Responsibility of representation – ethics of transcultural filmmaking practices

This chapter looks at the philosophy of representation in an intercultural context. Drawing on David Martin-Jones (2019) and his interpretations of Deleuze’s ‘time image’ (1985), this chapter explores the responsibility of a documentary filmmaker when fixing in time a version of the interpretation of documentary contributors’ lives. Drawing on my own filming experience with the Yanesha tribe in the Peruvian Amazon and the Zhigoneshi collective by the Arhuaco community from Colombia, I explore the challenges of fixing identities in time when fragmentarisation of reception practices became inevitable. Going further, I explore the conditioning of contemporary filmmaking (and editing practices) in the search for impartiality, while remaining acutely aware of the inevitable subjectivity of the whole process, as advocated by Piotrowska. With the illusion of capturing objective reality no longer possible, how can we deal with our positionality in the face of the subjectivity of choices embedded in the filmmaking process? Drawing onto intercultural examples of documentary filmmaking, this chapter explores the questions of who tells the story and controls the narrative and why. Grounded in Hall’s encoding-decoding paradigm (Hall, 1973), this chapter seeks to explore the nature of documentary filmmaking practices in intercultural contexts with the ethical challenges they bring.