Ethnographies of ‘On Demand’ Films

Over the last two decades, the advent of cheap, user-friendly video technologies has contributed to a revolution in representational agency. Videos are now made by production units that are at times composed of families, churches, musical groups, community associations or other institutions. Thus, on-demand videos produced and distributed within local and atypical networks profoundly shape contemporary urban imaginaries. This book explores the intertwined relations among infrastructure, technology, and modernity through an ordinary, yet little studied field of "on-demand" audiovisual production, which involves processes of negotiation and interaction between clients and commissioned video makers. On-demand films are considered as a space of collaboration and self-representation, that allows to reflect on the potential of fiction, artifice, and montage to render material desires, aspirations, and ideas of the future.

Alex Vailati is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Museology at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil. An anthropologist and documentarist, he is the coordinator of the university’s Visual Anthropology Laboratory (LAV). He is the author of Migration of Rich Immigrants: Gender, Ethnicity and Class (2016, with Carmel Rial).

Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal is a Professor and researcher at the Centro de Estudios Antropológicos in El Colegio de Michoacán, Mexico. She is the author of Indigenous Media and Political Imaginaries in Contemporary Bolivia ( 2017). Her current research includes work on popular photographic and audiovisual archives in Michoacán, Mexico and La Paz, Bolivia.