Over the last two decades, the advent of cheap, user-friendly video technologies has contributed to a revolution in representational agency. Videos are now made by production units that are at times composed of families, churches, musical groups, community associations or other institutions. Thus, on-demand videos produced and distributed within local and atypical networks profoundly shape contemporary urban imaginaries. This book explores the intertwined relations among infrastructure, technology, and modernity through an ordinary, yet little studied field of "on-demand" audiovisual production, which involves processes of negotiation and interaction between clients and commissioned video makers. On-demand films are considered as a space of collaboration and self-representation, that allows to reflect on the potential of fiction, artifice, and montage to render material desires, aspirations, and ideas of the future.
Part
1. ON DEMAND ETHNOGRAPHERS.- Chapter
1. Making Commissioned Home
Movies in Post-Socialist Romania: Ethnographic and Historical
Perspectives.- Chapter
2. Ethnographic Investigations of Collaborative
Filming for Dementia.- Chapter
3. Musicalizing the Other or the
Otherfication in Music?: The Anthropologist as an Audiovisual
Mediator.- Chapter
4. Between Institutional Policies and Ethnographic Gazes:
Thoughts on the Audiovisual Practices on the Register of Feira de Campina
Grande as Brazilian Cultural Heritage.- PART
2. PRODUCERS AND
PRODUCED.- Chapter
5. Videos of 'Prestes' or Religious Dance Fraternities as
New Forms of Ostentatiousness in La Paz, Bolivia.- Chapter
6. Shooting
Elites: An Ethnography of Wedding-film Production for Elites.- Chapter
7. The
Circulation of Low-budget Videos in the Football System.- Chapter
8. Multiple
Videographies: From Promotional Documentaries to Videoclips of Andean
Popular Music in the PeruvianVideosphere.- PART
3. FORMS AND
CIRCULATIONS.- Chapter
9. Expanding the Family Frame: Social Specialists,
Intimate Publics, and Gendered Images of Mobility in Transnational Wedding
Videos.- Chapter
10. Of Archons and Amateurs: Commissioned Filmmaking in
Contemporary Brazilian Cinema.- Chapter
11. Aesthetic Norms of Subaltern
Filmmaking: Comic Skits of the Everyday in Zimbabwe.- Chapter
12. Moral Panic
at the Country: Conservative Civil Society Groups and Social Video Uses in
Peru.
Alex Vailati is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Museology at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil. An anthropologist and documentarist, he is the coordinator of the universitys Visual Anthropology Laboratory (LAV). He is the author of Migration of Rich Immigrants: Gender, Ethnicity and Class (2016, with Carmel Rial).
Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal is a Professor and researcher at the Centro de Estudios Antropológicos in El Colegio de Michoacįn, Mexico. She is the author of Indigenous Media and Political Imaginaries in Contemporary Bolivia ( 2017). Her current research includes work on popular photographic and audiovisual archives in Michoacįn, Mexico and La Paz, Bolivia.