Lucien Castaing-Taylor: Documentary and the Senses

This film series, part of the inaugural lecture series, focused on three award-winning films produced by Harvard’s innovative Sensory Ethnography Lab. SEL is a filmmaking laboratory that works to explore the aesthetics and ontology of the natural and unnatural world through experimental video forms. Though distinct in style and topic, the three films reflect Center Director Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s goal “not to analyze, but to actively produce aesthetic experience, and of kinds that reflect and draw on but do not necessarily clarify or leave one with the illusion of ‘understanding’ everyday experience.” Professor of Visual Arts and Anthropology and director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, Lucien Castaing-Taylor is an anthropologist whose work seeks to conjugate art’s negative capability with an ethnographic attachment to the flux of life. Castaing-Taylor was unable to attend due to unforeseen circumstances, but the IU Cinema screened three of his films: Leviathan, Manakamana, and Sweetgrass. The series was sponsored by the CDRP, the Media School, Cinema and Media Studies Program, the Department of Anthropology, the College Arts and Humanities Institute, and IU Cinema.