Sensory Ethnography Lab: Experiments with Cinema

This series highlights contemporary work produced at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) exploring the intersection of cinema and anthropology. Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and managed by Ernst Karel, the lab provides an academic context for the development of creative works that test and respond to the traditions of documentary film. Anthropologists and artists who conduct research at the SEL investigate processes of realism and representation, expanding the potential of visual and acoustic media to represent indigeneity and alterity, lived experience and cultural difference, around the world.
 
The depictions of landscape and time presented in this series resonate with those found in the Harvard Art Museums’ special exhibition Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia (February 5–September 18, 2016) and in Ben Rivers’s nine-channel installation The Shape of Things (July 1–October 25, 2016), commissioned as a project for the museums’ Lightbox Gallery, on Level 5. Each of these projects challenges our relationship to the past, revealing new strategies for encountering ancestral and natural worlds.

Join us for weekly Sunday programs during the run of the series.

About today’s film:
Terrace of the Sea (2009)
52 min.; color; Lebanese

Diana Allan’s Terrace of the Sea was shot between 2008 and 2009 in an unofficial Palestinian Bedouin gathering in south Lebanon. Structured around a collection of family photographs taken over three generations, this film examines the experiences of the Ibrahim family, through their relationship to their work as fishermen and to the beach camp on which they are living. Because it is not presented through the prism of nationalist politics, other overlapping attachments become apparent, in particular the tension between a love of home and the ties that continue to bind refugees to their country of origin. A meditation on the distances between memory, photography, and film, Terrace of the Sea explores the relations between past and present, home and homeland, and between seeing and being seen.

The screening will be held in Menschel Hall, Lower Level.

Free admission

Support for this program is provided by the Richard L. Menschel Endowment Fund. Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.

Lead support for Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia and related research has been provided by the Harvard Committee on Australian Studies. The exhibition is supported by the Australian Government through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Australian Consulate-General, New York.