ABSTRACT
Experiments in form and aesthetics are currently enjoying a renaissance in documentary filmmaking and, although “experimental” and “art” are words fraught with anxiety and contention, author want to take them positively as a way of arguing for a new and expanded art of ethnographic filmmaking. Crystal Voyager is a film that both foregrounds the sensory and experiments formally-indeed the two are inextricably linked. Greenough was the first to adapt a 35mm camera to this particular representational task. In 2017 the influential journal American Anthropologist rebranded the title of its visual anthropology section as “Multimodal Anthropologies”, and there is a growing consensus that ethnographic filmmaking needs to actively embrace ways of working across many new digital media platforms.
