Tasting Tea and Filming Tea: The Filmmaker's Engaged Sensory Experience

Exploring the sense of taste with ethnographic film is challenging because the nature of taste is hard to record, describe, and remember, and also because film is restricted to recording just image and sound. Based on the author's experience in tasting tea and making films about tea in China, this article discusses the importance of incorporating the sensory experience of the filmmaker in exploring and representing the taste sensation. It argues that film can go beyond the limit of describing taste with words to represent and evoke the sense of taste, specifically through the filmmaker's embodied experience. Through active engagement with the sensory environment, film also generates new anthropological knowledge, linking the sensory experience of the filmmaker, the subject, and the viewer more closely.