Anthro Notes

National Museum of Natural History Bulletin for Teachers

Vol. 16 No. 1 Winter 1994

ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM: THEN AND NOW

[EDITOR'S NOTE: In recent years, anthropology, like other disciplines, has undergone a radical transformation as new intellectual currents have impacted the field. As anthropologist John Homiak explains in the following article, “there has been a shift from objectivity and ‘facts’ to subjectivity and ‘points of view.’” Anthropologists have had to come to terms with the legacy of their discipline's colonial roots, as the world's indigenous peoples increasingly engage in their own self-study and representation. In writing ethnographies and in making ethnographic film, most anthropologists today would subscribe to the belief that understanding another culture can at best be only partial and always filtered through the lens of one's own cultural biases. In analyzing films shown at a 1993 film festival, Homiak focuses on two major perspectives--the “indigenous perspective” and the “global perspective"--that help explain challenges to and changes in ethnographic filmmaking and cultural representation.]

INTRODUCTION

Time was when ethnographic films were rather straightforward visual documents that depicted ceremonies, socialization patterns, or phases in the subsistence cycles of small-scale traditional societies. Films like Trance and Dance in Bali or Bathing Babies in Three Cultures by Margaret Mead immediately come to mind. Such films served as visual illustrations of the concepts or cultural categories about which anthropologists most frequently wrote (e.g., ritual, myth, socialization, or identity).

The authority of these films rested, by and large, not in their images but in the commentary spoken over the image track. For good reason: the images of ethnographic film typically confront us with cultural differences--with scenes of people in faraway places engaged in seemingly exotic behaviors. The sound track carries the burden of meaning by explaining to viewers the significance of these unfamiliar behaviors and events.

Prior to the advent of the subtitling of native speech in the early 1970s, it was usually a “voice-of-god” narration that provided this translation in definitive and unequivocal terms. At times, these narrations even took on an omniscient quality as in the case of films like The Hunters (John Marshall 1957) or Dead Birds (Robert Gardner 1963). The narrators of these films liberally attribute thoughts to the subjects and seemingly know their every feeling, thought, and desire. Until recently (the last 15 years), this was not a problem for anthropologists because, like the general public, we accepted the conventions of cinematic realism by which these films were constructed. Never mind that the giraffe hunt in The Hunters was constructed from footage shot of various hunts, or that the tribal battle in Dead Birds was similarly constructed. As long as it was seen to serve the end of ethnographic ‘truth,’ such continuity editing was not seen as particularly problematic.

This, of course, has made ‘authenticity’ a somewhat more complex issue in ethnographic film, but we generally assume that unrehearsed ‘naturally occurring’ events are being recorded. All of this is supported by the unobtrusive camera associated with the documentary mode, the so-called “fly-on-the-wall” perspective that remained dominant from Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) until at least the early 1970s. This style of shooting makes an implicit claim to observational neutrality as seen, for example, in such made-for-television films as National Geographic Specials, Granada Television's Disappearing Worlds, and the BBC's Under the Sun series. One of the primary reasons why these visual texts continue to be popular among general audiences is that they appear transparent and objective.

ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM TODAY

CUT! CUT! I WANT CAMERA ONE TO COME IN TIGHT ON THE SHAMAN'S FACE . . . LET ME SEE THE ANTHROPOLOGIST ACTUALLY TALKING TO HIM...THE SUBJECT HAS TO SPEAK...ALL RIGHT, TAKE TWO...

Today, the encounter between ethnographic filmmakers and what we fashionably call ‘the Other’ has dramatically shifted. Filming as if the camera were not there has given way to a more frank admission of the fact that ethnographic film entails an encounter between the members of two cultures. In this regard, many films are now reflexive, incorporating strategies of presentation so that the terms, and even meanings, of an encounter between filmmaker and ‘Other’ are foregrounded as part of the context of the film itself. Now we not only see ‘the Other’ but we also see the filmmaker showing us ‘the Other.’ In theory, this serves to destroy any illusion that film is or can be an unambiguous representation of ‘reality’ by giving viewers access to the intersubjective basis on which ethnographic knowledge and understanding is constructed. This helps viewers remain aware of the fact that films, like written texts, adopt particular perspectives and reflect points of view--rather than express some transparent representation of “the truth.”

Many filmmakers now go out of their way to make clear that anthropologists traditionally engaged not in silent observation but in speaking and interacting with their subjects. The filmmaker/anthropologist is part of the plot. Being open about this dialogical process and about the intentions of filmmakers and subjects alike is also seen as a way to humanize anthropological subjects rather than treating them as examples of abstract or formal principles. This is part of a ‘postmodern’ turn which, to a considerable degree, has served to collapse the separation between a traditional ‘them’ and a modern ‘us.’

In visual ethnography--as in its written counterpart--there has been a shift from objectivity and ‘facts’ to subjectivity and ‘points of view.’ Following upon the impacts of interpretive, Marxist, and feminist theory in anthropology, we recognize that even the cultures of small-scale societies that were previously the stock-in-trade of the discipline can no longer be presented as unified and homogeneous realities. We understand that meanings are contested and negotiated in these (as in our own) societies--reflecting factors of age, gender, class, status, and power. In recognition of this complexity of society, films more often feature multiple voices and contested versions of reality. “Closed” didactic readings of societies by the anthropologist and filmmaker have yielded to “open” expressive readings that reflect more direct access to the “lived experiences” of subjects.

This latter effort to re-situate the individual as the primary focus of ethnographic filmmaking grades over into postmodern concerns with voice and authority. The omniscient voice-of-God noted above is now declassé and politically under attack. Filmmakers increasingly listen for indigenous voices “speaking with” or alongside their subjects with the intent of allowing subjects to voice their own concerns. Some advocate a kind of “participatory cinema” initiated by the most prolific of French ethnographic filmmakers, Jean Rouch. In this approach, filmmaker and subjects seek to work out an authentic collaboration that provides the latter a greater role in constructing their own images or that results in films that take us where their subjects want to go.

Around the globe, however, many of the traditional subjects of the filmmaker's gaze argue that anthropologists and other professionals should have no authority at all to represent them. Indigenous groups assert that the only way their stories can truthfully be told is if the means of production are wholly in native control. It is in this climate that native filmmakers have emerged as “professional Others” who seek to “speak back to the dominant culture in their own terms.

THE MARGARET MEAD FILM FESTIVAL

The Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, held at New York City's American Museum of Natural History each fall, showcases new and innovative works by independent, ethnographic, and indigenous filmmakers. The 17th Festival, held October 4-10, 1993, included 62 films and videos selected from over 400 submissions that included student projects, television and independent productions. Although subject matters and film styles represent an eclectic offering, salient themes emerge. Aside from the concerns with reflexivity and multiple voices noted above, two themes, in particular, over the past few years highlight and help define recent trends in ethnographic film: indigenous perspectives and global perspectives.

This year's festival included a special focus on indigenous media, featuring several native filmmakers--from Papua New Guinea, Native American and Canadian Inuit communities, Japan, and Ghana.

The first two films described below reflect reflexive and participatory approaches; others that follow illustrate the diversity of approaches within the indigenous perspective. Two final films described reflect the growing concern with global and transnational outlooks. All are appropriate for the high school or college classroom.

THE EARTH IS OUR MOTHER/THE JOURNEY BACK

This 1992 film depicts the encounter between Danish documentary filmmaker Peter Elsass and a community of Archuaco Indians in Columbia. Inhabitants of a coca growing region contested by the Columbian state, drug lords, and guerilla forces, the Archuaco find their way of life and their communities caught in the struggle between these warring elements. The Archuaco and their elders were the subject of Elsass's first film, The Earth is our Mother, which depicts the role played by Archuaco elders in passing on and preserving the traditional culture of their people.

Elsass returns six years later to document the Archuaco response to the first film and to follow up on the impact that this film has had upon the community. The Journey Back insightfully and sometimes humorously explores the politics that emerge from this type of collaboration.

The filmmaker chose to advocate for the cultural autonomy of his subjects and builds this into the film at various turns. At one point, the Archuaco confront Columbian soldiers who occupy their most sacred ritual site. At another point, they accompany an elder to Bogata, the capital, to protest the murder of three Archuaco leaders believed slain by government security forces. The film thus provides a first hand look at the conflicts of race and culture in Columbia and the ways in which an indigenous people strive to perpetuate their way of life.

Elsass's two “participatory” films bring the “inaccessible” and “distant"--so typically a fixture of ethnographic film-close to our own political homefront. Teachers who draw upon these films for classroom use will want to think about the toll that the international drug trade takes on both the producers and consumers. In the global village, the little-known tribulations of the Archuaco are paradoxically juxtaposed with the unrest and violence of our own inner cities.

MEMORIES AND DREAMS

Another 1992 film that resonates with the reflexive and participatory approach is Memories and Dreams by Melissa Llewelyn-Davies (1992). This film is of interest if for no other reason than it marks the filmmaker's most recent return to the Maasai of the Loita Hills in Kenya where she shot the celebrated trilogy A Maasai Diary, and The Woman's Olamal in the 1970s. All of these films have been enormously popular for teaching. In these finely crafted portraits of Maasi life, the filmmaker examined issues of gender, ownership, and power in Maasai society and gave us intimate emotional portraits of young Maasai women experiencing the major life transitions of their culture.

In Memories and Dreams the filmmaker returns nearly twenty years later to follow up on the lives of these women and to explore their own and their community's changing attitudes toward women's roles, sex, love, and marriage. As in her earlier works, Llewelyn-Davies is an ambiguous participant in this film, asserting her presence only as an off-screen voice that interrogates her subjects. Although there is “dialogue” between filmmaker and subjects in this film, genuine collaboration seems missing. At a time when authorship and ethnographic authority are being more carefully weighed, Llewelyn-Davies’ role as interrogator seems a bit heavy-handed. The “dialogues” with Maasai women are fully controlled by Llewelyn-Davies and lack a mutuality of exchange. At one point when being queried about attitudes toward their husbands, for example, two women redirect similar questions at the filmmaker, asking her about her own husband (who had been involved in shooting the earlier films and was, in fact, known to them). Llewelyn-Davies, however, deflects the questions and moves the interrogation along to where she wishes it to go. As in more traditional ‘observational’ style films, the gulf between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is retained. This one-way feel to the dialogue left me, for one, with the nagging question as to whose “dreams and memories” were being revisited in this work--those of the Maasai or of the filmmaker.

INUIT PRODUCED VIDEOS

A series of videos are of note in the indigenous media category. They are three Inuit-produced videotapes on Inuit culture directed and produced by Zacharias Kunuk, an Inuit filmmaker from Igloolik, Northwest Territories, Canada: Qaggig (Gathering Place, 1989), Nunaqpa (Going Inland, 1991), and Saputi (The Fish Trap, 1992). All of these videos have as their primary audience Inuit peoples themselves. All were made under the direction of Inuit elders and involve the ‘reconstruction’ and representation of various traditional Inuit practices. In contrast to the external contextualizing commentary of the anthropologist, we have only the subtitled dialogue of the Inuit. Recreating the recent past that exists only in memory, Kunuk seeks to keep alive a sense of identity grounded in a traditional way of life.

Teachers who have used films from the Netsilik Eskimo Series will find interesting parallels in Kunuk's videos, but, in this case, with a different sense of pacing and perspective in imaging the land, and in personal touches that give a sense of psychological realism and intimacy to the social interactions among the Inuit. Some teachers might wish to contrast Saputi with Fishing at the Stone Weir: Part I as a way to explore exactly what is distinctive about the Inuit perspective in Kanuk's videos that will become part of a series on Igloolik life for Canadian television.

IMAGINING INDIANS

By far the most notable film in this year's indigenous category was Victor Masayesva's Imagining Indians (1992). This Hopi filmmaker presents a Native perspective on the misrepresentation of Native Americans in feature films. Masayesva breaks with strict documentary conventions and feels free to use a combination of scripted scenes, documentary and feature archival footage, and interviews. Weaving a complex narrative, he plumbs the ways in which Native Americans react to, attempt to work with, or overtly resist their representation by the dominant White culture. We get an eye-opening Native look at recent popular films by Kevin Costner and Robert Redford. Intercut through all this is a subtheme about how a romanticized “noble savage” view of American Indians has gone hand-in-hand with the commodification [commercialism] and appropriation of their arts and material culture.

Employing a keen sense of irony, Masayesva opens the film with a scene in a dentist's office, the walls of which are covered with broadsides for Hollywood films featuring Indians. The patient, a Native American woman, is seen seated in the dentist chair, her mouth plugged ("silenced") with cotton tubes. The ensuing inability of the dentist to communicate with his patient stands as a metaphor for the misunderstandings explored by the filmmaker--just as the visit to the dentist (read: “white man's medicine") constitutes a metaphor which speaks on various levels both to Whites and Native Americans. Virtually any viewer will associate the dentist's office with anxiety and discomfort, a sentiment that Masayesva plays out as he registers the sentiments which Native Americans express at being variously patronized and controlled by the dominant white culture. Periodically the dentist office scene re-appears throughout the film, to frame newly introduced subthemes that are introduced.

What is most refreshing about Imagining Indians, however, is not simply its “indigenous” perspective, but the fact that Masayesva (unlike some other native filmmakers and some anthropologists), recognizes the existence of diversity and even ambiguity within this perspective. There is no single voice that “speaks back” to the dominant White culture but many competing voices with individual points of view. At one point the filmmaker explores native protest to a recent production by Robert Redford that casts a non-Indian in the starring role as a Native American. The inserts of two Native American “talking heads” appear on the screen, each simultaneously articulating a different viewpoint on the matter.

THE ‘LOCAL’ IN THE GLOBAL

Culture Within the global ethnospace is a second theme that has emerged in ethnographic filmmaking over the past few years. Two realities exist in these films. Cultures have become progressively “de-territorialized” as native peoples migrate to the colonial motherlands, as traditional art is commodified and produced for consumption within a world system, and as people find different ways of creating ethnicity in different sites of their respective diasporas. The second reality is that we can no longer maintain the fiction of presenting ‘the local’ without reference to the global.

In the 1960s, anthropologists began to handle these problems through network analysis, in the 70s through recourse to the concept of “world system,” and in the 80s by reference to transnationalism. All along, however, most ethnographic filmmakers remained content to make films in rustic peasant villages or distant island or other remote “traditional” sites. The formula, in fact, remains popular for the types of made-for-television documentaries noted above. No doubt it produces the familiar feel for the exotic that audiences have come to appreciate in films dubbed ‘ethnographic’.

But the world is now much more complex. Even television--with its current penchant for using images of ‘the Other’ in advertising--tells us as much. Today Aboriginal Australians control their own broadcasting network and display their art in the fashionable galleries of New York; Buddhist temples exist in the heartland of America; a fair majority of Maori in New Zealand have embraced the creed of Rastafari, a religion and culture “invented” in the African Diaspora; and Songhay and other West African traders ply an international trade on the streets of Harlem. “Culture”, the so-called object of anthropological study, stubbornly refuses to stay in its place and be properly analyzed regardless of how much we anthropologists long for the simplicity of our pastoral field sites.

While many popular documentaries continue to uphold the fiction of a radical separation between a modern ‘us’ and a traditional ‘them,’ the postmodern turn in filmmaking continues to dissolve this fiction. Films like Cannibal Tours (1987), In and Out of Africa (1990), Market of Dreams (1986), My Town--Mio Paese (1986), Joe Leahy's Neighbors (1987), Black Harvest (1992), and Valencia Diary (1992) all show the complex ways in which local and global domains intersect and are implicated in one another.

TWO EXAMPLES

In the 1993 Mead Festival, two films fit admirably into this more complex niche: Rime and Reason (1992) by Francis Guilbert and Kofi: An African in France (1993) by Carlyn Saltman and Beth Epstein. Rime and Reason is a lively reconnaissance exploring the global manifestations of rap, hiphop, and raggamuffin across the urban landscapes of France. What was initially a musical and cultural manifestation, featuring the cross-over between a Jamaican-inspired deejay style known as “toasting” and African-American rap and hip-hop, is now seen as having crossed the language barrier into multicultural France.

Guibert intercuts interviews with young working-class and immigrant males and females with performance vignettes, street scenes, and the visual artwork through which young immigrants (largely Arab and African and working class whites) publically announce their presence and claim their place in the urban terrain. Through interviews they discuss what the style means to them as a form of identity and cultural resistance amidst the current anti-immigrant sentiments prevalent throughout much of France. In this film one gets a sense of the emergent and recombinant nature of hip-hop culture; something assisted by the highly visual symbols and codes of this postmodern form of cultural expression. Kofi, by contrast, is an intimate portrait film that picks up the remarkable story of Kofi Yamgnane, a missionary-educated native of Togo who recently became the first African ever to be elected as the mayor of a French town. The film traces how Kofi came to the Breton village where he lives with his French wife and all-white neighbors, his early problems of acceptance, and the headlines that followed in the wake of his election as mayor. Although he has left the village life of Africa far behind, Kofi manages to introduce some “tribal” traditions into his running of the Breton village with the formation of a council of elders. As the film unfolds, Kofi is summoned to Paris to assume a post as minister for “integration"--and in this role we begin to see how the French government attempts to use Kofi's own status as a symbol in dealing with the current social climate surrounding immigrants in France.

Screened together, Kofi and Rime and Reason form an interesting couplet. Together, they contain thought provoking perspectives from which to explore different realities of the immigration experience and radically different takes on how this experience relates to issues of race and identity.

CONCLUSION

Over the past two decades, ethnographic film has undergone a series of transformations, from films which are didactic and ones in which individuals appear as cultural ‘types’ rather than full-bodied individuals, to ones which are reflexive and that incorporate narrative strategies of presentation, providing access to indigenous voices and concerns. Many of these changes in visual ethnography took place before the more talked about postmodern turn in the writing of ethnographic texts. The concern with “dispersed authority"--producing texts which present more provisional readings of cultural phenomenon in which the burden of representation is somehow ‘shared’ between ethnographer and subjects--was recognized as an issue in ethnographic filmmaking over a decade before it became a concern in ‘writing culture.’ Perhaps one of the reasons for this is that film images are specific and cannot in themselves generalize from the immediacy of the occurrences they record. Film presents behavior and events ‘fully-formed’ and cannot as easily overlook the specific individuals which they present to our gaze.

Concerns over voice and authority have led to a repositioning of the subject across broad swaths of ethnographic film. Films are more open to native voices and concerns. In addition, more films seek to produce representations commensurate with the lived experience of the specific and named individuals they depict. This tradition, of course, has a long history dating to Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North. Now, however, in addition to Nanook, we are more likely to recognize other ‘stars’ of ethnographic cinema—Damoré Zika, !Nai, Onka, Jero Tapakan, and others. Largely because of these developments, more anthropologists now consider ethnographic film to be an alternative means of representation with its own strengths and weaknesses, rather than merely an adjunct to the ethnographic text.

In acknowledging that film is a form of communication (as argued for decades by scholars like Sol Worth and Jay Ruby), there is an accompanying expectation that more critical skills for ‘reading’ film need to be brought to bear by those who use them. This is especially true given the challenge of ‘indigenous perspectives’ and indigenously produced media. Ethnographic films are not merely depictions of ‘the real'; they articulate points of view and incorporate ideologies of their own. I concur with the assessment recently put forward by Jay Ruby that “The move to give greater voice and authority to the subject [in film] has now reached a local but extreme point” (Ruby 1991:54). What indigenous voices say about themselves and their situation is as much data to be interpreted as insight into the world of the Other.

Note.

A free listing of films (with distributor information) shown at the 1993 Margaret Mead Film Festival is available from the Education Department, American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, N.Y. 10024. For further information about the film festival call 212/769-5305; fax 212/769-5329. In addition, the Margaret Mead Traveling Film and Video Festival is scheduled to appear in Berkeley, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Austin.

Suggested Readings:

Crawford, Peter, and David Turton, eds. Film as Ethnography. Manchester University Press (distributed by St. Martin's Press), 1992.

McDougall, David. “Beyond Observational Cinema”. In Principles of Visual Anthropology. Paul Hockings, ed. Mouton, 1975.

Rollwagen, Jack, ed. Anthropological Filmmaking. Harwood Academic Publishers, 1988.

_____. Anthropological Film and Video in the 1990s. Dual Printing, Inc., 1993.

Ruby, Jay. “Exposing Yourself: Reflexivity, Anthropology, and Film,” Semiotica 30:153-79, 1988.

_____. 1991. “Speaking for, Speaking about, Speaking with, or Speaking Alongside: An Anthropological and Documentary Dilemma”. Visual Anthropology Review 7:50-67.

John Homiak, Director

Human Studies Film Archives

National Museum of Natural History