The contemplative style in the ethnographic documentary between observation and immersion

Abstract

The author draws the field of a documentary style he calls “contemplative” essentially based on long shots, long takes, limited montage and absence of dialogues. The precursor signs of this style are indicated by Marano in the observational cinema, particularly in some of David MacDougall’s films, and then continued in the production of anthropological documentary filmmakers at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. The enunciative modes of the contemplative style do not lead back to contemplation as an activity of the mind, but are a rhetorical strategy to overcome oculocentrism, give way to the other senses and convert contemplation to immersion.