Research Statement

Research Questions

The short film Time and the Seashell explores Mixtec philosophic conceptions of time, identity, and landscape through film. The work is a collaboration between Mixtec writer Armando Bautista García and director & cinematographer Itandehui Jansen who has Mixtec roots. The project initiated when Bautista García noticed the landscape in his hometown had changed in his absence. The increasingly arid and dry weather in the region had pushed certain flora and fauna away, particularly lizards and smaller amphibians. He consequently started writing short poetic reflections in Mixtec about this phenomenon and suggested making a film on the subject matter. 

The writer and the director each examined different research questions through different methods and approaches as part of this film project. The writer focused on exploring how ideas around climate change and environmental degradation could be expressed in Mixtec language, as there are no straightforward translations for these concepts. For this purpose, the writer explored the changes in the landscape and considered different descriptions of time and memory in Mixtec language. 

The director concentrated on how to create a structure and visual language that supported the written reflections. Thinking about how to perceive and consequently represent the environment, the director decided to explore film representation and practice through Tim Ingold’s ideas on Lines.

The making process of the short film additionally examined sustainable approaches to film production. Different studies point out that the film Industry in general has a large carbon footprint and is extremely wasteful (Flanigan 2002, Corbett and Turco 2006, Cubitt 2017, Vaughan 2019). This does not align with the ideas and philosophies of Indigenous Peoples where care for the environment is paramount. Therefore, the film was shot on locations that the filmmakers were visiting for community screenings of a previous film and no additional travel took place. All props and costumes were property of participants, and no additional objects or costumes were purchased. The film was shot entirely with natural light on a second-hand camera with vintage lenses. The project thus explicitly adopted a Second-Hand Cinema approach as proposed by Bozak (2012).

Context

According to the INALI (National Institute for Indigenous Languages) sixty-eight different Indigenous languages are spoken in Mexico. It is estimated by the National Mexican Institute of statistics and Geography (INEGI) that in the last 200 years the number of speakers of an Indigenous language in Mexico diminished from 65 % of the population to less than 6 % of the population. Indigenous languages are hardly present in the media. According to data from the Mexican National Film Institute (IMCINE) on average there are slightly over two hundred film productions per year, but only 5 % of these films are in an Indigenous language or have Indigenous subject matter. It is important to note that a large segment of these films is not made by Indigenous filmmakers. In the past ten years Itandehui Jansen and Armando Bautista García have been making multiple films with Mixtec dialogues, including documentaries, short films and a feature drama. Both identify as Mixtec and maintain links with their respective communities. Itandehui Jansen has roots in the Mixtec community Chalcatongo and Armando Bautista was born and grew up in Apazco, both in the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico.

Adopting ideas from Indigenous Methodologies (De Santolo, Jo-ann Archibald, and Jenny Bol Jun Lee Morgan 2019) the writer conducted conversations with different community elders, including his own parents, on the changing landscape and the passing of time. The writer immersed himself, as community member, in knowledge sharing moments and circles, such as threshing corn with family and neighbours. Conversations during these activities explored different ways to notice and note changes in time in Mixtec language, such as the words to indicate the different seasons and different markers of time. For example, Viko Davi (rain time) is used to indicate the rain season which lasts from May to September, and Viko Tachi (Times of winds) is used to refer to January and February. Most of these seasons are marked by specific rituals and celebrations, such as asking for the rains to come at the beginning of May. 

Methods

Conversations also revolved around the passing of time. To discuss the passing of time, different participants turned to metaphors around the growth of plants, such as flowers and corn and noted that we are like flowers which grow, blossom and decay. Many commented on the inevitability of decay and death, but also on the return of life in new cycles. Others mentioned that time is something mysterious which we cannot really comprehend and is beyond our grasp. The writer’s father compared time to the sea. The writer did not record or transcribe these conversations but instead distilled them into poetic short texts which tried to express his concerns about the changes in the climate and landscape. The oral aspect of knowledge sharing in Mixtec is presented in the film through phrases such as “Shi kachi shi tada” (My father told me) and “Shi dakua’a ña’a shi ta, shi mada sa kotontsa, kotoviida nuni” (my mother and father taught me to take care of the corn). In this way the writer attempted to embed his own writing in the context of Mixtec oral traditions and epistemologies. 

The writer explored aspects of lived experience and memory by herding sheep with his parents and walking the same paths and routes in the mountains as when he was a boy as an active process of remembrance. During these walks the writer observed the landscape and noticed changes which he wrote down in Mixtec. Some of the changes were clearly the result of human activity and involved both deforestation as well as purposeful reforestation. The writer asked his parents how they recalled the landscape in their childhood, exploring a kind of “shared remembering”. On other occasions the writer invited his then 10-year-old son to join them on their walks herding of sheep. As they walked together, they shared stories to create intergenerational connections and to allow knowledge exchange through oral tradition. The narrative structure of the short film, in which a young boy looks ahead to the future, while a grown man, looks back to the past, tries to convey the writer’s experience of remembering and sharing the paths he walked as a boy with both an older, as well as a younger generation. Generational teachings and connections are important in Mixtec culture, and this is expressed in the film through the presence of both the writer’s father, as well as of the writer’s son.   

Through literary sources, the writer additionally explored representations of time in precolonial Mesoamerica with the purpose of creating a connection with precolonial Indigenous thought in the film. Mucía Batz (1997) explains that Maya hieroglyphs employ the seashell to represent the number “zero” but also as a sign to refer to the Mesoamerican calendar, and by extension to the idea of “time” in general. Mucía Batz argues that the Maya zero represents both beginnings and endings, and a cyclical perception of time. The ideas put forward by Mucía Batz greatly resonated with the conversations the writer had about time in his community and this led to the inclusion of a seashell in the film. 

The writer and director exchanged ideas on the content and form of the film through conversations, resulting in a kind of oral script. Building on Tim Ingold’s ideas of lines, the director explored cinema as a series of lines connecting in time and space.  Through this project the director investigated how different lines such as threads and traces might be present both in the film imagery as well as within the process of filmmaking. Film does not consist of additive or reductive traces, nor does it consist of threads forming a surface. Instead, film (re)produces lines through exposure to and reflection of light; one could say that cinema consists of light lines traveling through time. Furthermore, all kinds of threads and traces, whether natural, such as branches spiderwebs, hairs, furs and roots, or human made, such as cables, roads, textiles, and drawings can be embedded in the cinematic image. 

Ingold maintains that a line is the connection between different points, as film is usually considered a form of storytelling it consequently involves lines in its narrative structure and editing. Through editing film connects images, creates narrative structure, and advances in time, while stimulating an audience to create meaning from these connections. The process of filmmaking itself can be understood as a journey from initial idea, through a script writing, shooting and editing to a final film. Ingold considers traveling a way of tracing lines, as one travels from one place to another, encountering other people, places and events along the road. Ingold stresses that travel requires actual physical movement through space and time. Like writing and traveling, filmmaking is an embodied activity which requires movement in time and space from the involved participants, such as actors, director, cinematographer, sound recordist, and others. Not only does a film have a specific duration, also a certain amount of time is required to produce the actual film.

A medium specific aspect of film is that it has the possibility to condense and expand time. Within the process of filmmaking, choices are made with regards to the duration of action within a shot, the duration of the shot itself and the speed of alternation between shots. Film, whether fiction or documentary, documents specific events and moments in time, hence creating a line in time, between past, present and future, and between film and spectators. 

The narrative structure of the short film Time and the Seashell examines time by purposely drawing a line between past, present and future.  The narrative revolves around an adult man who tries to return to his memories as a small boy, while the boy he once was, tries to imagine his future self. The adult man and the young boy are visually connected through a seashell he found in his childhood. The seashell in this case functions as a metaphor for the camera and for cinema, as it reproduces the sound of the sea, similarly to how cinema reproduces traces of time in its attempts to capture (historical) moments and events. The narrative can thus be considered to draw a circular line in time, like the circular lines typical of the surface of seashells. The story takes place in a natural landscape and traditional Indigenous environment. Through questions on growth and time in Mixtec language the narrative is further embedded in an Indigenous worldview. The question “Who are we, where do we come from and where are we going?”, is thus reframed and reclaimed in a specific Indigenous context.  

The imagery of the film highlights a variety of threads, traces and surfaces, such as the threads of a woven petate and of spiderwebs in the woods, traces in the sand, as well as a variety of lines created by the play of light, such as shadows on walls or the reflection of sunlight in water. The short film contrasts material elements, such as the body, shells, water, sand, and fossils with immaterial elements such as shadows, reflections and sounds. Through an emphasis on shadows, reflections, and (sun) light in water, the visuals intent to address the limits of accurate representation, foregrounding the “fleeting” aspect of moments and events. In this way the imagery creates a philosophical exploration of body and matter in relation to the ephemeral nature of time. This is furthermore stressed by the presence of fossils in the landscape and imagery, creating an allusion to deep time.

Ingold distinguishes between lines created through wayfaring and lines created through transport, or lines created through a walk or by assembly; he considers that while one activity grows organically the other is a connection between predetermined static points or dots.  While filmmaking always involves aspects of spontaneous performance and is shaped around an ongoing artistic and thought process, one could argue that scripted filmmaking is much more akin to the connecting certain “predetermined” points or dots, while documentary filmmaking and ways of filmmaking that are less- or non-reliant on a script might be closer to “wayfaring”.  

The short film Time and the Seashell is shot on a Bolex D16 with vintage Kern Paillard lenses, producing a look very similar to that of 16 mm or 8 mm film. This choice of material supports the sense of an undefined or non-specific time frame, blending digital technique with analogue elements. More importantly, shooting on the D16 with small lenses, made it viable to work without a crew, on existing locations with natural or available light, allowing thus for a more intimate and intuitive filmmaking approach. This choice also coincided with ideas around a Second-Hand Cinema, as proposed by Bozak, which operates with a limited crew and employs elements that are already present in the filmmaker’s surroundings. 

In the filmmaking process preference was therefore given to an associative and intuitive approach, allowing the imagery to “grow” organically, akin to the lines created by a walk or freehand drawing. The imagery was shot without a script, taking as point of departure the basic premise of a man looking back to his childhood, and a boy looking forward to adulthood. The short film experiments with camera movement and motionless long shots as an organic reaction to the moment, allowing the story to “grow” from experience and travel, instead of being an assembly between predetermined (narrative) points in a script. This intuitive approach is an attempt to incorporate Ingold’s considerations on wayfaring within filmmaking, allowing the camera to create images in the moment as part of an embodied practice. The director endeavored to create a film through organic lines, both through the choice of imagery as well as through the filmmaking process.

Outcomes

The film allows for a better understanding of Mixtec concepts of time, landscape, and identity and their interrelation. Human life is inextricably connected to landscape, and the wider natural environment. An erosion of this environment will inevitably lead to an erosion of Indigenous livelihoods and culture. The film additionally explores modes of filmmaking that have a smaller carbon footprint. 

Impact

The two-channel installation has been exhibited in different venues in Mexico. The single channel version of the film has screened at over forty international festivals, both in Mexico and abroad. It screened for example at the Guanajuato International Film Festival, the Morelia International Film Festival, and was the opening film for the Festival del Puerto. It also screened at the ImagineNative Film Festival in Toronto, the Montreal First Peoples Festival, The Skabmagovat Film Festival in Finland, the IMPAKT Zero Carbon Footprint Festival in the Netherlands, ZINEBI in Bilbao, and the Climate Crisis Film Festival in Glasgow. The film was nominated to an Ocean Bottle Award, and to the Research in Film Award (RIFA) by the AHRC. It was furthermore taken up by different organisations and events to discuss climate change, environmental damage, and social responsibility of artists. Film Access Scotland invited the director to discuss sustainability in film. The filmmakers were furthermore invited to discuss sustainability and film at the Matters of Care Conference at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and at the Conference Taking Care at the Museum of Ethnology in Leiden. The film was highlighted by the Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE) in its curation of films in Indigenous languages. The film is currently available through the curated online platform FilminLatino. 

References

Bozak, N. (2012) The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Corbett, Charles J. & Turco, Richard P. (2006) Contractor's Report to the Board: Sustainability in the Motion Picture Industry. University of California Los Angeles. Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. 

Cubitt, S. (2017) Introduction to Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Media. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

De Santolo, Jo-ann Archibald, and Jenny Bol Jun Lee Morgan. (2019) Decolonizing Research Methodologies, Indigenous Storywork as Methodology. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Flanigan, P. (2002) “The Environmental Cost of Filmmaking”. UCLA Entertainment Law Review, 10(1).

Ingold, T. (2007) Lines, A brief History. London & New York: Routledge

Iturbide, G. (1996) Imágenes del Espiritu. New York: Aperture Foundation.

Mucía Batz, J. (1997)  Jun Raqän: la cosmovisión y los números mayas, el principio del movimiento. Patzún Chimaltenango: Editorial Saqb'e.

Smoke Signals (Chris Eyre, 1998, USA)

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response to what follows:

Review 1: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement.

The short film Time and the Shell is a poetic reflection on temporality and ecology that tells the story of a child looking forward to adulthood and an adult looking back to his childhood. Based on a long-standing creative collaboration between Mixtec writer Armando Bautista García and director and cinematographer Itandehui Jansen, the short film is narrated in the Mixtec language and embedded in his cosmovision. It explores forms of translation, of finding the right words, the right images, and the right representation for "something" that is disappearing. This "something" is not spoken out loud, but rather indirectly, evasively, and calmly, because the words to define its cultural and environmental disappearance cannot be translated literally. In this regard, the author followed indigenous methodologies to conduct interviews in the community. The interviews focused on the description of time, memory, and landscape. The filmmaker's methodological approach, on the other hand, explores questions of cinematic representation and practice. It is based on British anthropologist Tim Ingold's anthropological-archaeological theory of lines. For Ingold, lines are a conceptual abstraction that underlies fundamental human activities such as walking, weaving, singing, and storytelling - many of them historically underrepresented. Although the theoretical methodological framework could be further elaborated in the accompanying statement, the cinematic result is an original, interwoven manifestation of fragility and transience in the film's narrative and imagery, which spirals around Ingold's "wayfaring" lines and the Mixtec worldview of identity, time, and environment as represented in the seashell. This is supported by what Jansen describes as an intuitive and sustainable approach to filmmaking.

While the accompanying statement's specific questions about filmmaking activity may jump to general conclusions, the film's realization makes a genuinely new contribution to practice-based knowledge production that interweaves disciplines, methods, collective practices, and cultural worldviews. In this regard, I would recommend that the written statement further emphasize the originality of the collaborative work as a form of film practice-based research that weaves threads within indigenous storytelling and filmmaking. The idea of the path and not the place to reflect on Mixtec identity, and the representation of a lived time rather than a unidirectional past-present-future timeline as a form of filmmaking, give Time and the Shell an exceptional strength and novelty for artistic research in film and can offer a scholarly relevant contribution to other disciplines such as anthropology, postcolonial studies, film theory, or environmental studies, among others.

Review 2: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement.

Kii Nche Ndutsa (Time and the Seashell), a short film, explores the themes of time, memory, climate change, and environmental degradation through the lens of Mixtec Indigenous philosophy and language. The story, written and narrated in Mixtec, one of the endangered languages in Mexico, draws a circular line in time that visually reconnects a young boy with his future self as an adult man through a seashell on a beach.

The film takes a poetic and lyrical approach, where the visual imagery does not directly illustrate or represent the content of the narration. Instead, it intertwines tangible and intangible elements from the regional landscapes in an imaginative way. The film portrays seasonal flowers, tree shadows cast on a stone wall, reflections in a river, and the child's shoes and hands, creating an intimate and touching atmosphere. As the adult man reminisces about his childhood, these landscape elements lead to scenes where he realizes that the creatures that once inhabited the area are no longer present, and water and life have transformed into stone and dust. The concept of climate change is expressed in Mixtec through an original approach of ecological nostalgia and climate anxiety, highlighting the Indigenous philosophy and worldview that emphasizes the deep emotional connection between Indigenous peoples, the land, nature, and all living creatures.

The accompanying written text is well-thought-out and organized. It delves deeper into the process of auteur filmmaking, particularly as an embodied practice in relation to the concept of lines developed by Tim Ingold. Processes of filmmaking, akin to lines, should be understood as unfolding and evolving processes and movements rather than fixed entities. The text further explores the intersections of time, narrative structure, and the intuitive approach to filmmaking, bridging the Indigenous worldview with the concept of lines put forth by Ingold. 

However, the methodology of the film in the methods section could benefit from further elaboration and increased specificity. According to the text, the film was created 'through Indigenous Methodologies,' which refers to 'conversations with different community elders.’

While 'Indigenous Methodologies' may be the title of a book, it would be helpful to provide some background information and introduce the book in order to contextualize its relevance. Indigenous methodologies encompass a wide range of approaches, including traditional and cultural methods of inquiry, storytelling, oral histories, ceremony, community engagement, and various other research practices. As a result, the current methods section appears overly simplified and broad. It would be advantageous to provide a more detailed explanation by specifying the exact methods employed in the film. This would offer a clearer understanding of how the film incorporated and applied specific Indigenous methodologies.

Overall, the film and the written component highlight Mixtec language, philosophy and its worldview. The inclusion of Indigenous worldviews in the age of the Anthropocene is important as it offers alternative perspectives and ecological wisdom that can contribute to more holistic and sustainable approaches to addressing the environmental challenges of our time.

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response.