After introducing expository, poetic, and mobile documentaries that represent a range of field methods that are designed to co-produce versions of the Christine building, and examining how these modes of digital documentary co-produce a different kind of knowledge and affect about objects for different stakeholders, the focus now turns inward to consider the production process that led to “Saving the Christine,” “In the Matter of the Christine,” and “a_building_multiple.” Of course, examining the role of the researcher and the impact of research is not new in the social sciences. Indeed, in ethnographic methodologies all across the humanities, a reflexive position has become the norm. This chapter engages with the short film “Being with the Christine,” and dives into the act of gathering and gleaning the disparate digital media that comprises the archive of the Christine building. Interviews with residents and experts, behind the scenes of online and archive sleuthing, musical dalliances and theorizing, outtakes and unused versions all are arranged to provide a glimpse into the production of this archive. In this endeavor, I follow bonny lenore kyburz’s contention that “digital filmmaking provides obvious, visible reflective spaces and tangible frames for sensing and theorizing our affective attachments en route to the production of filmic arguments” (4). This is the chance to dive into the personal experiences of ethnographic fieldwork in and around The Christine and its residents. “Being with the Christine” uses a documentary production methodology to explore what it felt like to be in this crumbling, moldy old building in the final days of people inhabiting it in 2016. 

While the building itself has been the subject of the previous perspectives offered in this dissertation, it was the residents of the Christine who drew me in initially. This ragtag bunch of musicians and artists inhabited a unique space that was being threatened, and the first idea was to make a documentary about and in support of these people.  For many reasons, the original idea didn’t work out. What remains is “Being with the Christine,” an ex post facto ethnography of a building which charts my subjective experience from the initial interaction during the ‘My Father’s House’ project in 2015 to the renewed interest at Historic Columbia, the eviction drama in the summer of 2016, to more recent work in various archives and the post production process. It takes inspiration from theoretical and practical traditions in visual (David MacDougall), sensory (Lucien Castaing-Taylor), and performance ethnographies (Soyini Madison and Joni L. Jones). It is also informed by the performative, participatory, and reflective modes of documentary described by Nichols and Renov, particularly the films of Agnes Varda as well as traditions in performance writing (Gretchen Stein Rhodes, Phaedra Pezzullo, and Della Pollack). To think through how all these influences mingle with all the different kinds of digital media collected in the archive of the Christine, I turn to Karen Barad’s metaphor of diffraction to consider what happens when all these fragments cohere and then disperse. This is a thinking through of the materiality of process, an uncovering and consideration of parts that have been gathered to produce a whole Christine building—the history, the residents, the echos, the bricks, the eviction letters, the refusals, the paintings, the performances, and the songs. This is not a reflective look backward in an attempt to discover a truth about a building. Rather, it is a diffractive effort that lives alongside the archive from which it is created. In short, I suggest a diffractive form of documentary as new materialist rhetorical field method that asks the simple question: What is it about this place?

Visual Ethnographies

I will begin with a hybrid/interdisciplinary engagement of the history of visual ethnography that takes as its point of departure Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge was a photographer and inventor (and murderer) in the middle of the 19th century who played an important role in the development of photography as a kind of scientific method to understand movement and the natural world. A perhaps apocryphal story is told of a bet between Muybridge and Leland Stanford (founder of the university) to decide if all four legs of a horse leave the ground simultaneously during a gallop. By linking a series of cameras together and devising a unique triggering mechanism, Muybridge was ‘proved’ correct. There is a debate with proponents who believe that it is Muybridge (as opposed to the Lumieres or Edison) who was responsible for the invention of cinema. By choosing this as the starting point, I underline the important connection between image-capture technology and epistomology.