Monsoon Reflection, Stephanie Spray

Sonically and visually rich, Stephanie uses sounds, camera angles, color and lighting, constructing a film in the Lucien-Taylor-Sensory-Ethnographic-school-of-Visual-Anthropology mode.  The practice of daily life, filmed with long takes and vivid, enhanced sound is skillfully done as several women work at agriculture, sharing their meager existence (meager by Western standards) among themselves and with the audience.
Opening the film is a shot of a woman’s hands working a grinding stone on a metate (to use the Spanish word).  The low, frontal angle of the camera gives the sense that if the hands push the grinding stone too much further it will actually hit the lens of the camera.  It’s as if from a child’s point-of-view, their head on the ground directly in front of the metate.  The lighting is beautiful, with an almost reverence shown to the hands.  Sonically, we hear the crunch and grind as if our own ear were in the stone itself.
Following this is another arresting shot of a landscape.  Overlooking green fields–rice paddy–we see nothing but the field, and the green beyond.  However, we are not alone.  We hear the obvious sound of someone working.  It’s loud, and working just below the frame of the camera.  The camera slowly tilts downward to appease our curiosity revealing an elderly woman as she thins the field.
As a student of modern anthropological film, these techniques are a wonderful use of sync sound, and a welcome addition in ethnographic video/film.  That we can determine where the sound is coming from–it’s coming from below the frame–brings us into what is happening on screen.  Were I not learning film making myself, I would not ask:  Where are the mics?  How many?  How are they deployed?  What mic’s is she using?  Were I not concerned with these questions at this stage of my career I would not at all be concerned.  Which is sort of the point.  The enhanced sound is not distracting.  Contrarily it’s enhancing to the experience of the business of watching the film. 
There are many other scenes, which can be talked about, such as the long takes of one woman smoking, enhanced by the loud sound of her struggling lungs.  I won’t go into all of it for this blog, and suffice to say that the lighting and sound is great in this film, and in this style of ethnographic film making.