焦點專題｜非言之域——哈佛感官民族誌實驗室

2006年創立於哈佛大學的感官民族誌實驗室（The Sensory Ethnography Lab, SEL），核心在於透過音像媒介，揉合感官美學及民族誌實踐，呈現視覺民族誌、紀錄片及當代藝術的交匯與革新。作品一反倚重文字言說、獨尊視覺語言的紀實傳統，強調感知體驗，而非闡述理解；以音畫凝縮曖昧模糊的生命經驗，探索難以言說，卻更為深刻的真實切面。

本專題精選多位作者的歷年作品，涵納不同形式及題材，回顧SEL的創作多樣性，也透過其對感知體感的關注，開啟關於電影媒介的當代思考維度。

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【2026 TIDF】焦點專題｜非言之域—哈佛感官民族誌實驗室Sensible but Unsayable—A Retrospective of the Sensory Ethnography Lab

Dead Birds

Seminal and highly controversial, Dead Birds portrays the lives, beliefs and ritual warfare of the Dani people in the Baliem Valley of Western New Guinea, now part of Indonesia. Both immediate and allegorical, the film reflects on violence, death, cosmology, remaining a cornerstone of visual anthropology and ethnographic cinema.

El Mar la Mar

Under the merciless sun of the Sonoran Desert between Mexico and the United States, undocumented immigrants traverse an unforgiving terrain. El Mar la Mar weaves sublime 16mm images of nature, animals, people, and their traces into a multifaceted panorama of a deeply politicised and deadly borderland.

The Labyrinth

A journey into the labyrinthine memories of a Uitoto man who worked for drug lords in the 1980s Colombian Amazon. Moving between a rainforest and a narco mansion inspired by the American soap opera Dynasty, the film unfolds a hallucinatory near-death account.

Expedition Content

An immersive work of sonic ethnography, Expedition Content draws on audio recordings made in 1961, by Standard Oil heir Michael Rockefeller, during the Harvard–Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea. Nearly imageless, the film examines the encounter with the Hubula (also known as Dani) people, unsettling the power relations between sound and image, anthropologist and subject.

Leviathan

Filmed off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts — the U.S.'s largest fishing port and Melville's inspiration for Moby Dick — Leviathan plunges aboard a groundfish trawler on a weeks-long voyage. Dialogue-free yet mesmerising, it offers a visceral portrait of labour, machinery, sea life and the relentless force of the ocean.

Foreign Parts

In the shadow of the New York Mets' stadium, Willets Point is an industrial enclave marked for demolition. Amid scrapyards and auto salvage shops, Foreign Parts reveals a tight-knit community sustained by wrecks, recycling and precarious lives, observing a neighbourhood facing erasure under New York's urban redevelopment.

Single Stream

Named after the single-stream recycling method, the film explores one of the largest materials recovery facilities in the U.S. Through a visual and sonic investigation, it blurs observation and abstraction, reflecting on waste, excess, and their societal consequences.

The A-Team

Over the phone, fourteen friends recall their Ghanaian high school exchange trip to Jackson, Mississippi, in the United States, a decade later. As their memories accumulate, they grow uncanny. Blurred, darkened images mirror gaps, uncertainties, and moments the group still struggles to confront.

Untitled

A revealing single-take portrait of two Nepali newlyweds at rest and play. Uncut and without subtitles, Untitled rejects editorial guidance, confronting ethnography's fraught gaze and inviting viewers to derive meaning from presence, intimacy and duration alone.

Manakamana

High above Nepal's mountainous landscape, a cable car carries pilgrims, villagers and tourists to the ancient Hindu temple of the goddess Manakamana. Once a multi-day pilgrimage, the journey now takes minutes. Filmed entirely inside the cars, Manakamana captures intimate conversations, revealing a society suspended between ritual tradition and technological change.

Focus Programme｜Sensible but Unsayable — A Retrospective of the Sensory Ethnography Lab

Founded at Harvard University in 2006, the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) works through audiovisual media to merge sensory aesthetics with ethnographic practice, marking a fertile intersection of visual ethnography, documentary and contemporary art. Departing from documentary traditions centred on verbal explanation and visual dominance, SEL prioritises perception over interpretation, condensing ambiguous lived experience into sound and image to explore ineffable yet profound facets of reality.

This programme presents a selection of works by various filmmakers spanning a range of forms and subjects. Revisiting the creative breadth of the SEL, it invites contemporary audiences to reconsider cinema not only as something to be seen, but as something to be sensed and experienced.