The Films Not Made

In 2000, IFootnote 1 found myself sitting in an orphanage in Central Java, on a plastic chair under a weakly humming fan, conducting an interview – or, attempting to conduct one. I was in Indonesia to initiate research into the relationship between childhood exposure to traumatic experience and state-sponsored terror, and its relation to a range of individual and psychosocial outcomes, part of my enduring interest in issues central to contemporary psychological anthropology in Indonesia. Along with my Indonesian colleagues, psychiatrist Dr. Mahar Agusno and community mental health researcher Ninik Supartini, I had begun to visit Javanese orphanages for children impacted by the recent conflicts in what was then East Timor, now Timor Leste. East Timorese had recently voted for independence after twenty-five years of Indonesian occupation. Before withdrawing, Indonesian military and paramilitary troops had killed thousands, displaced thousands more, and destroyed much of the infrastructure there (CAVR, 2006; Dobbins et al., 2013).

“Mariana” (not her real name)Footnote 2 was in her early teens and had come to the orphanage via a refugee camp after her village had been set on fire and razed to the ground. Dr. Mahar had already conducted several exploratory interviews with the orphanage director, staff members, and several children. But now Mariana seemed too uncomfortable to speak at all, let alone answer questions about her experiences. In our halting interview, she alternately stared blankly, broke into panicked laughter that verged on tears, covered her face, and answered questions in as few words as possible. After a number of excruciating attempts Dr. Mahar paused his line of questioning to address her evident discomfort. The transcript reads:

MAHAR::

What are you afraid of? How are you feeling, sitting here, being interviewed by myself and Mr. Rob?

MARIANA::

I feel fine.

MAHAR::

Really? You’re not feeling worried or anxious?

MARIANA::

No.

MAHAR::

It’s alright, you can be honest. How are you feeling being filmed? Are you uncomfortable?

MARIANA::

(Covers her face with her hands, then looks up) Yes. I’m afraid, being recorded like this, the video is going to be sent to East Timor.

ROB & MAHAR (In unison)::

It will not be sent there.

MARIANA::

(Pausing, looking around doubtfully) If they hear what I say, I will be forced to go back there.

ROB::

This information will not be sent to East Timor.

MAHAR (to Rob, in English)::

When I interviewed her previously, she spoke freely for two hours.

ROB (to Mahar, in English)::

Well there’s a good reason why she wouldn’t want to talk to us, if she’s afraid it will hurt her. We have to either find a way to reassure her, or not conduct the interview. If she’s not comfortable, then it’s probably not the right thing to do.Footnote 3

Dr. Mahar then asked Mariana whether she was afraid of me. She nodded. He asked how she was feeling at the moment and she said her heart was pounding. When given the opportunity to switch seats to move farther away from me, she eagerly took it.

At first, I was confused as to why I seemed to frighten her so terribly. Later, I learned from Indonesian activists that some children had been subject to violence at the hands of mercenaries, some of whom came from Australia and New Zealand, and were white. Presumably, she associated me with these men. We subsequently learned that the situation was even more complicated, and the traumas more layered; many of the children at this orphanage essentially had been abducted from East Timor in order to be “integrated” into wider Indonesian society (Murdoch, 2012). Furthermore, Mariana said, the orphanage head occasionally subjected her to violence, hitting her when she did something “wrong.” Given her evident strong discomfort, I tried to end the interview as gracefully as possible. I conducted no further ethnographic research with Mariana, nor did I shoot any more film on the topic.

Yet this abbreviated interaction still stands out in my memory as a formative moment for the projects I did go on to make on related topics because it provided such insight: first, into the layered contexts of violence many Indonesians are living in, and second, into the complicated endeavor of making films with such participants. As Biehl and Locke (2017, pp. 28–29) remind us, when conducting ethnography, “People and the worlds they navigate and the outlooks they articulate are more confounding, incomplete, and multiplying than dominant analytical schemes tend to account for.” My own ethnographic interest was in the intersection of political trauma and personal experience, but Mariana was dealing with a more complex history – and still unfolding present – of political violence, social violence, poverty, stigmatization, displacement, and personal loss, which together had informed her experience of the interview. My intentions for including Mariana in a visual ethnography were, to my mind, good; yet I realized in the interview that I had some fundamental gaps in understanding how the film shoot, and indeed my very presence, might affect her comfort and response. I also saw how my misunderstanding could move into a deeper understanding with further questioning, and how that new understanding could determine how to move forward with work on the same issues, and with a new awareness of the multi-layered nature of trauma – even though, in this case, I determined that the work should not move forward at all.

Soon after this interview, we moved on to another child, in a different Yogyakarta orphanage, who was being treated by Dr. Mahar: a 12-year-old boy, Budi Santosa. Budi was in a deep depression, suffering from panic attacks, possible psychotic decompensation, and suicidal ideation. In our interview, Budi was emotionally expressive, quite open about his personal anguish, and exhibited a nascent understanding of his suffering as rooted in the mass killing and political violence that swept across Indonesia in 1965. His experience, and the questions it raised about history, violence, and personal suffering, jumpstarted 40 Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy (Lemelson, 2009; 40 Years), the first film discussed in this book. The production and post-production on this film occurred from the years 2000–2009, when it was released.

After working on 40 Years, activist colleagues in Indonesia pressed me to follow up on its themes of state-sponsored violence and look at the civil disorder and violence in 1998 and 1999, at the end of Suharto’s New Order regime. During this period, in the context of the Asian economic crisis and Suharto’s downfall, there was widespread violence and rapes of Indonesian women of Chinese descent in major Javanese cities. (These rapes were almost certainly instigated by agent provocateurs of Suharto’s regime and thus were directly connected to the violence of 1965, the topic of 40 Years.) Jakarta’s Chinatown, Glodok, saw some of the worst of that violence.

One of the main social service programs addressing the needs of survivors, Pulih (which means “recovered” in the psychological sense in Indonesian), arranged tours for me of their Jakarta program and reached out to women who had been raped and assaulted during this period. None of the women they contacted were willing to sit for an interview, let alone be in a film and have their identities publicly revealed. I learned that the fear, shame, and stigma associated with being a survivor of these mass rapes was overwhelming for these women, particularly in a context where anti-Chinese racism and sentiment were still active and the potential consequences of giving even basic testimony about this violence were severe. My colleagues and I realized that the project was unfeasible.

This second film I didn’t make also pushed me into a deeper understanding of the process of filming personal experiences of violence, trauma, and stigmatization. I learned that perhaps, if I had been able to spend several years living in Jakarta, getting to know these women and the communities they came from, earning their trust and developing an understanding about how to depict and narrate their stories in a sensitive way, it might have worked. Given the exigencies of my life, I was unable to do this. But it became clear to me that the issue of gendered violence in Indonesia was important and could be the focus of a socially impactful ethnographic film. I realized that I could explore gendered violence in more local contexts or intimate relationships, over a period of time, rather than the gendered violence implicated in the episodic and historically situated case of the mass rapes of Chinese women in Indonesian cities. Here, we would see the multiple dimensions of social pressures, cultural assumptions, economic conditions, and political and historical contexts, as they were woven into personal psychological experience over time. We could develop the kind of trust and understanding that allowed person-centered ethnography on film. We could be attentive to the multiple ethical considerations that such visual ethnography must entail. And this was the origin of Bitter Honey (Lemelson, 2015), the second of the films discussed in this book.

During this same period, we had been continuing our work on neuropsychiatric disorders and culture in Java. One of the subjects was a man, Imam Rohani, in his fifties, who lived with his young wife Tri, and daughter, Lisa, in a rural area of central Java. Imam had a range of neuropsychiatric symptoms that fulfilled the inclusion criteria for this project. But it was only after repeated interviews and fieldwork, conducted from 1999 to 2008, that a much wider range of issues emerged in this family. These issues diverged widely from the rather narrow focus on Imam’s neuropsychiatric symptoms and involved Tri’s out of wedlock pregnancy, family involvement in sex work, structural and sexual violence, and related village exclusion and stigma. These issues and their effects on this family became the origin of Standing on the Edge of a Thorn (Lemelson, 2012; Thorn), the third film discussed in this book.

The Origins of a Visual Psychological Anthropology

Each of these films had its own distinct topical and thematic focus at the time of filming, although this book goes on to note their commonalities in many dimensions. 40 Years investigates historic political violence through the testimonies of four survivors and their families, of different ethnic and religious backgrounds, on the islands of Java and Bali. The film examines the enduring impact the violent mass killings of 1965–1966, when Suharto took over the country, have had on victims and on subsequent generations. Bitter Honey presents multiple intimate perspectives on gendered violence through the unfolding lives of three contemporary polygamous Balinese families. In it, we hear from three husbands, 12 wives, their children, and other community members, in revelations that unfold over time as trust and intimacy develop with the filmmakers. Finally (in order of discussion), Thorn parses how multiple vulnerabilities, including mental illness, poverty, marital uncertainty, and sexual transgression, lead to stigmatization for members of one rural Javanese family, witnessed by their teenage daughter who finds herself in danger of being trafficked.

Separately, each film’s major theme is explored through specific, situated, subjectivity-focused and intersectional accounts of individuals. Together, the three films paint a broader picture, or present a wider frame, of Indonesian experience. Our book traces the move from the situated films to the broader shared historical and cultural landscapes.

In Indonesia in 1965 and afterward, a complex interaction of cultural, political, and historical forces has led to ongoing manifestations of fear, violence, trauma, and stigmatization operating on local and national levels (Suharnomo & Syahruramdhan, 2018). The films explore these complex phenomena, as well as wellsprings of resilience, on Java and Bali, two islands that have some common cultural elements, while being quite distinct (Forshee 2006; Hannigan 2015). Both islands share a 60-odd years history of political terror (Vltchek, 2012), culturally structured gender inequality (Clark, 2010), and local or village-level forms of scapegoating, violence, and social sanction – all of which, as we found, can overlap. By investigating the similarities and differences across the experiences of participants from the two Indonesian islands, the films provide insight into the ways in which the phenomenology of, response to, and long-term impact of trauma, gendered violence, and stigmatization is shaped by culture (Good & Hinton, 2016; Kirmayer et al., 2007). The personal stories of participants comprise nodes of attention to the relationships between social violence, historical events, and individual experience. The films portray varied possible outcomes for vulnerable individuals responding to the shifting politics, social norms, and cultural beliefs of a nation marked by historical violence.

Furthermore, by putting the three films in conversation with one another, we discovered that each separate organizing theme for the films is actually relevant to and operant in all three. Many of the participants’ stories presented in this volume include incidents of an initial fear exposure and their deep and structuring impact on aspects of individual subjectivity, whether or not manifested through the familiar symptomatology of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Some film participants have been victims of political violence or have experienced a traumatic event. Others have had their lives more subtly shaped by fear-based experiences embedded in forms of structural violence and oppression as embodied and enacted through social and cultural practice, whether their fears are triggered by the extreme and acute state terror of 1965 and subsequent histories of political stigma and discrimination, the everyday fear of living in a family which threatens to disintegrate or erupt, or the threat or experience of sexual attack.

The films also paint a polyphonic portrait of gendered violence in contemporary Indonesia in unexpected ways – unexpected because 40 Years and Thorn were not initially focused on gendered violence, yet as the filming and editing progressed this issue emerged as a significant influence on the participants. Indeed, structural and direct violence against women have recently come to the forefront of popular discourse in a moment of reckoning that marks it as an urgent and defining global issue. As recent gripping news events and the popular globalized #MeToo movements have shown, the dynamic of gendered violence is pervasive, a formative issue even in spaces and relationships where it might not be immediately apparent.

The experience of stigmatization is also interwoven throughout the narratives in each film, as a precursor or vulnerability to discrete or ongoing incidences of violence, a motivating factor for difficult and painful decisions, and a process in its own right that shapes participant self-image and constrains their behavior.

These experiences all have to be considered in the context of other situated concerns in participants’ lives, which at times and in different ways override a more singular focus on trauma, gendered violence, or stigmatization; as conceptual tools, these frames are each too narrow to contain the complexities of the participants’ lives and the multiple, situated contexts that surround them. The challenge of the project, and the tension of the book, is found in connecting these various domains, elaborating on the layers within them, and ordering them in a way that most accurately reflects our participants’ reality; all this while also contributing to the ongoing discussion in psychological anthropology regarding the thematic topics the films explore.

These three films are further connected through a shared methodology, what we have termed visual psychological anthropology (VPA). VPA adapts a form of person-centered ethnography that focuses on the subjective experience of film participants, and crafts narratives around that material as it emerges over the course of filming. This methodology cohered over the two-decades plus work of filmmaking, research, and writing that spans these films. We articulated the concept and discussed the development of VPA in our first book (Lemelson & Tucker, 2017). To briefly review here, VPA incorporates the topical, theoretical, and methodological concerns of psychological anthropology into visual practice. In other words, VPA uses visual techniques to address disciplinary interests in experiences such as mental illness and altered states; identity, difference, and notions of the self; life-cycle development; sexuality; consciousness and other domains central to contemporary psychological anthropology. This research seeks a phenomenological understanding of the subjective and intersubjective structuring of reality and experience, focusing on the emotional meaning in an individual participant’s narratives and embodied experience.

To capture the emergent nature of “life as lived” for individual subjectivities, VPA employs longitudinal research whenever possible, with the anthropologist returning to the field at regular intervals over the course of many years and maintaining ongoing relationships with film participants via local research collaborators. As with all longitudinal research, durational observation of changing life circumstances for participants witnesses the long-term consequences of events for them – their agency, suffering, and resilience. Key for psychological anthropology, longitudinal, psychologically oriented interviewing also allows the anthropologist to, with time and trust, eventually get past responses that are socially expected or culturally contained, into more pithy, textured content.

This book builds upon our first book on VPA. As we argued there, visual approaches have generally been lacking in psychological anthropology but are useful complementary methods that add much to person-centered exploration. VPA is able to present material on sensitive and emotionally resonant topics in ways that go beyond the written and the analytical format of much psychological anthropology (Lemelson & Tucker, 2017). In this book, we focus on three films, and by exploring the methodology and making of them, and the theoretical implications we derive concerning the subjects’ experiences, we show that VPA can “widen the frame” for psychological anthropology research in multiple, significant ways.

First, the incorporation of visual methodology allows for a more visceral representation of lived experience that accounts for – and more directly engages – embodied subjectivity, allowing the viewer to “be there” (Worthman, 2020) with participants, who are “rendered more knowable” (Das, 2015) by an intersubjective and intercorporeal engagement with their onscreen presence. Second, this methodology helps extend beyond the etic frameworks of inquiry brought by the anthropologist/filmmaker to the subject, by celebrating the overflow of meaning that comes from the participants themselves. This is especially pronounced as VPA’s longitudinal, iterative praxis leads to new theoretical connections on the part of filmmaker and participants, and captures processes of participant “becoming” as they unfold (Biehl & Locke, 2017). Third, by embracing a reflexive ethos, it presents what is typically outside the literal and metaphorical frame of ethnographic film, drawing attention to the interaction between filmmaker and participant during the fieldwork endeavor and road to discovery – and the broader complexity of human experience and its dynamic interaction with social, political, economic, and historical forces.

The holistic framework of this methodology, accounting for the dynamic and intimate context of participant and researcher relationship to the broad context of history and culture, can be put to use to explore any number of concerns in the field of psychological anthropology. In this book, we apply it to address – and even hopefully redress – some of the major areas of concern in representing experiences of trauma, violence, stigmatization on film, representations that inevitably raise an array of ethical questions.

A fundamental premise, which developed directly out of the filmmaking method and the iterative and responsive process of anthropological analysis it requires, is that the concepts we start with to explore the life-worlds of others – “trauma” (40 Years), “gendered violence” (Bitter Honey), “stigmatization” (Thorn) – are too reductionistic. Using VPA, we found that what is “at stake” for participants always overflows any initial theorized frame. Before returning to what VPA adds to both psychological anthropology and ethnographic filmmaking, and how it features in the three films that are the subject of this book, we briefly review some visual accounts of trauma, gendered violence, and stigmatized groups in ethnographic film (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1
figure 1

The author and Kereta filming 40 Years of Silence

Full size image

Trauma, Gendered Violence, and Stigma Onscreen

Many anthropologists have depicted the lives of those contending with economic and political vulnerability and have produced groundbreaking and “heartbreaking” written ethnographies of people contending with trauma, gendered violence, and stigmatization (Behar, 1996; Biehl, 2013; Goldstein, 2003; Pinto, 2014; Scheper-Hughes, 1993). What role does a visual approach, and film in particular, have to play in the anthropological study of these subjects (Başci, 2017; McLaughlin, 2010; Morag, 2013)? What problems does filming such things raise for a psychological anthropologist? Here, we review relevant ethnographic visual representations of trauma, gendered violence, and stigmatization (Garcia, 2017). Then, based on methodological, aesthetic, and ethical concerns, we suggest how our approach of VPA might expand and contribute to this visual archive in distinctive, wider frames, to address the multiple contexts and meanings through which these experiences are shaped.

Trauma

Since trauma is a contingent concept and/or an internal state (Murphy, 2015), it is difficult to say that ethnographic films can capture “trauma” (Friedman-Peleg, 2017). They can capture fear-inducing experiences and the embodied expression of fear, long known in ethology (Darwin, 1872; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989; Ekman & Friesen, 2003), and their sequelae, or aftermath for individuals or communities. Classic ethnographic films have depicted frightening experiences in ritual contexts involving initiation ceremonies, interpersonal conflicts, and intertribal warfare. These include, respectively, Guardians of the Flutes (Reddish, 1994; based on Gilbert Herdt’s [1994] book of the same name), The Ax Fight (Asch, 1975), and Dead Birds (Gardner, 1963). Striking recent examples of visceral and direct documentation of frightening events unfolding in real time include Survivors (Pratt et al., 2018), about Sierra Leoneans contending with the Ebola outbreak, and A Dangerous Son (Garbus, 2018), which portrays the interventions and treatments available to families of children with significant psychiatric problems and aggressive outbursts. While not ethnographic per se,Footnote 4 some documentary films have portrayed entrenched drug violence (Borrmann & Luhnau, 2013) and the harrowing symptoms of PTSD from military combat (Dennis, 2011). Others address the personal impacts of witnessing or participating in terrifying events during the Holocaust (Lanzmann, 1985). Still others address the “remainders of violence,” if not clinical symptoms of trauma, after random acts of violence (Blubaugh, 2007; Malmberg, 2010).

Gendered Violence

Many ethnographic and documentary films addressing gendered violence seek at once to portray the experience of being a victim or survivor and also to point to the structural factors behind such violence. For example, Driving with Selvi (Paloschi 2015) follows South India’s first female taxi driver as she works and tells her story of escaping an abusive arranged marriage, simultaneously presenting a fierce critique of women’s roles in India and a portrait of one woman’s strength. Frederick Wiseman’s Domestic Violence (2001), set primarily at a Tampa shelter, similarly presents both the shocking pain and rupture of domestic abuse but also illuminates the social and legal architecture built around abusers to protect them, framing domestic violence as just one part of patriarchal American violence. Some of these films focus on exceptional women who, either alone or in small groups, try to protect themselves and others such as Sisters in Law (Longinotto & Ayisi, 2005), Kung Fu Grandma (Park, 2014) and Gulabi Gang (Jain, 2012). Private Violence (Hill, 2014) chronicles the life and work of Kit Gruelle, a North Carolina woman who escaped an abusive relationship and went on to become a legal defender for others. Bringing the viewer into the courtroom, the film shows women actively fighting for justice and freedom from abusive relationships, educates the viewer on the visual cues and culture of American domestic violence, and reveals the legal framework around domestic abuse.

Stigma

Now more than ever, previously and currently stigmatized communities are being represented in ethnographic film (Hamer & Wilson, 2018; Thi, 2014), often but not always from a first-person perspective via participatory and auto-ethnographic projects. In many cases, the striking experimental, visual, and/or sensory methods of these films bring a new vibrancy to discussions about the positionality and lived experience of their subjects.

LGBTQ people are one such group whose stigmatized experiences past and present are depicted in films like Memories of a Penitent Heart (Aldarondo, 2016), which uses home video footage and other “found” material to address the experience of Latinx LGBTQ folks in conflict with their Catholic families during the AIDS crisis. Other films address stigmatization due to health status (The Blood of Yingzhou District; Yang, 2006), and disability or physical difference (A Life Without Words; Isenberg, 2011). Casa Blanca (Maciuszek, 2015) takes a person-centered approach, a technique we also use and one well suited to film, to intimately portray the lived experience of developmental disability in a family living in a small port town in Cuba. In Voice Unknown (Park, 2011), Jinhee Park allows a refugee from North Korea to tell her story of escape, loss, and resettlement while her face is blurred out, a visual marker of her marginalization in her new society, the ongoing vulnerability of her family and the necessity to protect them, as well as the universality of her experiences as a refugee. Perry Ogden’s The Traveller Girl (2005) is a hybrid documentary/fiction film which has incorporated the input and participation of his subjects from the nomadic minority Irish Traveller community, stigmatized within Ireland, to tell a story about what is at stake for them. Dan Girmus’s Oyate (2016) attempts to “sidestep the kinds of negative, issue-based approaches that have so long dominated films set in native spaces” (Girmus, 2016), by using a poetic sensory approach to portray everyday indigenous life on the Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation.

Filming Human Suffering: Questions Raised

Concerns that have been raised about films on trauma, gendered violence, and stigma sometimes echo those about written ethnography, and at other times raise issues specific to the medium. Here, we focus on two that are particularly relevant to our own project: the positionality of the filmmaker and the power dynamics inherent in the enterprise, and the relationship of ethics and aesthetics in filming suffering and its aftermath.

Historically, anthropology has been complicit in silencing voices in the realms of trauma and violence, and early ethnographic film was no different. Prior to the 1940s in Asia and the 1960s in Africa, anthropology was part of the colonial apparatus. Anthropologists were more often than not working under colonial regimes, even as colonial administrators (Thomas, 1994), and their work fit into colonial visions even when it did not overtly support its projects (Asad, 1973). Films usually focused on snippets of exotic rituals or daily life, or romanticized themes of man’s relationship to nature. Shifts in anthropological theories along with a repositioning of anthropologists in the post-World War II global order, and new technical flexibility, expanded the range and depth of films between the 1950s and the 1980s. Topics such as political and gendered violence appeared (Broadman, 1982; Hara, 1987; Laufer, 1983; Robertson, 1988; Rouch, 1961; White, 1974), as did films about individual social actors and their personal experiences (Loizos, 1993).

With increasing filming of “suffering subjects” (Robbins, 2013) came new critiques. For decades now, producers of ethnographic and documentary films have been aware of and striven to shake off what Brian Winston (1988) called the “tradition of the victim,” where participants are transformed into objects of our pity and concern and the act of filming is intended to do good by spurring viewers to action (Winston, 1988; see also Robbins, 2013, on written ethnography). Given this tradition, some felt it became “difficult to justify making films about the private acts of the pathological, socially disadvantaged, politically disenfranchised, and the economically oppressed” (Ruby, 1991, p. 52). Visual anthropologists became increasingly aware of the power dynamics inherent in every aspect of filmmaking and grew increasingly uncomfortable with speaking “for” others through film, especially if those onscreen were marginalized or otherwise disadvantaged (Bruner, 1989; Ruby, 1991, 1995).

Such reflection on the neocolonialist traps of ethnographic filmmaking led on the one hand to the rise of indigenous ethnographers and filmmakers making movies about themselves and the topics important to them from their own perspectives, using visual and narrative strategies they preferred (Ginsburg, 2002; MacDougall, 1997). At the same time, ethnographers and filmmakers who continued to do research with “others” adopted self-conscious methods of collaboration between “filmmaker” and “subject,” using techniques ranging from “ethnofictions” (Izzo, 2019) to discussion of daily rushes and other forms of collaborative project development (Elder & Kamerling, 1974; MacDougall, 1995) to “participatory visual ethnography” (Coffman, 2009; Gubrium & Harper, 2013; Pink, 2001) where shooting and direction duties are shared, if not handed over completely to participants.

A related discussion was taking place about whether cross-cultural research about gender, poverty, and power can ever ethically be undertaken by a researcher working from a place of privilege – which is to say, a Western white man (Scheyvens & Leslie, 2000). In some societies, this might be practically impossible anyway, due to cultural restrictions on interactions between genders. For example, because of extreme gender dimorphism in Sambia culture, it was difficult for Gilbert Herdt to interact with women, let alone observe or interview them about sensitive subjects (Herdt 2006). But even when it is socially possible to interact, certain material may remain hidden: “Male and female interviewers will not necessarily see or be allowed to see the same social worlds” (Women and Geography Study Group, 1984, p. 135). This observation stands, as well, for the interactions between Western interviewers and their subjects, as much as for cross-gender communication.

In addition to the issues surrounding the choice of topic and the interaction between filmmaker and subjects, what a finished film looks and feels like has been increasingly subject to critical concern, with some insisting that film must be visually stylish and emotionally compelling. Looking at Indonesia, let us take films about the mass killings of 1965–66 (’65) as an example. Ariel Heryanto (2012) has reviewed this small archive – one that has now grown to at least forty films (Parahita & Yulianto, 2020) – to challenge the idea that silence about the mass killings has been solely due to Suharto’s oppressive regime. He argues that this silence also hinges on the changing culture of media production and consumption. Because aging survivors and earnest activists haven’t presented the issue in a way to compel attention from the next generation of Indonesians, who live in an oversaturated media environment, ʼ65 doesn’t feel “relevant” to many. Plain testimony isn’t enough: a “cinematic imagination” is now a prerequisite to gaining some congress on justice, or even public acknowledgment. This argument is taken further by Nancy Van House and Elizabeth Churchill (2008), who contend that the advent of more “democratic” digital media helps little, as few in that media space will bother digitizing memories or minority perspectives that have no commercial value. In other words, whether or not it sits comfortably with the ethical positions raised by critics of ethnographic film since the 1980, contemporary culture requires a packaging and presentation of victimization that goes beyond just the substance of a film. Cinematic skill and media savvy are required to make people care.

This point was driven home by the success of The Act of Killing, a documentary film by Joshua Oppenheimer (2012) and anonymous Indonesian partners that received an Academy Award nomination, numerous accolades, and international acclaim. Oppenheimer’s work was successful in finally bringing the Indonesian mass killings to an international screen, perhaps because his clever and masterful “play within a play” structure and strikingly dramatic visuals drew notice (Nichols, 2013). Other more recent cinematic attempts to grapple with Indonesia’s past political violence seem to have assimilated this lesson, and use artful, engaging approaches. A Daughter’s Memory (Pratiwi, 2019), for one, uses animation to bring oral history to life, while Song of the Grassroots (Kurniawan, 2020) blends activist and “making the album” documentary genres to portray Fajar Merah making a record based on the poetry of his father Wiji Thukul, an activist who was disappeared in 1998.

The Act of Killing’s aesthetic impact, while inspiring and galvanizing to many and hailed as a masterpiece, did not go without significant critique. Its methodology of inviting perpetrators to make a movie about their past crimes raised a host of ethical problems for Indonesianists. Critical viewers, while acknowledging the intimacy and innovation of the film’s aesthetic, were disturbed by the affinities and erasures that came with it and ultimately protested the absence of context regarding the history of military influence in local violence (Cribb, 2014; van Klinken, 2014) and of activist counternarratives (Dwyer, 2014). Critics argued these lacunae created a dehistoricized ethnographic present of trauma and silence that was ultimately Orientalizing, leaving an impression of Indonesians as either ignorant or out of control (Yngvesson, 2014). Such representation “resurrecting colonial-era narratives of a barbaric “heart of darkness” penetrable only by the civilizing eye of the Western camera” (Dwyer, 2014) and ultimately perpetuating the impunity it was claiming to expose (Wandita, 2014). The critical response from scholars and activists to a putatively overly aestheticized (documentary) film highlights the positive aspects of an ethnographic approach. In ethnographic films, ethical considerations must always be primary. The three films that are the focus of this book operate in the ethnographic, interpretative, and ethical fields of VPA, visual psychological anthropology, fields that have something to offer the depiction of trauma, gendered violence, and stigmatization in Indonesia.

What Visual Psychological Anthropology Can Contribute

The method of VPA, a synergistic practice yoking the values and practices of visual and psychological anthropology, aims for aesthetic engagement while adhering to a rigorous ethic of reflexive inquiry and representation. It accomplishes this through the many integrated components of its method, which are: sensory, aesthetic, and emotional; longitudinal, inductive, person-centered, and reflexive; and multimodal. While these components are brought to bear in the making of each film in this book, we also found that sustained over a set of films, they revealed the cross-cutting dimensions of trauma, gendered violence, and stigmatization that came from historical and social context of Indonesia, and that deeply impacted the lives of our subjects.

Other filmmakers have used the components of VPA separately. Topics of psychological anthropology have been explored in film, including mental illness, selfhood and identity, the life cycle, grief, sexuality, and sensation and consciousness (Castaing-Taylor & Paravel, 2012; Gardner, 1986; Nakamura, 2010; O’Rourke, 1987; Plambech & Metz, 2018; Rickels, 2009; Rosenblatt, 2005). Filmmakers have made use of longitudinal techniques (Biella & Kamerling, 2016) and person-centered approaches (Jourdain, 2017; Maciuszek, 2015). They have also introduced critical reflexivity as a topic of the film (Breton, 2008) and worked across written and visual ethnography (Asch et al., 1986; Asten, 1997; Gill, 2011, 2014, 2016). VPA is unique for its integration of these different approaches. We now provide more detail about each component and why it can make a difference when filming trauma, gendered violence, and stigmatization.

Sensory, Aesthetic, Emotional Representation/Experience

VPA is sensory, aesthetic, and emotional. Films about individuals living through experiences of trauma, gendered violence, and stigmatization are often countering histories of silencing, oppression, apathy, ignorance, or eradication. Sensory, compelling, emotional films engage attention and also represent subjectivity and activate empathy in a way other mediums cannot.

Film as a medium compels with its ability to portray the affective and corporeal aspects of subjectivity (Taylor, 1998). Film represents in a way that can be experienced directly and immediately, in a sensorial manner. Ethnographic filmmaker and visual anthropology theorist David MacDougall has said, “Knowledge of the senses is one of the best channels to understand other people’s experience … an opportunity to embrace the knowledge of being” (MacDougall, 2006, p. 5). For MacDougall, film’s sensory evocation is one of its most significant offerings: A close-up evokes tactile characteristics, a wide-angle suggests three-dimensionality, and a telephoto lens flattens perspective. All confer a materiality to images, “recover[ing] a dimension often lost in texts” (MacDougall, 2006, p. 58). Visual psychological anthropology, therefore, has great potential to convey the individual and embodied experience of trauma, violence, stigmatization, and the social world in a way that makes these “forcefully” felt (Rosaldo, 1986) by the viewer. This is markedly different from the experience of reading written representations, which involves a number of different neural, perceptual, and interpretive/cognitive processes (Hall et al., 2019; Matsumoto & Hwang, 2011).

It is this sense of immediacy, of directly hearing and witnessing the complex “lives of others,” that film provides. With even the most evocative and concrete written descriptions, sensory elements remain in the realm of the imaginary. Through the visual, one can catch nonverbal communication that conveys interpersonal and social information, including tone, and that can help in developing trust, forming connections, and making more accurate assessments about others’ cognitive, emotional, and attitudinal states (Hall et al., 2019; Matsumoto & Hwang, 2011). When watching a film, senses beyond sight and sound are also activated – kinesthetic empathy, for example, can be activated via mirror neurons (Praszkier 2016), so that the movements and embodied states of others resonate in the viewer, forming an intersubjective relationship some have called “intercorporeal” (Csordas 2008).

While past ethnographic films often favored more dispassionate, or “objective,” representations, using emotion as a guide for meaning in interpreting the lived experience of others is a main tenet of psychological anthropology (see LeVine 2010). Showing emotion onscreen as a way to engage viewers’ attention, emotional attunement (Grodal & Kramer, 2010), and embodied empathy (Chung & Slater, 2013) is a tried-and-true approach in popular film and cinema, one not so different from telling tales by firelight (Wiessner, 2014). This felt, intuitive response to emotional and character-driven narrative has been demonstrated in neuroimaging experiments, where viewers watching a spaghetti western share similar brain activity, but viewers of an unedited, one-shot video clip of a music concert do not (Hasson et al., 2008). An emotional, dramatic narrative arc that involves heightened emotion and its resolution has also been associated with better memory retention of the main ideas in films, than presenting similar information in a written or a filmed but non-narrative or unemotional format (Zak, 2013). Opportunities for greater sensory information thus provide opportunities for understanding, empathy, and identification, and for conveying powerful ideas to viewers, particularly when what is being watched highlights emotion and emotional meaning.

In addition to forefronting emotional meaning and encouraging an embodied response, visual methodology affords a further opportunity to explore creative ways to capture and evoke the ineffable worlds of dreams, fantasies, memories, and sensations. It offers a cinematic toolkit for the dramatic and emotional presentation of the main subject’s conflicts and concerns, such as presenting his or her narrative arc in a dramatic structure, sometimes using non-observational filmmaking techniques such as recreations, and the addition of a soundtrack, animation, or other elements that can supplement observational or other footage during the editing and post-production process (Lemelson & Tucker, 2020; for additional film examples, see Hardie, 2015, and Ledésert, 2015).

Longitudinal, Inductive, Person-Centered, Reflexive

VPA also indicates certain aspects of the filmmaking and analytical process, beyond the ultimate look and feel of the finished film. These include working on a subject over a substantial period of time, being person-centered, inductive, and reflexive.

VPA is longitudinal, which matters because while arguably impactful ethnographic projects can be shot in short, “intense” periods of fieldwork and video recording (Pink & Morgan, 2013), when people have been living in contexts of trauma, violence, or stigma, it takes time to build their trust to get honest and emotional material about their experience. This is especially true when working in psychocultural contexts that value harmony, hierarchy, and shame avoidance, as is the case in Indonesia. VPA is inductive and person-centered, which matters because it is via person-centered methodology that you can get to the heart of what matters to the individual, seeing beyond what your initial “frame” was to understand what really matters on the ground. As the esteemed ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall (2016) has said:

We all make films within a frame – which is to say, a frame of mind, the frame of our interests, and the questions at the back of our minds. In selecting what to film we put a frame around reality. But the point isn’t to demonstrate what you already know. It’s to follow where this process leads you, to explore what you find, and make an analysis with the camera. If you already know what will be in your film, what's the point of making it?

This was very much the case with the three films discussed in this book, where the frame of what each film was “about” widened considerably over and well after the period of filming.

Fundamentally, these films are yoked together by a long-term and abiding interest in how individuals manage the numerous contradictions and pressures in their personal and social lives. How do they manage their life-worlds, relationships, and their selves? How do they understand, construct, and reconstruct their identities in the face of potentially life-shattering events? What roles do individual biography and experience, and the internalization of social and cultural worlds play in the subjective experience of these? And how can we capture these processes as they unfold at the speed of life as lived? Visual psychological anthropology contributes by situating responses to episodes of trauma, violence, or stigmatization within broader context by listening to the “cares that spill over” (Wikan, 1990) and following where these excesses lead over the life course. Life “lived forward” over the long haul shows concerns as rising into foreground and receding when balanced with other significant concerns.

Implicit in these questions is an investment in the interpretive lens of subjectivity. A primary concern in psychological anthropology, subjectivity refers to individual perceptions, emotions, overwhelming life concerns, motivations, and subsequent decisions and actions. In other words, it is how participants think of themselves as embodied individuals with capabilities and characteristics, or more poetically how they engage “identity and fate, patterned and felt in historically contingent settings and mediated by institutional processes and cultural forms” (Biehl et al., 2007, p. 5). For VPA, a focus on subjectivity promotes a holistic depiction of people’s lives, struggles, and conflicts, mining the intersection points of the personal, phenomenological, and biographical in relation to the historical, social, cultural, and political, which impact phenomenological experience and influence ideas of personhood and the formation of the self (Desjarlais & Throop, 2011; B. J. Good, 2012; M.-J. D. Good et al., 2008). These life-course, historical experiences and self-concepts are carried through from one developmental stage to the next, through neurophysiological impacts on developing brains and bodies, identity formation, and other psychobiologically attuned individualized responses to environments and events (Rorty, 2007; Worthman et al., 2010). While this book and the films are produced within the scholarly literature on subjectivities, they also aim to contribute to a fresh understanding of the dynamics of subjectivities in the making. By exploring the lives of participants longitudinally, via both periodic person-centered interviewing that follows the vicissitudes of emotional experience, and personal reflections and observational footage that captures the milieu of everyday life, we explore what happens to our understanding of subjectivity if we document life “lived forward,” with all of its uncertainties, over long spans of time that track major life-course events and developmental processes.

Visual psychological ethnography can become a valuable contribution to the “anthropology of becoming” (Biehl & Locke, 2017) by testing the presumed retrospective aspects of film – and at the same time, the presumed retrospective nature of traumatic or violent life experiences as they are so often depicted in the existing literature on subjectivities. Such conventional depictions risk temporally trapping the understanding of subjectivity to the contextual interwoven cultural, biological, and neurological components of suffering. Tracking a prospective life experience and the way expectations expand or constrict, and how life paths are adjusted accordingly, we find stories of individuals “muddling through” (Rosaldo, 1985) to uncertain futures in a way that generates and responds to an overflow of emotions and experiences.

This “muddling through” applies to the filmmaker as well as the subjects: VPA is reflexive, and involves ongoing re-evaluation over time. Attentive reflexivity leads to a more transparent understanding of filmmaker subjectivity and positionality. A reflexive understanding helps address power imbalances as the anthropologist-filmmaker checks in with subjects over the longer period of research and production to ensure they are comfortable with their depiction and how that depiction aligns with their experience as they understand it. Reflexivity invites researcher, participant, and audience to look beyond what is captured on screen to address interpersonal dynamics, ethics, and filmmaking craft choices with an eye toward how such methods impact the socially dynamic experience of fieldwork and hence the material gathered, as well as the final product.

It is a given that all films, including the ones discussed in this volume, are complex constructions of the concerns and interests of the filmmaker(s), rather than an objective depiction of people’s lives (Brand, 1976; Pink, 2013) and reflexivity is operative in a film whether or not the filmmaker chooses to represent it (Lutkehaus, 1989). After decades of thoughtful conversation and fruitful experimentation, though, some form of evident reflexivity is considered an integral part of ethnographic film practice (Pink, 2001). This can mean acknowledging the camera “as an integral part of the identity of the researcher and of the intersubjective relationship between her or him and the people participating in the research” (Pink, 2009, p. 101) and “investigat[ing] how visual images and technologies become a part of the encounters through which visual and other knowledge is produced in both fieldwork and representations of qualitative research” (Pink, 2001, p. 588). It expects that “the producer deliberately, intentionally reveals to his or her audience the underlying epistemological assumptions that caused him or her to formulate a set of questions in a particular way, to seek answers to those questions in a particular way, and finally, to present his or her findings in a particular way” (Ruby, 1980).

We have been engaged in ongoing dialogue with our participants regarding how the film is developing, how the characters see their role in the film and understand their participation, how the film has influenced their lives, and more. At the same time, we have been committed to reflection and transparency about the researchers’ own embodied reactions to the people filmed, and the vicissitudes of fieldwork and shifting relationships with team and subjects. The idea of reflexivity is extended to the craft of filmmaking and an open discussion of how the films were made – exploring and explaining the rationale for specific shots or sequences. These are usually addressed in accompanying written literature, such as this book.

The longitudinal, person-centered, reflexive process leads to a generative excess, which is mirrored both in the making the films and again in the analytical process of this monograph. A reflexive discussion of filmmaking methodology shows an ongoing process of refinement, or even a pivoting of inquiry and narrative arc to respond to participant stories, emotions, and shifting understandings that lead us outside the initial theoretical frame. This excess then leads to new connections that then can be applied back to refine theoretical understanding of these initial frames in a constant dialogue between the “experience near” – “that which “invokes praxis (rather than structure), events (rather than generalization), and feeling (rather than thinking)” (Wikan, 1991, p. 300) – and etic understandings of participant life experience.

Collaborative

While we have not insisted that it be a necessary part of VPA methodology, the three films in this book have all been collaborative endeavors, and that has complemented the reflexivity we feel necessary to VPA. Under my direction, we have made these three films with a diverse research, filmmaking, and therapeutic support team of Indonesians and Americans. Some have collaborated on all three of the films, and some just on one or two. The psychiatrist Dr. Mahar Agusno and his wife, a community health researcher, Ninik Supartini, mentioned in the encounter with Mariana that opened this chapter, contributed in multiple ways to each film, including finding potential participants, conducting interviews, serving as psychological support, and more; Livia Iskandar, PhD, a public health expert and co-founder of Pulih Center for Trauma Recovery and Psychosocial Intervention participated in Bitter Honey interviews. Degung Santikarma had many roles on the filmmaking team as anthropologist and researcher, conducting interviews in both 40 Years and Bitter Honey, acting at certain times as cultural liaison and expert commentator for the latter, and, of course, was a participant sharing his story as a subject for 40 Years. The essayist, cartoonist, and cultural commentator Wayan Sadha and later his daughter Sri were involved in multiple aspects of both 40 Years and Bitter Honey. The lawyer and advocate Luh Putu Anggreni began as an expert commentator for Bitter Honey and has since become a partner in on-the-ground advocacy efforts.

This collaboration has allowed us to respond to the needs of our participants, for example, by having therapists present for psychological support when interviewing participants about past episodes of traumatic violence. It has also mitigated some of the evident discomforts or (sometimes unconscious) dynamics that may come with interviews conducted by people of a different gender/culture/class as suggested in the opening anecdote. We hope our films challenge the model of the author/director as sole creator of meaning, and that they offer a conceptual space that incorporates and juxtaposes multiple perspectives, including that of the director, subjects, and indigenous researchers and experts (MacDougall, 1978, p. 422; Martínez, 1992). Such a model helps avoid the canonical ethnographic film style of “a film made by one cultural group attempting to describe another” by incorporating, both behind and in front of the camera, indigenous perspectives and purposes that might position ethnographic films as an instrument of political action, or a corrective to stereotyping, misrepresentation, and even denigration (MacDougall, 1997). Chapters 7 and 9 go further into how collaboration operated in interviews, filmmaking, and, indeed, use of the films once they were released.

Multimodal

Another key aspect of visual psychological anthropology is that, despite its name, it is emphatically multimodal. Given the focus and effort of the three films in this book, which each tells an emotionally moving, person-centered story about an individual or set of individuals, there was not room or time for many ethnographic details relevant, discussion of production and rational for methodological or visual style choices, or full reflexive elaboration within the films themselves. The more poetic, cinematic strategies used to make such films often work best without excessive analytical or didactic information. Yet at the same time, such information can be crucial to providing a contextualized ethnographic understanding of the topics, situations, and themes portrayed.

We believe that for ethnographic film per se to be successful, it must be directly linked with the more extensive and particularistic domain of ethnography. While we agree that ethnographic films must be approached, artistically, as their own “text” with their own creative logic, and not be mere “support” for a written ethnography (Lutkehaus, 1989), we do not leave the written behind. Our approach more closely aligns with that put forth by Sarah Pink (2013) in that films can be a meaningful element of ethnographic work that “bear an important relationship to, but cannot replace, words in a conventional theoretical discussion” (p. 6). We therefore join the existing tradition of ethnographic filmmakers providing written materials to accompany their work (Asch et al., 1973; Bateson & Mead, 1942; Gardner, 2007; Gardner & Heider 1969) and have designed the films to function in complementary fashion with ethnography presented in the more academically traditional written format of articles, books, study guides, and the like that can highlight, comment upon, illustrate, and unpack the different issues that the films address – such as this one. As noted in the preface and hinted at above, making person-centered, reflexive films that develop over a number of years result in a generative excess. Some of that “excess” is in the films, some is in this book. The book includes interviews, contextual research, and other material that could not be included in the films, although all of it informed the finished films themselves. And the films, each with its own topic, generated integrated insight that informs, and is discussed in, this book.

Book Outline and Summary

Part II, immediately following this introduction, provides a deep dive into the ethnographic material of the films, providing a familiarity with the key context, character narratives, and major theoretical points to be referenced throughout the ensuing discussions analyzing the material, process, and products of visual psychological anthropology. Chapter 2 addresses 40 Years, primarily exploring the connections between traumatic historical events, domains of power, domination, violence and surveillance, and how these operated, affected, and shaped the main characters, based on their positionality and status in their respective communities, but also on their idiosyncratic temperaments and personalities. Chapter 3, on Bitter Honey, highlights cultural influences on subjective experiences of gendered violence, discovering how the structuring effects of enduring Balinese patriarchal culture operate to create conditions for the expression of male dominance. While domestic violence and infidelity are of course in no way unique to polygamous marriages or Balinese Hindu society, there are numerous Balinese cultural beliefs and practices regarding courtship, marriage, and spiritual life that impact the thoughts and behaviors of husbands, wives, and children and may contribute to women feeling powerless or trapped in marriages they find at best less than satisfying and at worst detrimental to their physical and emotional well-being. Chapter 4, about Thorn, explores how the disparate vulnerabilities of mental illness, poverty, and gendered mores for courtship, marriage, and sexual behavior become intertwined with individual development and family dynamics for two generations of one Central Javanese family. It tracks the cascading effects of stigmatization and social violence on the family as a unit and as individuals. Mother, father, and daughter have different perspectives on the conundrums and contradictions they find themselves faced with, and based on their positionality make different efforts to manage these so that the burdens they confer do not become completely unbearable.

Part III provides a discussion integrating the three main themes in, across, and through each film. Chapter 5 theorizes the connections between trauma, gendered violence, and stigmatization and traces these connections through channels of Indonesian history, politics, and culture. Here, fear-inducing contexts and traumatic episodes of political violence such as the anti-communist purge of 1965 have been significantly gendered, even as more ongoing and pervasive experiences of gendered violence and stigmatization cause fear and anxiety related to the long-term felt effects of trauma. By widening the frame on each of these topics, we ultimately interconnect them under the overarching rubric of structural violence, situating violent events and stigmatizing dynamics within broader institutions of political oppression and discrimination, gendered legal protections and cultural practices, and the double-bind choices of poverty. These conditions engender precarity, often experienced as family loss, conflict, and destabilization. These more fundamental, relational losses are just as foundational to subjective experience as social violence or political trauma.

Chapter 6 turns to participant responses to these ruptures and hardships. Certain shared psychocultural themes emerged out of their quite different biographies, contexts, and experiences. First are the emotional reactions of shame and anger. As internally felt and behaviorally enacted, these are inflected by Indonesian, Javanese, and/or Balinese cultural models, schemas, and habitus of emotion and behavior. They are also deeply gendered, with different internal experiences and outward expressed behaviors expected and normalized for men versus women, in ways that compound experiences of fear, stigma, and violence. In its analysis of these emotions as felt and enacted, the discussion widens the frame again to account for numerous domains of interest to psychological anthropology beyond the scope of Chapter 5, such as childrearing and models of normative life course development, social status and identity, and gender roles.

While the participants in the three films find their suffering compounded by shame and anger, they are also resilient. Orientations and actions that support their resilience include religious belief and ritual, as providing an internal framework for meaning and a practice that reconnects them to a more inclusive social world. This faith encompasses a belief in the workings and logic of karma, which sees cosmological meaning in the suffering of self and others. Philosophies of healing introspection and outward behavior find articulation in culturally salient ideas of patience, surrender, and bearing burdens for the sake of others. Finally, some participants draw strength and resilience from social and political activism. In asking what role participation in the film projects have to play in furthering – or catalyzing – such an activist orientation, we turn to a reflexive consideration of the filmmaking process.

Part IV asks how we can represent subjective experiences in ethnographic film, according to tenets of VPA, and what impact filmmaking has on participants and the collective understanding of these domains. Here, we discuss film as process. Addressing the theory, method, and procedures of VPA from project conceptualization through shooting, interviewing and editing, final film, and screenings, we discuss how the practice of visual psychological anthropology might empathically and accurately represent individuals’ lived experience when conducting visual ethnography on “sensitive” topics with vulnerable subjects (Scheyvens & Leslie, 2000). We do this by first separating the discussion of the process into production and post-production, in other words, VPA methodology in the field and in the editing room. This is a somewhat misleading or arbitrary distinction, as in longitudinal projects often both “production” and “post-production” are occurring simultaneously and thinking through an edit might lead to insights that are brought back into the field for the next interview, but the areas of discussion are distinct enough to make this delineation useful.

In Chapter 7, we discuss two interrelated factors that are hugely influential in determining what material is generated via VPA methodology in the field. The first could be called the intersubjective factor – the psychocultural and social processes relevant to the film participants, and their relationship to and interpersonal dynamics with the interviewer/anthropologist. The second is the shooting method and approach. The discussion of VPA in the field provides an in-depth look at our longitudinal, filmed, person-centered interview process, which forms the heart of our methodology and films, as applied within Javanese and Balinese psychocultural contexts. Understanding that fieldwork is a unique, often alien and artificial social experience for our participants, we investigate dynamics of personal disclosure, performativity, and presentation of self when addressing potentially painful, embarrassing, or triggering incidents or topics. This chapter elaborates on the VPA method with a particular focus on reflexivity and Javanese and Balinese psychocultural models of social interaction and image management including understandings and embodiment of such domains as malu (shame) and wirang (disgrace); the presentation of self, encompassed in notions of the mask (Geertz), and bright faces (Wikan); and curhat, which can be understood as a performative spontaneous disclosure of personal matters. All factor into what participants choose to discuss on camera and how they address challenging or upsetting topics in their lives or incidents in their past as these are referenced during interviews. As we intend this book and this chapter to be a resource to those doing such work in other cultural locales, here we illustrate how culture is central, not peripheral, to the VPA process.

When further accounting for the vagaries of memory, the paradoxes of psychological truth, and the performativity of visual ethnography, the discussion of Indonesian habitus in the filmed interview dovetails with long-standing dialogue on “truth” in ethnographic film. The ever-contested notion of representational truth onscreen is further complicated by a reflexive consideration of anthropologist subjectivity and the impact of the interview staging, camera, and shooting method. How we position the camera and situate the crew impacts participants’ comfort and orientation toward being filmed and influences the way they can be represented during the film editing process.

In Chapter 8, we discuss how we can carry a person-centered ethos over into the editing room; how we can use film techniques to both address and reflect the needs of each unique story but also tell this story according to the tenets of VPA. Here, we must again negotiate the ethnographer’s own subjectivity in crafting any ethnographic representation of another (Pink, 2013) and address the challenges and opportunities of hewing this representation to the imperatives of visual storytelling (Marshall, 1993). Topics covered include the inductive process of narrative development, the necessarily artifice of narrative shape, the incorporation of visual and auditory elements, and editing for emotional impact. This last point is a hallmark of the VPA method, but remains contested within ethnographic film discourse. Here, we reassert the argument put forth in our first book that attempting to bridge different cultural worlds of emotional experience and expression is a necessary risk. First, emotion-oriented filming and editing enacts psychological anthropology theory that places primacy on emotional force and emotional meaning in participants’ lives. Second, an emotional approach is specifically suited to topics such as trauma, violence, and stigmatization, where we are countering histories of erasure and where an absence or mismatch of viewer emotional response risks radically misrepresenting the lived experiences of the participants onscreen.

In addition to the question of emotional representation, readers undoubtedly will have questions about the ethical concerns of making films about people who have undergone traumatic and violent events and unveiling aspects of their lives, usually kept private, for public viewing. We are well aware that participants will live not only with the consequences of their original suffering, but also the consequences of the filming experience, whatever those may be. Chapter 9 discusses these crucial ethical considerations, sharing both theoretical positions and the details of specific circumstances that arose over the course of making these three films (Perry & Marion, 2010) in order to respond to the need for a more “interactive” and “thickly descriptive ethics” (Harper & Mookherjee, 2009) in visual ethnography through a “case study” approach (Harper & Jiménez, 2005).

The chapter addresses two significant concerns, consent and amelioration of harm, as they arise from and impact each stage of filmmaking. We discuss how the filmmaking team thought through, alongside participants, initial consent discussions about joining the project and the risks to safety and well-being the film project engendered, reviewing and vetting rough cuts, and consenting to release and distribution. Here, we found that the medium of film might require different configurations of consent than written ethnography, due to film’s higher levels of direct exposure of participant and simultaneous greater accessibility. Yet obtaining consent is not a simple agreement between film-er and filmed, when accounting for participant positioning in a family and community, influential local psychocultural dynamics of deference and harmony, and the environment of contemporary media sharing.

We also address the attempts to ameliorate anticipated and unanticipated harms, by establishing psychological protection protocols during interviewing, discussing the move to intervene in certain cases, and the fall-out from that; and participation in public screenings.

Ultimately, we have found that film participants assert their agency throughout the entire filmmaking process, and use the opportunity of filmmaking and the final film products to their own ends. While none of these projects were initially conceived as activist or advocacy films, we have found that through their use by invested participants and communities, to a certain extent, they have become so. This use is a welcome development but can have unanticipated ethical repercussions. In the chapter, we widen the frame one final time by tracking the lives of the finished films as put to use by participants, in Indonesia and around the world.