ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces an extension of the sensory ethnographic film style the author calls sensory vérité. Sensory vérité goes beyond the speciesism and human-focused linguistic simplicity of “sensory ethnography” and finds the voice and sensory expression from the inclusive perspective embracing all natural and unnatural worlds. As its title suggests, the chapter locates sensory vérité at a filmic intersection of sensory ethnography, sensory biophilia, and cinéma vérité. Like the sensory ethnographic film, sensory vérité allows a viewer’s senses to come into focus through haptic, synesthetic images and heightened sound design, but additionally combines that with an interactive, co-creative voice of cinéma vérité and the ecological centering of sensory biophilia. Each of these concepts and their vital contribution to the inclusive voice of sensory vérité are discussed and referenced against actual film selected from the body of the author’s work.