Ljubav u doba kolere: etnografski film i vizuelna antropologija
Love in the age of cholera: ethnographic film and visual anthropology

Summary/Abstract: In this essay, I use the concept of love metaphorically to denote the relationships which were progressively established over a relatively long period between ethnographic films and visual anthropology. In striking similarly to the novel and its cinematographic transposition, to which I allude in the text, these creative and scientific practices managed to establish a sort of love ménage. The establishment, from the sixties onwards, of the canon of observational cinema was considered by many to be the high moment of their complex relationship. Telling credible and penetrating visual stories about how the world really functions by observing and recording how actual people go about living their lives seemed as the fulfillment of the promise that film made as it was coming into being – that of portraying and explaining life by ’ life itself’. After attaining this peak, the canon of observational cinema was progressively dismantled by several outbursts of what I term as ’cholera’ – postfilmic, hybrid and posthumanist authorial tendencies, best exemplified by Verena Paravel’s and Lucien Castaign-Taylor’s documentary Leviathan. The current situation makes it possible to redefine the whole idea of the established and fairly stable order, and replace it with the idea of the permanency of what I term as ’cholera’.

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