unconventional & subversive narrative forms & structures in cinema

Anthropological and cinematographic research on unconventional forms of narratives. By studying and incorporating new narrative structures, audio-visual practices could convey alternative ways of arranging, telling, feeling, and thinking about the world. To question cinematic narrative structures is for us also a way to question the politics of normativity, colonization, and ethnocentrism implied in dominant audiovisual practices.

To envision beyond western, hegemonic lenses

The starting point for this research was initiated long ago with Laurent van Lancker’s interest in alternative narrative forms. Generally speaking, one could say that despite the call for a "postmodern" turn in cinema and anthropology, few audiovisual works offer a narrative approach that goes beyond a Western and linear vision of narration.

Raul Ruiz (2006) has considered the dominant narrative system as a "predatory concept". Thus, the audiovisual products resulting from this norm have not only "invaded" the world, but have also imposed their rules on audiovisual practices in the world. This has increased in recent years with the dominance of Netflix series and other streaming platforms. Consider how many films we label as Mexican, Finnish, Egyptian, Korean, etc., when in fact they all follow the same Western narrative structure. As such, screenwriting gurus like Syd Field and Robert McKee spread the values and perception of linear systems of thought into audiovisual practices. To me, this amounts to a new form of colonization, standardization, and reduction of possible lived experiences. Since the Western evolutionary and causal structure "does not necessarily reflect the full range of experiences that people have of life, (...) such as the spiritual, transcendental, etc." (Knudsen 2008). Experiments with alternative narrative approaches are thus important contemporary epistemological and artistic research topics. Studying and injecting alternative, hybrid, or cross-cultural narrative forms through audio-visual anthropology projects could be a way to evoke a wider range of life experiences and thought systems. By proposing and incorporating these new narrative forms, filmmakers and anthropologists could convey alternative ways of arranging, narrating, feeling, and thinking about the world.

This theoretical and creative research is not the only one to resist and question this "predatory concept" of the dominant narrative form. Filmmakers like Apichatpong Weerasathekul, Naomi Kawase, Trinh Minh- ha, or thinkers like Donna Haraway, Tim Ingold, Kodwo Eshun, … also propose other approaches. This research will thus articulate a deeper theoretical and practical study of audiovisual and anthropological works that "touch" (Marks 2002, Beugnet 2008), "activate" (Bellour 2010), and "emancipate" (Rancière 2008) the transmission and form of address.

Offering the public other systems of narration and thus other modes of knowledge production can induce an awareness of the self and the other, thus an intersubjective and intercultural dialogue.

The impact of this research is therefore both political - by proposing an alternative to a dominant and normative model - and aesthetic - by proposing new contemporary narrative approaches that coincide with the global, hybrid, and intercultural world in which we live. This research also evokes the form of writing/structuring as a way of redefining the boundaries of human otherness.

Cinethnographic, sensorial, anthropological, photographic, artistic, sociological, also textual, political, and poetical accounts / multimodal apprehension

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chair of excellence / amU + a*midex

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