“ I Stole Your Camera and I Filmed You!” : The Diffraction of Perspectives in Documentary Filmmaking Experience

ABSTRACT: Centered on a collective ethnographic and filmmaking experience in the Roma neighborhood of Nadezhda in Sliven, Bulgaria, this article analyzes the interplay of perspectives between a French camerawoman (the author), her Roma collaborators, the Roma people who were filmed, and the camera. Based on an analysis of participants' interactions with the camera, perspective is considered as a dynamic, multimodal configuration of indexical signs that frame what we see, hear, and understand. The article shows how these relationships with the camera activate prior and imposed political perspectives shaped by anti-Roma (state) discourses, and which condition the world-relations of the Roma inhabitants of Nadezhda. At the same time, however, these examples reveal the ways in which these typified perspectives are contested and diffracted by social and subjective relations that emerge through the filmmaking process. Examined in its multi-scalar dimensionality and intensity as a movement that is always anchored in a here-and-now, and which involves bodies and affects as well as relationships of power and desire, the article shows how the diffraction of perspectives in this filmmaking experience provided a temporary and partial break with the established frameworks that had hitherto assigned these Roma populations a relegated status.