Journey, border and heterotopia: spatial formulations for two encounters between ethnography and cinema

Abstract

In 1997 and 1998 I accompanied the shooting of the films Esta é a minha casa and Viagem à Expo by João Pedro Rodrigues and, in 2010, part of the shooting of the films Alvorada Vermelha and A última vez que vi Macau, by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata. In both cases, I took the experience of participating in the film crew as an ethnographic work. With this text, I intend to present the way of doing anthropology that was the basis of the texts I wrote afterwards, based on that experience. In my view, João Pedro Rodrigues' cinema accesses the real within a mode of description that operates by integration in/with the forces that constitute it. In this sense it resembles the descriptions of some anthropologists. But, as in the case of the latter, the description already contains an interpretation, and this interpretation is inseparable from its author. Using the filmmaker's descriptions, I have therefore accessed a part of the real that would otherwise have been closed to me. My anthropological description was subjected to a folding, since I worked from a description, made by a filmmaker, of what I myself had observed. [...]