In an interview with the critic Scott MacDonald, filmmaker Stephanie Spray jokingly refers to a film she is working on as neither fiction nor documentary, but “ethnographic sci-fi.” It’s an odd but fitting description, encompassing the rigorous and mysterious, for the large body of work produced by the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, whose films are featured as part of the Whitney Biennial, beginning March 7.
Spray is one of the many students to emerge out of the “experimental lab,” established in 2006 by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, co-director of Harvard’s Film Study Center and a major creative force behind the group, who co-directed, along with Ilisa Barbash, one of the Sensory Ethnography Lab’s most widely seen works, “Sweetgrass” (2009). Other filmmakers who produce work within the lab are Véréna Paravel, JP Sniadecki, and Diana Allan.
As the name suggests, the lab is part of a larger project to bring two worlds — the sensory (aesthetics) and ethnographic — together. The content of the films vary, but each is engaged with human experience but devoid of the structures of informational narrative documentary as well as traditional ethnographic film, which approaches its subject from a distance. (Spray’s trilogy of films concerns the struggles of a rural Nepali family.)
They achieve this formally through a variety of methods, including explorations of time through long takes — Spray’s “Manakamana” and Aryo Danusari’s “On Broadway” — or through an immersion into the physical — especially Paravel’s “Foreign Parts,” a collaboration with Sniadecki that takes place in Willets Point, Queens, a forgotten land in danger of being wiped away due to former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s redevelopment plans, and “Leviathan,” her collaboration with Castaing-Taylor.
“Leviathan,” which is screening on the third floor of the Whitney, might be the most radical moving image work at the Biennial. Shot with consumer GoPro cameras (typically used by extreme sports enthusiasts) aboard a fishing ship, the film aims to formally mirror the arduous and often dangerous work at sea. The camera — frequently affixed to the workers or to the ship itself, released from control of the filmmakers — visually represents the movement of work. It’s a dizzying spectacle, the camera dipping and diving, sometimes underwater, other times from what seems like great heights.
Close attention is paid to sound through the work of Ernst Karel, who has edited and mixed sound on many of the films that have come out of the Sensory Ethnography Lab. The films are extraordinary as sound collages. “Leviathan” is rhythmically powered by the distorted audio of the consumer cameras being thrown around, while “Foreign Parts” creates a symphony of the clack and clang of the junkyards, the elevated 7 train rumbling overhead.
While the work of the Sensory Ethnography Lab has often been placed in the context of the museum of gallery — including PS1 and the Tate in London — it’s hard not to feel that the visceral nature of “Leviathan” will somehow be diminished tucked into the back of the Whitney, without the enveloping darkness of the movie theater. (The Film Society at Lincoln Center, coincidentally, will present a sidebar dedicated to the work of the Sensory Ethnography Lab as part of its “Art of the Real” program in April.) So much of the work achieves its power through close examination and immersion, so the casual viewing atmosphere of the museum setting does not do it justice.
Even though the Biennial this year, compared to the last few years — especially when Ed Halter and Thomas Beard curated in 2012 — is lacking in substantial moving image work, the fact that it made room for the Sensory Ethnography Lab within its overloaded program proves the museum’s continued commitment to film and video that complicates the distinction between the movie theater and the gallery.
