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Lorenzo Ferrarini
PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology with Visual Media
University of Manchester
[email protected]
http://www.lorenzoferrarini.com
IUAES 17th World Congress, Panel V01 Visual Encounters
Manchester, 7 August 2013
Not for citation nor diffusion without author's permission
Issues in filming in the first person among the donsow of Burkina Faso
Introducing his film Tourou et Bitti, Jean Rouch described it as an experiment in cinema in the
first person. Forty years later I found myself reinterpreting this idea, during my research on
the donsow of Western Burkina Faso. Donsoya is an initiatory society that centres its
knowledge on hunting. Not all hunters are donsow. Becoming one means acquiring esoteric
knowledge concerning, in addition to killing animals, herbal medicine, amulet making and
ritual practices. An important component in the lifeworld of a donso is also that of the
embodied experience of the bush environment, and this has been the centre of my research. I
must also add that donsoya is almost exclusively, even though exceptions exist, a society of
men. Women are theoretically excluded from this knowledge and from the practice of hunting.
Studying the donsow meant for me becoming part of this initiatory society, sharing practical
activities, experiencing apprenticeship, learning hunting and magic, thanks to the openmindedness of persons like the head of the hunters of the village of Karankasso Sambla and
my teacher Adama Sogo Traoré. I wanted to translate this experience in a film project that
could represent the apprenticeship of donsoya from the point of view of a newly initiated
person. I am going to elaborate a bit on three main issues I encountered using this approach
and show brief samples of the solutions I adopted.
I mentioned my interest in the embodied dimension of hunting, especially in its role in the
building of the community of donsow. I believe representing the sensuous aspects of culture is
already enough of a challenge, but when the focus is on hunting it is even more complicated.
Hunting is especially complicated because it is played on the thin edge that separates
perceiving with being perceived, its practice expands the limits of perception. My
apprenticeship of hunting allowed me to go through this enskilment of perception, and put me
in front of the problem of how to represent it. There is a long-established prejudice in visual
anthropology whereby the recording that is the closest to perception is the least edited one.
Steven Feld has written against this idea that keeps surfacing every now and then, as recently
in the Suhr and Willerslev article Can Films Show the Invisible? I believe a conscious mastery of
recording techniques and technologies can, on the other hand, help a great deal in the task of
evoking the sensuous qualities of the ethnographic experience. In visual terms, hunting in
daylight was often a very frustrating experience, made of endless wanderings trying to spot
small animals in a very contrasty scenario, overwhelming with details. I tried to convey this
puzzlement of perception using a hand held wide-angle lens, which embraces significantly
more than the human field of view but gives more sense of three-dimensionality, thanks to an
apparent increase in perspective. The camera and man system travels without really
focussing on anything, searching the bush. Night hunting is perhaps even more puzzling, it is a
world of altered perceptions, at the light of a head torch. In this case I recurred to more
experimental techniques like long photographic exposures and desaturation of the image.
Perhaps even more interesting is the relevance of sound. As a hunter, I had to learn to listen to
the environment and to the sounds I produced walking, trying as much as possible to perceive
and not to be perceived. Here I decided to reconstruct a soundtrack made of separate
recordings, mostly ambiances and the sound of my steps on different kind of terrains. A
spaced stereo microphone configuration like ORTF provides a sort of analogy to what for the
camera is a wide-angle lens, rendering a relatively three-dimensional recording where depth
is emphasised.
With the help of my main hunting companion Lasseni Traoré I worked on the balance of the
two kinds of recordings. Mindful of analogous experiments by Steven Feld in PNG, I had Lasso
give me indications on different mixes of bird ambiances and steps, first to represent his
perception of an inexperienced me in the bush, then what a good hunter should sound like. In
some points this reconstructed soundtrack is constituted by up to 12 tracks.
My point here is relatively simple: psychologists like James Gibson, philosophers like MerleauPonty and anthropologists like Ingold have underlined how perception is fundamentally
different from recording. For a recording to be evocative of perception, then, a reflexive and
dialogic effort is required, in connection with conscious choices in terms of the recording
techniques to be used. The aim is not to create a digital replica of perception but to mimic it, in
the sense of pointing at it while preserving a difference. For me it is less a matter of montage,
than it is of the actual recording process as an attempt to engage the body of the recordist
with that of the listener.
I remember before I left for fieldwork, most of those who listened to a presentation of my
project would ask me how was I planning to go hunting and be recording at the same time.
Even with all the analogies between the camera and a gun, evidenced especially by theorists
and historians of photography, I admit that the two activities are not very compatible. I found
it methodologically very important to separate a phase of my research in which I was mostly
worried about learning to hunt and the camera was most of the time in the backpack, from a
second, more productive phase. I had to practise hunting without a camera for a good six
months before I made myself an idea of how to represent my experience. And as you probably
realised from the earlier description, reconstruction has a very important place in my film
project. For example, to connect again with the previous discourse about perception, to
represent the difficulty of seeing animals lying in the shadow, I set up a camera on a tripod
and placed a dead francolin in front of it, giving the viewer the time to visually scan the frame,
without being able to individuate the animal camouflaged on some dry leaves. Then a shot is
fired and the animal is suddenly visible, while the hunter enters the frame to get it. This
staged scene recreates a situation that happened to me countless times, and is very telling of
the spotting skills of my companions.
My point here is that reconstruction has a great anthropological interest, especially for the
dialogic dynamics it generates in the process. In my case, filming in the first person meant also
that the film project and my apprenticeship were so intertwined that the people teaching me
were performing for the camera as much as they were for me. So I refuse to distinguish or to
put labels on the scenes that were reconstructed and those someone would consider
authentic because there is no such distinction. Many events in the film were inspired to the
events of my year of stay. The antelope killing that is placed at the very beginning has a
double role, in the development of the film script and as an arrival point of my learning
process. The footage from the initiation is from my own ritual, and a sequence about the
making of an amulet was staged for the camera but was in fact at the same time a way to teach
me how to prepare that amulet. So the whole film is permeated by an ambiguity between the
point of view of the camera and the point of view of the person behind it.
Now, the stress on reconstruction and staging inevitably brings me to the last point, that of
collaboration. I don't want to talk here about compensating the subjectivity of this approach
in the first person, because I believe it is rather a matter of making justice to the fundamental
intersubjectivity of human experience. Linguist Émile Benveniste, in Problèmes de linguistique
générale, wrote about subjectivity in language, and specifically of addressing as a way of
recognising a possible subjectivity from the point of view of a subject, so that both first and
the second person can be considered expressions of subjectivity. That of the second person is
a strategy I found myself using a lot in a film that I wanted to be in the first person. It is
fundamental in trying to make the viewer identify the point of view of the camera with a
person behind it, and this works at the level of language, with hunters referring to me as "you"
most of the time, and at the level of non-verbal communication with lots of eyes aimed at the
camera. This I could obtain first of all by learning the local trade language, so as to be able to
communicate directly. But most importantly it required sharing the making of the project
with the subjects, following a process of screening and feedback once again inspired by
Rouch.
Specifically, the film was realised out of three layers of footage. The first layer I filmed mostly
observationally. Once I had a first idea of how to structure the film into sections or chapters, I
held screening sessions with the hunter with whom I would realise that given section. Starting
from his feedback and the ideas we discussed, a second layer of footage was filmed that is in
part made of the hunter's reactions to the first layer, in which most often he was seeing
himself. Because I was effectively a student of these men, the chapters and the whole film are
structured as teachings - as a matter of fact they are teachings. The third layer is in dialogue
with my teacher, who finally watched the film chapters more or less as they are now, and
recorded his comments to them, again in the form of teachings. He delivered a brilliant
performance with much improvisation, which also showed how he and the other hunters
understood my use of the camera as a device for generating knowledge, in a path we could
somehow share in the study of donsoya.