Laurent Van Lancker both studied Film and Anthropology, and holds a PhD in Audiovisual Art. He is Professor in Audiovisual Anthropology at Aix-Marseille University, where he started a research group on “Alternative Narrative Ethnographic Forms”. He co-founded SIC – SoundImageCulture project lab. He made fifteen films (experimental, documentaries and fictions) and won nine awards. His early documentary works explored social and religious themes. Followed by a series of short works called 'Experimental Ethnographies'. Lately, he made three long-feature films around migration themes. His works draw on various modes: Collaborative, Hybrid and Sensory cinema. They propose a dialogue between ethics and aesthetics, poetics and politics.
Laurent Van Lancker
Professor in Audiovisual Anthropology - Filmmaker - Anthropologist - Researcher
Laurent's current Projects
ANFAA - Alternative Narrative Forms in Audiovisual Anthropology
Since 2023 Laurent has been developping a group of research and a hub for AudioVisual Anthropology in Marseille, France
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Together with Petna Ndaliko Katondolo, Laurent ...
Cutting, slicing, dismembering of the intersubjective relations between cultures, humans and non-humans has been part of the colonial project, which had his epitome in the Berlin Conference of 1885. Through ancestral ecology and ritualisation of sharing practices, this film evokes the need to re-member in order to remember the disrupted invisible lines. To decompose the colonial gazes, a multitude of textures, dreams and disorientation propose to recode aesthetics through an ejo lobi narrative form.
Production Yolé Africa et Polymorfilms.
Selection Berlinale'76 Forum Expanded
Backfeed is a reversed cinematographic feedback, since its addressee is an absent mad master. Feedback is a filmic method introduced by Jean Rouch inviting filmmakers to screen their films back to the people who were filmed and allow them to criticize your representation of them. It is a way for ethnographical cinema to go beyond written texts of the represented cultures. The film moves from a personal analogue archive to the use of AI to generate an imaginary encounter between me and the deceased Rouch, allowing for a speculative feedback on this film.
Backfeed draws on a 1994 audio archive, in which Jean Rouch explains to me, then a film studies student, the feedback technique and other ethnographic film methods. By editing this assertive discourse with superimpositions of his and my own films filmed in West-Africa, I critically question what still resonates or separates our cinethnographic practices.
GET IN TOUCH
ANFAA - IDEAS/MMSH
5 rue du Château de l'Horloge
13090 Aix-en-Provence, France
contact@audiovisualanthropology.net
