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Field studies and participant observation are methods of anthropology and applied social research. Being in a place, observe what goes on, take notes, try to understand and make sense of it all, have been the way to build knowledge about people, their relationships, society and culture. Concepts that describe
events and patterns of behaviour are used for comparison in order to discover similarities and differences and thereby a better understanding of the cultural variation of the world.

Today virtual field studies utilize the possibilities of visual and audio material. Watching and hearing people talk and laugh may create a feeling of a real encounter between the audience in front of the screen and the people on the screen. Subtitles overcome the language-barrier. In this exercise you will do a virtual field study by watching an ethnographic film. A few questions will guide you to what to look for. During your observation throughout the film you should build an understanding of the people you meet on the screen, their way of life, their culture and society.

Observation is something we practice whenever we are awake. Since we have to interpret every image in front of us, we do not see with our eyes alone, we have to use our minds. Still we do not necessarily notice all what we observe. Most of the time when we walk around we use our senses to avoid accidents and stay on the path. In this exercise your aim should be to notice as much as possible of what you can see and hear. You will watch a documentary from South West China where you will visit a village of Bai People. For most of you this will be an exotic experience as the everyday life of these people differs in many ways from your own. This fact makes your observation more interesting and in a way easier as it will help your work to compare the life of the people you observe with your own life and notice the differences.

The people you will meet on the screen are Mr and Mrs Yang, their son and his wife and grandson, and their neighbours. Before the Chinese revolution Yang’s family owned all the houses surrounding the courtyard, but as his family were considered landlords, their property was confiscated and redistributed to families in need. Yang himself was left with a corner of his courtyard. In the film you will learn about the history of the courtyard, but you should focus your attention on what you can observe of people and their relationships, how they live with their animals, utensils and other things, i.e. everything they are surrounded by. Then you should build up your own understanding of how these people live, how they deal with each other and how they make their living.

Observational approach to filming
The film is shot in an observational style. The use of the camera, and the editing of the film, is done in such a way that the audience is clearly positioned behind the camera, so that you as a viewer in a way can follow the events through the viewfinder as the camera person does. Long takes respect the temporal and spatial aspects of the events in the film and no cut-aways to smooth scenes taken from different camera angels are used. The idea is to give you as the viewer a chance to watch the camera person over the shoulder and somehow check the filmmaker’s decisions and draw your own conclusions based on your own observations through the frame of the camera.

The filmic devices used in most documentaries create a distance between the audience and the people on the screen. As opposed to the TV-style of film-making, more scientifically oriented ethnographic filmmakers strive for more authenticity in the whole film-making process. The observational approach to documentary film-making will argue that the use of natural light and hand-held camera that can follow the events closely, the lack of cutaways, the absence of music-scores and voice-over, represent efforts to bring audiences closer to events as independent witnesses. The idea is that the lack of a narrator’s voice-over and other filmic manipulations encourage you as the viewer to form your own conclusions.

The rules of the so-called Dogme-film, as formulated by the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier a few years ago, aimed at giving more authentic and convincing presentations, and included many of the same ideas as the most “puritan” ethnographic filmmakers. Von Trier has phrased similar rules for documentary film-making. TV-producers and fiction-filmmakers of today use techniques of the observational approach of filming to bring the illusion of authenticity and realism into their productions.

A film is made up by sequences and in order to make sense of how the sequences are related, you as a viewer have to reflect on what you see. The necessary mental mobilization the viewer has to do to bridge the gaps between sequences, invites a wide range of cultural and historical, as well as personal experiences. Do people, activities, or something you observe in the film trigger you in a certain way? Do you feel that there are things you observe in the film that surprise you, that touch upon prejudices you may have had?

A writer can exclude all unnecessary information from a text, a filmmaker cannot. Images carry a lot of unintended information, which may distract the viewer from the main message in a film. Did something you observed in this film distract you?
A film can be a more or less open text that can be interpreted in many ways. The observational approach of filming generally leads to more open texts. Still what the audience see is a snapshot of reality framed and edited by the filmmaker.

Finally, field studies are first of all about finding good questions to follow up in the field. What questions would you follow up if you visited this courtyard?

Questions

• What can you tell about the framing of a reality the film-makers do in this film?
• What can you say about how the directors influence reality in this film?
• Mr Yang’s mother, not his father, was member of the landlord’s family. The men in the family were killed, or arrested, following the Revolution and none of them, nor their families, were allowed to move back to the courtyard. But Mr Yang and his mother were allocated two rooms in the corner of their courtyard. What does this tell you about gender and social position of men and women in former China?
• From what you can observe throughout the film, what can you tell about gender relations in this Chinese community today?
• How do you observe age as a factor in these people’s relationships?
• How would you describe the economic activities in the community?
• How do people make a living? What resources do they utilize?

• How would you describe their way of life?