In her article “Theorizing in/of Ethnographic Film” (2020), Jenny Chio contextualizes the genealogical relationship of observational-sensory films in the history of ethnographic film via the anthropologic debate of thick/thin or thick vs thin description.  The notion of ‘thick description’, as introduced by Clifford Geertz in his influential essay “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture (1973), emphasizes the importance of analytical interpretation of the anthropologic observation and thereby claims that observation alone serves only as a thin starting point, a factual account devoid of meaning. 40 years after Geertz’s use of the notion of ‘thick description’, John Jackson, in his seminal book “Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem” (2013), critiques (the limitations of) ethnography in his contemporary challenge to “thick description”. He argues for the value in thin description that Geertz, in his assertions about thick description, deemed inadequate for meaningful interpretation. Thinness then, according to Geertz as interpreted by Jackson, becomes “raw and baseline empiricism, the necessary starting point for social investigation but not nearly enough all by itself” (13). Jackson posits, however, that thick description is not always as thick as it is made to seem; that “thick description, in a sense, has always been thin” (5). 

Chio then contextualizes arguments made for the thickness of the film image within the larger debate on thick/thin description, as supported by Jackson’s argument for the thickness of previously perceived thin description and particularly in consideration of Jackson’s point against Geertz’s thick description in the idea that “seeing through another person’s eyes is not the same thing as actually seeing that person” (15).  Chio primarily considers ethnographic filmmakers Lucien Taylor and Silvio Carta’s perspectives on visual anthropology. Taylor argues a material extension to Jackson’s argument, that “film does not say but show… does not just describe, but depict…it offers not only ‘thin descriptions’ but also ‘thick depictions’?” (qtd. in Chio 31). Carta’s perspective, which seems to compliment Taylor’s perspective on the thickness of the visual, notes that ethnography “gives us something of what is left out of any [thick written] description of the world in purely third-person terms” (qtd. in Chio 32). In pointing out the natural grouping of Jackson’s, Taylor’s, and Carta’s perspectives on the thickness of the visual, Chio is able to argue that the “wide-scale disciplinary adoption of” observational cinema and “the filmic version of sensory ethnography…as the new ‘thick description’ of ethnographic filmmaking” have allowed these two visual genres to become the “dominant conventions of what constitutes a visual representation of ethnographic fieldwork and knowledge” (32). 

Both borne from a tradition of observational documentary, the genres of observational cinema and sensory ethnography share filmic conventions such as the long take, an avoidance of interview or voice-over narrations, and a meticulous focus on detail. Given their related conventions, Chio also notes their differences. Chio utilizes Anna Grimshaw’s and Amanda Ravetz’s perspective on observational cinema, as iterated in their book “Observational cinema: Anthropology, film, and the exploration of social life” (2009), to contextualize and theorize the conventions of observational cinema and its dominance in the field of ethnographic film. Grimshaw and Ravetz note that observational film “emphasizes unassuming, modest and painstakingly detailed depictions of humanity and the everyday” and the acts of observation that create such depictions are also deeply embedded in the understanding of a cornerstone mode of ethnographic fieldwork: “participant-observation” (Chio 33).  In their conceptualization of the notion of observation within both ethnographic film and ethnographic fieldwork, Grimshaw and Ravetz note that the art of (ethnographic) observation may open into an “observational sensibility”, or a reflection of “the relationship between observer and observed” (Chio 33). Chio herself then notes a connection of Grimshaw and Ravetz’s conceptualization of such a “reflexive praxis, a way of doing anthropology that has the potential to creatively fuse the object and medium of inquiry” (qtd. in Chio 33) to Jackson’s ideas of thin description and Carta’s “argument for film as a ‘subversive empirical practice’” (qtd. in Chio 33).  Grimshaw and Ravetz ultimately “propose that observational cinema be considered an example of phenomenological anthropology, with a focus on lived experience” (Chio 33). Thus, conventions of observational cinema, like the long take and an avoidance of interview or voice-over narration, reveal an expected benevolence in the true depth of the relationship between the observer (as both the filmmaker and the film audience) and the observed (as the profilmic world). 

Chio utilizes Lucien Taylor’s professional work as an ethnographic filmmaker and as the director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard University to describe the institutionalization of the genre of sensory ethnography. Like observational cinema, Chio also notes a connection between sensory ethnography and a phenomenological anthropology via Taylor’s arguments on the thickness of the visual as well as his engagements with SEL, “each [of which] insist on the crucial role of the body and the senses, the visceral and the palpable, in any engagement with and representation of the world (Irina Leimbacher qtd. in Chio 33). Thus, Sensory ethnography, while it shares many of its conventions with the genre of observational cinema, differs as it extends its observations to consider the humanity of the non-human via its cinematography and places greater emphasis on the role of sound in the creation of tension and execution of disclosure (34). These differentiating filmic aspects were conventionalized namely by films of Taylor such as Sweetgrass (2009) and Leviathan (2013) – both of which were made in conjunction with SEL, and the latter of which “cemented SEL as a recognizable name with a recognizable aesthetic” (that aesthetic being the genre of sensory ethnography). Visually, Leviathan was focused moreso on the process and materials of fishing, and less so on the people who were doing the fishing – in this sense, Taylor embodied this convention of considering the humanity of the non-human via the painstaking depiction of the detail of his (non-human) subject. To capture this painstaking detail, the use of body-cameras and underwater cameras allowed for the capture of close-up shots, or shots that really got in the middle of the mess of commercial fishing, allow for the capturing of the chaos of the process. In addition, the constant unplaceable yet uncomfortable sound of what seems to most appropriately be heavy metal in the middle of the ocean befits the visual turmoil and creates an insane tension within the viewer, and thus and immersive depiction of chaos. 

We just spoke of genre conventions, or the filmic elements that commonly occur within a genre of film, but for a genre to be conventional itself means that the genre must commonly occur within a certain scope. Chio considers the genres of observational cinema and sensory ethnography as conventional within the world of ethnographic film as she believes them to be the type of “ethnographic filmmaking and ethnographic film theory dominating anthropological discourse at the moment” (30).  Chio argues that the “conventions of “observational-sensory” film continue to dominate discussions of ethnographic filmmaking and theorizing at the expense of other possibilities”, thus making “observational-sensory” film itself conventional within the field of ethnographic film (37). Chio utilizes the films of Maurizio Boriello, Jennifer Deger, Ben Russell, and Alisi Telegut to exemplify the potential in non-conventional modes of visual representation of the ethnographic, which she argues are just as thick as the “observational-sensory” convention.

Chio’s ultimate intention is to “illustrate in what follows how the “observational-sensory” convention now constitutes a terrain upon which new experiments, and new insights, in ethnographic filmmaking have emerged” (33) – in other words, she means to challenge the current conventions of the dominant form of ethnographic filmmaking (that is observation-sensory film) to explore how alternative films can engage (new) ethnographic knowledge. Take Alisi Telegut and her hand-painted animations of Mongolian ethnography, for example. Chio argues that Telegut’s animated films - while existing far outside the conventions of “observational-sensory” film, particularly in the mediums inability to engaging with the long take – are by no means lacking in thickness as the lack of the long take, which is instead replaced by numerous hand-drawn frames that require an “extensive engagement from both the artist and the viewer”, actually reveals the depth of Telegut’s engagement with ethnographic description in the “thickness of the textures and edges of every painted mark making up a single image that quite literally resonates and radiates when animated” (37).  Chio maintains throughout her argument that “theorizing ethnographic film should result in boundary pushing, not boundary maintenance” (37). In an effort to push the boundaries of ethnographic film as we understand it today, she challenges the dominant conventions of ethnographic film, which she deems is “currently encapsulated within what I have dubbed an “observational-sensory” mode of filmmaking”, in order to make an argument for the thickness of and create space for a more diverse breadth of ethnographic visual representation (37). 

Works Cited

Chio, Jenny. “Theorizing in/of Ethnographic Film.” The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video, 2020, pp. 30–39., https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429196997-4. 

Jackson, John L. Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem. Harvard University Press, 2013.