In an event he describes as “good luck,” ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch lost his tripod only two weeks into making his first film in 1947, a project about the Niger River (Rouch, 2003, 148).   This loss caused the immediate destabilization of his camera and forced Rouch to utilize the camera in the field in ways that undermined traditional cinematic technique. In transforming the camera into a mobile extension of himself, Rouch found himself in new relations with his erstwhile subjects.  The tripod had physically produced—and conceptually supported—a specific, static distance between anthropologist and the everyday world in motion before the ethnographic lens, denoting the camera as a stable platform and neutral tool with which to observe and record.  As the camera was put into motion, however, the ethnographic mise-en-scène could no longer be taken as a stable field of human action/phenomenon from which data could be extracted by the systematic deployment of the (ethnographic) camera. Rouch’s subsequent technique of placing himself and his camera into the immediacy of the everyday lives of his subjects is often depicted as the collapse of “an invisible wall” (Young 1995, 112) or perhaps the abandonment of an “observation post” (Rouch, 2003 38). With his ethnographic technique—the camera—in full view of his subjects, Rouch engaged them in an improvisational, mobile dynamic, through which he claimed himself transformed.  His camera no longer transfixed, he began to variously lead and follow action.  At the same time the boundary between camera and human-operator seems to collapse into the “living camera” Vertov dreamed of.  Rouch and his unmoored camera are not simply reducible to an idealized cyborg dyadic unification or a dialectical reformulation of anthropological labor in which the anthropologist, already hard at work in the field, becomes a mediated laborer or a “watchman and regulator” to the (visual) machine of ethnographic production (Marx 1976, 705).  Instead, Rouch finds himself within an ebullient field of shifting relations—relations between movement, mediation and method triangulating anthropology at the site of loss and luck.

When an earlier anthropology, equipped with the tripod-steady technique of observational cinema, is destabilized and cast out on its luck, we enter with Rouch into the magical space of this triangulation. It is a contact zone between the mobile physicality of bodies creating social space, the technological membrane mediating experience, and the ethnographic methods engaging the culture through which movement and media are made meaningful. This magical space is significant for anthropology because it describes a contact zone of seeing machines and sensuous bodies, of contacts both virtual and explicitly haptic. Throughout movement, mediation, and method is the question of action: how are the contacts made through media and around bodies? What is the mode?  How is the anthropologist touched and thus transformed in the process of haptic and machinic transaction? How does the anthropological subject handle the media-striated matter of culture?  These questions frame my interrogation of the camera’s relations with anthropological method and movement with a specific emphasis on Rouch’s concept of the ciné-trance and how it inscribes a particular ethnographic medium of engaged, haptic experience within the field site. I turn then to my own highly mediated field site of Tokyo to explore the mode of contact and transactions between myself, my own ethnographic camera, and skateboarders in Tokyo who video record their successful tricks, or mei-ku, and then create short videos that circulate digitally through global skate culture. 

Begin this path: Getting the Make

1. Getting Close to Machine and Method
2. Entranced Movement and Moving Truths
3. Getting the Make: Making It
4. Getting the Make, Getting the Data: A Total Machine on Screen
5. Getting the Make, Getting the Data: Trance-Action

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