Schneider, Andreas. 2017. (Presenter in Documentary) The Story of God with Morgan Freeman Season 2 episode "The Chosen One." National Geographic Channel. Monday, January 16th, 9PM.
You can stream it through Amazon.
In the episode of this documentary I take the perspective of the researcher investigating the roots of the festival and the role of the Ma Song that I have previously observed and interviewed. There is a specific focus on the trance state of the Ma Song in which they give up their identities to commit their bodies to their deities.
The Team
I was thrilled to work with a real field production team of nine professionals. We had 11 large rooms at the best hotel in town, one just for equipment, and they even hired six locals, two with a camera drone to support the team.
There was lost of fun working with this The Story of God with Morgan Freeman team. They had less fun when they were they saw the charge for excess luggage. That is just part of the room-filling equipment they brought with them:
This is just a phone shot of the camera and audio crew setting up in the field:
The Action
Believe it or not, Having had five cameras on me, I have not images of me in the field. So I cannot wait to see the movie. Obviously this time, being the object in the documentary I could not devote my time to photography as I did in a other projects (Schneider 2014a, 2015a). Still, I could not resist taking some snapshots:
Let’s see what comes out after all these hours of footage when the show is aired in 2017.
Thanks to Prasert Fakthongphol, the president of the shrines, we had tremendous support from the temples where I did previous research. He stands to the far right on the picture below (I stand left to him) Most important, however, was the help of Karudee Chotithamaporn (Cheng) (far left) who in extreme modestly called herself a helper for the Bang Neow Shrine. I would rather title her the PR manager of the shrine.
I knew Prasert and Cheng from my previous research project at the Bang Neow shrine that was sponsored by my Fulbright scholarship. That is when the picture above was taken. Cheng is perfectly trilingual and helped administering the interviews for my project in 2012 (Schneider 2014b, 2015b, 2016). Now she was again an important cultural informant; this time for the documentary movie project.
We had close contact with one Ma Song whom we followed through the stages of him falling in trance, getting the piercing and participate in the procession. He is the gentleman with the umbrella pierced through his cheek on the right.
Thanks to everyone --it was a blast!
Cheers Andreas
References
Schneider, Andreas 2014a. Four 12x12 inch prints at the Creative Minds Show of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction Morrison Hall, Bloomington Indiana. April 11th to September 12th.
Schneider, Andreas. 2014b. ”High on Religion“ presentation in "Visualizing Emotions" a joint seminar of Sociology and Graphics Design at the Fachhochschule Potsdam, Germany. June 27th.
Schneider, Andreas. 2015a Principal Investigator. “Images of Submission in Buddhist Context” at the Vegetarian Festival, Phuket, Thailand October 15th to 24th .
Schneider, Andreas. 2015b. “Esthetic Experience of Submission” Annual meeting of the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE). Geneva Switzerland July 10th.
Schneider, Andreas. 2016. “Self-attitudes in the Frame of Submission” Regular Session Social Psychology 3 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. Seattle, USA Tuesday, August 23rd. Sociological Abstracts; full version available at Sociology*Express.