This seminar will be a hybrid event where the speaker will be presenting in- person and the talk will be streamed via zoom. Those who want to attend physically are more than welcome to join us in meeting room 929 at Eilert Sundt’s building.
Abstract
What is commercial cinema, and where is it made? The typical answer is that it is an audiovisual medium made in studios and in postproduction rooms. This answer justifies a focus on the medium’s historical, formal, and theoretical analysis in film studies, since production is conventionally seen as a black box. This assumption has been challenged by two recent subfields: what is known as “production studies” in media studies and the anthropology of cinema. Both subfields show how commercial filmmaking is a dense social and material field beyond stereotypical spaces of production, where the labour of technical workers – e.g., camera workers, prop masters, grips and gaffers, costume assistants – impacts filmmaking in subtle yet important ways.
While technical workers have received some scholarly attention, being an anthropologist on set also means interacting with drivers, cleaners, catering workers – in short, the “unknown soldiers” of commercial cinema to use the Egyptian industry’s insider language. These workers are not directly involved in creating images and sounds – hence their near absence in existing scholarship – but they are crucial to the production’s everyday work: feeding crew members, cleaning after them, and moving them around the city. This paper will center these unknown soldiers to expand on two observations. First, I argue that the central social role of drivers, cleaners, and catering workers on set has been systematically ignored by an overemphasis among crew members and scholars alike on audiovisual production. Second, I argue that this overemphasis has blinded anthropologists of cinema to the different ways in which drivers, cleaners, and catering workers understand what “cinema” is and where it is made. These different understandings offer fresh, ethnographically grounded ways to define the activity of commercial filmmaking.
Biography
Prior to joining the University of Oxford, Dr Chihab El Khachab was a Junior Research Fellow in Anthropology at Christ Church (2016-2020) and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in Cambridge (2020-2021).
El Khachab is a social anthropologist specializing in visual and media anthropology, with a focus on Egyptian media production. He has broader interests in cinema, labour, technology, bureaucracy, humour, and social theory.
El Khachab’s publications include the first ethnographic study of the Egyptian film industry, Making Film in Egypt - How Labor, Technology, and Mediation Shape the Industry (American University in Cairo Press, 2021). The anthropology of cinema has been instrumental in describing the ‘unseen’ labour invested in making films. What has been less explored is film workers’ erasure of each other's concrete effort in a similar manner. This process is what El Khachab calls ‘reification’: The reification of concrete work in Egyptian film production (JRAI, 2021).
Read more: http://chihabelkhachab.com/