Jón Bjarki Magnússon, director and producer of Half Elf, will present his paper, Visualizing my grandparents: Filmmaking as a way to make visible the experience of elderly people, at the 16th EASA (European Association of Social Anthropologists) Biennal Conference tomorrow, Wednesday.
In his presentation, Jón Bjarki looks at how documentary filmmaking becomes research practice when the lens is focused on the everyday life of an elderly couple. Further, he explores how an ethical approach to filmmaking for fieldwork and the use of editing as an analytical tool are affected when working with those familiar to us. His case study is Half Elf(2020), a feature length documentary film made during his Masters in Visual Anthropology program at Freie Universität in Berlin. The film is about his grandparents, Hulda and Trausti, both recently deceased but previously and when he was making this film, sharing life on Icelandic shores for over seventy years.
As his one hundredth birthday nears Trausti begins searching for a coffin and tells his wife that he wants to change his name to “Elf”. Hulda warns him that if he does this his family will abandon him and she retreats into a world of poetry with the help of an electric magnifying glass. The process of filming this story, editing a narrative and raising funds to bring the film to a wide audience were all fraught with familial difficulties. Jón Bjarki needed to navigate these obstacles and use the problems they presented to support the filmmaking and deepen the research.
The presentation will be a part of the Illuminating Futures of the Life Course through Visual and Digital Media panel of the Age and Generations Network, which explores an emerging trend in the Anthropology of the Life Course to use visual and digital methods to generate and disseminate anthropological knowledge. Presentations examine how visual/digital engagement changes the experience of ageing, and the act and product of ethnographic fieldwork.
The 16th EASA Biennal Conference was set to be held in Lisbon, Portugal, during the week of July 20th-24th but was moved online due to Covid 19. More information about the panel here.