A Work in Progress |
A Revised Text of a Talk given in Norway
and Germany in May, 1996.
. Do Not Cite Without Permission.
Jay Ruby
Temple University
Philadelphia, PA
Abstract - The concept of "voice" is useful in exploring the rhetorical devices employed by ethnographic filmmakers to establish authority. It has been difficult for ethnographic film to develop its own voice - to speak with an authority recognized as being legitimate by both anthropologists and the people portrayed in the films. Anthropologists seem to make contradictory demands on the medium - requiring film to be, at once, scientific and artistic. It is essential to locate a new voice that is sensitive to the postmodern criticisms of objective, positivist science, while at the same time not reducing film to being merely an expressive outlet for the creative urges of anthropologists. This paper suggests a model of social communication as a means of locating such a voice - one that does not claim the omniscience of being objective nor the idiosyncreticness of an artistic statement. It is premised upon the assumption that all human communication is ideologically based; that anthropologists cannot escape their culture; and that the basis upon which one speaks must be made explicit. J. Jhala's and Lindsey Powell's video Whose Paintings? will be used as example of a multivocial work in which authority is shared and the conflict of position left unresolved.
A Contextual Note - Do Ethnographic Film Festivals Serve the Purposes of Visual Anthropology?
This paper is a revised version of a talk I gave at the Nordic Anthropological Film Association meeting in Bergen, Norway and then again at the IWF Festival in Göttingen, Germany in May, 1996. The talk was based upon and followed the screening of a videotape, Whose Paintings? Portions of the talk were taken from a longer paper, "Misappropriating the Ethnographic" in which I explore some of the arguments present here in more detail. Presenting a scholarly paper is a venue designed to screen films is a strange experience and trying to conduct a scholarly discussion is even stranger.
I have attended film festivals, seminars, conferences, etc. all over the world for over thirty years. I have become more and more frustrated with these events and find myself feeling that most of what occurs has little to do with anthropology and a lot more to do with the interests of professional filmmaking. Those of us concerned with the scholarly exploration of film as a vehicle for the transmission of anthropological knowledge have located neither the physical space nor social conventions to do so successfully. I submit that the "film festival" format (The most popular nomenclature and one I used for events I organized at Temple University at the beginning of my career) is fundamentally at odds with the purposes of a visual anthropology. A different venue and new canons of public debate must be constructed if film is to become more central to the concerns of anthropology.
The overwhelming majority of film festivals are marketplace events designed to enhance the commercial value of the works shown. Distributors lend films because doing so will enhance their market value, even when sponsored by academic institutions or organizations. The prestige of being in these events and possibility of winning a prize is commercially motivated. It has little to do with the normal activities of a scholar. The works are shown in the best possible theatrical fashion. Whether it is a film or a video, it is projected as large as possible in an auditorium that will accommodate as many people as possible, thus maximizing the quality of the image if it is film and minimizing the possibility of discussion - theatrical seating inhibits active discussion by the audience. This system favors the larger budgeted 16mm productions while stigmatizing the modestly produced Hi8mm video works designed to be seen on a television monitor by a limited number of people.
The makers of these works are often invited to appear at film festivals. Because the interests, expectations and knowledges of most filmmakers are different from those of most anthropologists, discussions lack a common set of assumptions. A filmmaking sensibility dominates. Rather than encouraging a serious discussion, the makers' presence often invokes two polar and virtually useless responses - adoration or character assassination. Discussion topics seem to fall into two basic tropes: 1. aesthetic judgments about the work, as in "I really liked your film..." or "I was bothered in your film by..." and 2. questions about particular details of the life portray - what I call the "do the Eskimos really do that...?" variety. The personal assessment questions are often accompanied with technical questions about how the maker accomplished some effect or they are asked to justify a decision they made, as in, why did you decide to dub and not subtitle. This line of questioning often causes the filmmaker to tell "war stories" about the making of the film. What is seldom discussed is the contribution the film makes to anthropology. It seems to me that visual anthropologists have passively accepted the needs and expectations of the film world and not developed places and approaches to discussion more appropriate to their own needs.
One concrete example is necessary. At the annual American Anthropological Association, films are shown in their entirety in a kind of visual ghetto, that is separate from the "scientific" papers. They are sometimes grouped by locale and sometimes the maker is present but there is little to no discussion. When it does happen the talk is strictly among visual anthropologists and filmmakers. The films therefore never enter the mainstream of the meetings. I submit that if the makers of these films are interested in behaving like anthropologists and wish their work to enter the scholarly arena of debate, they could excerpt a 15 minute portion of their film (the time allotted for a paper) and submit it to a panel that was concerned with the anthropological issues they film addressed. While excerpting 15 minutes from a larger work is difficult, it is no more difficult than excerpting a 15 minute talk from a book length study, which is what anthropologists who write do all the time. This approach would insure that their films would be considered within the scholarly debate generated by these meetings.
Introduction - Setting The Scene
Anthropologically intended film occupies a position equally marginal to documentary film and cultural anthropology. It is a minor pursuit of the few, and a pedagogical device used in a relatively uncritical manner by most teachers of culture. Hopefully this situation is temporary - a liminal state. Because pictorial media are logically at the center of any debate about representation, it is possible to bring visual representation into the mainstream of anthropological concerns. The promise is the construction of a theory and practice of anthropologically intended film that challenges the logocentric basis of anthropological theorizing while at the same time confronting the ethnocentric narrowness and unsubstantiated assertions of some film, media, and cultural studies. The goal is at the core of my interest in the anthropology of visual communication.
Voice As Metaphor
This conference was called to explore the mechanics of voice in the context of the debate about representational authority. Voice is a way filmmakers articulate their authority and agency. To discuss voice is to explore and rationalize who can speak for or with whom under what circumstances and with what consequences. Thus conceived it becomes a way to consider the related issues of authority, authenticity, objectivity, and truth and their relevance to anthropologically intended film. I will make concrete my ideas through a discussion of the production choices two of my colleagues, J. Jhala and Lindsey Powell, made in their construction of their videotape, Whose Paintings?
Traditional Styles of "Speaking"
For some time the dominant voice of the so-called ethnographic film was the third person passive off-screen voice of absolute authority coupled with camera and editing styles that erased the filmmaker. It was manifested in two seemingly different ways. The feature length epics about the exotic other attempted to present an apparently seamless work through a pastiche of scenes edited in a style that emulated the romanticism of narrative fiction films. Nanook, The Hunters and Dead Birds are among the best examples. And in its "purist" form, it can be seen in the set of rules Wolf developed at IWF that defined the whole of "scientific" film - images made with a 16mm camera with a 28 mm lens at eye-level on a tripod, no pans, tilts, or zooms. If there was an offscreen narrator she or he dispassionately presented the "facts" about the events and people portrayed. It was assumed that meaning resided in the world and that the scientifically correct observer would passively record the reality in front of the camera in a unobtrusive manner. The "scientific" films had no authors in the creative sense of the term. They were the "view from nowhere" displaying the unquestioned authority of facts and striving to authentically present the truth about a culture. Films of the "ethnographic pastoral" like Nanook were the "vision" of an artist creating filmic beauty and truth that paralleled the truth of "scientific" film.
Among the myriad of errors contained in this realist approach is the mistaken notion that by following a set of film conventions labeled documentary realism or research film or film art, objective reality can be portrayed. This is a complicated argument that cannot be adequately addressed here. So I will simply state that I dispute the notion that documentary techniques or realism in general are necessarily the most appropriate means of expression for anthropology nor will the assumption that all film is art aid in the development of an anthropological cinema.
In the 1960s the traditional approaches described above began to be criticized from a variety of perspectives. As a consequence observational style emerged. Described by MacDougall as intending "...to render faithfully the natural sounds, structure, and duration of events." Thus "...placing the viewer in the role of the observer, a witness of events." It was claimed that the voice of God narrator and the cinema style that accompanied it was too directive. Audiences were forced to accept the point of view of the film. Observational cinema passively recorded events without making any overt comments - offscreen narration was absent or kept to a minimum. Asen Balicki's Netsilik Eskimo films are good examples. Thus it was argued that audience were free to make up their own minds about the significance of the events portrayed.
Some thought that there was more "excess" in an observational film and therefore more "open" to variant readings. This assumption ignores an anthropological vérité that socially shared interpretations of films and other cultural artifacts cause responses to be predictably limited - not open ended. Others proponents claim that the so-called objective reality captured in observational films would lead audiences to the truth of the events. Both seemingly contradictory assertions remain unsupported in that no audience research has been undertaken to confirm or deny these assertions.
Like their predecessor, observational style films erased the author. Ricky Leacock called it "...the pretense of our not being there..." Filmmakers regarded themselves simply as recorders of the objective truth that unfolded in front of their cameras. The point of view of the maker which was made manifest in the voice-over narration of the earlier form now became implicit in the choice of shots and editing. The voice of the maker was not absent. It simply became harder to locate. To be somewhat harsh, observational style allowed makers to hide their point of view and therefore avoid responsibility for its consequences. It is based on the fallacy that the world is understandable based solely on surface appearances with no analysis necessary and logically denies a basic anthropological assumption - that behavior has to be analyzed before it is comprehensible. An implicit critique of observational cinema began as soon as the style was invented with Jean Rouch's 1962 Chronicle of a Summer in which he introduced a participatory/provocateur camera style, multivocality, and possibility that a film can be coherent even though it contains competing and contradictory points of view.
The basic flaw in both observational and earlier styles is their attachment to a nineteenth century scientific paradigm - positivism and its accompanying assumption that all knowledge can be located on a continuum that ranges from the objective to the subjective. For the purposes of this talk, I will only explore objectivity.
For the past quarter of a century, a myriad of critics have presented a variety of arguments against a positivist science that asserts an objective reality and the ability of social scientists to arrive at the truth about other people's lives. The notion that objectivity and reality are a social construction has been a social science cliché since the work of Berger and Luckman. Anthropologists, journalists, and documentary filmmakers have all had some difficulty accepting that this idea applies to them as well as the people they portray. Positivism assumes the observer can behave outside the strictures of his/her class, gender and culture - a premise that denies a fundamental anthropological assumption - the role of culture is shaping reality.
A paradigmatic shift in science started in the 1930s with Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty. A new kind of science emerged in which propositions about the world are made that can be transformed into researchable questions which are used to generate data that lend themselves to a defensible interpretation. Meaning is thought to reside within the mind of the observer not in an objective reality which exists in the world.
Without being able to elaborate on this complex issue, let me simply state that once this paradigm is accepted the role of the anthropologist becomes that of the author of an interpretation who must reflexively explore the origins of his/her knowledge and make an argument in support of his/her point of view. What anthropologists represent is merely their own views, nothing else. They cannot speak for or about anyone. So they must find ways to speak along side and with those they study. The entire concept of "representation" has to be called into question. This approach is manifested in the writings of Michael Jackson and other "post-modern" critics of anthropology as well as the cinema vérité of Rouch and documentary filmmakers like Jill Godmillow in Far From Poland.
Given this perspective anthropologically intended film's voice should be an explicitly authored one with its claims to authority and authenticity made overt. The voice is now complex and multivocal in that the voices of those portrayed assume a greater importance. It is tentative, uncertain, conflicted and even unresolved. Definitive objective statements about other people's lives are simply not feasible or defensible or morally acceptable.
Whose Paintings? - Who Is Speaking?
Now let me make these condensed and abstract notions concrete by examining the video, Whose Paintings? - a tape about a collector of Rajput paintings. I will begin with an examination of the "look" of this film because it perplexes many viewers and can cause them to dismiss it as a marginally competent film rather than seeing it as a work that deliberately violates the canons of "good" film production as practiced by most so-called ethnographic filmmakers in the U.S.
Let me go through the film and point out where and how it is at variance with "received wisdom." First, the "technical problems." The sound quality is marginal. There is room noise throughout - a radio playing in the background. The anthropologist is underlit in the opening interview scenes. The resolution is below broadcast standards. Serious production errors - ones that could compromise the career of a professional filmmaker and get the film rejected in many documentary venues. These are not the mistakes of a beginning producer but rather the rational choices of someone who has made dozens of films over the past two decades. The music playing was the choice of the collector as "mood setting." The delicate nature of the paintings and the restrictions of the collector's apartment made the addition of extra lighting beyond the means of the filmmakers.
The first title card explicitly limits the audience and denies the film's position as a product designed for mass audiences - a choice that flies in the face of the notion that film is a mass medium and all films should have a commercial potential.
"This video is primarily intended for persons interested in Rajput paintings and Rajput Culture, in the practice of collecting art and its ramifications, and in the nature of how knowledge is shared by two individuals from different societies brought together by a common interest."
To understand how much this work varies technically from standard U.S. practice some background is necessary. So-called ethnographic film has become dominated by independent documentary filmmakers seeking to have their work seen on public television. Even those works produced by anthropologists seem to blindly follow the dictates of documentary convention with no apparent questioning of their appropriateness. The educational market, mainly one of rental, while still sizable, is economically unimportant in that few educational institutions have the funds to purchase any but the most inexpensive videotapes. No national funding agency provides production moneys for films made primarily for scholarly or educational purposes. While not all so-called ethnographic films are federally funded and only a small percentage are ever broadcast, it is fair to say that the majority of these filmmakers aspire to be part of that system. And most important, the notion of what constitutes a good ethnographic film derives from television and commercial standards, not scholarly ones. Because most so-called ethnographic filmmakers must produce work that generates revenue and insures their professional standing, they therefore strive to maintain certain production values because it is assumed that by so doing they will attract a wide audience and consequently funding for their next project - certainly makes senses if one assumes ethnographic films must be made by professionals.
As a result, these films are expensive and seldom experimental or risk taking. The needs of professional filmmakers dominate production decisions. The costs of professional quality films is sufficiently high that few are made, crews seldom can afford to spend much time in the field and most important the needs of the anthropologists to portray his/her knowledge become secondary to the need to make "a good film." Time will not permit a full examination of this thorny issue so I will simply state that if anthropologists wish to express their ideas in film, they will have to take over the production of modestly budgeted work with no commercial potential - a tendency Whose Paintings? exemplifies. The videotape was produced with a consumer level Hi8mm video camera and edited with a very inexpensive computer setup. The work had no budget except tape costs. No one was paid for even their expenses. Following this example means that once the equipment is purchased for less than $10,000, the cost of producing a tape is under $1000. Compare this to a television documentary with average costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Now let us explore more closely the voice of the tape. The tape begins with the identity of the anthropologist/filmmaker as native elite and scholar being explored - followed by a similar first person biographical sketch of the collector. If either point of view is to be given more credence, it is not indicated at this point - separate but equal seems to be implied. One could argue that because the tape was produced by the anthropologist and not collaboratively with the collector, the weight of the work leans heavily toward the point of view of the anthropologist. Some viewers react negatively because they feel the collector was setup to be ridiculed - a response that is not effected by the knowledge that the collectors likes the film and gives copies as gifts.
The body of the work is a series of encounters between the anthropologist and the collector in which each gives a reading of a painting. At times, the interpretations are virtually non-overlapping and, other times, they seem contradictory. Is the anthropologist rebuking and correcting an "inappropriate" Western collector's attitude with his culturally enriched views? It is not altogether clear until near to the end of the film when a title card appears which invites the audience to consider some serious and complex social, political and ethical matters -
"In this pleasant fashion the afternoon continued. Perhaps it was because of the different emphases we had concerning each painting a tumble of questions began to intrude disturbing my enjoyment."
And thus begins a long series of interrogations of the situation represented in the film - questions that occur to the Rajput anthropologist and his collaborator.
When is collecting an act of service and cultural preservation and when is it cultural pillage by the dominant society over the weaker?
When is an art object an individual's property, what a family's, when a community's, when a country's?
When is it permissible for individuals to defy national patrimony laws and convert objects of cultural value into cash by selling them to outsiders?
Do people who reject their artistic inheritance, in one epoch, have the right to demand the repatriation of those artifacts later, when these artifacts are in the possession of alien collectors?
Is preserving and displaying a ritual object made for a temporary existence an actual desecration?
Some appear to accuse all Westerns involved in non-Western "art worlds" of serious wrongdoing. Others, with equal intensity, take the anthropologist's culture to task for allowing their patrimony to be exported. In the end, we are left with a series of conundrums. According to the standards of U.S. produced ethnographic film, audiences are not supposed to be confused by unresolvable questions, they are supposed to be soothed or even entertained into thinking that now know something about the "exotic other."
Next, a set of title cards appear asking the audience to consider their own aesthetic questions about Rajput paintings.
But perhaps your questions were different? Were they about themes and style? Why blazing four armed gods?
Why do the lovers glow like fireflies in the dark?
Why are there no shadows?
Why does falling rain discretely avoid birds and flowers and make no puddles?
Why are figures in profile and who do they step out of the frame?
We invite your comments and questions......
Does the production of a video tape like this effect the exchange value of objects for collectors?
How does the creation of a market for exotic things compel the activities of looters, poachers, and forgers?
What would the effect be of photographing an object in situ at primary site and distributing Its likeness to a mass audience via the electronic highway?
These are virtually rhetorical queries unless a viewer has extensive knowledge of Rajput aesthetics. The implication is that the viewers will need to seek an answer outside the tape, thus admitting the limits of the work. The film invites viewers to make comments and ask questions of the makers by listing their addresses and email numbers. No resolution. No dominant voice. Simply two divergent attitudes - two people speaking about and no one speaking for. One emanating from an elite native and scholar and the other from the collector representing a Western fine art market stance. No bad or good guys. Simply a historical struggle between different assumptions, if not, worlds.
Conclusions
The uncritical acceptance of the conventions of documentary and broadcast journalistic realism has not succeeded in creating filmed ethnography and has thwarted an exploration of the issues raised by post-modern criticism which suggest that a multivocal, reflexive, tentative voice is more appropriate for anthropology than the assured styles of pervious approaches. Anthropologists incorrectly assumed that some cinematic approaches are more "objective," more "scientific" than others. It is time to look at all forms of cinema for elements useful to the task and to accept Geertz's notion that all anthropology is "fiction" that is a construction. This approach will find allies among experimental and avant garde producers and those dissonant elements from within the documentary community who play at the edges of the form. Works like Silverlake Stories, Daughter Rite and Far From Poland come to mind.
If films like Whose Paintings? are to succeed, viewers will have to be cultivated. Their expectations about how a video should "look" will be violated. They will have to be taught that what they see is not a mistake or a sign of incompetence but rather the result of an authorial choice. They must accept the complexity and unresolved quality of these works and actively view - stopping and rewinding the tape at passages unclear upon first glance. Viewers will have to learn to look at these videos not for the pleasure of the image but for the ethnographic knowledge and theoretical argument they contain. I am not making the old and tired argument that something called "ethnographic content" is more important than the cinematic form in which it is presented. I am arguing that the primary goal of an ethnographic film has to be the communication of ethnographic knowledge not producing something the industry calls "a good film."
A final product could be designed for a tiny audience of specialists without violating funders' expectation or harming a filmmaker's reputation. It should be self-evident that this activity would not be very economically rewarding. These modestly produced videos will have little commercial potential and lack the production values public television deems necessary. One cannot make a living from the kind of films I envision but then anthropologists don't make a living from their writings why should they from their film work. The need to produce revenue from these activities inhibits the exploration of form.
As the cost of producing such work is minimal, once the anthropologist has secured funding for their field work, the tapes could be sold at modest prices. No distribution company currently in existence is able to accommodate this form of dissemination. Some sort of alternate distribution would have to be instituted. For film to be truly important as the written word, the cost of acquiring a tape has to be comparable to that of a book.
Ethnographic film has been too long dominated by technical specialists and cinematic artists whose knowledge of the topic of their films is often limited to a few months of reading and scattered days of consulting with subject matter specialists. To borrow a military cliché, ethnographic film is too serious a thing to be left to professional filmmakers. The voice in these films must be that of an anthropologist and the people portrayed.