Nuevos juguetes para un etnógrafo ansioso: derroteros del registro audiovisual

Abstract

The first generation of motion pictures expands the possibilities of the iconic and indexical qualities of photography, of figuration and contact, as it complicates the links between the image and what is depicted. This paper proposes an analysis of the audiovisual image as a result of a conglomeration of signs in a corpus of discourses ranging from early ethnographic film to more recent developments. It consolidated a challenge to the heuristic power traditionally assigned to the image and its epistemic heiress, the motion picture. The beginning of this journey could be placed at the end of the nineteenth century, a period in which a considerable number of films were produced by way of chronophotography, that had the purpose to document the lives of distant and unknown people. These were the years in which Felix-Louis Regnault, member of the Society of Anthropology of Paris, thought about motion pictures as privileged tool for studying the gestures of the human body and recorded in 1895 the first scenes of an African woman. It is also the time in which ethnography goes hand by hand with colonialism, and cinema becomes a metonymic device of apprehension of the colonized space. The main purpose of this work is to trace a path that goes from the first uses of chronophotographic devices towards current audiovisual productions. In order to do this, we will study privileged rhetorical tools for the construction of otherness in order to give an account of key moments in the relationship between image and knowledge/science.

Keywords

• device
• film
• chronophotography
• representation
• otherness