Relations, encounters and reciprocity: reflections about ethics in contemporary

Abstract

Relations, encounters and reciprocity: reflections about ethics in contemporary documentary cinema — One of the most noteworthy features of documentary cinema is its ability to deal with the other, to have otherness at the core of its construction. Underlying this is the event without which a movie does not exist: the encounter between the filmmaker and the people he films. Any appreciation of the conditions in which this encounter takes place must be based primarily on the assumption that the person holding the camera wields unquestionable power over those targeted by the camera’s viewfinder. This power is always present, independently of the procedures involved in sharing it, which have been in fashion for some time — such as distributing cameras to the subjects under observation, or the much older “shared anthropology” of Jean Rouch, in which the film takes shape by returning the recorded images of the filmed people to them and by means of the dialogue between them and the filmmaker. This is because the final edition of the film is almost entirely in the hands of the filmmaker. We focus here on this “rapport de force” and its unfoldings, and on its underlying ethical and esthetic aspects.