Abstract: As a special form of ethnographic text, video ethnography has advantages in detailed description of cultures. Traditional video ethnography has an edge in offering a detailed partial elaboration of a culture in a specific situation, but it is confined to the linear video recording of the “visible” world. In recent years, festival video ethnography, an important subcategory, aims at a description of cultural systems behind festivals through long-term field work under the guidance of related theories such as visual anthropology. Through the production of the festival video ethnography of The Winter Solstice in the Jinyi Valley, we tried to get rid of the presentation structures confined to the linear time sequence in real spaces, a practice adhered to by traditional video ethnography. In this way, the interpretation and expression of the cultural system were untethered from the scenes and the “invisible” world was revealed. Accordingly, we were able to transcend and shuttle freely through different levels of cultural spaces. The experience is a case of multimodal video ethnography production which may present new opportunities and directions of development for the discipline and push forward holistic expression of cultures in video ethnography.

Key words:  cultural space, video ethnography, The Winter Solstice in the Jinyi Valley, holistic expression of culture