Reel time: ethnography and the historical ontology of the cinematic image

Abstract

Confronting the cinema philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson and Andre Bazin with ethnographic work in the shooting of south Indian popular film, this essay explores a cinematic experience of time as a creative duration of emergence. I seek to suggest that such a texture of time is essential to such filmmaking as a process of affective expression. If modern cinema allows for an intuition of time in flux, that is, its capacity to do so may often depend upon the inhabitation of such time on the part of its makers. Closely attending to the cinematic thought and working practice of one Indian director, this essay focuses on the various ways in which practices of shooting on location may be taken to extend the virtual horizons of one's perceptions, actions and affections. Each of these three domains of experience – perception, action and affection – are proposed as means by which time itself is encountered as creative in nature. To scout, shoot and inhabit such a milieu to make oneself open to what it might yet become as it is filmed: to move along with the flow of its emergent potential. This essay argues for ethnographic engagement with film production practices as a crucial means of engaging the contingent and uncertain ‘happening’ of cinema, seeking thereby to encourage a broader shift in scholarly examinations of creative expression: from the subjective intentions of creator-auteurs, to the immanent potential of the situations in which they come to encounter newness.