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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.
List of contents
Part 1. ON DEMAND ETHNOGRAPHERS.- Chapter 1. Making "Commissioned Home Movies" in Post-Socialist Romania: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives.- Chapter 2. Ethnographic Investigations of Collaborative Filming for Dementia.- Chapter 3. Musicalizing the Other or the "Otherfication" in Music?: The Anthropologist as an Audiovisual Mediator.- Chapter 4. Between Institutional Policies and Ethnographic Gazes: Thoughts on the Audiovisual Practices on the Register of Feira de Campina Grande as Brazilian Cultural Heritage.- PART 2. PRODUCERS AND PRODUCED.- Chapter 5. Videos of 'Prestes' or Religious Dance Fraternities as New Forms of Ostentatiousness in La Paz, Bolivia.- Chapter 6. Shooting Elites: An Ethnography of Wedding-film Production for Elites.- Chapter 7. The Circulation of Low-budget Videos in the Football System.- Chapter 8. Multiple Videographies: From Promotional Documentaries to Videoclips of Andean Popular Music in the PeruvianVideosphere.- PART 3. FORMS AND CIRCULATIONS.- Chapter 9. Expanding the Family Frame: Social Specialists, Intimate Publics, and Gendered Images of Mobility in Transnational Wedding Videos.- Chapter 10. Of Archons and Amateurs: Commissioned Filmmaking in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema.- Chapter 11. Aesthetic Norms of Subaltern Filmmaking: Comic Skits of the Everyday in Zimbabwe.- Chapter 12. Moral Panic at the Country: Conservative Civil Society Groups and Social Video Uses in Peru.
About the author
Alex Vailati is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Museology at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil. An anthropologist and documentarist, he is the coordinator of the university's Visual Anthropology Laboratory (LAV). He is the author of
Migration of Rich Immigrants: Gender, Ethnicity and Class (2016, with Carmel Rial).
Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal is a Professor and researcher at the Centro de Estudios Antropológicos in El Colegio de Michoacán, Mexico. She is the author of
Indigenous Media and Political Imaginaries in Contemporary Bolivia ( 2017). Her current research includes work on popular photographic and audiovisual archives in Michoacán, Mexico and La Paz, Bolivia.
