The Authoring of Observational Cinema: Conversations with Colin Young

Based on a series of conversations with Colin Young that have taken place over more than thirty years, this article explores how a certain set of practical and institutional circumstances, in combination with a series of philosophical and aesthetic ideas about the nature of cinema, first led to the emergence over the late 1960s and early 1970s of the approach to ethnographic filmmaking that would become known as “Observational Cinema.” Although it was those whom Colin Young trained, inspired or simply influenced who worked out the practical filmmaking applications of his ideas, it was he who initially formulated the foundational concepts underpinning this approach to ethnographic filmmaking. As such, although he has been a “filmmaker-maker” rather than a filmmaker himself, Colin Young has a rightful claim to be considered, in the sense defined by Roland Barthes, as the original “author” of Observational Cinema.     

Dans le bain avec Rouch: A Reminiscence

This issue's Visual Anthropology Section is a tribute to anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch (1917–2004). In nine brief articles, authors discuss the impact of Rouch's pathbreaking career on ethnographic and documentary filmmaking and his contributions to our knowledge of postcolonial Africa. The authors demonstrate the significance of his work for the larger discipline of anthropology, and commemorate Rouch with personal reflections of their time working with and learning from him.     

Filmic encounters: Multispecies care and sacrifice on island Timor

This is a story about the ‘arts of noticing’ more‐than‐human noticing. In it I reflect on the ways in which my own practice of ethnographic filmmaking is itself an agent of multisensory participation. As artifice and artificial eye, there is something both liberating and sensuous about filmmaking practice. It heightens the performativity of participants and their embodied rituals and allows me to enter intimate spaces I would otherwise not encounter. In these encounters a deep multispecies noticing takes place, although in the first instance this is usually only by the camera. The intimacy enabled in these artificial but sensorial encounters can be both revealing and confronting, especially in cases of animal sacrifice. Re‐encountering footage filmed across years of research‐led endeavour, in this paper I explore the power of film to convey these multisensory and multispecies stories, as well as to evoke understanding and engage the multisensory memory of the filmmaker.     

Ethnographic film: Technology,practice and anthropological theory

Despite the enthusiasm of the pioneer generation of anthropologists for the camera as a means of ethnographic research, filmmaking remained marginal to the anthropological project for most of the course of the last century. However a combination of technological developments and recent theoretical paradigm shifts within anthropology generally now offers the possibility of greater integration of filmmaking into ethnographic research. This article1 seeks to identify the basis for this theoretical incorporation and discusses some of the practical ways in which film can now be used as a means of generating ethnographic understanding,     

Dreaming a Narrative and Conjuring an Image: Collaborative Filmmaking with People and Spirits in Melanesia

This article explores long-term creative engagement, through filmmaking, with a community in Papua New Guinea. It examines the process and results of three feature film projects done in collaboration with Melanesian communities. The films discussed here have employed diverse methods to engage with people creatively. All three of these ethnographic films seek to privilege local epistemologies through their construction, narrative approaches and subjects. The article details the methodologies employed for promoting indigenous ways of knowing. It is suggested that filmmaking and creative engagement have helped generate a meaningful site for Lak communities to explore their traditional practices and identity.     

Ecstasy,Choreography and Re-Enactment: Aesthetic and Political Dimensions of Filming States of Trance and Spirit Possession in Postwar Southern Italy

States of trance and spirit possession have inspired the modernist imagination perhaps more than anything else, as they typically exceed the limits of visual representation. This article investigates different approaches to coping with these challenges, focusing on the works of a group of Italian documentary filmmakers, including Luigi di Gianni, Cecilia Mangini, and Gianfranco Mingozzi, who used a novel set of audiovisual techniques to explore ecstatic religious expressions in southern Italy in the postwar years. I look into the processes through which trance and possession rituals (e.g. Apulian tarantism) themselves have inspired and initiated innovations in audiovisual documentation by means of combining—or blurring the boundaries between—ethnographic and experimental modes of cinematic practice. Through highly stylized image/sound compositions including high-contrast lighting, wood-cut like silhouettes, montage, abstract sound effects and poetic, partly fictionalized commentary, as well as by consciously making use of re-enactments and staged encounters, these films contest both the realist-observational narrative and the focus on individuals otherwise prevalent in ethnographic filmmaking. Reading the Italian films against the backdrop of the earlier and contemporaneous, yet much better-known trance films of Maya Deren and Jean Rouch, the article argues that their antirealist audiovisual aesthetic fabricates a social aesthetic that raises sensitivity to human experience and fosters a radically humanist stance.     

Reflections of an Ethnographic Filmmaker-Maker: An Interview with Paul Henley, Director of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester

ABSTRACT  Two decades ago the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology (GCVA) at the University of Manchester, U.K., was created. Since then it has become one of the most acclaimed postgraduate visual anthropology schools in the world, providing a space for theoretical debate and training in ethnographic filmmaking techniques. Conceived originally as a master's program under the sponsorship of Granada Television and the University of Manchester, it has now extended training to the Ph.D. level to students from around the world. In this interview, Professor Paul Henley, GCVA's director since its inception, reflects on the last 20 years of the Granada Centre, ethnographic filmmaking, the state of the art in theory and practice in visual anthropology, and new possibilities and challenges for the future. [Keywords: visual anthropology, ethnographic filmmaking, documentary, Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology]     

Making Forest of Bliss: The Film, the Book, the DVD, and the Breakthrough

Robert Gardner's and Àkos Östör's Making of Forest of Bliss (2002) is a combination book and DVD that contains eight teaching tools for better understanding Gardner's celebrated film Forest of Bliss. After the film was shot in 1985, filmmaker Gardner and anthropologist Östör recorded a conversation about each image and sound of the film while they screened it again in 1987, and remembered their filmmaking process on location in Benares, India. The feature length (89 minute) documentary about death ritual, reincarnation, the sacred Ganges River, and the very atmosphere of Benares is included as DVD, as are teaching tools such as frame grabs (still images from the film), a mathematically precise shot list, bibliography, important criticism and essays about the film, and the featured in-depth conversation between filmmaker Gardner and anthropological advisor Östör. This essay articulates the unique breakthroughs in pedagogy, cross-cultural studies, and multidisciplinary analysis such hybrid technology provides.     

From Documentation to Representation: Recovering the Films of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson

Although the seven films made by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, based on footage shot in Bali and New Guinea during 1936–39, are identified as a landmark in various histories of ethnographic film, these films have been the subject of remarkably little analysis in the anthropological literature. In contrast, their photographic work has received much more extended commentary. Making a close reading of the films in their final edited form, this article aims to recover this aspect of Mead and Bateson's work from its relative neglect. We consider the circumstances under which the films were made, the theoretical ideas that informed them, and the methods employed in shooting and editing. Notwithstanding recent skepticism about both the theoretical ideas and the quality of the research on which Mead and Bateson's work in Bali was based, as well as the naiveté of some of the filmmaking ideas found in the films themselves, when considered as a group, they continue to be interesting examples of a particular transitional phase in the history of ethnographic film.     

An Ethnographic Filmflam: Giving Gifts, Doing Research, and Videotaping the Native Subject/Object

Using the discussion of self-reflexivity as an organizing principle, this article examines how mobilizing digital video technology during fieldwork opens up empirical and theoretical space for reconceptualizing the relationship between anthropologists and informants. Placing the field of visual anthropology into critical conversation with long-standing theoretical arguments about the objectivist limitations of native anthropologists, I argue that the slipperiness of nativity as an anthropological designation helps to provide analytical tools for examining filmmaking as a kind of gift-giving process between native ethnographic filmmakers and the subjects of their films. This article highlights some of the ways in which my own filmic and videographic exploits in Harlem, New York, mark integral connections between seeing and being the proverbial other, probing social exchanges predicated on the usefulness of low-budget digital technology as a means of fostering politically and epistemologically valuable ethnographic collaborations.     

The Texture of Events and the Stuff of Dreams: Jean Rouch at the Heart of Film and Anthropology

Too little known in the English‐speaking world, Jean Rouch died in 2004, leaving a prolific body of work. Influenced by the surrealists, by dance, cinema and music, his ‘shared anthropology’ and filmmaking began when he was an engineer in colonial West Africa during World War II—through friendship with African public works employees and revolt over the working and living conditions of the people forced to labour. Rouch saw his engineering, anthropology and filmmaking as creating with the concrete, ‘building bridges’. He did not renounce the ‘rational’, but wanted to supplement and broaden it with other ways of searching and knowing, always concerned with the relationship of the concrete material to the spiritual, dream and fantasy—working in the imaginative place where art meets science. This article discusses Rouch's ciné‐ethnography, focusing on a few of the many films he made.     

Slashing the Complacent Eye: Luis Buñuel and the Surrealist Documentary

Land Without Bread [1932] has always been misunderstood. The film incorporates both documentary and Surrealist traditions and has been considered highly problematic as an ethnographic film. Viewers are still perplexed and even outraged by the insensitivity of the portrayal of the residents of Las Hurdes, a remote region in the western interior of Spain where living conditions in the 1930s resembled those in the Third World. In this article I examine the history of the film's creation in the contexts of both documentary/ethnographic film and Surrealism. I argue that the point of the film is to mock both the complacent viewer and filmmakers who construct colonialist documents; and also that ethnographic filmmaking today still has not fully rid itself of an inherent colonialism that has always characterized the genre.     

From Vues to Ethnofiction: French Ethnographic Filmmaking in Africa before Jean Rouch

This article offers an overview of the very substantial body of films of ethnographic interest produced by French filmmakers working in Africa before Jean Rouch arrived on the scene. It identifies a number of genres. For the first two decades this work largely took the form of short films of reportage, mostly shot in North and West Africa by anonymous operators working for newsreel agencies. Then, in the 1920s, longer and technically more complex films based on transregional and even transcontinental expeditions began to appear. Films offering an inventory of cultural traditions in particular French colonies also emerged in this decade. Also to be considered are films based on extended field research, from the 1930s onwards. We conclude with a brief analysis of the originality of Jean Rouch as he developed a new form of ethnographic filmmaking in the late 1940s.     

The Last of the Great (Foot-Slogging) Explorers: Lewis Cotlow and the Ethnographic Imaginary in Popular Travel Film

This essay focuses on the popular travel films and books of Lewis Cotlow (1898-1987), an American explorer, author, filmmaker, insurance broker and amateur ethnographer who made photographic expeditions to Africa, South America, New Guinea, and the Arctic from the 1930s to the 1950s. This essay aims to uncover the shared historical practices and narratives in travel film and ethnographic film, examining scientific films in light of popular forms of anthropological cinema. In particular, the author examines the construction of an ethnographic imaginary and modes of ethnographic realism in the feature-length color film Jungle Headhunters [1950], shot during Cotlow's various expeditions to the Amazon during the 1940s.     

Early Ethnographic Film in Britain: A Reflection on the Work of Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf

A brief history points up the relative scarcity of ethnographic film made by British anthropologists in the 20th century. The reasons for this were the difficulty and expense of filmmaking until recent years, and a theoretical disinterest in filmmaking, leading to a limited opportunity to capture visually the last tribal worlds. The importance of Fürer-Haimendorf's collection of films thus stands out. The conditions which made his work in India, the North-East Frontier and Nepal possible are discussed, with an outline of his filming and written ethnographies. Why was he interested in film? Fürer-Haimendorf's technical ability with film and photography combined with an emotional sensibility are key. Not fully a man of his time, he avoided the abstract and anti-materialist phase in anthropological theory. An interview with Fürer-Haimendorf and his views on film are presented; and we see that the role of Betty Fürer-Haimendorf was crucial. We conclude with a brief consideration of his attitudes and, in his later life, the role of the BBC and the professionalization of anthropological filmmaking.     

Ethical issues in ethnomusicological filmmaking

This paper investigates ethical issues which the author had to face in making a series of four ethnomusicological films in central Switzerland. Specifically related as well to an experience in filming music, the subjects considered raise questions of general concern in ethnographic filmmaking. Three main matters are discussed: revealing editing devices, which is rarely done in the film itself; the risk of the musicians becoming the laughing stock of the village if they appear to have weaknesses in their performance; and the return of research to those being studied, for their own benefit.     

Beyond authenticity: The discourse of tourism in ethnographic and experimental film

This paper explores the relationship between postmodern ethnographic and experimental filmmaking. Recent shifts in both modes of film praxis away from modernist paradigms of anthropology and aesthetics have disclosed a rich field of nonscientific, non‐visionary common ground. Theoretical issues that help to define this inter‐penetration of film modes include allegory, tourism and intertextuality. Films by Jonas Mekas, Trinh Minh‐ha, David Byrne and Paula Gaitan are discussed with the aim of indicating the scope, the potential and the problems of postmodern ethnography.     

From the delta to Detroit: Packaging a folk epic for a new folk

This paper provides a narrative account of the making of the video, Tales from Arab Detroit: Abu Zayd Comes to America. It focuses upon the original project which involved bringing Egyptian epic‐singers to Detroit to perform selections from the epic of the Banî Hilâl tribe and their hero, Abu Zayd, in September 1993. The paper offers a brief background to the epic tradition itself, an analysis of two of the Detroit performances, a critique of the portrayal of the singers found in the final version of the video, and concludes with a textual ethnographer's thoughts about ethnographic filmmaking.     

Of Shifting Economies and Making Ends Meet: The Changing Role of the Accompagnant at the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in Dakar,Senegal

Since 1972, inpatients at the Fann Psychiatric Clinic have been required to have a family member or close friend—an accompagnant—stay with them for the duration of their hospitalization. In recent years, however, the role of the accompagnant has seen a dramatic transformation. This article considers the emergence of a new kind of accompagnant at Fann: the for-hire accompagnant mercenaire, who is unrelated to the patient and not employed by the clinic. Against the backdrop of Senegal’s neoliberal turn and in light of the growing prominence of the biomedical approach at Fann, the author shows how the idealized accompagnant model of family caretaking has given way to this new form of commodified care. At the same time, however, the author argues that accompagnants mercenaires regularly draw upon and establish new sets of moral codes, obligations, debts, and expectations in their day-to-day interactions with patients, family members, and staff alike. By way of a careful ethnographic examination of the evolution of the accompagnant role at Fann, this article brings into focus a complex and multidimensional picture of the shifting economies—moral and political, as well as therapeutic—within the present-day clinic.