Ethnographic Lessons from Experimental Filmmaking

Abstract Jafar Panahi's film Taxi is emblematic of how Iranian filmmakers find creative ways to undermine government-imposed regulations. As a socio-political critique that effectively suspends our doubts regarding the film's degree of improvisation and authenticity, Taxi recursively replicates its content in its own form by luring the Iranian government into demonstrating what the film merely sets out to communicate. In doing so, the film exemplifies a form of creativity within constraints that captures and exceeds those very constraints. By discussing Taxi in analogy to ethnographic practice, this article argues that the captivating qualities of ethnography derive from the narrative trope of captor-turned-captive. Here, incomplete entrapments of the field are used as a device for turning ethnographer and reader into entrapped.