Visualising Rapid Life Transitions: Ethnographic Documentary Filmmaking Through Smartphone-Based Collaborative Research

Abstract

Many Japanese individuals fall victim to the disease of cancer, making it the most common cause of death in Japan. The second author Mizuno's wife, Mie was diagnosed with stomach cancer in May 2017, just before the delivery of their first child. She passed away three months after their son's first birthday. Mie’s loss made Mizuno a widower and a single father. Up until then, the life transitions of family caregivers who became young widowers during the infant-care period were scarcely documented in academic studies in Japan. Mizuno had started to record himself and his family's life using his smartphone camera almost every day ever since he was informed of Mie's cancer. From June 2018, he started a collaborative research with the first author Ohashi to understand and express the rapid and unpredictable changes of his family's lifeworld. The authors began to share diaries and visual images generated with his smartphone and arranged to have weekly online interview sessions to collaboratively reflect on the files. Eventually, the authors made an ethnographic documentary film to express the rapid life transitions experienced by Mizuno. In this paper, the process of how the authors applied multiple methodologies to develop the research project will be reflected and described. Secondly, the characteristics of the visual images recorded on Mizuno’s smartphone during the project will be analysed. Thirdly, the findings and implications of visualising the experience of life transitions as a family caregiver will be elaborated. Lastly, the authors will discuss how we can understand and visualise the life transitions experienced by family caregivers, given that smartphones are a part of everyday life for many people nowadays.