Educational Media Reviews Online

The Yellow Bank, a Harvard Sensory Ethnography Laboratory short film, depicts a 2009 solar eclipse in Shanghai, China. Whereas other such films use the Harvard techniques to document day-to-day reality, this film focuses on an unusual astronomical event—thus robbing the viewer of the quotidian pleasure one expects from this stylistic device. While well-constructed, the film’s primary focus is a static landscape under variable light conditions, filmed—by the way—on a somewhat rainy day. Droplets on the lens only add to the film’s dreary mise en scene.

Overall, Sniadecki’s film about the solar eclipse provides a visually unique glimpse at a rare phenomenon, but fails to capture one’s full attention in the way that more action-packed films like Leviathan (2013) or Manakamana (2013) do. In some sense, one might consider this film as a failed experiment, of potential interest to film studies or visual anthropology students as a guide to the pitfalls of vérité filmmaking. Apart from libraries collecting the complete output of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, The Yellow Bank will hold little interest for general collections.