Living the weather: a film by lorenzo ferrarini
Living the Weather is an experimental documentary film on people’s everyday experiences of the weather and seasons in the Calder Valley, West Yorkshire. It was filmed as part of a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust and led by Professor Jennifer Mason at the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives, Department of Sociology, University of Manchester.
The documentary presents five different ways of living different atmospheric conditions, repeating five times a structure made of two fundamental components. This is the reason Ferrarini used a musical analogy in the subtitle Five Variations on Weather and Seasons in the Calder Valley. Each section is first made of static shots, accompanied by a voiceover that was prepared by the protagonists of that chapter during the research phase, creating an evocative narration lasting about 2.5 minutes. The remainder of the section is constituted by a sequence shot, with synchronous sound only, of the duration of 5 minutes. This 7.5 minutes structure is repeated five times for different subjects and different weather conditions, with just a single-shot intertitle between them.
The film was conceived as a sensuous immersion in five ways of interacting with weather environments, with a stress on how different activities or stances produce different experiences of an atmospheric event. Ferrarini contrasts this with an approach that only looks at weather as an external force affecting our existence. The film has a double nature: on the one hand it is observational – or perhaps better hyper-observational, given the more-than-realistic use of ultra-wide angle lens and gimbal stabiliser – with its sequence shots. The succession of static shots with voiceover, on the other hand, is meant to reveal the collaborative process behind the film and make it more of an interactive enterprise between the filmmaker and the subjects. Both components are forms of sensory ethnography, in different ways contributing to a visual anthropology of everyday weather experiences.
Lorenzo Ferrarini is Lecturer in Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology. His research revolves around ecology, embodiment, and perception among donso hunters in Burkina Faso. His practice as a filmmaker, photographer, and sound recordist experiments with sensory ethnography and the borders between fiction and non-fiction. Much of his work is available at https://lorenzoferrarini.com
1st October 2019