In love with my footage: Desirous undercurrents in the making of an essay film on Candomblé

What underlies the choices anthropologists make when opting for a pen or a camera, or for “the observational style” or “video experimentation”? In this essay, I look at anthropology as a practice of mediation. I take this practice to be driven by the desire to arrive at a full account of fieldwork experiences, and to be informed by the fantasmatic promises with which particular media have been endowed. You might think of the possibilities promised by the linear clarity of your word-processing environment; of the possibilities promised by the sensuousness of Forest of Bliss; of the way you found yourself seduced by such promises, moving in one direction, rather than another. To arrive at the details of the dynamics of anthropological mediations, I reflect on the making of my film about Brazilian Candomblé. I describe how I moved from writing about this religion to filming it, and how my initial attempts to make a film reminiscent of the “delinguified” sensory films coming out of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab made way for the reintroduction of the word as proposed in the genre of the essay film.