Download Prerana Reddy is a writer and filmmaker

Prerana Reddy is a writer and filmmaker. She is also a program coordinator for African Film
Festival Inc. She holds an MA in Film Studies from New York University.
Copyright © 2001-2002 African Film FestivalThe
Emergence of
Ethnographic Film Practice:
Past Travels and Future Itineraries
by Prerana Reddy
Tutorial # 01: module 1, filmography | module 2: Rouch, Les Maître Fous >>
The history of discourse on ethnographic film has been rife with contentions
and opposing viewpoints. There have been contestations over its very definition
to the issue of its proper role within the discipline of anthropology. There is
not even a consensus as to when ethnographic film first emerged. A few people
would cite as the genesis, the Lumière’s Arrival of a Train from 1895 and the
many short actualities made and shown by traveling agents and local people
trained in the equipment. It is important to note that at this time (between
1895 and 1905) Eastern peoples saw Western peoples as well as vice versa.
Traveling filmmakers/projectionists both took footage of distant cultures and
viewed their footage throughout their travels. These were some of the first
glimpses, though often brief, that most people had of people from distant
cultures moving and doing ordinary things. But most anthropologists don’t think
of Arrival of a Train or the actualities that followed as ethnography at all,
despite the fact that the people portrayed were not actors, often non-Western,
and the action was often of the everyday. I would suggest that perhaps
anthropology at that time saw itself, in Franz Boaz’s description, as a salvage
operation. Consequently, what counted as ethnographic films were those
whose subjects were not only non-Western, but non-urban and generally lived
in societies whose ways of life were threatened by contact with the modern
world.
From this perspective, it is not surprising that many accounts of ethnographic
film begin with Edward Curtis’s In the Land of the Headhunters (1914), a
fictional romantic melodrama made among the Kwaikutl. Despite depicting
costumes and dances of ethnographic interest, there was little integration of
these scenes into the larger narrative, nor was there any attempt to portray
individuals in depth. Furthermore, the headhunting scenes and the evil witch
character were obviously added to suit Western audience expectations. These
issues were later resolved in Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922). As
Brian Winston has observed, while both Curtis and Flaherty utilized native
Americans recreating their past culture, Flaherty created drama out of
everyday events like igloo building and hunting, rather than imposing an
external narrative (100). Also to Flaherty’s credit, he spent long periods of
time living in the community he filmed and screened rushes for the
participants. In these ways he was well ahead of his time, as participatory
filmmaking seemed to disappear until Jean Rouch brought it to the forefront in
the 1950’s. Nanook also brings up an important problem that continued to
plague ethnography for several decades: the tendency to mythologize the
native individual and to fix native culture at a seemingly changeless time
untouched by modernity or the influence of other cultures. As Eliot Weinberg
has aptly stated, “the struggle against hunger in the Arctic persisted whether
the Eskimos carried harpoons or rifles.(6)”
Why was it then necessary to ignore the current struggles of the communities
being filmed in favor of constructing idealized images of the pure, primitive
man? Perhaps there is an underlying desire to view such cultures as a window
into Western Culture’s own past, as a living evolutionary remnant. Viewing
them in this way allows the West to designate the multiple histories of
different cultures as simply earlier stages of its own cultural development,
authenticating its colonialist desires and erasing its own role in jeopardizing
native ways of life. This tendency, which Fatimah Tobing Rony has termed the
“taxidermic” impulse, persisted well into the ’50s as we can see by examining
John Marshall’s The Hunters (1958), a film of four !Kung San men hunting
giraffe (15).
There are many similarities between Flaherty and Marshall: neither were
trained anthropologists, both spent a long period of time with their subjects,
both shaped their footage into a unified narrative, and both of their films
portray courageous men fighting for survival in a harsh environment. Marshall’s
film also seeks to portray individuals in an archetypical fashion, offering
simplistic accounts of the hunters’ personalities which we must take on his
word, since the film offers little visual information by which to distinguish the
characters. The film ends with the words, “And the old men remembered. And
the young men listened. And so the story of the hunt was told.” This ending
insinuates the continuity of the (false) narrative and projects the culture into a
static, mythic temporality. It also misrepresents the importance of hunting in
!Kung society which relies primarily on gathering for its sustenance. It is
important to note that Marshall later criticized this film and turned toward
record-footage of discrete events in attempt to make films that were more
useful in the academic context. In the ’70s he went on to take a more
proactive role in making people aware of the changes being wrought on !Kung
San culture as result of their being dispossessed of their land and the incursion
of missionary and military activities in the area. In N!ai, The Story of a !Kung
Woman (1979-80), he reworked older footage with new footage in an attempt
to show the how the !Kung lifestyle was changing via the story of one woman’s
life over two decades and the effects of Western influence on her relationship
with her community.
The problems that Curtis, Flaherty, and Marshall bring to light make it easy to
see why anthropologists have been wary of how film has been used to convey
ethnographic information and how the requirements of narrative can result in
an anthropologically suspect product. It is understandable then that
anthropologists’ discourse on ethnographic film has been cautious of the
demands of art and narrative editing. Furthermore, the desire to authenticate
cultural anthropology as an academic discipline and hard science led to
questions of the role of film in methodology. Not only was it important to
understand how film can be used to (re)present cultures, but also how film
could be used to gather data, or rather evidence in the form of record-footage.
In this regard, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s Balinese study in the
1930’s is an important and illustrative case. Mead tried to treat the camera as
a primary recording device and not simply as a mechanism to illustrate a thesis,
a proposition aided by new, lighter 16mm equipment. She suggested that notetaking was an inadequate way of recording behavior and ritual activity, and
that recording these largely visual events on film would allow for greater
analysis and re-analysis of data. There was an underlying assumption that an
examination of a culture’s psychological characteristics could be made from a
study of their bodies and movements, and that film (and photography) may
allow fieldworkers to capture and represent such visual data in a fuller way
than written accounts alone (Lakoff, 2).
This notion of using film to capture patterns of human behavior for scientific
analysis has a long history, dating back to Fèlix-Louis Regnault who in 1895 took
high-speed chronophotography footage of a Wolof woman making pots at the
Exposition Ethnographique de l’Afrique Occidentale. His subsequent films aim
to compare movement across different cultures, but specifically to demarcate
physical differences amongst races(deBrigard, 5). Mead extended Regnault’s
purely physiological studies to an exploration of how behavior can be used to
understand the “ethos” of a culture, defined by Bateson as “a culturally
standardized system of organization of the instincts and emotions of
individuals. (Bateson & Mead, xi)” However, the films resulting from this study,
the Character Formation in Different Culture Series and Trance and Dance
in Bali, do not succeed in fulfilling her goals. The observations and analysis
spelled out in the voice-over narration seldom seem conclusive on the basis of
the corresponding visuals. Also Mead’s own call for using long takes was not
apparent in Trance and Dance which is edited for continuity and has many cuts.
This contradiction may have been a result of Bateson’s having different notions
of how film should record an event, favoring a more exploratory approach than
Mead (Jacknis, 161). Finally, it seems that the copious data was never fully
analyzed or reanalyzed the way she had hoped it would be. Despite this failure,
Mead continued to support the idea that film could be useful as anthropological
data given that it included long stretches of unedited footage, that is if it is
mainly record-footage (Mead, 9). Alan Lomax, Karl Heider, and Timothy Asch
also supported this idea, further adding that synch sound, utilization of long
shots that encompass whole bodies and events (as opposed to close-ups), and
accompanying written material are necessary if film is to be anthropologically
sound (Heider, 6; Asch, 199-204).
This tendency towards using the camera as an observational tool was further
supported by the concurrent documentary styles of direct cinema and cinema
verité, which were somewhat obsessed with the idea of achieving verisimilitude
to the actual experience of watching people and events unfold with a minimum
of interference. It did not take long to problematize the initial arrogance of
being an innocent and invisible observer and the fact that there were serious
ethical problems associated with the surveillance mode of filming. In addition
there were serious limitations of what record-footage or strict observationist
cinema could show. David MacDougall points out that if filmmakers limit
themselves to only unprovoked manifestations of behavior during filming, they
often do not get access to the events and information that subjects take for
granted (MacDougall, 124). Also since human behavior is such a tangled web of
contingencies, associations, and motivations, simply rendering an event
faithfully in the sense of duration and natural sound is obviously insufficient to
the task of understanding the meaning of what’s actually taking place.
Thus, a new form of participatory filmmaking was called for, one in which
there was an understanding that what is being recorded is the relationship
between the observer and the observed. This has been accomplished in several
ways. MacDougall cites as an example Jean Rouch’s experimentations with role
playing in Jaguar, which allowed the subjects to play roles and create their
own images of themselves (128). Another very different approach was used by
Sol Worth and John Adair in their project, Through Navaho Eyes (1972) which
allowed Navaho people to make their own films in an attempt to see whether,
in fact, they have a different ways of seeing and ordering visual space. While
these films obviously make some assumptions about why and how subjects
choose to portray themselves, they do point towards a new direction for
ethnographic film which does not eschew the evocative and experiential
potentials of cinema. They also suggest a realization that film, though not
equivocal to written accounts, may in fact provide altogether different kinds of
information. Moreover, rather than pigeonholing film as either scientific
instrument or inherently narrativizing/aesthetizing mechanism, ethnographers
can use it as a reflexive interpretive device that leaves open the possibility of
multiple points of view. Having had to confront the fact that the complexity of
human behavior always eludes both scientific specificity and broad
generalizations, it seems we are poised to explore how more complexly
structured films utilizing satire, argument, and a full range of aesthetic
techniques fulfill this task. Lastly, it seems that prescriptive formulations of
what ethnographic films are should give way to an acceptance of a variety of
techniques that serve the diversity and specificity of the subjects themselves
and which are better suited to the particular relationship that exists between
the filmmaker and participant.
Filmography
A Weave of Time, 60 min.
John Adair, S. Fanshel, and D. Gordon.
New York: Navaho Film Project, 1986
In the Land of the Head Hunters
Edward Curtis
No longer available in Edward Curtis’s original silent version of 1914.
It has been reworked in a new video version with added sound score into
In the Land of the War Canoes, 47 min.
New York: Milestone Film and Video, 1992
Nanook of the North, 70 min.
Robert Flaherty
Paris: Revillon Freres, 1922
Arrival of a Train
Lumiére Brothers
Availiable in The Lumiere Brothers’ First Films, 62 min.
A collection of 85 shorts shot between 1895 and 1897
New York: Kino on Video, 1997.
The Hunters, 73 min.
John Marshall
Available in16mm, Films on the !Kung
Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources, 1958
N!ai, Story of a !Kung Woman, 59 min.
John Marshall
Available in 16 mm, Films on the !Kung
Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources, 1952-78
Character Fomation in Different Culture Series, 42 min.
Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.
Audiovisual Services Penn State University, 1988. Original version 1940.
Jaguar, 35 min.
Jean Rouch
Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources, 1965.0
References
Asch, Timothy (1992), ’The Ethics of Ethnographic Film-making’, in Crawford, Peter Ian and
Daivd Turton (eds), Film as Ethnography, Manchester University Press, New York pp196-204.
Bateson, Gregory and Margaret Mead (1942) Balinese Character: a Photographic Analysis. New
York Academy of Sciences, Special Publications 2, New York.
deBrigard, Emilie (1995), ’The History of Ethnographic Film’, in Hockings, Paul (ed), Principles
of Visual Anthropology 2nd Ed. , Mouton de Gruyter, New York pp13-44.
Heider, Karl (1982), Ethnographic Film 3rd Ed. University of Texas Press, Austin.
Jacknis, Ira (1988), ’Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali’, Cultural Anthroplogy vol.3
no.2.
Lakoff, Andrew (1996), ’Freezing Time: Margaret Mead’s Diagnostic Photography’, Visual
Anthropolphy Review vol 12 no. 1.
MacDougall, David (1995), ’Beyond Observational Cinema’, in Hockings, Paul (ed), Principles of
Visual Anthropology 2nd Ed. , Mouton de Gruyter, Inc. All rights reserved.
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