Collaborative audio-visual rhetoric: A self-reflexive review of collaboration in anthropological film projects

Themed section on Visual rhetoric and rhetorics of the visual

Abstract

Through a self-reflexive review of collaboration in two anthropological film projects conducted during the period from 2013 to 2018, we address the dilemmas that are at stake when producing and distributing audio-visual images of vulnerable subjects (for example, refugees), and the consumption of so-called “subject-generated” imagery. The poetical and political strategies of audio-visual forms of anthropological (re)presentation as well as the existing shortcomings related to those topics, such as the ‘refugee crisis’, which is caught in the current context of our media-saturated society is explored. We suggest the notion of “shared anthropology” as a framework for exploring the critical potential of collaborative audio-visual rhetoric. From this perspective, we discuss the films Unless the water is safer than the land, in which performers re-enact the narratives of refugees; and Passager, a collaborative film project between an audio-visual anthropologist and a young Afghan refugee who left his country in search of safer living conditions. We explore how these films can be conceptualised as distinctive forms of “collaborative audio-visual rhetoric”.