4

Writing about sociology through or else with cinema is a challenge that seems easier to overcome given today’s lower cost of filming and editing videos. Above and beyond this apparent improvement, however, there are a number of old questions that the filmic sociology cannot avoid answering. A film’s images and sound, or else the way that it has been written, can both be used to apprehend the tensions that it creates between social realities – with the filmic sociology consi­dering both to be complementary, hence a combination worthy of organising. To achieve this, sociologists-filmmakers must learn to think with the film, an ability that is very different from using video to express a sociological outcome that already exists. This is particularly true due to the fact that cameras/microphones also constitute tools of investigation. Creating a sociological documentary means learning a cinematographic language, which can be a very difficult task for sociologists, in part because of the way that sociological or ethnographic images/sounds resist the process of narration. At the same time, new tools (Multimedia, Internet) are creating new possibilities for combining filmed and written sociology.