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Rivers of Sand
1. Anthropologist and filmmaker Peter Loizos has argued that while many of Robert Gardner’s
films have fallen afoul of the strictures of textual anthropologists on the grounds that they are
non-”realist”, and operate more through montage and symbolism, nonetheless “[w]ritten
ethnography [itself] has to be synthetic and composite; it has to transpose, to decontextualise, and
reaggregate.” Do you agree? Think also about Gardner’s style in this film, and how it compares
to that (those) of observational filmmakers. (Some critics, such as William Rothman, have
lumped him in as a vérité filmmaker: does this seem plausible to you?) How interested does
Gardner in fact seem to be in “the people,” and their unique subjective experiences? Or is he
indeed interested in something beneath consciousness, beneath surface appearances —
something, then, only ever accessible by playing fast and loose with the rules and regs of realism
(though are there indeed such rules and regs?)?) Do you agree, for instance, with Ivo Strecker’s
characterization of the differences between the two in these terms (in Reader):
“I was frustrated [with the filming of Rivers of Sand] because of the omnipotent and
alienating way we were doing the filming... Bob had all the film in the world. We could
have quietly settled down in one place and filmed one domain of Hamar life closely. We
could have been “real people sitting in a compound filming other real people”
[MacDougall 1982: 8]. But this was not what happened. We constantly moved around
and were the ubiquitous observers who, to paraphrase David MacDougall, “defied
ordinary social limits and forms of accountabity.” Although seemingly scientific, our
observation was “magical” and a tool by which, at the expense of the Hamar, the
filmmaker would later give his audience “a sense of untrammeled will”.”
2. Rothman, in his essay on Rouch’s Chronique, wrote of Gardner in these terms: “For Gardner,
culture is the system of masks and lies humans create to deny the truth of our condition, a truth
that nonetheless can be recognized by anyone with eyes to see. It is the system by which we hide
our cruelty, and our tenderness, from each other and from ourselves. Films like... Rivers of
Sand... are sublime and beautiful poems in which each society Gardner films becomes a
metaphor for the tenderness and cruelty of all human existence... Gardner turns to a particular
people to make a film that speaks an unspeakable truth about humanity, then moves on.” As you
watch, think about whether Gardner seems more interested in the universal than the particular. If
so, what are the ethical implications of producing such a (universalist) documentary
representation on the backs of the actual people involved? Is one more likely to fashion a
universal statement from a culture foreign to and distant from one’s own? If so, so what? What
ethical and epistemological “forms of accountability” are there/ should there be, if any?
3. Of the whipping of girls in this film, Ivo Strecker writes (in Reader): “That the whipping was
ritualized and initiated by the girls themselves, is not made clear in the film.” Do you agree?
(Loizos, conversely, proposes that the “extended metaphor” of this film is an image “of a youth
whipping a girl who smiles lovingly at him after the whipstroke,” which at least has the merit of
entertaining a more complex interplay between pleasure and pain, as well as domination and
subordination.) How do you explain such differences in the interpretation of this film by two
anthropologists?
4. Strecker also characterizes the content of Omalleinda’s narration as belonging more properly
to the “ideal-typical” than the actual realm of social behavior, when he implies that it is
misleadingly presented as everyday reality. But is it? Listen closely to Omalleinda’s rhetoric, as
her words are translated, and think about how general or specific they are...
5. Loizos has also suggested that in “Rivers of Sand,” we are invited to “suspend” our
conceptual/ abstract faculties, and to “surrender” to our sight. Do you agree? Of all the senses,
what is it about the phenomenological experience of sight — and the object of sight, the visual in
general — that encourages one to conceive of “surrendering” to it? (Does one ever talk about
surrendering to language, to one’s linguistic faculty, to expository prose?)
6. In “Metaphors of Vision,” avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage wrote: “...I suggest there is
a pursuit of knowledge foreign to language and founded upon visual communication, demanding
a development of the optical mind, and dependent upon perception in the original and deepest
sense of the world.” What is he talking about? What is, or could be, “perception in the original
and deepest sense of the world”? And how might it be beyond, or outside, or precede language?
What then might be the nature and the status of the particular kind of “knowledge” that would
ensue from or else be embodied in such optical perception, and how might it relate both to the
synaesthetic cinematic viewing experience and to “anthropological knowledge” in its classically
circumscribed logocentric modalities?
Put another way, or simply more generally, if the human subject is constituted by both
language and imaging, and the one is not fully reducible to the other, then what is the status of
image-based “knowledges,” might they lie partly outside the science of semiotics (and the
interpretive endeavor of anthropology?), and may they be linked to instinct, the unconscious, the
body, or other pre- or nonlinguistic domains? And if so, how are we to respond to them — how
may we best take advantage of them — within the confines of the traditionally word-based
academy (at least in human sciences and humanities, if not the arts)?
7. Stan Brakhage has written of “Rivers of Sand” that it “is in every way greater than Dead
Birds, which is miracle upon miracle; [Gardner’s] anthropological camera eye and personal sense
of communal “I” collaborate in near perfect balance, so that we know these peoples [he]
photograph[s].”
Do you agree that we “know” the people Gardner photographs? What is a communal
“I””? And, whatever it is, how does Gardner’s “personal sense” of it dovetail with his
“anthropological camera eye”? Does it at all?
8. The great Mexican poet Octavio Paz has written of this film,
“In filming Rivers of Sand, Robert Gardner has been neither indifferent to the
extraordinary loveliness of the landscape, nor to the handsomeness — no less
extraordinarily alluring — of men and women. His camera scans with precision and feels
with sympathy — the objectivity of an anthropologist, the fraternity of a poet.”
Consider two things: (1) what is the relationship between Gardner’s camera and the
“handsomeness” of the bodies, both male and female, that are paraded before us on the screen?
What is his relationship to the bodies in the film, and how it is expressed both in the
cinematography and the editing? (2) Do you in fact believe that his camera yokes the
“objectivity” of an anthropologist to the “fraternity” — or at any rate, sensibility — of a poet?
What is, or might be, the relationship between anthropology and/or non-fiction film, on the one
hand, and poetry, on the other, and in what fruitful configurations, if any, could you ever see
them being combined?
9. The literary critic Fred Jameson once opened a book with the claim, “The visual is essentially
pornographic.” Do you agree? What does this mean, if anything, in regard to a film like Rivers
of Sand? How can one distinguish between the erotic and the pornographic (and is the
distinction to be made in regard to the putatively objective content of a representation/image, or
to the use and/or abuse of it made by the beholder)?