Film as method: memories, self-investigation and intergenerational dialogues in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Abstract

From the Memory and Cinema Workshop created interdisciplinary from anthropology, cinema and popular education, with high school students from the Canelos Ancestral People in the Ecuadorian Amazon, we carried
out an ethnography of the method to reflect on community self-investigation. Through filmed interviews, the young people held an intergenerational dialogue with their older relatives whose memories were significant to them. This was a collaborative research process that combined historical and photographic reflexivity and the learning of audiovisual technologies. We discuss the importance of memories and self-representation for the construction of meanings that claim the dignity and autonomy of indigenous peoples as part of bilingual intercultural education. We also address the construction of forgetfulness as the absence of an own history
in the official school curriculum of the national State. Likewise, we debate about the power of the colonial eye that points out savage subjects in front of those it considers civilized. Interviewing and filming as a team became devices for intergenerational meetings for the transmission of the word, the opening of memories as oral documents. In the accounts of the people interviewed, we discover alternate visualities and temporalities, autobiographical, community, ecological-symbolic narratives, and we also detect the milestones of Catholicmissional domination. Pretending a decolonial look, we reflect theoretically-methodologically on the praxis to
propose the cinema as a method of recording and language different versions of history itself. At the same time, we retrace the steps taken to critically observe our participation in the research.