| Owing its legacy to film, video is an excellent way of showing human interaction with the landscape, as ethnographers and, more recently, conservation architects have realized. The history of use of video in built heritage conservation is young given the history of film. Video raises issues that are important to a reflexive and interactive conservation of cultural memory: the relationship between investigators and local people, the desirability of reporting in multitude ways to various constituencies, the use of video as an appropriate way of reporting, and the value of people's responses to the video document for further analysis. Through the different approaches to non-fiction film making that are discussed herein, this paper aims to inspire the convergence of video and conservation studies. We suggest that, in the field of built heritage conservation, video can be more than a mere note-taking tool; it can be used as a means to explore, understand and present the everyday, and benefit from the medium's capabilities to preserve unresolved ambiguities and paradoxes in a kind of conscious appreciation of space as it unfolds itself in a particular place. |
