preparing and Shooting a Videoclip
Videoclips: Esthetics and Exchange
Circulation: From Material Exchanges to Occupying Cities
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 6: Shooting Elites: An Ethnography of Wedding Film Production for Elites
Weddings Reproductions
Shooting Elites
Professional Authorships
The Social Life of Wedding Film
The Production of the Wedding
Reinstituting an Elitist Society
Bibliography
Chapter 7: The Circulation of Low-Budget Videos in the Football System
Introduction: Defining Videos On Demand
Lion Killers: The Protagonists of Football Videos On Demand
Mediators in the Production of Low-Budget On-Demand Videos
One Video, Many Meanings
Conventions and Meanings
Final Considerations: Democratization of the Media and Agency
References
Chapter 8: Expanding the Family Frame: Social Specialists, Mediated Experiences, and Gendered Images of Mobility in Transnational Wedding Videos
Introducing Transnational Wedding Videos Between Senegal and Europe
The Videographer as a Ritual and Social Specialist
The Aesthetics of Respectability: The Film-Souvenir as a Fictionalized, Imagined Place
Circulating Weddings: Memory, Waste, and Mediated Experience
Concluding Remarks
References
Part III: Forms and Circulations
Chapter 9: Multiple Videographies: From Promotional Documentaries to Music Videos of Andean Popular Music in the Peruvian Videosphere
Municipal Promotional Videos and Performative Modes: “Dias de Huanta”
Local Videographers and Videos of Festivities
Freelance Music Video Producers and Music Recording/Video Production Microenterprises
Multiple Videographies: Layers of Performativity, Networks and Affects
References
Videography
Chapter 10: Aesthetic Norms and Motivations of Subaltern Video-Filmmaking: Comic Skits and Mobile Journalism of the Everyday in Zimbabwe
Introduction and Background
Video Activism in the Context of Socio-political Advocacy
Classifying Comic Skits: Video Artivism as Alternative Filmmaking
The Aesthetics of Subaltern Filmmaking
Mocking the State as a Way of Speaking Truth to Power
Funding, Professional Filters and Effect on Creativity
Conclusion
References
Chapter 11: Of Archons and Amateurs: Commissioned Filmmaking in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema
Introduction
Commissioned Filmmaking as a Contractual Relationship
Commissioned Filmmaking as Mixed Authorship
Countervisuality and “Dispositifs” of Infiltration
Commissioned Filmmaking as Archivisation
References
Chapter 12: On-Demand Postscript: Emergent Engagements in the Anthropology of Images
References
Index
