Больше, чем антропологический фильм? Визуальная антропология и развитие межкультурного диалога

No ethnographic film is merely a record of another society: it is always a record of the meeting between a filmmaker and that society. If ethnographic films are to break through the limitations inherent in their present idealism, they must propose to deal with that encounter. Until now they have rarely acknowledged that an encounter has taken place.

David MacDougall

The idea of my film is to transform anthropology, the elder daughter of colonialism, a discipline reserved to those with power interrogating people without it. I want to replace it with a shared anthropology. That is to say, an anthropological dialogue between people belonging to different cultures, which to me is the discipline of human sciences for the future .

Jean ouch

Foreward

In September 2012, I was appointed as a member of the International Jury at the XVI Sardinia International Ethnographic Film Festival (SIEFF) in Nuoro [1] . One of the issues raised during the discussions that took place between the participants (most of them anthropologists-filmmakers) was the question as follows: What should be the criteria to distinguish an ethnographic film from (generic) documentary films ?

Annoyed with such an obsolete and inconclusive issue, I once stressed the uselessness and absurdity o what was a sort of return to the past in my opinion. In fact, my perception was that the most polemic critiques against some of the films screened at the Festival were re-echoing a debate that I thought that had been closed since several decades – at least since the late 1980s. Obviously, the youngsters are too often unaware of the mistakes made by the elders! That is the reason why I consider useful to evoke here what was my outlook at that time.

What is Ethnographic Film?

With a certain irony, “visual” anthropologists – some decades ago – used to speak of themselves as a “small tribe”. We might define that group as the people involved (though certainly not exclusively) with questions about the use of audio-visual media in anthropological research, teaching and museum contexts, and/or those who gathered frequently during international meetings, festivals, and other academic events. Given the present growth of interest in visual anthropology and the consequent increase in numbers of its neophytes, it seems no longer appropriate to speak of a “little tribe” but its “elders” still continue to consider themselves as “referees” of the visual anthropology history and development (thereby adding a dose of pride and self-satisfaction to the irony).

Merely because they are united on this point, one should not believe that they share a more general intellectual homogeneity or solid concurrence about ideas. Of course, there are always conflicts and roughly sketched contrasts between different academic “schools.” However, such distinctions have usually been maintained within the domestic walls and in this context, the family's dirty laundry has always been washed discretely. Until what seems like yesterday, the life of our tribe was one in which respect and reverence for what Jean Rouch always called notres ancêtres totémiques were maintained and at the head of such ancestors sat the father of fathers, Robert Flaherty, immutable and unchangeable, as if he had been deposited there by higher forces.

Suddenly, in the late 1980s, some of the inherited unspoken rules of the game were shattered, and the result was something of a riot – and, as always happens when it is a family quarrel, the turmoil was such that even the blindest and deafest of the family could not fail to notice that it was taking place. I refer to the sudden (though not unexpected) burst of polemical writing about Robert Gardner's film, Forest of Bliss [2] .

I will not consider why hostilities about a film that has been possible to see since 1985 emerged only in 1988/89. Rather, I would like to underline that like the kidnapping of Helen for the War of Troy or the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo for the First World War, ForestofBliss was the pretext or catalyst for a debate whose real purpose was the release of deep and complex tensions, which had created a light illness in the realm of visual anthropology.

And so, the problems have risen to the surface, a good example of which is represented in the counter offensive that Edmund Carpenter launched against Jay Ruby in defence of Gardner [3] . This counter offensive might be reduced to a not very academic response to injuries, which seem to be rather trivial. It appears to be something like a reprimand for Ruby's temerity in having dared to raise doubts about the status of the totemic ancestor Flaherty, for having committed the crime of injuring a divinity by suggesting a “de-mystification” of Flaherty. I do not believe it is very important to continue re-telling stories about the polemical onslaughts that are still going on around ForestofBliss – it is hardly educational and I cannot enter the fray without making at least some sort of anthropological analysis of Gardner's work. However, that task is neither my intention nor could it be done in the space available to me if it were.

All the same, if we individualise the principal themes of the polemic, in the essential criticisms of Forest ofBliss and the other “ethno-graphic” documentaries of Gardner we can identify a number of general questions about the very nature of what is considered to be the ethnographic film and the future of visual anthropology itself – questions that require facing and resolution. I do not say this to give asenseof drama to these pages. I believe, it is very significant that a discrete domain of “scientific cinematography” has been developed without particular difficulty in the natural sciences, while in the domain of human sciences and in anthropology in particular (even after the promising start during the 19th century and early 20th century), it often created a sentiment of “suspicion” toward the cinema, which was thereby pushed to the margins of scientific and didactic activities. If we do not clarify the nature and the function of “ethnographic film,” the credibility of “visual anthropology” itself risks being compromised. It is important to understand the danger that causes Jonathan Parry in commenting on Forest of Bliss from an “expert” point of view (that is from the position of an ethnographer of Benares, the subject of the film) to observe: “if this genre is all we can expect from the marriage between anthropologist and filmmaker, then I wish for a speedy divorce.”

Although it may not be necessary to formulate a definition of the concept of ethnographic film, it is imperative that we provide a response to the demands implicit in the debate among the members of our tribe. I do not pretend to suggest an answer; rather I propose to indicate some of the problems, which I hold to be prejudicial , as clearly as possible.

John Marshall was both ethnographer and creator of the film The Hunters (1957). Without question, he provided the detailed anthropological knowledge about the Bushmen of the Kalahari, while the editing was done by Robert Gardner. John Collier has written about this relationship: “ the shooting is an expression of an effort to record the ethnographic reality ,” while the editing was an attempt to make a recording of the film as “ethnographic drama” [4] . Writing about Dead Birds (1963) (which is considered one of the major Gardner's masterpieces), he mentions that the filmmaker admits “ to have taken the opportunity to speak of some of the fundamental themes of the human life ... the Dani were thus less important for me than those themes.... ” [5] . Collier observes: “ It is evident that the ethnography gives to Gardner the excuse to develop his own philosophic ideas about the unavoidability of the eternal conflict among men .”

The two films cited (which were awarded at the Festival Dei Popoli of Florence, respectively in 1959 and 1964) are generally considered among the “classics” of ethnographic cinema. All the same, we cannot avoid asking ourselves whether we can use them to speak of an ethnographic cinema at all. If we may use a term promoted by Karl Heider, the ethnographicness of a film is not determined by its content. A film made about a “primitive” population is not ipso facto ethnographic, nor is a film made around “complex” society necessarily of a non-ethnographic genre. These are obvious points but they have been frequently forgotten.

On the other hand, this is not a problem pertaining to visual anthropology only but all the ethnoanthropological disciplines in their entirety. In a work of some years ago on “cultural anthropology” I wrote that about “the problem of delimiting with precision the field of cultural anthropology, to pretend to define it in reference to a specific object of research, (would be) misleading.” I concluded by observing that “cultural anthropology does not pose itself today as the study of something, but rather as a method of approach to the human reality” [6].

According to Heider, the value of an ethnographic film is directly proportional to the value of the research and of the analyses which precede the research [7] . Collier is of the same mind, maintaining that the criteria by which to judge an ethnographic film can be found only in the field work that constitutes its basis [8] . And Ruby (1989) asserts on his own behalf that “ the fundamental criteria that we should use to measure the value of a film designated as ethnographic are those of anthropology and not of the aesthetic of cinema ” [9] . On his own behalf, it is exactly in reference to Gardner's films that Asen Balikci (1989) asks himself why they are classified with an anthropological designation “ if we recognize that his films are essentially visual poems that express the free creativity of an artist uninterested in accepting the discipline of the ethnographic method... This certainly does not mean that those films must be banned from our classrooms. On the contrary, they must be shown often, as examples of the perception that an artist has of the diversity of the exotic environments, but not as an example of visual ethnography” [10] .

Many other scholars who have expressed similar points of view could be quoted but I believe that it is not necessary. It appears evident that we can consider relatively shared the desire to confirm the primacy of anthropology over cinema, the first being a “science” to which the second can and must serve only as an instrument, important and sometimes irreplaceable though it may be.

One of the recurrent leitmotifs in the controversy over Gardner is in substance the same problematic o the relationship between anthropology and cinema. Our positivist “ancestors” did not have any doubts about the fact that “photo-cinematographic” images furnish an “objective” representation of reality. Paradoxically, today it seems that the attitude has been reversed: the anthropological method (in as much as it is “scientific”) is more objective than images (whose manipulatibility no one doubts now). This sentiment certainly does not get expressed in explicit terms, although it is one possible interpretation o the refusal on the part of the (visual) anthropologists to evaluate ethnographic films according to aesthetic and/or artistic and therefore subjective criteria, while the “anthropological” criteria are less subjected to the interpretive “caprice” of the artist who freely re-elaborates the reality.

From this point of view Radihika Chopra, while intending to defend the value of Forest of Bliss , inadvertently deals a blow to her own criticisms when she affirms that the way in which the film is made limits it to only one possible interpretation: “ The film is a textual analysis of Benares, but one which does not impose a single meaning frame upon the viewer; rather it leaves open the levels of interpretation to which the city is subject ... the film provides us the visual words to give voice to the silent structure. But it provides them in the way the city makes them available to us – through images, which demand that we make of them what we choose, but within the paradigmatic frame of the sacred city of Benares ” [11] . This position confirms the idea of those who declare that this film is truly an example of “art” rather than of anthropology!

This consideration aside, we need to ask ourselves what will become of that essential function o ethnographic film, which is that of communication. As Collier points out, the value of an ethnographic film is based only on its communicative abilities, that is capacity to permit the spectator to “read and understand” what is happening [12] . Parenthetically, I do not believe that it is useful to add to this proposition that an ethnographic film cannot present events filmed as they unfold “ in the same way and in the same time ” as they would have unfolded even in the absence of the observer (anthropologist/cineaste), as Jean Dominique Lajoux still suggests [13] .

As much as ethnographic film can communicate an interactive situation in general terms, as David McDougall notes, its intercultural character is what distinguishes it from documentary film in general [14] . MacDougall writes: “ Its intent to interpret a society to benefit another is the element that reveals its relationship with anthropology .” Even more explicitly he specifies ethnographic film as something “ that places itself somewhere within a conceptual space comprised by the film's subject, the filmmaker and the audience .” In other words, the interactive situation does not involve only the filmmaker/anthropologist and the film's subjects but also, in a relatively mediated form, the spectators. Much has been written about this subject, but the tyranny of space does not allow me to conduct a comprehensive review. Nevertheless, the controversy with regard to Gardner's films offers a number of useful indications in formulating a response to the question “what is ethnographic film?”

I would begin by highlighting the question of the nature of the rapport between filmmaker and anthropologist in the process of making a film. The problem has been widely debated and does not need to be rehashed here. I will cite only the very clear position summarized by Timothy Asch in emphasizing the necessity of the anthropologist and the filmmaker in having a common goal: ethnographic film can only become a productive tool for anthropologists if they can influence the creation of the film at every stage from planning to filming and editing [15] .

It appears that these conditions are not always respected in Gardner's films. Alexander Moore bases all his criticisms of Forest of Bliss on an initial consideration that merits our maximum attention. Disagreeing with many who maintain that “to see is to know”, Moore argues that “ there are clear limitations in the information that can be conveyed by visual images. There are many techniques available today, not used by Gardner, to extend visual information ” [16] . These techniques are:

• a)    the use of subtitles to translate the dialogue of the film's subjects;

• b)    the insertion on the sound track of translated interviews;

• c)    the use of a narration and/or subtitles serving as an “omniscient voice” (most commonly that of the filmmaker).

As Heider observed, the use of off-screen narration is legitimate only when the information conveyed with images is not sufficient to understand the film text [17]. In particular, he took into consideration two possibilities: the “contextualisation” of the filmed event and the explanation of the “visual mysteries” (for example, in films about ritual where one must consider abstract, symbolic and verbal meanings; words are indispensable means of explanation). No doubt, in Forest of Bliss the “visual mysteries” are many, for most of the audience have little knowledge of Indian culture.