Collaboration in/through Ethnographic Film. A Conversation

In this conversation Steven Feld (University of New Mexico, USA) and Antonello Ricci (“Sapienza” Università di Roma) discuss the four hour-long films that comprise the Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra series. Feld present's his ideas of “dialogic editing” and “dialogic auditing” as refinements of the playback and feedback methods he learned in the 1970s as a student of Jean Rouch. Feld and Ricci discuss and analyze the audio-visual methods and theoryy informing the Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra series. Their conversation reveals how a practice of collaborative cine-ethnography was developed over ten years in these four stylistically diverse films about contemporary musical life in Accra, Ghana.