‘Say, rare Machine, who taught thee to design? / And mimick Nature with such Skill divine’ (anonymously authored poem in praise of the camera obscura, 1747).
Does a study of the history of ethnographic film reveal a tension between creativity and naturalism?
The camera’s ability for representation has been an area of critique in the history of documentary filmmaking. What is real and what is constructed? Are truth and reality the same thing? Can one construct truth? With regards specifically to ethnographic film, this paper will focus on its crucial formative years and, within this period, chronologically trace its development from the first footage of ethnographic interest in 1895 to the radical challenges to documentary leading towards its technical and theoretical modernisation in 1960. I will argue, using film examples, that there has been an ever present tension between creativity and naturalism and that the reason for this tension has come from (1) filmmaking technology’s possibilities and limits, and (2) the social context that influence the filmmaker’s decisions.
In 1895, Felix-Louis Regnault visited the Exposition Ethnographique de l’Afrique Occidentale in Paris. Like a zoo, they consisted of constructed sets marked off by a fence where ‘exotic’ people would seemingly conduct their everyday activities for the pleasure of Europeans who sometimes threw them money. Most importantly, it was considered rude or inappropriate for the Other to return the gaze. This meant that Europeans ‘were free to define, categorize, and label their subjects with impunity’ (Chapman 2009: 98). Reganult’s camera visually recorded ethnographic subjectivity for the very first time, and in Paris subjectivity happened to be at its most extreme, because what Regnault captured was not a skilled pot-making Wolof woman but the power relationship of the colonial era aligned with normative ideas of social evolutionism. Thus the story of ethnographic film begins with its most creative work, not because of its coercive out of place performance in a constructed set, but because of the 1895 ‘creative’ mentality of the viewer. Naturalism it was not.
Left: Sketch of Regnault’s destroyed footage of Wolof woman (SPLA n.d).
Right: Example of exposition poster, Lyon, 1894 (Libèration n.d.).
In 1898, Alfred Cort Haddon led a holistic Cambridge expedition of seven – whose professional roles covered anthropology, ethnology, zoology, neurology, psychiatry, psychology, linguistics, musicology, and photography – to the Torres Strait. Aligning themselves to the natural sciences, Haddon’s positivist generation saw the camera as their equivalent to a microscope or telescope which could visually apprehend material culture such as dress, technology, and architecture and overcome the objective problem of their discipline (Torresan n.d.). For the first time, the camera was taken into the field for salvage ethnography. However, not yet accustomed to developing technology, Haddon’s 35mm Newman and Guardia camera often jammed, spoiling the film. It was also too big and the film stock too sensitive to be able to move around in the manner now associated with realist documentary. Thus due to the limits of both early technology and the lack of knowledge of how best to take advantage of it, what is produced is, like Regnault’s piece, a performance, although there is at least collaboration between Haddon and the Malo (Eaton 2010).
Malo ceremonial dance in Haddon’s Torres Strait Islanders (The Bioscope 2010).
In the early 20th century, filmmaking failed in anthropology. Firstly, there was the practical difficulties of taking cameras into the field, and secondly, a new way of anthropological thought arose that focused on the invisible structures that held society together, like kinship and politics over material culture. With academia’s obstacles, the ethnographic film void was filled by commercial enterprise.
In 1912, Gaston Méliès family company Star Film, producer of special-effects films such A Trip to the Moon (1902), travelled to Tahiti and New Zealand to capture authentic locations set within fictional stories or documentaires romances. Visual anthropologist scholar, de Brigard (1975: 19) is critical:
Apart from entertainment, what is the value of nonscientific films of peoples and customs?...Human behaviour in documentary and fiction films is subject to directorial distortion to such an extent that the film may be scientifically worthless. However, authenticity can be found on levels untouched by dramatic action.
According to de Brigard (1975: 19), a film that demonstrates such authenticity is Edward Curtis’s 1914 film In the Land of the Head Hunters (aka In the Land of the War Canoes) shot in the Pacific Northwest. Although, to state this film is ‘untouched by dramatic action’ would be false. The film does depict many authentic elements such as artwork, architecture, dance, costume, rituals, and the use of local people as actors; however, it is again weaved into a fictional plot which, in de Brigard’s own
words (1975: 19), ‘concerns a wicked sorcerer, a hero, and their respective factions battling for a girl’. Melodramatic scenes are clearly staged with de Brigard (1975: 19) even commenting that ‘Curtis had learned the same lessons as D. W. Griffiths [Hollywood filmmaking pioneer], and he handled suspense well’. For de Brigard (1975: 19), her praise seems to be directed at the hard work put in by Curtis to capture his subjects.
The photographers of the Indian were not trained anthropologists, but the best of them did their work with enthusiasm, extraordinary dedication, and sensitivity. Curtis, a prolific stills photographer, spent three seasons with the Kwakiutl filming a drama of love and war in settings painstakingly reconstructed for precontact authenticity.
Here, I must state that it is important not confuse reconstructed authenticity (however painstaking it was to recreate) with authenticity itself, but I can understand de Brigard’s appreciation for the ‘authentic’ scenes being depicted and the ethnographic value of Curtis’s footage to anthropologists. This tension between creativity and naturalism would continue in the commercial sector with arguably the most famous ethnographic film released eight years later in a seminal year for anthropology.
Dramatic scenes from Curtis’s In the Land of the Head Hunters (Canadian Heritage Film Festival n.d.).
In 1922, both Robert Flaherty’s film Nanook of the North and Bronislaw Malinowski’s monograph Argonauts of the Western Pacific were released. Both raised the bar in their field and shared common ideas. Malinowski promoted focus on the ‘imponderabilia of everyday life’; Flaherty filmed mundane activities such as eating and sleeping. Malinowski sought the ‘native’s point of view’; Flaherty collaborated with Nanook by showing him new footage and receiving his comments (Loizos 1993: 13). Malinowski moved away from the dominant social evolutionist theory; Flaherty moved away from the dominant adventure and romance storyline. Malinowski promoted extensive stays in the field and participant observation; Flaherty spent several years working and filming in the area and spent one year filming the actual footage released. Malinowski promoted native language learning; Flaherty was already familiar with the language (Marks 1995: 340). Flaherty, although not an anthropologist, was certainly an adept filmmaker and pushed the look of naturalism in ethnographic film. However, this realism comes under scrutiny when one investigates behind the scenes. For example, Nanook isn’t his real name, and the family isn’t his family; Nanook hunted with guns rather than spears as depicted in the film; Nanook knew what a gramophone was, contrary to the film; the interior igloo scene was shot in a constructed three-wall igloo set; Nanook battled against an off- camera person in the rope pulling scene, rather than a seal as edited (Rothman 1997, Barnouw 1993, Ebert 2005, Leacock 1990). With this in mind, notions of naturalism clearly weaken. Anthropologist and filmmaker Timothy Asch agrees: ‘…the film was scripted. Flaherty used Eskimos as actors playing their own roles and in that sense created a prototype for feature narrative films rather than documentary films’ (Crawford and Turton 1992: 196). From this statement, Asch might also agree with my own thoughts that the film should be considered strictly under the hybrid fiction/non-fiction genre of ethnofiction or docudrama and not ‘documentary’ as reflected in the categorisation and reviews on popular Internet websites such Wikipedia, IMDb, and Amazon. However, Hollywood film critic Roger Ebert (2005) is more sympathetic:
“Nanook” is not cinema verite. And yet in a sense it is: The movie is an authentic documentary showing the creation of itself. What happens on the screen is real, no matter what happened behind it…It has an authenticity that prevails over any complaints that some of the sequences were staged. If you stage a walrus hunt [a
separate scene to the one with the seal], it still involves hunting a walrus, and the walrus hasn’t seen the script. What shines through is the humanity and optimism of the Inuit.
Both Asch and Ebert’s comments are valid but whereas Asch, the anthropologist, is looking for scientific authenticity, Ebert, the commercial cinemagoer, wants authentic emotion. This tension has arisen through two reasons. The first – the influence of technology – is evident from the hand cranked 35mm Bell & Howell camera that limited Flaherty to the tripod and thus necessitated staging but with the new Akeley Gyro head it enabled him to pan and tilt, which became a Flaherty trademark. Richard Leacock (1990: 1), a documentary filmmaker and Flaherty’s once cameraman, explains the three-walled igloo: ‘The photographic emulsions were slow by contemporary standards, hence the absolute need to construct an igloo which was open on one side to let daylight in and afford room to set up the tripod’. The second reason – the social context (in Flaherty’s case commercialism) – is evident from Flaherty’s decision to sacrifice absolute reality for entertainment. Leacock (n.d.) recognises this: ‘When these films were made there was only one place to show films and that was in commercial cinemas. There were no film clubs, no film schools, no television. The cinemas were run, in most cases, by the big movie producers and they were run for profit’. Leacock (1990) explains the rope fight:
Both the Flahertys [Robert and his wife Frances] were acutely aware that after the almost miraculous success of Nanook, they still faced the same problem in their subsequent films. This is why there are sequences in all the films except Moana, which was a bust at the box office, that in my view are “crowd pleasers”. The struggle between Nanook and the seal at opposite ends of a rope. The same sequence with Tiger King and the basking shark and then again in Louisiana Story with the boy and the alligator. These served as comic relief, no more, no less. In all these scenes there were some sturdy fellows at the other end of the rope.
These early 20th century ethnographic films must be put in the social context of commercial filmmaking. These filmmakers had no obligation to represent ethnographic subjects in the scientific or sensitive way that an anthropologist would. In defence of his old employer and friend, Leacock (1990) continues: ‘Cheating? This
accusation implies that Flaherty had claimed that his films were pure “observation”. This is not so. Flaherty was making “movies” to be shown in Theaters along with the hokum coming out of the studios.’ In the most straightforward argument for the rights of creativity over naturalism in early ethnographic film, Leacock (1990) simply states
‘Robert Flaherty never claimed to be an Anthropologist’.
Left : Nanook attempts to eat the gramophone record in Rouch’s Nanook of the North (True Films 2004).
Right: One-man crew of Flaherty films Nanook in precarious conditions (Quintero 2011).
Between 1922, the year Nanook was released, till 1925, a different style of filmmaking happened in Russia. Dziga Vertov, directing the Kino-Pravda newsreel series, meaning ‘cinema truth’, combined the naturalism of the first cinèmatograph actuality films by the Lumières’ in 1895 with the technical creativity that D. W. Griffith pioneered with his 1915 Hollywood film Birth of a Nation to create what one would call today social documentary. Documentary scholars Ellis and McLane (2005:
28) describe Vertov’s ethos: ‘His iconoclasm was intended to free film from bourgeois obfuscation of story and the effete pleasures of theatrical performance in order to arrive at the truths of the actual world’. In 1929, influenced by the films in Russia, John Grierson’s Drifters filmed the workers of a North Sea fishing trawler and started the British Documentary Film Movement and its ‘creative treatment of actuality’ (de Brigard 1975: 25). For both Vertov, being a young man in a new Communist Russia, and Grierson, being raised in a household supporting the poor and
the labour movement (Evans 2005), there are certainly parallels between their left- wing ideologies and their representational and uncensored style of filmmaking, which would in turn influence fiction films most notably in post-Fascist Italy in the form of Italian neorealism and the French and British New Wave in the late 1950s and 1960s. For anthropologists, this socially influenced shift towards naturalistic filmmaking in the 1920s was important because it was filmmaking’s first major turn towards minimal stagecraft.
Left: Newsreel showing the underprivileged in Vertov’s Kino-Pravda 1
(Germanwarfilms.com n.d.).
Right: Trawlermen at work in Grierson’s Drifters (University of Stirling Archives 2011).
Between 1936-1938, Bateson and Mead’s film work in Bali and New Guinea differed from others in two aspects. Firstly, they were anthropologists whose intentions were strictly for scientific research. Bateson explains: ‘We tried to use the still and the moving picture cameras to get a record of Balinese behaviour, and this is a very different matter from the preparation of a “documentary” film or photographs’ (Bateson and Mead 1942: 49). Secondly, they used the new 16mm Movikon camera (Jacknis 1988), instead of the heavier and more expensive 35mm. This allowed Bateson, the technician of the pair, more freedom to capture everyday naturalist behaviour. ‘We tried to shoot what happened normally and spontaneously, rather than to decide upon the norms and then get the Balinese to go through these behaviours in suitable lighting’ (Bateson and Mead 1942: 49). One issue that came out of their visual ethnography was the need to find balance between science and humanity, with Mead leaning on the side of the objective former, and Gregory the subjective latter. Mead, like Haddon and the early anthropologists, believed in the neutrality of the camera, envisioning that anthropologists could leave a filming camera in the middle of a village and return later to empirically analyse the data. Bateson disagreed and thought a mobile anthropologist was needed to engage in all aspects of life with the subject. The difference in their objective/subjective opinion remained throughout their lives and is evident from a 1976 discussion where in the following extract, Bateson has just argued that filming should not be on a tripod but handheld (Askew and Wilk 2002: 42-43):
Mead : And therefore you’ve introduced variation into it that is unnecessary. Bateson : I therefore got the information out that I thought was relevant at the time.
Mead : That’s right. And therefore what do you see later? [Referring to an earlier comment about altered material becoming unscientific.]
Bateson : If you put the damn thing on a tripod, you don’t get any relevance. Mead : No, you get what happened.
Bateson: It isn’t what happened.
(Several short exchanges later)
Bateson: If Stewart [the interviewer] reached behind his back to scratch himself, I would like to be over there at that moment.
Mead: If you were over there at that moment you wouldn’t see him kicking the cat under the table. So that just doesn’t hold as an argument.
Bateson: Of the things that happen, the camera is only going to record 1 percent anyway.
Mead: That’s right.
Bateson: I want that 1 percent on the whole to tell.
The most important part of this discussion comes from Bateson and the acknowledgement of his own subjectivity.
Bateson: …I think the photographic record should be an art form.
Mead: Oh why? Why shouldn’t you have some records that aren’t art forms? Because if it’s an art form, it has been altered.
Bateson: It’s undoubtedly been altered. I don’t think it exists unaltered.
This acceptance of the inevitable altering filmmaker is an early sign of the reflexivity that would later become a concern in its textual counterpart in the 1970s and 1980s, most notably with the publication of Writing Culture (1986). Jacknis (1988: 171) writes ‘Research involving human subjects attain objectivity not by ignoring the role of the observer, but by explicitly considering it as part of the investigation,’ and continues (1988: 173) ‘Bateson and Mead’s work was ahead of its time’. This reflexivity or ‘disciplined subjectivity’ – an appropriate, more conservative term given by their daughter Mary Catherine Bateson (1984: 163) – was indeed supported by Mead (1968:15-16), with the last line highlighting the delicate balance needed between the innate creativity of subjectivity and the naturalism of objectivity:
There is no such thing as an unbiased report upon any social situation…It is comparable to a color-blind man reporting on a sunset. All of our recent endeavors in the social sciences have been to remove bias, to make the recording so impersonal and thereby meaningless that neither emotion nor scientific significance remained. Actually in matters of ethos, the surest and most perfect instrument of understanding is our own emotional response, provided that we can make a disciplined use of it.
However, Bateson and Mead’s academic work isn’t without its creative faults. In Trance and Dance (1951) two separate dances, one shot in December 1937 and the other in February 1939 (Jacknis 1988: 171), were edited and presented as one. Going further, John Marshall’s much-acclaimed The Hunters (1958) constructed a two-week story from several years of footage. In particular, the film’s set piece of a long, single hunt is actually from several ventures, whilst the hunters themselves are occasionally interchanged with other similar looking people (Heider 1976: 35, Loizos 1993: 22). Loizos (1993: 22) explains the medium’s technical limitations for presenting narrative precision:
Many writers have noted that because of the way film is typically edited, it tends to create the illusion of single continuous event unless we are deliberately told otherwise, because at the level of images it lacks the grammatical qualifying adjectives ‘some’ ‘most’ ‘many’ ‘all’ (Metz 1974, Nichols 1981). With the simple
insertion of such terms writers can move back and forth between the general and the particular, but in film these issues are much harder to manage.
Left: The camera records the child’s fear and jealousy, illustrating Mead’s research in
Childhood Rivalry in Bali and New Guinea (PACE n.d.).
Right: Bateson on one knee as he films handheld from the Iatmul child’s eye level in New
Guinea, 1938 (Community Manager 2010).
In 1946, travelling down the Niger river, one person would avoid such creative pitfalls by, instead, embracing them in his search for truth. Frenchman Jean Rouch, like Bateson and Mead, was fortunate to be an anthropologist working with a smaller
16mm Bell & Howell camera (de Brigard 1975), but added to this would be four more technical factors that would lead Rouch to create a groundbreaking style of documentary. Firstly, early in his project, his tripod went overboard and forced Rouch to fully adopt a handheld shooting style (de Brigard 1975, Cousins and Macdonald
1996: 264). Secondly, new 16mm film stock that required less light emerged. Thirdly, portable synchronous sound recorders, such as Rouch’s Nagra, was developed. And fourthly, by 1960, Rouch and his cameraman Michel Brault had constructed the even lighter and silent (so as not to be heard by the sound recorder) KMT Coultant-Mathot
16mm camera whose slimline body could be placed over the shoulder; this would be the prototype for the popular Éclair camera.
Rouch handling an over-the-shoulder Éclair camera (DER n.d.).
All four factors freed the camera to become more spontaneous and mobile, in particular in accessing small, quiet, and low-light environments like the informal and imitate privacy of someone’s home. The development in synchronised sound that we take for granted today also allowed subjects to speak for themselves instead of having the filmmaker’s voice-over like in Mead and Bateson’s work or Marshall’s The Hunters, which now draws criticism for its omniscient narration (Aitken 2006: 384); sync sound would also push towards the mainstream use of subtitles (Loizis 1973: 11,
13). French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard wrote that in Rouch’s seminal psycho-sociological film Chronique d’un été (1960, co-directed with sociologist Edgar Morin) set in Paris, it ‘was the first time I heard a worker speak in a movie’ (Di Iorio 2013). As a result of these technical advances, Rouch managed to capture an unprecedented degree of naturalism and humanity in his subjects.
Although Rouch’s filmmaking style can be traced to these moments of mechanical liberation, his deeper ethos was influenced by the social context. In the years towards the decolonialisation of West Africa by France and Britain, Rouch was interested in Europe ‘decolonising themselves’ (Stoller 1992, Loizos 1973) through subverting European understanding of West Africa on topics like magic, urban migration, and racial attitudes. In essence, he aimed to return Regnault’s gaze, and most notably he did so with the humorous ‘reverse anthropology’ of Petit à Petit (1970) where a Nigerien flies to Paris to study their culture.
Damouré conducts measurements on Parisians for his ‘ethnology diploma’ in Rouch’s Petit à
Petit (Encounters n.d.).
Technically inspired by the urban hardship naturalistically depicted by Vertov and Italian neorealism, and philosophically inspired by the creative artist/subject relationship’s ploy for truth of Flaherty and Surrealist paintings (Bregstein 1986), Rouch combined them to create cinéma vérité, a filmmaking style committed to depicting truth through self-reflexivity and, in particular, the extreme acknowledgement of the subjective presence of the camera. Like Flaherty’s Nanook, Rouch’s films are what he himself called ‘ethnofiction’, only he stretched the tension between creativity and naturalism so far that, to viewers, fiction and reality seemed to circle round and blur into each other.
Three innovative truth-seeking tactics stand out in Rouch’s films that produce the grey area between creativity and naturalism. The first tactic is provocation via the
‘observer effect’ with the camera and filmmaker as an ‘active agent’ (Loizos 1993:
46) leading subjects into situations and emotions that could reveal a truth that would otherwise lie dormant. La pyramide humaine (1959) begins with Rouch recruiting a group of white students for his film about black-white relations but warns that ‘some of you will have to be the racists’. In the Chronique d’un été café table scene, Rouch creatively guides the natural discussion to caress out truths about people’s fears, prejudices, beliefs, and ignorance. Rouch explains:
When you have a microphone and when you have a camera aimed at people, there is, all of a sudden, a phenomenon that takes place because people are being recorded: they behave very differently than they would if they were not being recorded. But what has always seemed very strange to me is that, contrary to what one might think, when people are being recorded, the reactions that they have are always more sincere than those they have when they are not being recorded. The fact of being recorded gives these people a public. (Cousins and Macdonald 1996: 269)
Left: Young black-white friendships and romances are explored in Rouch’s La pyramide humaine (Álvarez 2009).
Right: Guided by Rouch, Parisians speak frankly about race in Rouch and Morin’s Chronique d’un été (Blondesearch n.d.).
The second tactic is collaboration, or the egalitarian ‘shared anthropology’ approach of giving ‘voice’, with the subjects as unofficial co-technicians, co-writers, co- directors, and informant-feedback commentators who mould the ethnographic film into a collective truth, becoming the precursor to indigenous filmmaking. In Moi, un noir (1957), the subject is also the film’s informal voice-over narrator. This replaces the traditional tightly scripted, all-seeing, all-knowing commentary of the filmmaker, or ‘voice of God’ (Loizos 1993: 12), and it addresses historic power relations in ethnographic film. In Chronique d’un été, the subjects are allowed to watch footage of themselves as Rouch films their different critical, defensive, protesting, and praiseful responses. Rouch explains the relationship between such a collaboration and new technology:
New techniques and equipment [allow] you to make feedback during the next visit to the people and work on the film with the people, which is very important. For example, now you can use small Super-8mm projectors and you need only a small Honda electrical generator to project the film where you want…Going back, stop on a frame, going back…collecting information that would be impossible to collect without these tools. It's impossible to stop the priest or the Pope while he is saying his mass and say, ‘Why are you going from the right to the other part of the alter with this book.’ But, you can do it if you show the Pope or the priest the film — he can say [why he's] there. (Johnson 1978)
Left: The subject, Edward G. Robinson, looks directly at the camera and via voice-over introduces the viewer to his suburb in Rouch’s Moi, un noir (De Película n.d.).
Right: Subjects watch themselves in a cinema and offer opinions in Rouch and Morin’s
Chronique d’un été (The Metropolis Times 2012).
The third tactic – which also falls under ‘shared anthropology’ but which differs in the way truth is excavated – is improvisation by the subjects who perform a role that is a variation of themselves so as to attempt to uncover a subconscious or off-the- record personal truth behind the surface layer of everyday formality. In Moi, un noir the subjects take on ‘characters’ they aspire to be like and perform this role throughout the film revealing through their improvisation their own possible aspirations and frustrations in life. Documentary filmmaker and scholar Howes (1982:
28) praises the protagonist: ‘He expresses himself freely, improvising a dialogue which strikes one as overpowering in its honesty, intimacy and poignancy’. In the
standout scene of Chronique d’un été, Marceline’s improvisation powerfully morphed with her true memories of Jewish deportation with her father. She would later explain:
My truth is not in this film even though the memories of deportation which I evoked are real; and that is where all the ambiguity of cinema-verité exists, even if I thought about that scene in advance before shooting and it was a question of me finding ‘the tone’, but my truth in this sequence is there because I had really lived what I was talking about. (Rouch and Morin 1962 in Loizos 1993: 63)
Left: A reflective scene allowing the character ‘Edward G. Robinson’ to reveal the subject
Oumarou Ganda in Rouch’s Moi, un noir (Losada 2010).
Right: Marceline painfully improvising as the camera follows from an unobtrusive distance in
Rouch and Morin’s Chronique d’un été (Images de Cinéma 2007).
Supporters of Rouch like Loizos (1993: 54) write ‘there is a real case for saying that by…“improvising” and “provoking” Rouch offered us something which perhaps comes closer to the truth than a stilted “film of record” might have done’. However, de Brigard (1975: 28) writes that his work has been described by some as ‘inveterate amateurism’ and ‘incurable dilettantism’, whilst Richard Leacock and the Direct Cinema movement across the Atlantic argued against Rouch’s provocative style and thought that the ‘fly on the wall’, non-intervention approach could better present objective truth: ‘We find that the degree to which the camera changes the situation is mostly due to the nature of the person filming it. You can make your presence known, or you can act in such a way as not to affect them’ (Cousins and Macdonald 1996:
257). Here, Leacock switches the power of presence from camera to filmmaker; however, I would argue that unless the subject was unaware they were being filmed, then the camera, no matter how hidden the filmmaker, still retains its power. The importance of Rouch to ethnographic film, then, is not the filmmaker’s provocative and collaborative tactics for truth per se, but rather his acknowledgement of the camera as a powerful, deforming, non-objective instrument that his tactics serve to convey.
In conclusion, from 1895 to the 1920s, anthropologists were hindered by the physical and economic difficulty in ethnographic filmmaking as well as the discipline’s analytical turn from the positivist study of material culture to the abstract study of invisible structures (e.g. Regnault’s Wolof women in Paris, Haddon’s Torres Strait expedition), subsequently this left the space for commercial films to depict ethnographic subjects (e.g. Méliès’s documentaires romances, Curtis’s In the Land of the Head- Hunters, Flaherty’s Nanook of the North). In the 1920s, left-wing social movements led to the creation of realist social documentary (e.g. Vertov’s Kino- Pravda, Grierson’s Drifters). In the 1930s, the smaller and lighter 16mm camera provided greater filmmaking freedom, and the refocus on scientific research raised questions over filmmaker objectivity/subjectivity and highlighted the notion of reflexivity to anthropology (e.g. Bateson and Mead’s research in Bali and New Guinea). In the 1950s, Rouch’s naturalistic handheld 16mm filmmaking style complimented the creative truth-seeking ethos of cinéma vérité and its active agency. Fundamentally, Rouch opposed the empiricist theoretical ideas of Haddon, Vertov, and Mead by not believing the camera to be an objective truth-telling machine, but instead he heavily built on the collaborative work of Flaherty and the reflexive thoughts of Bateson to find his truth (it would take at least another decade before anthropologists working in the textual medium publicly questioned their own systematic biases in the construction of their written ethnographies, at least in the USA). Beyond 1960, innovations in technology – e.g. wireless mics, cheaper and user-friendly video and DV cameras, digital editing, and Youtube – and changing social contexts – e.g. increased academic interest in ethnographic films (e.g. the 1968 formation of Documentary Educational Resources, which produced Asch and Chagnon’s 1975 The Ax Fight with its pedagogic presentation of a single, continuous
‘sequence’), emergence of ethno-entertainment television programmes (e.g. Granada’s Disappearing World 1969-1993 series), new post-structuralist anthropological theory (Loizos 1993: 12), increased ethnographic film writing (e.g. Ruby 1975, Heider 1976, Nichols 1981), indigenous filmmaking (e.g. Worth and Adair’s Navajo Film Themselves 1966 series), and experimental filmmaking (e.g. Gardner’s Dead Birds 1963 and Forest of Bliss 1985) – all continued to shape and challenge the definition of ethnographic films.
As stated at the top of this essay, there has indeed been a tension back-and-forth between creativity and naturalism not only in the chronological history of ethnographic films but, more importantly, within individual films themselves. As outlined above, this tension was born from, firstly, the possibilities and limitations of technology and, secondly, the social context. From 1895 to 1960, this tension reached its pinnacle in the subversive films of Jean Rouch who taught future ethnographic filmmakers the importance reflexivity and future ethnographic film viewers the importance of scepticism.
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University Press.
Ruby, Jay (1975) Is an ethnographic film a filmic ethnography? Studies in the
Anthropology of Visual Communication, 2 (2), 104-11.
Stoller, Paul (1992) The cinematic griot: the ethnography of Jean Rouch. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Torresan, Angela (n.d.) Using film in ethnographic film research.
Films
Asch, Timothy and Napoleon Chagnon (1975) The ax fight. Watertown, MA: Documentary Education Resources. Colour, 30 mins.
Bateson, Gregory and Margaret Mead (1951) Trance and dance in Bali.
Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University. Black and white, 22 mins.
Bateson, Gregory and Margaret Mead (1953) Childhood rivalry in Bali and New Guinea. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University. Black and white, 16 mins.
Bregstein, Philo (1986) Jean Rouch and his camera in the heart of Africa.
Watertown, MA: Documentary Education Resources. Colour, 74 mins.
Curtis, Edward S. (1914) In the land of the head hunters. USA: World Film. Black and white, 47 mins.
Eaton, Michael (2010) The masks of Mer. UK: Potlatch Production. Colour, 37 mins.
Flaherty, Robert (1922) Nanook of the north. Paris: Les Freres Revillon. Black and white, 79 mins.
Gardner, Robert (1963) Dead birds. Watertown, MA: Documentary Education
Resources. Colour, 83 mins.
Gardner, Robert (1985) Forest of bliss. Watertown, MA: Documentary Education
Resources. Colour, 90 mins.
Grierson, John (1929) Drifters. UK: Empire Marketing Board. Black and white, 49 mins.
Griffith, D. W. (1915) Birth of a nation. USA: D. W. Griffith Corp. Black and white,
187 mins.
Haddon, Alfred Cort (1898) Torres Strait islanders. Cambridge: University of
Cambridge. Black and white, 4 mins.
Lumière, Louis (1895) Workers leaving the Lumière factory. France: Lumière.
Black and white, 1 min.
Marshall, John (1958) The hunters. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational
Resources. Colour, 73 mins.
Méliès, George (1902) A trip to the moon. Paris: Star Film. Black and white, 12 mins.
Rouch, Jean (1955) Les maîtres fous. France: Les Films de la Plèiade. Colour, 36 mins.
Rouch, Jean (1957) Moi, un noir. France: Les Films de la Plèiade. Colour, 70 mins.
Rouch, Jean (1959) La pyramide humaine. France: Les Films de la Plèiade. Colour,
90 mins.
Rouch, Jean (1967) Jaguar. France: Les Films de la Plèiade. Colour, 93 mins. Rouch, Jean (1970) Petit à Petit. France: Les Films de la Plèiade. Colour,
93 mins.
Rouch, Jean and Edgar Morin (1960) Chronique d’un été. Paris: Argos Films. Black and white, 85 mins.
Vertov, Dziga (1922-1925) Kino-pravda. USSR: Kultkino. Black and white, 10-29 mins x 23.
Images
‘Say, rare Machine, who taught thee to design? / And mimick Nature with such Skill divine’ (anonymously authored poem in praise of the camera obscura, 1747).
Does a study of the history of ethnographic film reveal a tension between creativity and naturalism?
The camera’s ability for representation has been an area of critique in the history of documentary filmmaking. What is real and what is constructed? Are truth and reality the same thing? Can one construct truth? With regards specifically to ethnographic film, this paper will focus on its crucial formative years and, within this period, chronologically trace its development from the first footage of ethnographic interest in 1895 to the radical challenges to documentary leading towards its technical and theoretical modernisation in 1960. I will argue, using film examples, that there has been an ever present tension between creativity and naturalism and that the reason for this tension has come from (1) filmmaking technology’s possibilities and limits, and (2) the social context that influence the filmmaker’s decisions.
In 1895, Felix-Louis Regnault visited the Exposition Ethnographique de l’Afrique Occidentale in Paris. Like a zoo, they consisted of constructed sets marked off by a fence where ‘exotic’ people would seemingly conduct their everyday activities for the pleasure of Europeans who sometimes threw them money. Most importantly, it was considered rude or inappropriate for the Other to return the gaze. This meant that Europeans ‘were free to define, categorize, and label their subjects with impunity’ (Chapman 2009: 98). Reganult’s camera visually recorded ethnographic subjectivity for the very first time, and in Paris subjectivity happened to be at its most extreme, because what Regnault captured was not a skilled pot-making Wolof woman but the power relationship of the colonial era aligned with normative ideas of social evolutionism. Thus the story of ethnographic film begins with its most creative work, not because of its coercive out of place performance in a constructed set, but because of the 1895 ‘creative’ mentality of the viewer. Naturalism it was not.
Left: Sketch of Regnault’s destroyed footage of Wolof woman (SPLA n.d).
Right: Example of exposition poster, Lyon, 1894 (Libèration n.d.).
In 1898, Alfred Cort Haddon led a holistic Cambridge expedition of seven – whose professional roles covered anthropology, ethnology, zoology, neurology, psychiatry, psychology, linguistics, musicology, and photography – to the Torres Strait. Aligning themselves to the natural sciences, Haddon’s positivist generation saw the camera as their equivalent to a microscope or telescope which could visually apprehend material culture such as dress, technology, and architecture and overcome the objective problem of their discipline (Torresan n.d.). For the first time, the camera was taken into the field for salvage ethnography. However, not yet accustomed to developing technology, Haddon’s 35mm Newman and Guardia camera often jammed, spoiling the film. It was also too big and the film stock too sensitive to be able to move around in the manner now associated with realist documentary. Thus due to the limits of both early technology and the lack of knowledge of how best to take advantage of it, what is produced is, like Regnault’s piece, a performance, although there is at least collaboration between Haddon and the Malo (Eaton 2010).
Malo ceremonial dance in Haddon’s Torres Strait Islanders (The Bioscope 2010).
In the early 20th century, filmmaking failed in anthropology. Firstly, there was the practical difficulties of taking cameras into the field, and secondly, a new way of anthropological thought arose that focused on the invisible structures that held society together, like kinship and politics over material culture. With academia’s obstacles, the ethnographic film void was filled by commercial enterprise.
In 1912, Gaston Méliès family company Star Film, producer of special-effects films such A Trip to the Moon (1902), travelled to Tahiti and New Zealand to capture authentic locations set within fictional stories or documentaires romances. Visual anthropologist scholar, de Brigard (1975: 19) is critical:
Apart from entertainment, what is the value of nonscientific films of peoples and customs?...Human behaviour in documentary and fiction films is subject to directorial distortion to such an extent that the film may be scientifically worthless. However, authenticity can be found on levels untouched by dramatic action.
According to de Brigard (1975: 19), a film that demonstrates such authenticity is Edward Curtis’s 1914 film In the Land of the Head Hunters (aka In the Land of the War Canoes) shot in the Pacific Northwest. Although, to state this film is ‘untouched by dramatic action’ would be false. The film does depict many authentic elements such as artwork, architecture, dance, costume, rituals, and the use of local people as actors; however, it is again weaved into a fictional plot which, in de Brigard’s own
words (1975: 19), ‘concerns a wicked sorcerer, a hero, and their respective factions battling for a girl’. Melodramatic scenes are clearly staged with de Brigard (1975: 19) even commenting that ‘Curtis had learned the same lessons as D. W. Griffiths [Hollywood filmmaking pioneer], and he handled suspense well’. For de Brigard (1975: 19), her praise seems to be directed at the hard work put in by Curtis to capture his subjects.
The photographers of the Indian were not trained anthropologists, but the best of them did their work with enthusiasm, extraordinary dedication, and sensitivity. Curtis, a prolific stills photographer, spent three seasons with the Kwakiutl filming a drama of love and war in settings painstakingly reconstructed for precontact authenticity.
Here, I must state that it is important not confuse reconstructed authenticity (however painstaking it was to recreate) with authenticity itself, but I can understand de Brigard’s appreciation for the ‘authentic’ scenes being depicted and the ethnographic value of Curtis’s footage to anthropologists. This tension between creativity and naturalism would continue in the commercial sector with arguably the most famous ethnographic film released eight years later in a seminal year for anthropology.
Dramatic scenes from Curtis’s In the Land of the Head Hunters (Canadian Heritage Film
Festival n.d.).
In 1922, both Robert Flaherty’s film Nanook of the North and Bronislaw Malinowski’s monograph Argonauts of the Western Pacific were released. Both raised the bar in their field and shared common ideas. Malinowski promoted focus on the ‘imponderabilia of everyday life’; Flaherty filmed mundane activities such as eating and sleeping. Malinowski sought the ‘native’s point of view’; Flaherty collaborated with Nanook by showing him new footage and receiving his comments (Loizos 1993: 13). Malinowski moved away from the dominant social evolutionist theory; Flaherty moved away from the dominant adventure and romance storyline. Malinowski promoted extensive stays in the field and participant observation; Flaherty spent several years working and filming in the area and spent one year filming the actual footage released. Malinowski promoted native language learning; Flaherty was already familiar with the language (Marks 1995: 340). Flaherty, although not an anthropologist, was certainly an adept filmmaker and pushed the look of naturalism in ethnographic film. However, this realism comes under scrutiny when one investigates behind the scenes. For example, Nanook isn’t his real name, and the family isn’t his family; Nanook hunted with guns rather than spears as depicted in the film; Nanook knew what a gramophone was, contrary to the film; the interior igloo scene was shot in a constructed three-wall igloo set; Nanook battled against an off- camera person in the rope pulling scene, rather than a seal as edited (Rothman 1997, Barnouw 1993, Ebert 2005, Leacock 1990). With this in mind, notions of naturalism clearly weaken. Anthropologist and filmmaker Timothy Asch agrees: ‘…the film was scripted. Flaherty used Eskimos as actors playing their own roles and in that sense created a prototype for feature narrative films rather than documentary films’ (Crawford and Turton 1992: 196). From this statement, Asch might also agree with my own thoughts that the film should be considered strictly under the hybrid fiction/non-fiction genre of ethnofiction or docudrama and not ‘documentary’ as reflected in the categorisation and reviews on popular Internet websites such Wikipedia, IMDb, and Amazon. However, Hollywood film critic Roger Ebert (2005) is more sympathetic:
“Nanook” is not cinema verite. And yet in a sense it is: The movie is an authentic documentary showing the creation of itself. What happens on the screen is real, no matter what happened behind it…It has an authenticity that prevails over any complaints that some of the sequences were staged. If you stage a walrus hunt [a
separate scene to the one with the seal], it still involves hunting a walrus, and the walrus hasn’t seen the script. What shines through is the humanity and optimism of the Inuit.
Both Asch and Ebert’s comments are valid but whereas Asch, the anthropologist, is looking for scientific authenticity, Ebert, the commercial cinemagoer, wants authentic emotion. This tension has arisen through two reasons. The first – the influence of technology – is evident from the hand cranked 35mm Bell & Howell camera that limited Flaherty to the tripod and thus necessitated staging but with the new Akeley Gyro head it enabled him to pan and tilt, which became a Flaherty trademark. Richard Leacock (1990: 1), a documentary filmmaker and Flaherty’s once cameraman, explains the three-walled igloo: ‘The photographic emulsions were slow by contemporary standards, hence the absolute need to construct an igloo which was open on one side to let daylight in and afford room to set up the tripod’. The second reason – the social context (in Flaherty’s case commercialism) – is evident from Flaherty’s decision to sacrifice absolute reality for entertainment. Leacock (n.d.) recognises this: ‘When these films were made there was only one place to show films and that was in commercial cinemas. There were no film clubs, no film schools, no television. The cinemas were run, in most cases, by the big movie producers and they were run for profit’. Leacock (1990) explains the rope fight:
Both the Flahertys [Robert and his wife Frances] were acutely aware that after the almost miraculous success of Nanook, they still faced the same problem in their subsequent films. This is why there are sequences in all the films except Moana, which was a bust at the box office, that in my view are “crowd pleasers”. The struggle between Nanook and the seal at opposite ends of a rope. The same sequence with Tiger King and the basking shark and then again in Louisiana Story with the boy and the alligator. These served as comic relief, no more, no less. In all these scenes there were some sturdy fellows at the other end of the rope.
These early 20th century ethnographic films must be put in the social context of commercial filmmaking. These filmmakers had no obligation to represent ethnographic subjects in the scientific or sensitive way that an anthropologist would. In defence of his old employer and friend, Leacock (1990) continues: ‘Cheating? This
accusation implies that Flaherty had claimed that his films were pure “observation”. This is not so. Flaherty was making “movies” to be shown in Theaters along with the hokum coming out of the studios.’ In the most straightforward argument for the rights of creativity over naturalism in early ethnographic film, Leacock (1990) simply states
‘Robert Flaherty never claimed to be an Anthropologist’.
Left : Nanook attempts to eat the gramophone record in Rouch’s Nanook of the North (True
Films 2004).
Right: One-man crew of Flaherty films Nanook in precarious conditions (Quintero 2011).
Between 1922, the year Nanook was released, till 1925, a different style of filmmaking happened in Russia. Dziga Vertov, directing the Kino-Pravda newsreel series, meaning ‘cinema truth’, combined the naturalism of the first cinèmatograph actuality films by the Lumières’ in 1895 with the technical creativity that D. W. Griffith pioneered with his 1915 Hollywood film Birth of a Nation to create what one would call today social documentary. Documentary scholars Ellis and McLane (2005:
28) describe Vertov’s ethos: ‘His iconoclasm was intended to free film from bourgeois obfuscation of story and the effete pleasures of theatrical performance in order to arrive at the truths of the actual world’. In 1929, influenced by the films in Russia, John Grierson’s Drifters filmed the workers of a North Sea fishing trawler and started the British Documentary Film Movement and its ‘creative treatment of actuality’ (de Brigard 1975: 25). For both Vertov, being a young man in a new Communist Russia, and Grierson, being raised in a household supporting the poor and
the labour movement (Evans 2005), there are certainly parallels between their left- wing ideologies and their representational and uncensored style of filmmaking, which would in turn influence fiction films most notably in post-Fascist Italy in the form of Italian neorealism and the French and British New Wave in the late 1950s and 1960s. For anthropologists, this socially influenced shift towards naturalistic filmmaking in the 1920s was important because it was filmmaking’s first major turn towards minimal stagecraft.
Left: Newsreel showing the underprivileged in Vertov’s Kino-Pravda 1
(Germanwarfilms.com n.d.).
Right: Trawlermen at work in Grierson’s Drifters (University of Stirling Archives 2011).
Between 1936-1938, Bateson and Mead’s film work in Bali and New Guinea differed from others in two aspects. Firstly, they were anthropologists whose intentions were strictly for scientific research. Bateson explains: ‘We tried to use the still and the moving picture cameras to get a record of Balinese behaviour, and this is a very different matter from the preparation of a “documentary” film or photographs’ (Bateson and Mead 1942: 49). Secondly, they used the new 16mm Movikon camera (Jacknis 1988), instead of the heavier and more expensive 35mm. This allowed Bateson, the technician of the pair, more freedom to capture everyday naturalist behaviour. ‘We tried to shoot what happened normally and spontaneously, rather than to decide upon the norms and then get the Balinese to go through these behaviours in suitable lighting’ (Bateson and Mead 1942: 49). One issue that came out of their
visual ethnography was the need to find balance between science and humanity, with Mead leaning on the side of the objective former, and Gregory the subjective latter. Mead, like Haddon and the early anthropologists, believed in the neutrality of the camera, envisioning that anthropologists could leave a filming camera in the middle of a village and return later to empirically analyse the data. Bateson disagreed and thought a mobile anthropologist was needed to engage in all aspects of life with the subject. The difference in their objective/subjective opinion remained throughout their lives and is evident from a 1976 discussion where in the following extract, Bateson has just argued that filming should not be on a tripod but handheld (Askew and Wilk 2002: 42-43):
Mead: And therefore you’ve introduced variation into it that is unnecessary. Bateson: I therefore got the information out that I thought was relevant at the
time.
Mead: That’s right. And therefore what do you see later? [Referring to an earlier comment about altered material becoming unscientific.]
Bateson: If you put the damn thing on a tripod, you don’t get any relevance. Mead: No, you get what happened.
Bateson: It isn’t what happened.
(Several short exchanges later)
Bateson: If Stewart [the interviewer] reached behind his back to scratch himself, I would like to be over there at that moment.
Mead: If you were over there at that moment you wouldn’t see him kicking the cat under the table. So that just doesn’t hold as an argument.
Bateson: Of the things that happen, the camera is only going to record 1 percent anyway.
Mead: That’s right.
Bateson: I want that 1 percent on the whole to tell.
The most important part of this discussion comes from Bateson and the acknowledgement of his own subjectivity.
Bateson: …I think the photographic record should be an art form.
Mead: Oh why? Why shouldn’t you have some records that aren’t art forms? Because if it’s an art form, it has been altered.
Bateson: It’s undoubtedly been altered. I don’t think it exists unaltered.
This acceptance of the inevitable altering filmmaker is an early sign of the reflexivity that would later become a concern in its textual counterpart in the 1970s and 1980s, most notably with the publication of Writing Culture (1986). Jacknis (1988: 171) writes ‘Research involving human subjects attain objectivity not by ignoring the role of the observer, but by explicitly considering it as part of the investigation,’ and continues (1988: 173) ‘Bateson and Mead’s work was ahead of its time’. This reflexivity or ‘disciplined subjectivity’ – an appropriate, more conservative term given by their daughter Mary Catherine Bateson (1984: 163) – was indeed supported by Mead (1968:15-16), with the last line highlighting the delicate balance needed between the innate creativity of subjectivity and the naturalism of objectivity:
There is no such thing as an unbiased report upon any social situation…It is comparable to a color-blind man reporting on a sunset. All of our recent endeavors in the social sciences have been to remove bias, to make the recording so impersonal and thereby meaningless that neither emotion nor scientific significance remained. Actually in matters of ethos, the surest and most perfect instrument of understanding is our own emotional response, provided that we can make a disciplined use of it.
However, Bateson and Mead’s academic work isn’t without its creative faults. In Trance and Dance (1951) two separate dances, one shot in December 1937 and the other in February 1939 (Jacknis 1988: 171), were edited and presented as one. Going further, John Marshall’s much-acclaimed The Hunters (1958) constructed a two-week story from several years of footage. In particular, the film’s set piece of a long, single hunt is actually from several ventures, whilst the hunters themselves are occasionally interchanged with other similar looking people (Heider 1976: 35, Loizos 1993: 22). Loizos (1993: 22) explains the medium’s technical limitations for presenting narrative precision:
Many writers have noted that because of the way film is typically edited, it tends to create the illusion of single continuous event unless we are deliberately told otherwise, because at the level of images it lacks the grammatical qualifying adjectives ‘some’ ‘most’ ‘many’ ‘all’ (Metz 1974, Nichols 1981). With the simple insertion of such terms writers can move back and forth between the general and the particular, but in film these issues are much harder to manage.
Left: The camera records the child’s fear and jealousy, illustrating Mead’s research in
Childhood Rivalry in Bali and New Guinea (PACE n.d.).
Right: Bateson on one knee as he films handheld from the Iatmul child’s eye level in New
Guinea, 1938 (Community Manager 2010).
In 1946, travelling down the Niger river, one person would avoid such creative pitfalls by, instead, embracing them in his search for truth. Frenchman Jean Rouch, like Bateson and Mead, was fortunate to be an anthropologist working with a smaller
16mm Bell & Howell camera (de Brigard 1975), but added to this would be four more technical factors that would lead Rouch to create a groundbreaking style of documentary. Firstly, early in his project, his tripod went overboard and forced Rouch to fully adopt a handheld shooting style (de Brigard 1975, Cousins and Macdonald
1996: 264). Secondly, new 16mm film stock that required less light emerged. Thirdly, portable synchronous sound recorders, such as Rouch’s Nagra, was developed. And fourthly, by 1960, Rouch and his cameraman Michel Brault had constructed the even lighter and silent (so as not to be heard by the sound recorder) KMT Coultant-Mathot
16mm camera whose slimline body could be placed over the shoulder; this would be the prototype for the popular Éclair camera.
Rouch handling an over-the-shoulder Éclair camera (DER n.d.).
All four factors freed the camera to become more spontaneous and mobile, in particular in accessing small, quiet, and low-light environments like the informal and imitate privacy of someone’s home. The development in synchronised sound that we take for granted today also allowed subjects to speak for themselves instead of having the filmmaker’s voice-over like in Mead and Bateson’s work or Marshall’s The Hunters, which now draws criticism for its omniscient narration (Aitken 2006: 384); sync sound would also push towards the mainstream use of subtitles (Loizis 1973: 11,
13). French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard wrote that in Rouch’s seminal psycho-sociological film Chronique d’un été (1960, co-directed with sociologist Edgar Morin) set in Paris, it ‘was the first time I heard a worker speak in a movie’ (Di Iorio 2013). As a result of these technical advances, Rouch managed to capture an unprecedented degree of naturalism and humanity in his subjects.
Although Rouch’s filmmaking style can be traced to these moments of mechanical liberation, his deeper ethos was influenced by the social context. In the years towards the decolonialisation of West Africa by France and Britain, Rouch was interested in Europe ‘decolonising themselves’ (Stoller 1992, Loizos 1973) through subverting European understanding of West Africa on topics like magic, urban migration, and racial attitudes. In essence, he aimed to return Regnault’s gaze, and most notably he did so with the humorous ‘reverse anthropology’ of Petit à Petit (1970) where a Nigerien flies to Paris to study their culture.
Damouré conducts measurements on Parisians for his ‘ethnology diploma’ in Rouch’s Petit à
Petit (Encounters n.d.).
Technically inspired by the urban hardship naturalistically depicted by Vertov and Italian neorealism, and philosophically inspired by the creative artist/subject relationship’s ploy for truth of Flaherty and Surrealist paintings (Bregstein 1986), Rouch combined them to create cinéma vérité, a filmmaking style committed to depicting truth through self-reflexivity and, in particular, the extreme acknowledgement of the subjective presence of the camera. Like Flaherty’s Nanook, Rouch’s films are what he himself called ‘ethnofiction’, only he stretched the tension between creativity and naturalism so far that, to viewers, fiction and reality seemed to circle round and blur into each other.
Three innovative truth-seeking tactics stand out in Rouch’s films that produce the grey area between creativity and naturalism. The first tactic is provocation via the
‘observer effect’ with the camera and filmmaker as an ‘active agent’ (Loizos 1993:46) leading subjects into situations and emotions that could reveal a truth that would otherwise lie dormant. La pyramide humaine (1959) begins with Rouch recruiting a group of white students for his film about black-white relations but warns that ‘some of you will have to be the racists’. In the Chronique d’un été café table scene, Rouch creatively guides the natural discussion to caress out truths about people’s fears, prejudices, beliefs, and ignorance. Rouch explains:
When you have a microphone and when you have a camera aimed at people, there is, all of a sudden, a phenomenon that takes place because people are being recorded: they behave very differently than they would if they were not being recorded. But what has always seemed very strange to me is that, contrary to what one might think, when people are being recorded, the reactions that they have are always more sincere than those they have when they are not being recorded. The fact of being recorded gives these people a public. (Cousins and Macdonald 1996: 269)
Left: Young black-white friendships and romances are explored in Rouch’s La pyramide humaine (Álvarez 2009).
Right: Guided by Rouch, Parisians speak frankly about race in Rouch and Morin’s Chronique d’un été (Blondesearch n.d.).
The second tactic is collaboration, or the egalitarian ‘shared anthropology’ approach of giving ‘voice’, with the subjects as unofficial co-technicians, co-writers, co- directors, and informant-feedback commentators who mould the ethnographic film into a collective truth, becoming the precursor to indigenous filmmaking. In Moi, un noir (1957), the subject is also the film’s informal voice-over narrator. This replaces the traditional tightly scripted, all-seeing, all-knowing commentary of the filmmaker, or ‘voice of God’ (Loizos 1993: 12), and it addresses historic power relations in ethnographic film. In Chronique d’un été, the subjects are allowed to watch footage of themselves as Rouch films their different critical, defensive, protesting, and praiseful responses. Rouch explains the relationship between such a collaboration and new technology:
New techniques and equipment [allow] you to make feedback during the next visit to the people and work on the film with the people, which is very important. For example, now you can use small Super-8mm projectors and you need only a small Honda electrical generator to project the film where you want…Going back, stop on a frame, going back…collecting information that would be impossible to collect without these tools. It's impossible to stop the priest or the Pope while he is saying his mass and say, ‘Why are you going from the right to the other part of the alter with this book.’ But, you can do it if you show the Pope or the priest the film — he can say [why he's] there. (Johnson 1978)
Left: The subject, Edward G. Robinson, looks directly at the camera and via voice-over introduces the viewer to his suburb in Rouch’s Moi, un noir (De Película n.d.).
Right: Subjects watch themselves in a cinema and offer opinions in Rouch and Morin’s
Chronique d’un été (The Metropolis Times 2012).
The third tactic – which also falls under ‘shared anthropology’ but which differs in the way truth is excavated – is improvisation by the subjects who perform a role that is a variation of themselves so as to attempt to uncover a subconscious or off-the- record personal truth behind the surface layer of everyday formality. In Moi, un noir the subjects take on ‘characters’ they aspire to be like and perform this role throughout the film revealing through their improvisation their own possible aspirations and frustrations in life. Documentary filmmaker and scholar Howes (1982:
28) praises the protagonist: ‘He expresses himself freely, improvising a dialogue which strikes one as overpowering in its honesty, intimacy and poignancy’. In the
standout scene of Chronique d’un été, Marceline’s improvisation powerfully morphed with her true memories of Jewish deportation with her father. She would later explain:
My truth is not in this film even though the memories of deportation which I evoked are real; and that is where all the ambiguity of cinema-verité exists, even if I thought about that scene in advance before shooting and it was a question of me finding ‘the tone’, but my truth in this sequence is there because I had really lived what I was talking about. (Rouch and Morin 1962 in Loizos 1993: 63)
Left: A reflective scene allowing the character ‘Edward G. Robinson’ to reveal the subject
Oumarou Ganda in Rouch’s Moi, un noir (Losada 2010).
Right: Marceline painfully improvising as the camera follows from an unobtrusive distance in
Rouch and Morin’s Chronique d’un été (Images de Cinéma 2007).
Supporters of Rouch like Loizos (1993: 54) write ‘there is a real case for saying that by…“improvising” and “provoking” Rouch offered us something which perhaps comes closer to the truth than a stilted “film of record” might have done’. However, de Brigard (1975: 28) writes that his work has been described by some as ‘inveterate amateurism’ and ‘incurable dilettantism’, whilst Richard Leacock and the Direct Cinema movement across the Atlantic argued against Rouch’s provocative style and thought that the ‘fly on the wall’, non-intervention approach could better present objective truth: ‘We find that the degree to which the camera changes the situation is mostly due to the nature of the person filming it. You can make your presence known, or you can act in such a way as not to affect them’ (Cousins and Macdonald 1996:
257). Here, Leacock switches the power of presence from camera to filmmaker; however, I would argue that unless the subject was unaware they were being filmed, then the camera, no matter how hidden the filmmaker, still retains its power. The importance of Rouch to ethnographic film, then, is not the filmmaker’s provocative and collaborative tactics for truth per se, but rather his acknowledgement of the camera as a powerful, deforming, non-objective instrument that his tactics serve to convey.
In conclusion, from 1895 to the 1920s, anthropologists were hindered by the physical and economic difficulty in ethnographic filmmaking as well as the discipline’s analytical turn from the positivist study of material culture to the abstract study of invisible structures (e.g. Regnault’s Wolof women in Paris, Haddon’s Torres Strait expedition), subsequently this left the space for commercial films to depict ethnographic subjects (e.g. Méliès’s documentaires romances, Curtis’s In the Land of the Head- Hunters, Flaherty’s Nanook of the North). In the 1920s, left-wing social movements led to the creation of realist social documentary (e.g. Vertov’s Kino- Pravda, Grierson’s Drifters). In the 1930s, the smaller and lighter 16mm camera provided greater filmmaking freedom, and the refocus on scientific research raised questions over filmmaker objectivity/subjectivity and highlighted the notion of reflexivity to anthropology (e.g. Bateson and Mead’s research in Bali and New Guinea). In the 1950s, Rouch’s naturalistic handheld 16mm filmmaking style complimented the creative truth-seeking ethos of cinéma vérité and its active agency. Fundamentally, Rouch opposed the empiricist theoretical ideas of Haddon, Vertov, and Mead by not believing the camera to be an objective truth-telling machine, but instead he heavily built on the collaborative work of Flaherty and the reflexive thoughts of Bateson to find his truth (it would take at least another decade before anthropologists working in the textual medium publicly questioned their own systematic biases in the construction of their written ethnographies, at least in the USA). Beyond 1960, innovations in technology – e.g. wireless mics, cheaper and user-friendly video and DV cameras, digital editing, and Youtube – and changing social contexts – e.g. increased academic interest in ethnographic films (e.g. the 1968 formation of Documentary Educational Resources, which produced Asch and Chagnon’s 1975 The Ax Fight with its pedagogic presentation of a single, continuous
‘sequence’), emergence of ethno-entertainment television programmes (e.g.
Granada’s Disappearing World 1969-1993 series), new post-structuralist anthropological theory (Loizos 1993: 12), increased ethnographic film writing (e.g. Ruby 1975, Heider 1976, Nichols 1981), indigenous filmmaking (e.g. Worth and Adair’s Navajo Film Themselves 1966 series), and experimental filmmaking (e.g. Gardner’s Dead Birds 1963 and Forest of Bliss 1985) – all continued to shape and challenge the definition of ethnographic films.
As stated at the top of this essay, there has indeed been a tension back-and-forth between creativity and naturalism not only in the chronological history of ethnographic films but, more importantly, within individual films themselves. As outlined above, this tension was born from, firstly, the possibilities and limitations of technology and, secondly, the social context. From 1895 to 1960, this tension reached its pinnacle in the subversive films of Jean Rouch who taught future ethnographic filmmakers the importance reflexivity and future ethnographic film viewers the importance of scepticism.
References
Book and articles
Aitken, Ian (ed.) (2006) The concise Routledge encyclopedia of the documentary film. Reprint, Oxon: Routledge, 2013.
Askew, Kelly and Richard R. Wilk (eds.) (2002) The anthropology of media: a reader. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Barnouw, Erik (1993) Documentary: A history of the non-fiction film. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Bateson, Gregory and Margaret Mead (1942) Balinese character: A photographic analysis. New York: Academy of Sciences.
Bateson, Mary Catherine (1984) With a daughter’s eye: A memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. New York: William Morrow.
Crawford, Peter Ian and David Turton (eds.) (1992) Film as ethnography. Reprint, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
Chapman, Daniel Ethan (2009) The scientist and the potter: Felix-Louis Regnault and his imperialist lens. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 2 (1), 88-99.
Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (ed.) (1986) Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press
Cousins, Mark and Kevin Macdonald (1996) Imagining reality: the Faber book of documentary. London: Faber and Faber, 2006.
de Brigard, Emilie (1975) The history of ethnographic film. In Hockings, Paul (ed.)
Principles of visual anthropology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Levin, G. Roy (1971) Documentary explorations: 15 interviews with film-makers.
Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
Loizos, Peter (1993) Innovation in ethnographic film: from innocence to self- consciousness 1955-1985. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1922) Argonauts of the western Pacific. Reprint, London and
New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.
Marks, Dan (1995) Ethnography and ethnographic film: from Flaherty to Asch and after. American Anthropologist, 97 (2), 339-347.
Mead, Margaret (1968) The mountain Arapesh, 1: the record of Unabelin with
Rorschach analysis. Garden City: Natural History Press.
Metz, Christian (1974) Film language: a semiotics of the cinema. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Nichols, Bill (1981) Ideology and the image: social representation in the cinema and other media. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Rothman, William (1997) Documentary film classics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ruby, Jay (1975) Is an ethnographic film a filmic ethnography? Studies in the
Anthropology of Visual Communication, 2 (2), 104-11.
Stoller, Paul (1992) The cinematic griot: the ethnography of Jean Rouch. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Torresan, Angela (n.d.) Using film in ethnographic film research.
http://www.methods.manchester.ac.uk/methods/ethnographic-film/index.shtml
[Accessed 17 March 2013].
Films
Asch, Timothy and Napoleon Chagnon (1975) The ax fight. Watertown, MA: Documentary Education Resources. Colour, 30 mins.
Bateson, Gregory and Margaret Mead (1951) Trance and dance in Bali.
Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University. Black and white, 22 mins.
Bateson, Gregory and Margaret Mead (1953) Childhood rivalry in Bali and New Guinea. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University. Black and white, 16 mins.
Bregstein, Philo (1986) Jean Rouch and his camera in the heart of Africa.
Watertown, MA: Documentary Education Resources. Colour, 74 mins.
Curtis, Edward S. (1914) In the land of the head hunters. USA: World Film. Black and white, 47 mins.
Eaton, Michael (2010) The masks of Mer. UK: Potlatch Production. Colour, 37 mins.
Flaherty, Robert (1922) Nanook of the north. Paris: Les Freres Revillon. Black and white, 79 mins.
Gardner, Robert (1963) Dead birds. Watertown, MA: Documentary Education
Resources. Colour, 83 mins.
Gardner, Robert (1985) Forest of bliss. Watertown, MA: Documentary Education
Resources. Colour, 90 mins.
Grierson, John (1929) Drifters. UK: Empire Marketing Board. Black and white, 49 mins.
Griffith, D. W. (1915) Birth of a nation. USA: D. W. Griffith Corp. Black and white,
187 mins.
Haddon, Alfred Cort (1898) Torres Strait islanders. Cambridge: University of
Cambridge. Black and white, 4 mins.
Lumière, Louis (1895) Workers leaving the Lumière factory. France: Lumière.
Black and white, 1 min.
Marshall, John (1958) The hunters. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational
Resources. Colour, 73 mins.
Méliès, George (1902) A trip to the moon. Paris: Star Film. Black and white, 12 mins.
Rouch, Jean (1955) Les maîtres fous. France: Les Films de la Plèiade. Colour, 36 mins.
Rouch, Jean (1957) Moi, un noir. France: Les Films de la Plèiade. Colour, 70 mins.
Rouch, Jean (1959) La pyramide humaine. France: Les Films de la Plèiade. Colour,
90 mins.
Rouch, Jean (1967) Jaguar. France: Les Films de la Plèiade. Colour, 93 mins. Rouch, Jean (1970) Petit à Petit. France: Les Films de la Plèiade. Colour,
93 mins.
Rouch, Jean and Edgar Morin (1960) Chronique d’un été. Paris: Argos Films. Black and white, 85 mins.
Vertov, Dziga (1922-1925) Kino-pravda. USSR: Kultkino. Black and white, 10-29 mins x 23.
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