Cinematography and camera crew: practice, process and procedure

This series addresses the need for works that describe and theorize multiple, emerging, and sometimes interconnected, media practices in the contemporary world.

Interdisciplinary and inclusive, this series offers a forum for ethnographic methodologies, descriptions of non-Western media practices, explorations of transnational connectivity, and studies that link culture and practices across fields of media production and consumption.

Although practice theory has been a mainstay of social theory for nearly three decades, so far it has had very limited impact on media studies. This book draws on with work of practice theorists such as Wittgenstein, Foucault, Bourdieu, Barth and Schatzki and rethinks the study of media from the perspective of practice theory. Drawing on ethnographic case studies.

The contributors address a number of important themes: media as practice, the interlinkage between media, culture and practice; the contextual study of media practice; and new practices of digital production. Collectively, these chapters make a strong case for the importance of theorising the relationship between media and practice and thereby adding practice as a new strand to the study of anthropology of media’.

Cathy Greenhalgh approaches practice theory as a filmmaker, ethnographer and teacher. She argues that film and media theorists have rarely acknowledged the collaborative character of filmmaking, as they have focused on forms, texts, and authorship and not on how the crew shape the making of the final product. Her chapter describes in detail two cinematographic practices – ‘cheating’ (‘the constant coordination of bodies and set with different lens views’) and ‘visualisation’(‘the visual concept of a sequence or whole film’)- with particular reference to how digital technologies have transformed ways in which films are visualised today.

Following the practice theorist De Certeau(1984), Greenhalgh distinguishes between the long-term ‘strategies’ of the film industry and the semi-autonomous ‘tactics’ of the crew. She ends by suggesting that theories of practice tend to be too general to capture bottom-up, contingent emergence of actual (mediated) practices.

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