Rouch’s camera-in-motion is revelatory to the ethnographic film project because it redirects our gaze from the fleshy subject on screen and beckons us towards a contemplation of how motion itself—of the camera and the world around it—constitutes what we behold as the filmic object. In watching projected images Deleuze argues we see not “a figure described in a unique moment” but instead we witness “the continuity of the movement which describes the figure” (1968, 5). This inversion of the relation between actor and movement dissipates any assumed solidity of the ethnographic subject simply enacting (cultural) motion before the camera, which in turn forces us to grapple with the ethnographic film as a much larger assemblage-in-motion or a “whole which changes” (Ibid., 22). For if the ethnographic film is a moving artifact of a researcher’s attempts to frame action as the subject’s embodied and performed cultural truths then what is the mode of action of the researcher appended to the catalyzing machine of the camera? The figure on screen is a machinic trace of the camera’s movement in the field and the frame itself marks the territory of site. Movement is always within the frame and its very containment is the effect of the ethnographer’s mode—for Rouch one of a mobile immersion, so close as to disappear right into the movement of the subject. “…we film with wide angles, that is, seeing everything, but reducing ourselves to proximity, that is, without being seen by others” (Rouch 2003, 154). Who are these others that cannot see Rouch but are certainly seeing his entranced movements? Is this an attempt to become the motion that creates the ethnography, rather than the field researcher possessed so sensuously by the discipline’s corpographic energy that every observation and jotted note contributes to its synthetic vitality? As we watch, the film is not only an object of knowledge activated as moving images on screen (upon which Deleuze’s analytical focus is primarily fixed). The film—that moving ethnographic artifact—also comprises and frames the field-site within which the camera is moving. Eerily, the field-site exists primarily out of frame, serving as a kind of invisible ether of an authenticating reality emanating from the moving images and thus fixing the unstable chemistry of their truth.

Rouch’s tripod represents a symbolic challenge to the panoptic dreams of celluloid culture-capture conjured by Margaret Mead that sought to fix the camera as a tool and sign of a scientifically rigorous anthropology. Mead was convinced of the singular power of ethnographic image making to secure material evidence in the present and to ensure knowledge in the future. The camera represented a mechanical, dispassionate rationality and expressed “the idea that one can truly understand people through the copious use of recording…” (Rony 2008, 11). The camera here seems to ameliorate the deep anthropological anxiety over the “whole that changes” with its capacity to “preserve materials…long after the last isolated valley in the world is receiving images by satellite” (Mead 1995, 9). Mead imagined 360 degree camera arrays long before those used to create the spectacularly frozen motion of Keanu Reeves in The Matrix and she insisted on long, uninterrupted sequences of footage (or the long take) that could be “repeatedly reanalyzed with finer tools and developing theories” (Ibid., 10). Against this version of truth-making so contingent on cameras harnessed to fixed modes of acquisition and analysis, Rouch demonstrates an ethnographic approach to the camera and to anthropology’s elusive, mobile object that is far less rigidly self-assured: “You have to set off a series of actions to see, all of a sudden, the emergence of truth, of the disquieting action of a person who has become disquieted” (Rouch 2003, 149). Setting aside the temporal moment in which “truth” emerges, it is the “series of actions” I want to emphasize as the movements of cameras and the ethnographic field site in contemplation of a productive “disquieting” in anthropological practice whereby the stability of the field site and of the researcher are both challenged.

Mead values the camera’s production of a material record, and her research with Gregory Bateson generates a deep archive.  This emphasis on the material value of truth-artifacts resonates strongly with the visual practices of skateboarders in Tokyo among whom I conducted fieldwork for two years. However, they put themselves and their cameras in repetitive motion on the streets, relentlessly attempting a trick, shifting angles to capture an image or sequence of images to evoke an intense embodied sensation in the viewer, searching out new locations to try new tricks and acquire new images and footage. By this repetitive circulation through the streets, alleys, and industrial labyrinths of Tokyo, skaters carefully accumulate a folio of visual documents that will continue to do particular kinds of definitive and signifying work once put into circulation; much like ethnographic writing, they hope to express the ineffable through the concrete. They use image technologies to document skateable architecture and to record themselves riding and performing tricks across Tokyo’s varied surfaces.  Their camera equipment ranges from the intimate to the assertive: multi-use, portable technology including personal cell phones equipped with cameras, and expensive, high -definition digital video cameras such as the favored DCR-VX2000. The cameras supplement and alter the central experience of the skater: the body is in alert and risky contact with city space, a relation exemplifying what Elizabeth Grosz describes as the “productive constraint and inherent unpredictability” of the corporeality of cities and bodies (49).  Image-making technologies create a precarious relay of haptic and representational signals, contributing to the “relations of exchange and production, habit …and upheaval” between body and urban space (49). From the position of the anthropologist, the skaters’ cameras frame the representation of mobile relations of body and space while calling attention to the force of movement itself in producing these relations. These cameras also incite questions about how the visual machines—video cameras, cell phones, computers, digital playback programs, and editing software— structure the terms and affects of those relations when images are circulated and commodified in the global networks of skate culture, where they put into motion bodily “habit” and “upheaval” as techniques of mediated skaterly identities.  The skaters’ use of visual technologies creates habituating structures as they record the “upheaval” of skaters’ bodies, including serious injury and conflict with authority.  The mediated/filmic self-representations of anthropology’s Others have become as significant to the discipline as the self-deployment of cameras by skaters, since Sol Worth’s famous attempt in 1965 to mediate Malinowski’s charge to the ethnographer “to grasp the native’s point of view…to realize his vision” by equipping Navajo informants with 16mm movie cameras (25).  What is crucial here are the new terms of mediation introduced by the intensely corporeal zone of the skaters’ action. I encountered upheaval in my own ethnographic video practice—a rhythmic crisis of my own visual apparatus, a crisis akin conceptually to Rouch’s lost tripod. What is this capacity of the camera to simultaneously orchestrate the body-rhythms of the skaters and the machine-rhythms of the anthropologist? How does movement itself operate in the dynamic frisson created between skaters inhabiting a spectacularized corpus or mode of the body created by their own cameras and the force of video capture exerted by the ethnographic camera?

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