Legend has it that one day in 1946, French anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch dropped his tripod into the wild waters of the Niger River while driving through the rapids. As a result of this accident, he was forced to abandon the static setup of filmmaking and continue filming with the camera held in his hands. This seemingly minor incident had a profound impact on his filmmaking style. The handheld camera compelled Rouch to move alongside his subjects, allowing him to adopt a more intimate and immersive perspective on the reality around him (cf. e.g. Henley 2009, 39, 265). Whether or not Rouch’s tripod story is entirely factual (cf. Stoller 1992, 37), its symbolic value remains strong. This approach – where ethnographic filmmaking is seen as ‘a way of moving through the world’ (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2015, 263; italics mine) – would go on to influence many generations of visual anthropologists, leaving a significant legacy in visual anthropology textbooks.
Although movement has long been central to ethnographic filmmaking and widely theorised in film studies more broadly, its implications for ethnographic knowledge production have received less sustained attention. While camera mobility once marked a turning point in visual anthropology, it is now somewhat taken for granted — especially given the rapid democratisation of filming technologies. Lightweight cameras, stabilisers, action cams, and even smartphones have made shooting in motion accessible to virtually anyone – whether visual ethnographers or those that ethnographers used to call interlocutors. Hence, what was once a radical shift in method has become a default mode of practice, less frequently examined as a distinct analytic category in its own right.
I encountered this theoretical gap not primarily through reading, but through practice, while making my own film project Hopa lide — a feature-length ethnographic documentary completed in 2023. The film was made in collaboration with Romani musicians from Slovakia, with whom I had worked since 2013 on a series of ethnographic and ethnomusicological research projects. Incorporating motion-picture media — both video and film — became a complementary method that helped me better grasp the moving nature of my ethnographic field. The visual methods offered not only ‘different ways of understanding, but also different things to understand’ (MacDougall 2006, 220; Nuska 2022c, 25–28; 227–230). During the production of Hopa lide, it became increasingly clear that movement was not only integral to the aesthetic of the field itself but also to the form of anthropological knowledge that emerged from it — knowledge that moving motion picture was uniquely well suited to capture. Hence, this article uses Hopa lide as a point of departure for a self-reflexive examination of how movement operates as method, form, and mode of knowing in ethnographic film.
This article is addressed primarily to visual anthropologists, documentary filmmakers, and other scholars who work with motion-picture media as part of their research practice. Its aim is not to propose a comprehensive theory of movement in ethnographic cinema, but to offer a self-reflexive commentary on a methodology developed in the making of Hopa lide. While the discussion engages selectively with debates in visual anthropology and documentary film theory, it does so in order to foreground a more modest claim: that movement, despite being central to contemporary ethnographic filmmaking, remains surprisingly under-theorised and insufficiently reflected upon in practice. Drawing on the production of Hopa lide as a situated case, the article reflects on how movement informed my style of filming and shaped the kinds of ethnographic insights that emerged. What I hope readers will take away is not a set of prescriptive techniques, but an invitation to attend more deliberately to movement in their own work — as a camera practice, a bodily and relational process, a narrative logic, and an epistemological condition that can open up new ways of engaging with ethnographic material.
Throughout this article, I use the concept of movement in an intentionally broad and layered sense. While the text opens with a literal moment of physical motion — Jean Rouch losing his tripod to a river’s current — it quickly becomes clear that movement may manifest in a range of ways, such as the bodily gestures of musicians, the improvisational flow of Romani music, the roaming of the camera through space, and the evolving relational dynamics of fieldwork. Rather than reducing these to a single theoretical frame, I embrace their productive overlap. In this, I take inspiration from anthropological and philosophical traditions that regard movement not merely as locomotion, but as a condition of becoming, relation, and knowing (Ingold 2011; Deleuze and Guattari 1980). What follows is thus not a taxonomy of movement, but an invitation to attend to how motion — in its many forms — shapes the aesthetics, ethics, and epistemologies of visual anthropology.
The article is structured as a sequence of three movements, each approaching movement from a different analytical angle. First, it sketches a selective overview of how movement has been approached in the history, theory, and practice of documentary and ethnographic cinema. Secondly, it explains why movement was key for capturing the Hopa lide’s topic (i.e. Romani music and musicianship) and its protagonists (i.e. Romani musicians). Thirdly and importantly, it offers a reflection on how movement shaped the making of the film. I explore how physical movement — particularly the specific use of camera — enabled a distinctive visual engagement with the field; how relational movement fostered new forms of proximity and collaboration between myself and my research participants; how narrative movement emerged through the film’s structure, allowing for thematic transitions without relying on a central storyline; and how movement more broadly influenced what I was able to know, feel, and represent as an ethnographer. In doing so, I hope to encourage other scholars to think more critically and deliberately about the politics and poetics of movement in their own work.
Finally, because the discussion that follows refers directly to the film’s form, structure, and audiovisual excerpts, readers may find it helpful to view Hopa lide alongside the text. The film was completed in 2023 and is available online.
From the moment anthropologists began using motion-picture technology, the question of movement posed a profound methodological challenge. As early as the 1930s, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s collaboration in Bali revealed fundamental tensions over camera movement in ethnographic filmmaking. Mead favoured a stationary, tripod-mounted camera that could unobtrusively record events in their entirety, aiming to preserve an objective visual record for later analysis. Bateson, in contrast, resented the rigidity of the static camera; in a later interview he even described the passive tripod approach as ‘disastrous,’ arguing that it failed to capture the dynamic ‘relevance’ of what was unfolding (Mead and Bateson 1977, 78). For Mead, the virtue of the fixed camera was precisely its neutrality: it would faithfully capture ‘what happened’ without the film-maker’s interference, yielding an unaltered record that others could study scientifically (ibid). Their disagreement foreshadowed broader debates about movement and subjectivity in ethnographic cinema. Indeed, a generation later, Jean Rouch’s handheld cinematography explicitly rejected the static observational style Mead had championed by placing the camera at the centre of the action rather than at a reserved distance. The tensions evident in the Mead–Bateson exchange thus signalled an early fault line between an ‘objective’ fixed gaze and a more immersive, participatory approach in visual anthropology (cf. Figure 1).
The 1960s marked a technological and methodological shift in ethnographic and documentary filmmaking with the advent of lightweight, portable cameras and synchronised sound equipment. This new mobility liberated the filmmaker from the constraints of the tripod and enabled a more intimate, reactive form of engagement with the world. No longer anchored in place, the camera could now move fluidly with its subjects, capturing spontaneous and unscripted moments of daily life. These innovations made it possible to either observe from a distance or interact directly with participants — opening a spectrum between detachment and participation (e.g. Nichols 2001, 32). This period also saw the rise of cinéma vérité and direct cinema, both of which embraced movement as central to their aesthetic and epistemological claims. The handheld camera became not just a tool for observation but an instrument of immersion — an embodied presence within the field. This approach brought the camera — and by extension, the viewer — closer to the rhythms, tensions, and unpredictability of lived experience. In this moment, movement ceased to be a technical challenge and became instead a marker of immediacy, authenticity, and presence (cf. Figure 2).
The advent of handheld digital camcorders in the late 1990s and early 2000s marked another turning point not only in the affordability and accessibility of filmmaking, but also in how movement functioned within ethnographic practice. As Ruby (2001) observed, this ‘sea change’ in digital technology allowed anthropologists to carry a camera throughout the entire duration of fieldwork; without the need for expensive crews, bulky gear, or institutional funding structures (that often imposed their own narrative agendas). This new portability transformed the mobile camera into a constant companion: a tool for ongoing responsiveness and an invitation to collaborative authorship in the field. Footage could be reviewed and discussed on the spot, enabling interlocutors to become active participants in shaping what was filmed and how. Movement was no longer just a matter of visual style — it became a means of building relationships, exchanging perspectives, and decentralising the authority of the filmmaker.
Amid this broader shift in the early 2000s, a revealing moment of generational tension was captured in The Future of Visual Anthropology, a film shot in 2001 by anthropologist Martin Gruber and his colleagues, in which they interviewed some of the most influential personas of the discipline. In one scene, Jean Rouch — by then in his late eighties — expresses clear scepticism about the rise of digital video. Surrounded by younger colleagues, he dismisses the proliferation of lightweight consumer cameras, insisting that ‘we don’t shoot with all these cameras... it doesn’t work... it’s not a camera,’ and calls for a return to ‘the real tool’ equipped with ‘a proper viewfinder’ (Gruber 2006; Nuska 2019a). His resistance reveals a fascinating tension. Having once famously embraced the freedom of handheld shooting, Rouch may have come to feel that the ease of movement had gone too far. With consumer-grade digital cameras, mobility no longer required the same physical effort, technical discipline, or deliberate intention. What he referred to as ‘the real tool’ was not just a matter of equipment quality, but a device that imposed a kind of responsibility — demanding attention, care, and seriousness of purpose from the filmmaker (cf. Figure 3).
But by then, the digital revolution in global visual imagery had already gathered momentum and the field of visual anthropology was not excluded. Motion picture mobility had become not only widespread but radically democratised, reshaping the ethics, economics, and aesthetics of the discipline in ways that could no longer be reversed. As technological innovation continues apace, camera equipment has become increasingly compact, affordable, and capable — enabling filmmakers to move more easily, more independently, and with higher visual fidelity than ever before. For anthropologists, this shift has been particularly significant: the ability to own and operate lightweight, high-quality gear has allowed researchers to remain flexible in the field, untethered from institutional budgets or professional crews. The tools once reserved for commercial filmmakers are now accessible to solo fieldworkers, making ethnographic filmmaking more participatory, interactive, and self-directed; in short, more in motion. These shifts offered an ideal opportunity to explore more deliberate uses of motion – a challenge I found myself facing (and embracing) — in the making of Hopa lide.
I consider the theme of movement central to my film Hopa lide for two key reasons. First, Roma are often portrayed in cinema as figures ‘on the move’, both literally and metaphorically, and this stubborn image calls for critical reflection. Second, the Romani musical practices at the heart of the film are themselves fluid and shaped by ongoing motion. This section considers both dimensions: how Roma have been represented as protagonists on the move, and how Romani music itself enacts and embodies movement.
As for the first topic, Roma have long occupied a liminal place in the European imagination as a perpetually wandering people, an identity defined by movement even when many communities have been settled for generations (e.g. Lauritzen 2018). The image of the wandering Roma — often labelled in popular discourse as the ‘nomadic Gypsy’ — has remained a strikingly persistent trope in global cinema since its early days. From the earliest films (e.g. the 1897 British short A Camp of Zingari Gypsies) to contemporary art films, Romani characters are depicted as perpetual travellers living on the road. Fiction films, in particular, have long portrayed Romani characters as itinerant fortune-tellers, mystical outsiders, passionate lovers, or carefree rogues living on the road. Consequently, more often than not, Roma appear in cinema as mere symbols and archetypes of roaming and freedom (cf. Figure 4).
Across fiction and non-fiction cinema alike, this aesthetic of mobility is both evocative and problematic. As one survey of European film notes, such portrayals often reflect ‘more about the fantasies of their directors than about the reality of [Roma] communities’ lives’ (Chansel 2005, 6). By fixating on perpetual mobility, filmmakers have often ignored or downplayed the more complex truth: not all Roma roam, and those who do are not endlessly wandering by choice alone. In fact, many Romani communities have been settled for generations, and those that travel have done so in part due to exclusionary policies or economic necessity. Yet cinema’s ‘Gypsy’ archetype remains frozen in motion, sometimes reinforcing the notion that Roma are alien to modern society – rootless by nature and forever apart. The romantic image of the open road offers audiences a sense of poetic escape. It has even been reclaimed by some Romani filmmakers as a celebration of cultural continuity and resistance (Tony Gatlif’s film Latcho Drom, a musical journey tracing Romani migrations from India to Spain, representing an iconic example of such case). Yet, this trope also simplifies. It risks rendering Roma as eternally rootless — people without homes, professions, or rights — thereby reinforcing their otherness. Still, the cinema’s fascination with Roma ‘in motion’ persists, shaping public imagination in ways that blur poetry with prejudice (cf. Figure 5).
This was precisely the challenge I sought to confront in Hopa lide: how to acknowledge the role of movement in Romani life and artistry without slipping into its romanticised cinematic cliché. Unlike many portrayals that reify Roma as perpetual wanderers, I aimed to recognise that movement – both physical and musical – is indeed central to the lives of my collaborators, yet without reducing it to an ethnic essence. In the film, movement was not a symbolic theme imposed from the outside, but a necessity of the filmmaking process itself. Following musicians through their daily rhythms required a filmmaking style that could remain in motion – aesthetically, ethically, and also practically. Movement became a method: a way of keeping pace with my participants and of co-constructing the film’s language with them. In other words, the camera did not simply follow events as they unfolded; it responded to the tempo, mood, and texture of each encounter, allowing these dynamics to inflect the film’s form. While this approach avoided the narrative traps of the ‘wandering Roma’ trope, it did not reject motion as an ethnographic insight. On the contrary, it embraced it – not as spectacle, but as lived relation. I expand on this more deeply in the next section, which reflects on the production process of Hopa lide as filmmaking in motion.
Turning now to the second theme identified earlier — the movement inherent in Romani musical practices — we find a similarly fluid, improvisational logic that has long been recognised in ethnomusicology. Rather than adhering to any single canon, Roma have historically absorbed and reinterpreted the musical idioms of surrounding majority populations, blending these with their own expressive vocabularies. In this sense, movement defines not only the social lives of many Roma but also the aesthetic logic of their music: fluid, improvisational, and constantly evolving. Romani performance is constructed in real time through intersubjective relations between musicians and their audiences. Far from simply mimicking dominant traditions, Roma assume the role of what Piotrowska calls ‘cultural translators’ (2025, 80); intuitively adapting styles and repertoires to suit diverse social settings. Their music moves with the people, through spaces, genres, and audiences — not as an act of preservation, but of ongoing reinvention.
This fundamentally fluid and moving aesthetic aligns with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome: a decentralised, non-hierarchical structure that proliferates through unpredictable connections and mutations (1980). Today’s Romani music has no singular root. Instead, it forms a sprawling, adaptive network, taking shape in Balkan brass, Transylvanian fiddle and Spanish flamenco guitar — each a localised node in a wider cultural web. Wherever Roma travel or settle, new musical offshoots emerge. These are not linear evolutions but lateral growths, creative ‘translations’ that scramble the distinction between source and copy, tradition and innovation. Analytical approaches that prioritise thematic coherence or notions of musical ‘authenticity’ often struggle to account for the Romani repertoire, which resists such ordering (e.g. Silverman 2012; Pettan 1992; Nuska 2022b). It is not logos, but rather chaos; not an arborescent system of stable categories, but a rhizomatic unfolding of relations, borrowed lines, improvised junctions. In this light, Romani music is not just a music culture that moves; it is an embodied movement by its very conception.
This is precisely why I believe film — especially ethnographic film — offers a powerful medium to engage with Romani music making. During my fieldwork preceding the film Hopa lide, I often found myself confronting moments that refused any easy explanation: music sessions held together (as if) by gaffer tape, fragments of songs stitched into performances with no clear logic, or spontaneous changes in style driven by a passing mood. These experiences ran counter to the academic impulse to organise and explain. I wanted the film to reflect this — not by imposing narrative coherence, but by opening a space for viewers to trace their own pathways through the rhizome. Thus, I deliberately avoided a fixed storyline or thematic thesis (cf. Nuska 2025). Hopa lide treats moving images as fragments of sound and motion that ask to be felt before they are understood. Rather than providing definitive answers, the film seeks to encourage viewers to activate their own ‘cinematic imagination’ (cf. MacDougall 2006, 243–249) — to explore the material intuitively, relationally, and on their own terms. In this way, Hopa lide does not aim to explain Romani music — it moves with it and invites the audience to do the same.
To engage meaningfully with both my moving research participants and their moving musical practice, the choice of camera was not incidental but foundational. Capturing movement — not just as a theme but as a lived, embodied reality — required equipment that could follow, adapt, and remain in motion. The camera needed to move with the field; not observe it from a distance, but to inhabit its moving nature.
As MacDougall observes, the ethnographic image possesses a “double nature”: it is at once a piece of evidence and a reflection of thought (MacDougall 1975, 569). This doubleness extends to the camera itself. On one level, it refers to the physical device — the motion-picture tool used to record the world around. On another, deeper level, it stands for an entire set of methodological and aesthetic choices: decisions about framing, proximity, participation, authorship, and presence. What the camera does — or should do — in ethnographic filmmaking has evolved considerably over time. Early proponents like Goldschmidt championed the ideal of recording ‘people doing precisely what they would have been doing if the cameras were not present,’ a notion that has since been widely critiqued and ultimately displaced (Goldschmidt in Ruby 1975, 106). Later scholarship has highlighted how both the presence of the camera and the positionality of the filmmaker fundamentally shape the ethnographic encounter. As MacDougall notes laconically, ‘the camera is there,’ highlighting that it is not neutral observer but an active participant in the field (MacDougall 1975, 125; capitals removed). Today, the camera in visual ethnography is understood not just as a technical apparatus, but as an epistemological agent — one that mediates, translates, and even transforms what it means to see, move, and relate in the field.
The camera choice for Hopa lide was shaped by both long-term ethnographic engagement in the field and dedicated inquiry into how equipment influences visual ethnographic practice. Around a decade ago, I closely examined the emergence of the so-called ‘DSLR revolution,’ a moment when filmmakers, particularly those working in documentary and ethnographic contexts, began adopting cameras originally designed for still photography (Nuska 2018). Despite their many drawbacks, including limited ergonomics, overheating issues, and the need for external audio recording, DSLR (i.e. Digital Single-Lens Reflex) cameras gained popularity for a few key reasons: they were affordable, portable, and capable of producing images with a recognisably ‘cinematic’ aesthetic. My interview-based study found that filmmakers highlighted not only these technical and economic advantages but also the creative possibilities DSLRs afforded. In particular, their small size and unobtrusiveness enabled more intimate camerawork, while their mobility allowed filmmakers to follow unfolding events with a fluid, reactive approach. Many of the practitioners I spoke to described this flexibility — the ability to move with the rhythm of the field — as one of the most decisive benefits for their documentary and/or ethnographic work (ibid: 36–38).
I began working with DSLR video in my field research around 2015. By 2018, I had shifted to even smaller mirrorless cameras (MILCs), a transition that my earlier study identified as a natural continuation of the same technological trend toward portability and discretion (ibid: 40–41). However, like many other filmmakers in this space, I had to contend with a persistent drawback: poor ergonomics. The benefits of a pocket-sized camera — affordability, mobility, and the ability to capture immersive footage — are significant, but they come with a central challenge: how to hold the camera in a way that allows one to move freely without compromising image stability. In my own ethnographic filmmaking, I experimented with a range of support systems, from tripods to monopods, in an effort to stabilise the image while staying mobile. Yet these static solutions, while technically effective, failed to capture the dynamic and constantly shifting character of my field. As discussed earlier, the world I was filming was not still — it moved. And so, the camera needed to move with it.
For me, the real game-changer was the emergence of lightweight, affordable electronic gimbals developed in response to the rising popularity of compact cameras such as DSLRs, MILCs, action cameras, and smartphones. Gimbals use a system of electronic motors to stabilise the camera’s orientation, even when the operator is in motion. With relatively little effort, they enable footage that is smooth and steady — almost dolly-like — while still retaining a subtle human rhythm. In this sense, working with a gimbal evoked for me the dream of a freely moving camera described by earlier filmmakers. F.W. Murnau once imagined an ideal apparatus that could ‘move freely in space, that at any moment can go anywhere, at any speed… [to] fulfil cinema’s ultimate goal’ (Eisner 1973, 84). In practice, working with a gimbal gave me a tangible sense of moving closer to this long-imagined cinematic freedom. Rather than eliminating the constraints of filming, it shifted how movement felt in the field — less encumbered, more responsive, and more attuned to the rhythms of encounter. This capacity to create footage that is both lively and legible aligned closely with my intention to place the viewer, metaphorically, in the ethnographer’s shoes: to see not only what I saw, but how I moved through the field (cf. Figure 6).
Another crucial aspect of filming Hopa lide was the choice of focal length, a decision that directly shaped the viewer’s proximity to the film’s protagonists. My primary goal was to remain physically and emotionally close to my participants, and this meant rejecting the long-lens conventions typical of many music documentaries. Instead of observing performances from a distance, I opted to step onto the stage with the musicians. For almost the entire production, I used a Sigma 16mm lens — the equivalent of a 24mm lens on a full-frame sensor. This wide focal length allowed me to stay close while still capturing rich contextual detail within the frame. This choice created a distinctly embodied perspective: to fill the frame, I often had to be within arm’s length of my participants. In some scenes, the viewer might even notice the moment I shake hands with someone while still holding the camera (cf. Figure 7). This intimate distance brought another benefit: it encouraged interaction. When the camera is close and the filmmaker is visibly part of the scene, people tend to engage more directly. As a result, Hopa lide became a film grounded not just in observation, but in interaction — shaped by proximity and presence.
Another dimension enabled by my camera setup was a different kind of closeness — not simply spatial, but also relational and ethical. In much contemporary documentary discourse, ‘closeness’ and ‘intimacy’ are frequently promoted as desirable — and marketable — qualities. As a visual anthropologist, however, I was after something different: what Henley describes as filming ‘from within a close personal relationship’ (2020, 5). My aim was to cultivate what we might call ‘ethnographic closeness’ (e.g. Pilbeam, Greenhalgh, and Potter 2023) — a form of intimacy rooted in long-term engagement, mutual trust, and shared authorship. The challenge, then, was to make this closeness visible in the film without betraying my participants’ trust or aestheticising their vulnerability. I wanted intimacy not as a marketing hook, but as a methodological (and ethical) principle — one that emerges from, and speaks to, the entangled realities of our shared fieldwork experience.
To sum up, for Hopa lide I developed a one-person crew setup that allowed for a high degree of mobility — both technically and logistically, but also ethically and relationally. The equipment was minimal, mobile, and configured to support both movement and intimacy. This setup not only reflected the practical constraints of solo ethnographic filmmaking but also shaped the film’s aesthetic and methodological stance. It enabled a kind of filmmaking in motion — responsive, improvised, and entangled with the rhythms of fieldwork — which I explore more fully in the following section.
Improvisation has often been associated with ethnographic and observational cinema, especially within the legacy of filmmakers like Jean Rouch, who famously compared his style of filmmaking to jazz — a structure that emerges through intuitive, moment-to-moment response (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2015, 269). Yet the role of improvisation in practice is more complex than this analogy suggests. I recall presenting the initial idea for Hopa lide at an ethnomusicology conference, where John Baily asked whether I intended to work with a script (Nuska 2019b). The question caught me off guard at first, especially given Baily’s own legacy of observational filmmaking. But later, while reading his reflections on his film Amir: An Afghan Refugee Musician’s Life in Peshawar, I came to understand his point. Even observational films that appear wholly unscripted are often scaffolded by production notes, scene lists, or guiding concepts that lend coherence to the final structure (cf. Baily 2009). By contrast, Hopa lide followed a looser, more contingent mode of making — not unprecedented in ethnographic film, but unusually reliant on improvisation at every stage of production. It was this openness, rather than a predetermined script, that shaped the film’s unfolding logic.
This ethos of improvisation found its most concrete form in the collaborative process that shaped the film’s production. The true driving force behind Hopa lide was neither a script nor a conventional production schedule, but a collaborative process anchored in the creation of music videos with Romani musicians. These collaborations provided both a structural and methodological framework: each of the three film’s chapter grew out of a shared creative venture in which the musicians were not just subjects but co-directors of their own representation. Because there was no storyline to follow, there was no pre-written script to constrain the flow of events. This looseness was not a flaw, but a feature: it allowed space for serendipity, responsiveness, and the kind of unscripted magic that formal production logistics often suppress.
A striking example of this occurred during the shooting of the film’s opening scene. That night, I had already packed up my gear, convinced my protagonists would not be performing at the local music festival, since their scheduled slot had overrun by more than six hours. While passing the festival’s entrance, I ran into a fiddle player walking in the opposite direction, who told me the band was (finally) just about to go on stage. Apparently, it was he who convinced Vladimir — one of the film’s central protagonist — not to abandon the performance entirely, since the fiddle player was still hoping to receive the honorarium Vladimir had promised him. I turned around, unpacked, and captured what became one of the film’s most emblematic scene: me stepping onto the stage and asking, ‘What will you play?’ with the band replying, ‘We don’t know’ (cf. Figure 8). Such a moment could never have been planned — it happened because I was alone, flexible, and open to improvisation. It is hard to imagine persuading a paid film crew to wait six hours on a hunch, armed only with the vague promise: ‘Wait — this is how it always works. Trust me, something will happen in the end.’
When it comes to the conversations with the musicians, I approached them with a similarly improvisational mindset. In contemporary documentary filmmaking, such conversation often takes the form of set-up interviews, more often than not serving as narrative glue. These interviews are shot under controlled, studio-like conditions, and they provide convenient voice-over to tie together disparate scenes. When essential information is missing, interviews can be used to ‘patch the hole’ in post-production. Because of this effect and efficiency, the practice has unsurprisingly entered ethnographic filmmaking too. I consciously rejected this approach, though. I knew that asking musicians to sit down for a formal interview would change the dynamic entirely — it would interrupt their movement, and in doing so, strip an important part from their presence. Thanks to a lightweight setup that allowed me to stay physically close to the musicians while filming, I was able to ask questions organically as we moved through shared activities. I also chose not to cut out my own voice or interventions. These interactions form part of the film’s processual nature. The result is not a set of interviews, but an ongoing conversation between research participants and myself — in motion.
As a result of this approach, I was often asked by fellow filmmakers how I managed to achieve such closeness and openness from my participants. The answer, I believe, lies less in technical finesse than in not overwhelming my collaborators with formal interview setups. One telling example comes from the film’s second chapter, which includes a candid conversation with Dalibor, captured while we were driving through a spring night back from a gig. Interestingly, I had not even planned to go with him that day; I was originally meant to film with Vladimir. But since Vladimir changed his plans last minute (as he often does), I called Dalibor instead: ‘Yes. I’m heading to Budiná for a music festival. I’m picking you up in twenty minutes!’ That spontaneous decision gave me footage that ended up forming the backbone of his entire chapter. I doubt the exchange would have had the same naturalness if I had tried to seat Dalibor under lights and ask him to recount his thoughts on cue. The key was to adapt to his movement — both literally and metaphorically. By moving with him, not staging him, he emerged not as a subject to be questioned, but as a person expressing himself on his own terms. Structured interviews, in this context, feel like an arborescent method — fixed and hierarchical. But if you want to follow a rhizome, you have to let it lead.
Another notable feature that emerged in Hopa lide, again as a virtue of necessity, was the use of long takes. This technique resonates with the ethos of observational cinema, with its commitment to the ‘unfolding of the real’ (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009, 551). In my case, the consistent use of a gimbal-mounted camera enabled this practice, allowing for a continuous, gliding presence that could move with the musicians — an attempt to replicate, through form, the embodied presence of the ethnographer. In contrast to conventional documentary production, where filmmakers typically capture a mix of wide shots and close-ups for editors to assemble later (the so-called ‘shooting for the edit’), Hopa lide was composed on the spot. Rather than constructing scenes through post-production montage, the camera itself wandered through space, dynamically transitioning from wide shots to close-ups and back again within a single take (cf. Figure 9). This technique became something of a visual signature for the film — a movement-based mode of shooting that mirrors the ethnographic process itself. In my own ethnographic practice, this has often meant oscillating between granular attention to detail and the search for broader context — a dynamic that may resonate with other ethnographers. Here, the camera performed a similar dance. The shift between perspectives was not made in the editing room through cuts, but in the field, through the moving camera. In this sense, the camera itself became an ethnographer — not just a recording device, but an agent of attention, navigating the field through motion.
Another layer of movement the viewer may notice — this time within the narrative world rather than the cinematography — is the film’s recurring motif of road travel. A striking proportion of footage was filmed in cars. Though logistically challenging (shooting in a moving vehicle is never simple), filming during car rides emerged as both a practical solution and an ethnographic opportunity. Many of my research participants spent entire nights travelling hundreds of kilometres for a single gig, only to return home before dawn. Cars, for today’s Romani musicians, are not just modes of transport; they are a second home, a liminal space between the stage and the everyday. They are places where they can take off the masks of eternal entertainers and do not have to put their Roma-ness on display; instead, their humanness come to the front (cf. Nuska 2022a, 194–204). In the car, they were no longer performers — they were tired, thoughtful, and opened to critically reflect upon their beautiful, but enormously laborious craft. These were moments when the conversations deepened. The contrast between the explosive, often chaotic energy of performance scenes and the quiet introspection of car rides gave the film its rhythm — a rhythm defined by contrast: rest, and motion; rest and motion; rest and motion.
Finally, the principles of improvisation and movement were not only embedded in the film’s production process but also shaped its overall structure. Hopa lide does not follow a prewritten storyline, but took form organically, evolving out of the collaborative making of three music videos. These videos, each envisioned and directed by different Romani musicians, provided the spine of the film. The chapters unfold around these pieces: the first follows Martin and Barna as they reimagine Queen’s I Want to Break Free in Slovak and Romani; the second accompanies the young cimbalom player Dalibor as he records his debut song Tak šancu daj [So Give it a Chance]; the third documents Vladimir and his band performing the catchy Romani tune Hopa lide lide, which lent its name to the entire film.
At this point, it is worth explaining that even the film’s title, Hopa lide, emerged through improvisation and reflects the movement logic of the film itself. ‘Hopa’ is a widely used exclamation among Romani musicians, an energising interjection that punctuates performance, signals shifts in tempo, and incites bodily movement among performers and listeners alike. ‘Lide’, by contrast, is a playful reworking of the non-lexical vocables found in the original song’s chorus. In the cover featured in the film’s third chapter, the repeated syllables ‘lile lile’ are rearticulated as ‘lide lide’, which by coincidence echoes the Czech word for ‘people’. Yet this resemblance is incidental (and grammatically inaccurate). The phrase does not function as a translation, but as a creative mistranslation, characteristic of the musical practices through which Romani musicianship often takes shape. In this sense, the title Hopa lide becomes a small trace of the rhizome – something that sprouts from somewhere without origin, something that resists tidy explanation but still carries affective power and meaning. So ‘Hopa lide,’ that is ‘[very loosely] cheer up, people,’ is perhaps also movement and mystery, a name that dances in improvisation like the film it titles.
To sum up, though structured in parts, the film resists linearity — its segments operate like jazz movements, each playing with its own tempo and thematic motifs while remaining loosely in harmony with the others. Each chapter, in turn, thematises movement in its own way. Martin and Barna’s chapter gestures toward labour migration — performing abroad as a livelihood necessity. Dalibor’s chapter focuses on generational movement: his effort to push beyond the circumstances of his community and carve out a new space for artistic self-expression. And Vladimir’s chapter brings movement to the foreground, both musically and literally. The lyrics of the titular track Hopa lide lide declare in Romani: Pal o svetos amen phiravas — ‘We roam the world.’ Whether improvising on stage, navigating the demands of transnational gig work, or traversing genres and styles, movement is both the condition and expression of Romani musicianship. The film reflects this not through a fixed argument, but through a rolling sequence in motion.
When preparing for the production of Hopa lide, I was struck by a sentence in MacDougall’s writing: ‘Rouch’s films, perhaps more vividly than any others, convey a sense of the life that surrounds the filmmaker, even what lies behind his back.’ (MacDougall 2006, 252; italics mine). This evocative phrase — likely meant metaphorically — prompted a literal response in me. What would it mean, I wondered, to actually include what lies behind the filmmaker’s back? Could this perspective offer a new aesthetic or epistemological insight into ethnographic filmmaking? When I first attached a newly arrived gimbal to my camera, I began experimenting with what I jokingly called for myself ‘back-of-the-filmmaker shots’ — rehearsing, adjusting, and finally testing them in the field during a pilot project. A few of these experimental shots appeared in my earlier short film Rooted Musicians from Klenovec (Nuska 2021), which preceded Hopa lide (cf. Figure 10).
But in Hopa lide, I ended up not using this technique explicitly. My back is never directly shown, yet my presence is unmistakable nonetheless. My voice remains uncut. I speak, respond, laugh, ask — not hidden behind the fourth wall, but as part of the unfolding ethnographic encounter. In doing so, I acknowledge my role not only as an observer but as a co-creator. The film did not emerge spontaneously from the community. It was my initiative, my invitation, and my camera that set it in motion — and so my presence needs to be part of the motion too.
Another way I sought to foreground my presence — and more broadly, the collaborative nature of the project — was by incorporating the filmmaking process into the film itself. Rather than masking the behind-the-scenes negotiations, I chose to leave traces of them visible. One telling moment occurs during a scene with Dalibor, who is tuning his cimbalom while I attempt to ask a question. He interrupts me: ‘Let’s do the interview when I’m done tuning, because there’s no way to handle this.’ I am sure that many filmmakers would have cut this moment in favour of a more polished edit. I left it in. To me, it illustrates something essential: the filmmaking process was not scripted or controlled from one side, but emerged from an ongoing negotiation between myself and my participants; in other words, directing does not come from one direction. By acknowledging the frictions of our collaboration, the film resists the illusion of seamless authorship — and instead frames authorship as shared, contingent, and very much in motion.
This approach aligns closely with what MacDougall terms ‘deep reflexivity’ (1998, 87–91). Unlike ‘external reflexivity,’ which addresses the filmmaking process from the outside (for instance, through an academic article on the particular ethnographic film; similar to this one), deep reflexivity is woven into the structure of the film itself. It reveals how ‘subject and object define one another through the work,’ and how the figure of the filmmaker emerges as an artefact of that process (p. 89). In Hopa lide, I aimed to foster precisely this kind of embedded awareness. I wanted to show that my research participants were not only aware of the camera’s presence, but also capable of shaping its gaze — redirecting questions, refusing engagement, or co-producing scenes as they unfolded. In this way, Hopa lide carries the presence of a ‘moving self,’ not only through literal camera motion, but through a reflexive subjectivity. This ‘moving self’ became an important methodological and aesthetic feature of the film, one more mode of motion that structures both its methodological process and its cinematic poetics.
In this article, I have argued that movement, in its multiple forms, is not merely an aesthetic or technical feature of ethnographic film, but a consequential mode of knowing. Movement shapes how ethnographic encounters are perceived, recorded, and understood, particularly in contexts where social life itself unfolds through motion, improvisation, and relational attunement. Some aspects of ethnographic experience are too fluid, embodied, and contingent to be adequately grasped through textual description alone. Ethnographic motion pictures offer a distinct epistemological capacity in this regard, not least because they are, quite literally, pictures in motion: they move alongside those who move within the field, produce knowledge through movement itself, and remain open to being shaped by it. Attending more carefully to motion therefore opens up productive questions about how anthropological knowledge is generated, mediated, and shared.
Through a self-reflexive examination of Hopa lide, this article has sought to show how movement informed both the filmmaking process and the ethnographic insights that emerged from it. Rather than presenting the film as an exemplary model, I have used it as a situated case through which to reflect on the methodological and epistemological implications of filming in motion. In doing so, I have suggested that movement can operate simultaneously as a camera practice, a bodily engagement with the field, a narrative principle, and a relational method. For visual anthropologists and other researchers working with audiovisual media, the central takeaway is not to adopt specific techniques, but to recognise movement itself as an analytic dimension worthy of deliberate reflection in practice.
To conclude, as visual anthropology approaches the eighth decade since Jean Rouch’s oft-recounted loss of his tripod, camera mobility has become so technologically normalised that its conceptual significance is easily overlooked. Yet this very normalisation makes it all the more important to return to movement deliberately, not as a default condition, but as a perspective through which to rethink the history, present practices, and future possibilities of ethnographic filmmaking. A sustained theory of movement in visual anthropology remains largely unwritten, but its potential is considerable. One could easily imagine, for instance, a full-length study tracing how developments in film technology have continually reshaped the epistemological conditions of ethnographic knowledge by enabling new ways of moving. Attending to motion as an epistemological, relational, and ethical concern offers a productive lens for examining how ethnographic knowledge is made and mediated. It also provides a way of bringing unfamiliar worlds closer, not by fixing them in place, but by engaging with them in motion. Hopa lide is offered here, modestly, as one such moving world.
Published with support for the long-term conceptual development of the research organisation RVO: 68378076, Institute of Ethnology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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This article offers a self-reflexive commentary on a methodology developed in the making of Hopa lide (2023), a feature-length ethnographic documentary produced by the author in collaboration with Romani musicians in Slovakia. The article reflects on how movement functioned as a methodological, aesthetic, and epistemological principle within this specific project, and argues that, despite its centrality to ethnographic filmmaking, movement remains surprisingly under-theorised in visual anthropology. The article is structured as a sequence of three analytical movements. First, it sketches a selective overview of how movement has been approached in the history, theory, and practice of documentary and ethnographic cinema, from early debates around camera mobility to its contemporary technological normalisation. Second, it explains why movement was key to engaging the film’s topic and protagonists, focusing on Romani music-making as a fluid, improvisational, and relational practice. Third, and most importantly, it reflects on how movement shaped the making of the film itself: through camera practices, improvisational modes of collaboration, narrative organisation, and forms of proximity between filmmaker and participants. Addressed primarily to visual anthropologists, documentary filmmakers, and other scholars working with moving images, the article invites readers to consider movement not merely as a technical feature of filming, but as a productive lens for thinking about how ethnographic knowledge is generated, mediated, and shared. The analysis is closely tied to the film itself, which is publicly available online; while the article can be read independently, engaging with the film enhances the discussion.
Keywords
Ethnographic film, Participatory filmmaking, Collaborative filmmaking, Movement, Improvisation, Reflexivity