Where does this leave the anthropologist with the other, externalized camera? In studying the relations between skaters, cameras, and city, I am conscious of deploying my own video camera as a recording tool set to “deep focus”—not focused on any particular detail or person but set so the foreground, middle-ground and background are all equally sharp —certain to snare data indiscriminately.  Beneath its modernist masquerade of “scientific rigor,” my position is helpless. I watch Koji enviously from behind my own camera as he skillfully pursues the visible events necessary for a theater of the immediate and painful.  He skates fast behind his subject, pushing, while keeping his eyes fixed on the small viewing screen that frames his shot.  With small adjustments, he keeps the skater in focus and gracefully times his motions to sweep to the edge of a staircase just as the skater launches off. I begin filming as if I can trust my own epistemo-kinaesthetics to tell me when to turn the camera on, when to pause, when to save it for later. On tour through southern Japan with the Lesque team, we spend a night in Kyoto, skating till the early morning hours.  We leave for Nagoya around midday in a steady grey drizzle.  But just outside Kyoto we pull over alongside a rice field that borders a massive elevated superhighway, flanked on either side by a major surface road.  Beneath the superhighway is a pristine concrete embankment stretching for several hundred meters, interrupted only by the highway’s enormous vertical pilings, and enclosed by a fence.  The spot is incredible: perfectly smooth concrete and an imposing setting made deliciously and, more importantly, visibly illicit by being fenced off from the street, which marks it as a totally authentic site of unintentional public architecture waiting to be discovered and liberated.  One of the Lesque pro riders, Itoshin, is determined to “make” a trick on the bank.  Yamada, the pro photographer, gathers his gear: remotely synced strobe flash and stands, camera bag, and tripod.  Koji readies his expensive video camera.  I insert a fresh DV tape into my own inexpensive, borrowed video camera.  We climb the fence. Each participant takes up his place beneath the faint shadow of the superhighway above that shields us from the unrelenting rain. 

Initially I let my camera run continuously, but nothing spectacular is happening. I turn the camera off.  The battery needs to last.  Itoshin makes a few attempts at a frontside noseblunt slide on the lip of the bank, attempting to slide over a protruding box on the face of the bank before popping off his nose and re-entering into the bank past the obstacle. He increases his speed.  Changes his angle of approach.  Pops into the trick later.  Yamada shoots a few test frames.  Moves a strobe flash. I film these things.  Itoshin pulls a white T-shirt over his black tank top.  The shirt is emblazoned with his new, American skate-clothing sponsor’s logo.  The company hasn’t asked for any footage or photos from him.  He is so intent on keeping the sponsorship that he takes any opportunity he has on tour to get a mei-ku on video or jpeg.  The other riders lounge against a piling.  I don't film them.   The ritual begins in earnest.  The flash bursts again and again as Itoshin miscalculates, or loses his balance, or bails before he even gets to the top of the bank.  Koji doggedly films every attempt, following just behind Itoshin on his own skateboard, giving the camera a mimetically smooth motion in relation to Itoshin’s own body.  I film their approach from atop the bank and after almost every failure, I stop recording, just like Koji.  Koji asks me to move because I am in his shot: the anthropologist is contaminating the reality of the trick.  I shift down to the flat section of concrete, behind Yamada, who crouches with his reflex camera mounted to an intimidatingly professional tripod.  I zoom in on Itoshin and Koji beginning their approach and zoom out to keep Itoshin fully in frame as he fails the trick yet again.  Subtly, without thinking, I have ceased to remain in deep focus where I can catch all motion and interactions at once, including Yamada’s and Koji’s uses of their respective cameras.  Zooming in, I have made Itoshin’s performance-spectacle the object of my own filmic gaze, synchronizing my own scopic machine with those of my subjects.  The ritual has pulled me into its rhythm and texture.  The repetition is dulling and hypnotic.  The near-misses accumulate into an unbearable deferral of the mei-ku.  This is what I want: to be subjected to the ritual without terminus, when the cameras fixate on machinic repetition.  This is frustrating, painful data. But it is also relentlessly soothing in its ever-present promise of the moment that will captivate us all: the instant when Itoshin will make the trick and ride out smoothly.  That tape has seventy three clips, sixty eight of which show Itoshin attempting the trick. The anthropologist’s camera emerges as the perverse counterpart to Koji’s obsessive attention to viewing statistics on Masataka’s YouTube video.  I accumulate the statistics that comprise the zone of failure, an accumulation possible only because I am taken over by the machine of the visible that involves the skaters’ cameras in their own rituals of the mei-ku.  I bend to read the counter on the video camera like Marx’s watchman and regulator, immersed in painstaking labor that exceeds the parameters of what my body understands as work. I am entranced, waiting for the make and simultaneously under the spell of the rhythm and movements of this complex embodied ritual of cameras, skateboards, illicit space and agile bodies.

The long, continuous take is the defining mode of so many canonical ethnographic films, based on the idea ardently pursued by Mead, that the camera is a neutral and greedy machine for accumulating visual data.  If well positioned and left alone to record uninterrupted, like a surveillance camera, it will “naturally” pull into itself the unique spectacle of culture in action.  But under the highway in Kyoto, I cannot make the camera record the long take.  It is an aberration to keep the camera running with the CCD sensor continuously converting light into electronic signal. In the midst of this ritual I am not easily hypnotized by the imperceptible whispering of the unspooling tape or the uninterrupted duration of the shot sequencing an “objective truth.” Letting the camera run without my interference feels as though I was forcing myself out of a trance.  The timecodes of my tapes are punctuated with stops and starts, the skaters around me intent on creating a spatio-temporal zone within which the field of the visible can take hold at close range.  Long after the event, the deep, unblinking gaze now broken, I survey my data in its temporally perforated form.  Having been recorded through this method of stopping and starting, the tapes display a visual artifact that Rouch calls the ciné-monte, the edited filmic event created in the moment the real is enacted and failed.   I am gazing back at myself in the data and discovering the limits of the “‘film-trance’ (ciné-transe) of the one filming the ‘real trance’ of the other” (99).  In this ritual, which depends so heavily on the presence of multiple cameras, what is the function of my spectating camera, the ethnographic camera that intends to produce knowledge or evoke the ambiguous and lively intersections of movement and mediation? That is, while the skaters always anticipate the camera as a necessary component of the event they themselves were making, I do not seem to be absorbing the event. Instead, my ethnographic gaze is absorbed into the skaters’ mediated movements, arcing through a socially organized sense of time. The transactions between the haptic experience of the skaters’ bodies and their cameras are pre-conditioned to include yet another layer of mediation. The cultural event I sought to record was already established around the terms of mediated/machinic visuality, so that the skaters, videographer, and photographer had entered into a ritualized series of intense repetitions—entranced by their own work of cameras on bodies moving dangerously through an out-of-bounds space. My own ethnographic lens is made coherent through inclusion in their social and scopic relations. Even though I am swept up in the same rhythmic pacing of their bodies and cameras, I am engaged in trance-action with their own framing of the world. My body-camera assemblage is enlarging the field of experience through its desiring predisposition toward retrieving the extraneous and peripheral—what Benjamin calls the “unconscious optics” of the camera (21). Itoshin’s repetitions and failures produce so much discarded visual data for Koji and Yamada yet are fundamental to the ecstatic “realness” of the event, just as trespassing below the highway confers authenticity. The failures, though invisible in Koji’s final video edit or in Yamada’s careful photo selection, demonstrate a collective agreement between the three young men to persist in achieving the mei-ku and each failure itself confirms their willingness to endure. Itoshin “leads,” as the focus of action and energy circulates around him, but all three participants share in a flowing series of negotiated choreographies upon which the mei-ku and its documentation depend.  These failures and the social relations cohering within them ethnographically endure in my own footage. My punctuated recording method reveals the strength of the temporal rhythms of the ritual within which I was immersed, but the moving frame of my shot draws in the intense inter-relations of the three men.

Though my camera also follows Itoshin’s lead, the unconscious optics of my camera emerge intensely within the contact zone comprised of laboring bodies behind and before cameras, in spaces mediated through grueling repetition. The series of flowing exchanges I have described above depend on trance-action: a mode that incorporates the methods of creativity and labor for the skaters and myself, as well as our haptic understandings of what it means to ride a skateboard, amplified through our own mediations of that embodied knowledge. Destabilized along with Rouch, trance-action becomes my ethnographic method, the effect of multiple movements and mobile mediation. Situated dangerously at the moment where youthful bodies engage the city in play and spectacle, working hard to manufacture a visual document saturated with realness, the ethnographic camera attempts to assemble meaning from the “upheaval” of corporeality reinscribed by the skaters’ cameras that track it, coming in so close. It is a delicate exchange: my camera never out of touch but never close enough to become invisible to the very cameras awaiting its gaze.

The trajectories of our bodies and cameras in this fraught space are unruly, and their effects on one another produce tense relational oscillations that threaten to recapitulate Caillois’s illinix of disordered play.  By marking out instead the contact zone of movement, mediations, and methods, the focus turns toward the mode that shapes these contacts. Rouch’s ciné-transe is transformed through new relations between sensuous bodies and scopic machines, and in the methods and spaces where the bodies and machines trance-act. The field site, as conceptual ground and lived space, is in turn powerfully possessed by these social and machinic exchanges—trance-actions—before it becomes a mei-ku, or the site of knowledge making. The transformation of this site presents a significant, sometimes uneven, and “disquieting” challenge to anthropology. The authoritative distance of the tripod is long lost for rich, proximal contact between researcher, subjects, and their media—contact that undermines the very stability of those subject positions and their affects in relation to media. Movement is transmuted into a bodily knowing through senses and camera. And new ethnographic media-rhythms are gained in research with young people choreographing their own encounters between the mediated and the haptic.

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