I had fun getting to see the editing and unediting processes of different documentary videos during our classes this week. I have some limited experience with the unediting process, having made a few AMVs in the past. AMVs, or anime music videos, rely on an editor to split longform content into short clips and reconstruct them in a new order, set to music and occasionally with added sound effects, in order to tell a new story or relay the editor’s vision or version of the story. A lot of other videos can be found on Youtube in which people have edited a particular movie in the style or genre of a different movie. (Please ask me for recommendations if you happen to be interested in this.) My interest in this is part of the reason I took this class. 

These AMVs are fan-produced derivative works that allow audience members to become a type of co-producer of the series that they love. Oftentimes these works are community-produced, either literally (in the case of MEPs) or theoretically (a person who produces an AMV is inevitably a member of the community that consumes AMVs and is influenced by the knowledge and insights that are shared within that close-knit community, which informs their production practices). As for this second point, I am beginning to think that all media is community-produced.

We’ve brought up questions about the positionality of the ethnographer in both culture-media-data and producer-content-audience schematics. However, I am now wondering about our own positionality within these structures and processes as we begin to embark on endeavors of unediting and reediting media content. In the case of an anthropologist who produces an ethnographic account through some type of media (description/article, film, etc.), I still think it is difficult to parse out the degree to which that anthropologist can be considered artist vs. scientist, especially if they take on a major creative role (as opposed to a consultant-type role). This is one of the reasons why I asked so many questions about the roles and personal stakes of the various producers and creatives that participated in the Torture Letters animated documentary. I recalled how the chapter “Putting American Public Television in Its Places” discussed the different goals that individual actors had in terms of putting together the Childhood production. But how should we position ourselves within the new schematics we’re creating by taking up reediting projects? What type of investment is necessary for us to mark the delineation of artist vs. anthropologist in this scenario–or is there even a point in attempting to mark those roles separately? I’m excited to discover what types of new insights we’ll be able to gain from participating in this project from such a unique position.