I have spent most of the month shooting material for use in a film about the Housing Center. I have shot interviews with the director, an apartment owner, some of the counselors, some of the Marketing people previewing an apartment prior to listing it with the Center and clients as the entered the Center hoping to find an apartment. I stand at the entrance to the Center buttonholing people and asking them if I can film them through the process of locating an apartment. Most people say yes. I am attempting to shoot as wide a variety of clients as possible. Sometimes, when I get lucky, a client will be escorted to view some apartments. I will tag along. The process can take over an hour. As I can never know in advance if the interaction between the client and the counselor and escort will be revealing or not, I must continue to shoot clients and will continue to do so until the high season for finding apartments is over - around Labor day. The process is very inefficient but completely necessary. As I sit and wait for clients to arrive at the Center I fantasize that the next one will be the "perfect" client who will say all the right things. I plan to follow-up some of the clients with interviews in the fall after they are settled into their apartment. In addition, I am interviewing some of the Center staff - the director, counselors, escorts, board members. As the Housing Center is at the heart of a complex of organizations and Village ordinances designed to maintain diversity and promote integration, I will also interview and filmic observe in the Residence Corporation, Housing Authority, the Community Relations Commission and Community Relations Department. I must discover how to interweave this complex of relations into a coherent film that viewers can understand. Clearly the end product will be long and demanding of viewers.
I am sending the tapes off to Kathryn Ramey, the media lab technician at Temple University. She dubs them onto VHS tapes and returns them to me for viewing and logging. In this manner I can get some idea about the quality of the material I am producing and can make adjustments the improve the picture and image. I am logging each scene and making some comments. I will go back sometime later for a more detailed look. It is a sobering process.
I am shooting in terrible conditions that sometimes produces very marginal results. The Housing Center has ancient air conditioners that sound like cement mixers. The gain on the mike must be adjusted so that the voices are audible which means the sound of the air conditioner overmodulates the recording. We visit apartments with no furniture or rugs with hardwood floors. The sound echoes. The lighting is terrible. Some counselors' desks are in the window producing a strong back lighting situation. If I adjust the exposure for the faces of the clients and the light from the window is overexposed. When following a client being escorted to an apartment, I must adjust the light and sound while I am shooting form being inside the car to walking outside to the building, up the stairs and into the apartment where often there are no blinds to curtail the outside light. I am determined to make people I interview as comfortable as possible and not create the totally artificial environment commonly associated with a filmed interviewed where the technical needs of filming dominate all decisions. The result is that the interviews are taped in less than perfect situations - sometimes the subject is backlit and almost always their face is not well lit.
Sometimes I capture a scene
with a reasonable degree of comfort and other times the image
and/or the sound is barely acceptable. When these videotapes
are finished and ready to be seen, I must discover a way to inform
viewers that they must put aside their expectations of a certain
level of slickness and that they will not be seeing "pretty
pictures." They must concentrate on the ideas, arguments,
point of view, and intention of the work and not reject them simply
because these pictures do not look like those they see on television
or in the movies. That is asking a lot but hopefully those seriously
interested in the topic will make the necessary adjustments.
Perhaps I am being overly defensive but my years of experience
suggest to me that even scholarly audiences expect serious ethnographic
films to meet their expectations of what constitutes "a good
film.
I will be making a number of preliminary talks and reports on my work in Oak Park and elsewhere. Therse events forced me to pull together my thoughts and to get feedback about the direction my research is going. As soon as I arrived in June I gave an informal talk to the Lowell Society and have promised to give another talk in April, 2001. I have been invited to a conference at Oxford University in December and a lecture series in France in September of 2001. Here is the abstrast for those talks.
Some Oak Park Stories: An Experiment in Video Ethnography.
An Abstract for a Talk to be given at Oxford Universiyt in DEecember, 2000 and the Université de Caen, September 2001
This presentation explores what happens to a theory when you subject it to practice. For over 30 years I have critiqued the role film has played in the representation of ethnography within socio-cultural anthropology in the United States. I recently completed a book-length explication of these ideas for the University of Chicago press under the title, Picturing Culture. My position, briefly stated, is that cultural anthropologists, acting without benefit of any filmmakers, should explore the potential of film (and videotape) for the communication of ethnographic knowledge. They should do so free of the marketplace constraints and conventions of the professional documentary film world that is concerned with producing marketable products for television and the classroom. They should disassociate themselves from the majority of "so-called ethnographic films" displayed at film festivals and conferences because they seldom advance the goals of anthropology. Anthropologists should be producing video-ethnographies designed as scholarly communications and not as collaborations with professional filmmakers. They should be free to borrow from all forms of cinema - fiction and non-fiction - and not slavishly follow the conventions of documentary realism. As low-cost digital cameras and modestly priced editing systems are now available, ethnographers can free themselves from the intellectual restrictions that are a consequence of the high cost of film production. As these video-ethnographies will confound the normal expectations of viewers, their producers will also have to aid viewers in understanding how to comprehend these works.
To test these ideas, I have embarked upon an ethnographic project designed to produce a series of related works I have tentatively titled, "Some Oak Park Stories." From June 2000 until June 2001, I shot material to produce an introduction and four works that form a "video-book" that explores the social costs of maintaining diversity in Oak Park, Illinois, a middle-class suburb of Chicago. As Oak Park is also my hometown, the study also allows me to explore the place of autobiography and reflexivity in ethnography. I am in the process of editing that material. In addition to the videotapes, I intend to produce accompanying and complementary written materials. I anticipate the project will take several more years to complete.
For more than thirty years
Oak Park has dedicated itself to being a place tolerant of various
religions, ethnic (racial) groups, economic statuses and sexual
orientations. To realize this ambitious goal, Oak Park has created
many civic ordinances and non-profit institutions. It appears
to spend a large portion of its social capital to ensure it will
remain the most stably diverse place in the United States. During
a one-year ethnographic study, I concentrated my efforts on the
following: 1. The Housing Center, a non-profit organization,
that manages the integration of the apartments that constitute
40 % of the housing market by attempting to distribute Anglo-Americans
and African-Americans throughout the community and thus avoid
the creation of pockets (ghettos) in which one ethnic group dominates;
2. An exploration of how the core values of Oak Park are exemplified
and personified through the lives of a family that has lived here
for five generations; 3. A portrait of a middle-aged gay couple
with their children; and 4. A portrait of a Euro-American Evangelical
protestant family and their two adopted African-American children.
The gay family and the religiously conservative family are examined
because they test the limits of diversity. Evangelicals consider
gays and lesbians to be living immoral lives. At the same time,
the political and religious values of the Evangelicals seem to
defy the liberal character of this place. These two families
beg the question as to how diverse a community can be and still
exist as a community.
My presentation will constitute a preliminary report on this
long-term and ongoing study. For a more detailed description
of the research see http://astro.temple.edu/~ruby/opp/