This article addresses the need to define a visual anthropology from the complexity of different perspectives, and advocates for a project that takes an anthropological account of the historical dimension of the object and the reflective component of the ethnographic method. Thinking from the analysis of four video-ethnographic works developed in Spain, which are characterized by their different uses of the image on the approach to scientific knowledge, the authors emphasize, first, the dialogic and performative character of ethnographic cinema, showing how, through a shared visual experience between the researcher and the participants in the film, new social relations are woven, that allow a mutual understanding as well as a transformation of the social and cultural reality. Moreover, these films serve to exemplify the characteristics of the contemporary social order: an object at once local and global, where the past is updated by the social actors in order to be placed in the political and cultural framework that characterizes the "world system" of globalization.