Section 4

In The Virtual Window, Anne Friedberg described a lineage in which to situate my own experience of the world through the windows of video cameras their screens and traces. Her text gave me a background and foundation for thinking about the personal nature of each media object and its own unique attributes of time, space and potential to negotiate the boundaries of interpersonal relationship building. You can see the time it takes to read a chapter of Friedberg’s book, but you cannot see the words reformed in my mind as my eye scans the page and my superstructure idles around the room.

The windows in this section connect three cases: One More Shot, the Junior AV Club, and I course I taught and developed called IML 500: Digital Tools and Tactics. In each case the relationships on screen are worth considering in their relationship to the use of video cameras.

One More Shot is the most direct outcome of the way I originally learned and used video cameras. Maya and Noah, the couple in the film trying to start a family, were friends of mine at UC Berkeley. We shared a house and made video projects together. It seemed natural to us that I would bring a video camera along as they took their first steps into the easily bewildering world of assisted reproductive technologies; a world where women’s bodies are rendered into images of instrument, quantified, analyzed, pathologized. We made video images together that gave countenance and voice to the human story. The video practice made a place for me to be there as their friend. The video practice gave us a sense of scope to see past just the immediate story and everything that was at stake for them and to find bridges to other families, communities and structures of society, economy and power that were worth exploring and understanding.

These topics were a bridge to my students in IML 500. Most of them were of a cohort of Masters of Visual Anthropology at USC and my class was designed to help them learn the craft of documentary within the methodological context of their discipline. Anthropology and its approach to ethnographic filmmaking equipped them with a history of methods and approaches, but as a department and a discipline it was looking at least somewhat outwards, to us at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, for contemporary approaches to tools for visual scholarship. In this section is a record of the day I shared with my class my own theoretical and methodological background as well as dailies from my own work. They had been sharing theirs with me and with each other for more than half an academic year. The video I shared of one story sequence of an egg retrieval from One More Shot (early in its life, before the project had even title) helped me to show them my approach to the practice of video making. The way I shoot without cutting, keeping the camera on and moving with me, even if I know it’ll be cut someday; but shooting this way keeps my own moment to moment perception in focus and in movement with intelligible transitions from place to place and beat to beat. I shoot as though they’ll all always be on screen.

Shooting like that demands an account of subjectivity because your eyes and body will be so clearly rendered on the screen from behind the lens. So you have to be able to be present and relate to the people in your surroundings like the self you want to be. Listening and watching, not imposing but not ghosting either. These were concerns and skills that were forward in the material of the class. They worked hard with my support to become fully at ease and at comfort with the camera. To keep their eyes and themselves wide open to their subjects so that they could be sensitive to their own involvement in the events they hoped to witness, understand and communicate.