Anthropologist and filmmaker Asen Balikci has been an innovator in the field of ethnographic film and film in education for decades. Born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1929, he was educated in francophone Switzerland, and went on to study at Columbia University with Margaret Mead and others, where he earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology. From 1957 to 1965 Balikci conducted fieldwork with the Netsilik Eskimo, and in the following years he made a number of field trips to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Siberia, India and Ethiopia.

In the frame of DOCUMENTARIST 2011 program, Balkci for the first time is meeting the audience and visual anthropology enthusiasts in Turkey.

3 June 2011, Friday
16:00 – 19:00

Whose story is this?

To what extend do we construct the story of other? In other words, to what extend do we allow the contribution of other’s real experience to the story created through the films?

The introduction of visuality into the field of knowledge is a process developed hand in hand with the search within possibilities of cinema as the record of an event since the factory workers of the Lumière Brothers. John Grierson called this “the creative treatment of actuality” when Robert Flaherty produced Moana in the 1920s. Vertov’s Kino-Pravda was born at around the same time elsewhere in the world. The reality was questioned with the possibilities of the cinema and a new way of relation with the reality was coming to the stage in the history.

The impact of the challenge of the moving images against the language of the text was not limited only to the methodological discussions of social sciences but extended to questioning the knowing subject’s relation with the World. “How our bodily presence resolves and leads to change the inherent relations in the field” is a provocative question that documentary makers working in the field with their camera has invoked social scientists working behind a desk. Cinema has the power for prompting the relationality of this bodily presence to communicate regarding the spatio temporal unity in the dimension of both pro filmic environment and as a screen event. In this respect, promoting the use of visual materials in social sciences, as a less popular perspective, is highly important. This has a stimulating impact not only for social scientists but also for documentary makers. Recording reality can be regarded as making the invisible visible and also considered as developing tools that would serve our efforts to understand reality. Having distinctive sides within documentary cinema, visual anthropology, or ethnographic filmmaking, is almost at the beginning of the study in its theorization.

Believing that an interdisciplinary approach should circulate more, we will participate in Documentarist 2011 to share the project entitled “Towards a Deeper Understanding of Rural Europe” as one of the experiences of visual anthropology in Turkey. Within the scope of this program, we will screen a film followed by an interactive discussion session where we will open up topics such as ‘methods of ethnographic filmmaking’, ‘doing field research’, ‘problems and solutions throughout the whole process’, ‘the relation of ethnographic film to documentary cinema’. The discussion will be attended by Asen Balıkçı, one of the legendary names of visual anthropology.

- Kozavisual