How to film “visual trust”? A practical and methodological approach

In this session, Roger Canals will share some theoretical and methodological reflections on how to conduct experimental research cinema about “visual trust”. To do so, he will introduce the principle of “studying images through images” and will comment on the importance to critically connect theoretical approaches with practical, aesthetic, and ethical choices. To illustrate these debates, Roger Canals will screen some fragments of some of the films made within the ERC project VISUAL TRUST. He will also show the first cut of the on-going film A Matter of Facts, co-directed with the anthropologist and filmmaker Mihai Andrei Leaha. This film aims at exploring how visual disinformation works in contexts of electoral processes marked by logics of polarization and of raise of the extreme right.

Roger Canals is a Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona (UB). He is currently the PI of the ERC-Consolidator project ‘Visual Trust. Reliability, accountability, and forgery in scientific, religious and social images’ (2021-2026). Specialist in Visual Anthropology, he is the author of many articles as well as of the books including A Goddess in Motion (2017) and The Image that Never Ends. A Journey through Visual Anthropology (forthcoming). As a filmmaker, he has made several internationally awarded films like “A Goddess in Motion” (2016) and “Chasing Shadows” (2019). In 2016, he received the Fejos Fellowship for Ethnographic Film from the Wenner-Gren Foundation of New York.

Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona

www.rogercanals.net www.visualtrust.ub.edu

Location

SODA (School of Digital Arts), Cinema, Manchester Metropolitan University

Parking

Parking is available nearby at the University's Booth Street West car park and the Circle Square multi-storey, both a short walk from SODA on Higher Chatham Street. Limited on-street pay-and-display bays also operate in the surrounding area from 8 am to 8 pm.