Narrative (dis)encounters between cinema and the social sciences

Counterpoint methodological reflections from a documentary experience

Abstract

This article presents a series of methodological reflections that point to a narrative dilemma that emerges when working from the linkage of cinematographic processes with ethnographic ones: to show or to explain in the final product. Taking as a starting point the experience of producing a documentary film from a long and ethnographic depth research on deported peoples who inhabit the streets of a border town in northern Mexico, the article elaborates the theoretical-philosophical approach of the inexorability of reality in order to emphasize that the simultaneity of lived time and documented time is the novelty that cinema offers to ethnographic work. It also argues that recreating reality is the possibility offered in film work and, therefore, three forms of representation of border street life in cinema and the social sciences are discussed: meritocratic, victimist and miserabilist. It addresses the possibility of working the local from the ethnographic and the universal from the cinematographic and concludes by highlighting the advantages of the joint work between ethnography and cinema, as well as the role that the viewer can play in that process.