16/03/2022
📣📣The Anthropology Social invites all students and staff to a film screening of final year Anthropology student Beatrice Messuti's ethnographic film 'Folkpores', filmed as part of Sussex's Junior Research Associate (JRA) scheme in the summer or 2021.
🎥🎥The screening will be held on Thursday 17th March 4pm at Fulton 213. Free entrance.
Here's what Beatrice shares about her work:
"'Folkpores' (San Giovanni) is a sensory storytelling of Summer Solstice traditions in Northern Italy, especially focusing
on areas of Lombardy and Piedmont. The focus of film is the traditions of the nights surrounding the Summer Solstice, especially the Notte di San Giovanni and the traditional herbalism embedded
in the picking of the herbs and the making of the Guazza, a special water made with herbs and flowers and left outside on San Giovanni to absorb the magical properties of the dew.
By exploring these traditions behind the camera, in an attempt to create a multi-sensory visual ethnography, the relevance of the senses in these practices has become increasingly evident to me. Ideas of “porous subjectivity” have been useful in exploring the connection of the senses to the realm of spirituality and enchantment, to dissect the role of the senses in syncretic practices. The entanglements between the body, the sensory, and the spiritual world have been fascinating to explore, as the senses enable the body to participate in a spiritual experience and absorb spiritual essences and forces.
This has especially struck me in regards to the ritual of washing one’s face and body with the filtered Guazza, the morning after San Giovanni. This ritual and the water are believed to possess special
healing properties and to bring forth luck, fertility, and love. As the film displays, when the experience is described, the senses (sight, touch, smell) are used to paint a very vivid picture and are
vessels of spiritual meaning. The rich scent of flowers is capable of “penetrating one’s soul”, the water “feels fresher than it really is”, and that the flowers contained in it are the most colourful and
smell the strongest at that time of the year. Many describe this experience as very purifying and soothing, and this purification is enabled and enhanced by the sensorium.
I have tried to portray this in the film through different techniques: these include keying in images of flowers to represent the prominence of scent and colour in the storytelling of the participants, as well as making animated collages in collaboration with the participants, with cutouts of pictures taken by them that they felt represented the sensory landscape of their celebrations.
Participants created soundscapes and collages have therefore been incorporated in the video interviews and footage of the celebrations. They accompany the narration and reveal the sensory and emotional landscapes of individuals and their “porous subjectivity”. The camera itself is used as a tool for further immersion and to enhance perception: it becomes a porous subject that absorbs information and reflects it to the viewer of the film. It also enhances the filmmaker’s sensory immersion (e.g. through zooming in and focus), similar to the film possession described by Jean Rouch as cinétrance.
The way the film is constructed seeks to echo the way the participants share their stories: conversational, vivid, rich in sensory details, and to immerse the viewer in the same spiritually charged sensorium I had the pleasure to explore last Summer. I hope I have succeeded in my intent and that it will be a pleasure to explore for the viewer, too."
