THE
ETHNOGRAPHIC IMPULSE
Class 6 – March 12
Class 6 – March 12
We
explore ethnographic practice in documentary, whether it be framing the other or
documenting a culture from the inside
out.
LOOK:
· Robert Flaherty. “Nanook of the North.” 79 minutes,1922.
LOOK
(IN-CLASS):
· Timothy Asch & Napoleon Chagnon. “The Ax Fight.” 30
minutes, 1974.
· Robert Gardner. Excerpt from “Forest of Bliss.” 90 minutes,
1986.
· Xav Leplae. Excerpt from “I’m Bobby.” 32 minutes, 2003.
· Bruce Baille. “Valentin De Las Sierras.” 10 minutes.1967.
READ: (all in class files)
· Jean Rouch. “The Camera and Man.” Ciné-Ethnography. University
of Minnesota Press, 2003.
· James Clifford. “ On Ethnographic Allegory.” Writing Culture:
The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography University
of
California Press, 1986.
· Robert Gardner. “Some Thoughts about Making Forest of Bliss.”
Remarks at the Invitational Screening, 1985.
· Alexander Moore. “The Limitations of Imagist Documentary.” SVA Newsletter, Fall, 1988.
· Ákos Östör. “Forest of Bliss: Film & Anthropology.” East-West Film Journal. Vol. 8, No. 2, 1994.
This week’s collection of articles and films provides an
extensive array of methods and styles with which to examine the ethnographic
impulse.
While the week’s question directs me to think about
documenting a culture from the inside
out as well as from the outside in, it seems to me that these examples
constitute only the latter category, one that has long been controversial. As
James Clifford notes in his discussion of Margaret Mead, the practice of
ethnography has been assailed with claims of inauthenticity since the inception
of the genre with Nanook of the North.
(ironically, it is well known that even the name of Nanook was misleading, as it
was not his actual name)
I found myself agreeing with Clifford, that allegory is
perhaps endemic to the genre of ethnography, and rather than fight this, documentarians
should be conscious of what allegory they are responsible for creating. I'm Bobby seems to make one kind of commentary on this. If ethnography can't be honest, it can certainly be entertaining. I wasn't sure if such a highly orchestrated pieces truly fit into the tradition of ethnographic documentary of Vertov and Regnault, however.
In contrast
to this view that manipulation must be accepted, Asch and Chagnon’s film Ax
Fight is a uniquely labored attempt to present a sociologically accurate
picture of an event in Yanomamo culture. The filmmakers show a fight in its
chaotic entirety, break down the events with text and graphic organizers, and
then show an edited version. Interestingly, the filmmakers were challenged
regarding their interpretation of the events in Adam Curtis’s The Trap, where Curtis claimed that the
fight was most likely exacerbated by the presence of the film crew and its
effect on the local economy of the tribe. Asch refused to admit it, but current notions regarding the influence and effects of observation on people's behavior would tend to support that view. Watching one of the Yamomamo women spout a series of insults at her kinsman, her eye straying multiple times to the camera as if it was a witness, provides another kind of corroboration.
Baillle’s macroscopically trained portrait of Mexican
culture in Valentin de las Sierras was
the only piece in this week’s viewings that challenged Clifford’s limiting of
ethnography as allegory for me. The universalizing way in which the camera
roved across the eyes of beasts, the neck of the guitar, and the colors of the sky
seemed to deny any possibility of encapsulating a culture in a conceptual framework.
The film had an intense physicality, and this utterly sensorial quality combined
with its abstract visual style seemed to cut across cultural judgements.
Postscript
Forest of Bliss is an interesting take on the idea of ethnography as allegory. Gardner seems to embrace that view, in the opening credits a title card announces what the film will be about- about the circle of life, where everything is either being eaten or eating.
While the film shows us rituals of this cycle, it also does not hesitate to interrupt our sense of it, particularly with sound. We hear burps and see dead bodies in the midst of otherwise beautifully composed scenes. In a moment where we might feel some kind of transcendence with people or animals, something visceral takes precedent. In this way the film, which seems to start out as illustrative, transcends the illustrative to become multi-sensorial experience, a kind of living metaphor.
While Gardner is indeed a master of film form, I can't help but point out that the marvel of this film of course has everything to do with his subject. India is a land where the Farsi people engage in a ritual of vultures eating their dead, and Hindus feed rats because they are there. Even today, fecundity and decomposition balance on the point of a knife, absolutely everywhere you look.
Postscript
Forest of Bliss is an interesting take on the idea of ethnography as allegory. Gardner seems to embrace that view, in the opening credits a title card announces what the film will be about- about the circle of life, where everything is either being eaten or eating.
While the film shows us rituals of this cycle, it also does not hesitate to interrupt our sense of it, particularly with sound. We hear burps and see dead bodies in the midst of otherwise beautifully composed scenes. In a moment where we might feel some kind of transcendence with people or animals, something visceral takes precedent. In this way the film, which seems to start out as illustrative, transcends the illustrative to become multi-sensorial experience, a kind of living metaphor.
While Gardner is indeed a master of film form, I can't help but point out that the marvel of this film of course has everything to do with his subject. India is a land where the Farsi people engage in a ritual of vultures eating their dead, and Hindus feed rats because they are there. Even today, fecundity and decomposition balance on the point of a knife, absolutely everywhere you look.
Clifford, like Sontag, provide a nice way to frame the ethnographic film as what I like to call a "productive text." In thinking about allegory we can think of meaning (culture) being shaped by the filmmaker, however there are inevitably myriad readings of that meaning by the viewers/listeners. Furthermore, it's the type of meaning that evolves/transforms over multiple viewings. Teaching these films every year, I get to experience new meanings each time.
ReplyDeleteAx Fight is an interesting one partly because of its opaque formal structure, but also because of its controversy. Every term my students shift from either hating it or loving it. Last term I had a student in tears because she couldn't even believe I would screen such a film. As far as the controversy goes, there is the initial and very valid argument you noted that anthropologists with cameras provoke performances from their subjects. This is an argument that continued/s to be a critique of direct cinema (sometimes mistakenly called cinema verite). Also Chagnon wrote many books about the "fierce" cultural of the Yanomami, something that seems to have been exaggerated if not exploited. He also writes about their early sexual development and there have been claims that Chagnon himself had sexual encounters with young Yanomami girls. These claims mainly were made in a film called "Darkness in El Dorado," in 2002. The AAA has discredited this film and I haven't seen it myself. Regardless, Ax Fight is an important film and one that almost all intro ethno film classes watch. It's a film about method, a film about making ethnography….and, as an added benefit, one full of controversy that calls question to the ethics of its makers and ethnographic practice on whole.