Passing Girl: Riverside An Essay On Camera Work (1998) dir. Kwame Braun

At a street festival in West Africa, a young girl is delighted to discover a video camera trained on her. But her exuberant display is quickly cut short when she recognizes that the cameraman has already lost interest in her. But all is well: he has a document of the moment. Video has tipped the balance in another human interaction, and turned it into a curio. This experimental video essay probes the complexities of video as a tool for crosscultural research and representation: it examines, in effect, the politics of its own production. How does the intrusion of this expensive technology distort relationships What are the ethnographic filmmaker s responsibilites towards his subjects Yet perhaps these concerns are themselves distortions, preoccupations that obscure a more balanced encounter, in which human accommodation can flow in both directions.