Camera Monologue: Cultural Critique beyond Collaboration, Participation and Dialogue

Cameras always seem to capture a little too little and a little too much. In ethnographic films, profound insights are often found in the tension between what we are socially taught to perceive, and the peculiar non-social perception of the camera. Ethnographic filmmakers study the worlds of humans while leaning on, and sometimes being inspired, obstructed, and even directed by the particular non-human and monologic forms of seeing and hearing that a camera can produce. But how would a camera perceive the footage it produces, and what would it think of the various ways we use it? In this textual experiment, I imagine what different cameras might reply to these questions if they could speak. In doing so, I call attention to ethnographic filmmaking as a more-than-human, more-than-collaborative, and more-than-dialogical mode of cultural critique.