Origins and Inspiration

This website originally served to share information about the first documentary I made on Tonga, about the comedian Tevita Koloamatangi, nicknamed Tinitini. As I have made more films and thought about them in relation to visual anthropology, I have realized how much my time filming in Tonga has influenced my philosophy of filming and the very choices of what to film, and what projects to commit to.

The value I give to video is profoundly linked to what I learnt in of the social value of video in Tonga. The epistemological claim of my video research is indicated by the name of the organisation under which I claim authorship, Potolahi Productions. Poto and lahi, together communicates social awareness and sensitive engagement. It also references how my surname was jokingly Tonganised during my time in Tonga. Before arriving in Vava’u, I booked a room mispronouncing my name as Maika Potulahi (rather than Potolahi), not realizing that potulahi, with a u, signified very large testicles. The uproarious laughter at the end of the line, made me more careful when Tonganising English words, but also made me curious about Tongan humour. My attraction to Tinitini was connected to the  shared laughter I experienced in Vava’u over 18 months.

Since filming in Tonga in 1998 the internet has opened up an audience for video in a way I never anticipated. I have archival footage of events in Tonga, that are historical documents as well as potential reference points for diasporic populations in search of identity and connection.  I recall one Tongan thanking me for making Tongan comedy accessible to him, as he had been brought up speaking English. Watching my film had been transformative for him, it had also been transformative for me. Through the process of making the documentary I had learnt things about Tonga, about health, that I cannot imagine having learnt about otherwise. There was something about the knowledge emergent from working together on a common project, that was distinct from that of interviews and simply participating in community life. When I returned to the UK, editing and working on the footage kept an emotional link to friends in Tonga, that were not distancing but evocative of the experiences we had shared. I am still figuring it out, as I improvise from film project to project, but I think it spirals around the idea of a social health in meaningful and transformative social relationships. How social health relates to the health of communities and health in a biomedical and environmental sense is a key question of all my video projects. How the production and presentation of video facilitates a process of transformation has been a question ever since I started videoing healing in Tonga to better understand how it worked. For me a central motivation of making videos is to be able to gift and in the process feel part and recognized as part of a community.

I have felt a strong need to create this new website for several years as a reconciliation and integration of personal and transformative experiences to communicate the value of video in ways that wider audiences can receive and value. I hesitate to say ‘objective’ way, preferring to recognize a baseline of anthropological wisdom, that all knowledge is created ‘intersubjectively’.

I wish to present and make accessible my video and documentary work and to use the website as a means of better understanding the value of video to contributing to a public and engaged anthropology and myself as person wanting to contribute to social change.

Fun(d)raising is on comedy in Tonga.  The production of the film helped me present aspects of Tongan life that I loved and allowed me to address the textual and wider epistemological and political challenges of representing life in Tonga. I didn’t know about Jean Rouch’s work at the time I started filming, but I think I aspired, like him, to a ‘shared anthropology’.

The second is ‘One Week West of Molkom’, which integrates video work with the community of Angsbacka, where I was a media volunteer over three years. I was inspired by a documentary called ‘Three Miles North of Molkom’ to visit this course centre. I learnt a tremendous amount from spending time in Angsbacka, personally and also professionally. The presence and attention to honesty, cultivated by the community practice of sharing, has changed how I teach and helped me introduce a greater sense of vulnerability in how I communicate.

One tab is on teaching visual anthropology, which has served as a central pivot for my understanding of previous project and inspirations for others. Through teaching I have been able to share my practices and gained feedback from really inspiring students at Kent. I here present and link to student work of the last five years. This website is constructed on wordpress.com because I taught students to create film blogs in this format.

Five Ways In, is a documentary on contact improvisation that very much draws on research on contact improvisation (CI) and is an example of sensuous anthropology. I have used CI to teach film making, and so the video also relates strongly to pedagogy. The process of making and screening the documentary is research that I am using to write about contact improvisation. This documentary has its own dedicated website.

The Healer and the Psychiatrist is the project I worked on the longest. It attempts a visual dialogue between a healer and a psychiatrist who I worked with since 1998, but who had not met. It was the most challenging to edit and so I left it till after I had become a more proficient editor through completing One Week West of Molkom, which involved collaboration with the editor, John Murphy and editing ‘Five Ways In’. After Five Ways In was accepted in an international ethnographic film festival, I was more confident. I created a first cut of the Healer and the Psychiatrist for feedback, but it was the considerable editing work of Heidi Hiltebrand that transformed a long feedback cut into the narratively coherent and moving final version.

These are not my only video projects. I have also filmed many weddings for friends and funerals in Tonga. In India I kept a video diary when researching on vaccination. I have also filmed family members in Poland in an attempt to better get to know my own ancestry. Some of my more vernacular video making I will introduce when it feels that they might be of use.

This website is part of a process that extends beyond what it can report. Likewise, attention to process, without overt focus on a goal, is most likely to deliver the embodied appreciation and transformation. This resonates strongly with medical anthropological work on efficacious healing.