Filmmaker visibility and truth in popular ethnographic film

Ethnographic Films

Capturing Their Souls

When Polaroid discontinued its instant film in 2008, one of the most disappointed constituencies was police agencies. Crime scene investigators had for years depended on Polaroids to document what had happened for court cases because Polaroids could not be manipulated. In an age of Photoshop, in which everything in every other kinds of photographs had to be considered to be fungible, Polaroids provided a picture of what was true. Just the (visual) facts, as it were.

This forensic fondness for Polaroids is understandable, and if any of us were the victim of a crime we would probably be pleased if the police had access to an accurate and reliable method for collecting and preserving evidence. But the argument about why Polaroids are quintessentially truthful falls apart with a deeper level of examination. For while it is certainly true that Polaroids cannot be as easily manipulated as can a digital image, it is just as certainly true that they do not tell just the facts. For any visual image has a creator, who serves as an editor, telling us in the audience what it is important for us (the viewers and auditors) to focus on.

A skillful filmmaker or photographer can give us the impression that she or he has created a version of the world that is both objectively accurate and subjectively authentic. A skillful filmmaker can forget that we are watching an edited version of the world and make us believe that what we are seeing on the screen is exactly what we ourselves would focus on if we had been wherever the filmmaker was. (Setting aside for the moment the question of how accurate any individual's perception of the world can be considered to be even when that person is actually present.)

A highly skilled filmmaker can also clue the audience into the fact they are watching an edited version of the world, one that can certainly considered to be truthful, albeit in the way that a novel can reveal the truth through the creation of a certain narrative. Indeed, one of the most important decisions that a filmmaker must make is whether she or he will remain invisible to the audience or become fully visible. Does the filmmaker remain the figure behind the curtain, pulling the strings of the puppets, or does she step out in front of the footlights, even while he continues to pull the strings?

Each subset of filmmakers makes different calculations in determining how transparent the process of the creation of a visual narrative should be to the viewer -- and, of course, each filmmaker within each of these media communities must refine the conventions of their genre to meet their own needs and those of their audiences. This paper examines how one particular group of filmmakers makes decisions about the production of a particular type of film, that of the popular ethnographic film.

Defining a New Medium

This last term -- "popular ethnographic film" -- might seem to be something of an oxymoron given that ethnographic films are hardly the stuff of shoot-'em-up blockbusters that bring in the big bucks for the major film studios. But there is a genre of ethnographic film that is created for a lay audience that is created (as well as distributed and produced) in a different manner than is true of ethnographic films (or perhaps more actually ethnographic footage) that is created for use by scholars in the pursuit of understanding a culture or community. This paper focuses on the popular ethnographic film, the kind of visual ethnography that Todd Holland created in the 1998 Krippendorf's Tribe or that was featured in Granada Television's Disappearing World Series and the BBC Television's Worlds Apart and Under the Sun series.

Film that is created for anthropologists or other scholars should never be anything other than explicit about the fact that it is an edited version of the world with a certain epistemological (and often explicitly political) perspective. A scholar looks at an ethnographic film in the same way that a scholar reads a written ethnography: Both are products made by a person or a team from one culture investigating a community most often other than their own for particular reasons.

An ethnographic film made for a lay audience, however, has much more latitude in terms of how much the director lets the audience in on how much editing -- or manipulation, if one wishes to reframe the same process -- has actually occurred. Both of these types of ethnographic films can be analyzed in terms of the way in which films establish a dynamic between Us and Them, the Native and the Expert, the Seer and the Seen.

Not Just Whose Story, but Whose Definition of a Story?

Another way of distinguishing between a scholarly ethnographic film and a popular one is that the director of a popular ethnographic film has to be much more aware of the fact that the film must tell a story. A popular ethnographic film has to be sold to an audience. Filmmakers creating a popular film have to be aware of budgetary restraints: They will be unable to continue to work in their profession if they consistently lose money.

Popular ethnographic films must -- precisely to appeal to an audience that is greater than the scholarly community -- follow a narrative that appeals to a fairly wide audience. Unless the culture that is being depicted in an ethnography is very similar to the culture that the filmmakers are from, it is very likely that there will be very different narrative forms that are accepted by these two different groups. The filmmakers will pick a narrative that appeals to their audience. This may or may not be a narrative style or form that resonates with the subjects of the ethnography.

This is not to criticize the popular ethnographic filmmaker. Making a film that will be well received by an audience in London or New York or Milan is precisely what he or she should be doing. This is precisely the same thing as acknowledging that a company is run to make money: Ethnographic filmmakers are sometimes supported by non-profit organizations, but even non-profits cannot afford to lose money consistently on their projects. Thus makers of popular ethnographic films must always be conscious of the costs and potential profits of their work.

Anthropologists and other scholars, on the other hand, must be attentive to the narrative traditions of the people whom they are studying regardless of how closely the story that they are recording matches their own sense of how a story should be told. One possible example of this is that a popular ethnographic filmmaker would in many cases want to focus on an individual undergoing some sort of personal transformation -- some version of the heroic journey so central to Western narrative forms from at least Homer onward.

Such a biographical approach would appeal to many Western audiences. It might, however, be highly problematic to a culture that is more collective in its focus and disapproving of individual unconventionality. A scholar recording a culture would be obligated (both ethically and in adhering to the most basic standards of scholarly inquiry) to capture on film those images and sequences that allowed the subjects to tell their own story within the narrative traditions of their own culture.

It should be made explicit at this point that this paper is addressing not all films that have central ethnographic elements to them for arguably all films have ethnographic elements to them, since ethnography is simply the act of recording details of a culture in a conscious way. However, the term "ethnographic film," like the broader term "ethnography" itself is conventionally used to describe films made about non-Western cultures or, in a pinch, disempowered communities in Western cultures such as prostitutes.

Henley summarizes this definition of ethnographic film:

Although there is no absolute reason to consider films about such exotic societies as any more 'ethnographic' than films about the societies of the metropolises, the former present the particular of ethnographic film in a more acute manner.

He also summarizes some of the key aesthetic and philosophical points that ethnographic filmmakers must take into account:

This difficulty concerns the question of how information that is non-visual, but which is of critical importance in providing the sociological context of the action visible on the screen, is to be retailed. If this information is presented in the form of a heavy-handed voice-over commentary, it can kill one of the greatest advantages that film has over a literary account, namely the capacity to facilitate an empathetic understanding on the part of the viewer of what exotic ways of life mean to those who live them. In films of this kind, the film subjects can become no more than mute visual aids to an intellectual argument that could be advanced probably more coherently and certainly more cheaply on paper. On the other hand, if this contextualizing information is simply omitted in a film dealing with an exotic society, it runs the risk of becoming no more than a spur to ethnocentric fantasy.

It should be noted that this risk of becoming simply an "ethnocentric fantasy" is something that not all filmmakers are worried about. Indeed, it might well be argued that the creation of an ethnocentric fantasy might well make an ethnographic film more popular and more profitable.

Indeed, an ethnocentric fantasy is one of the storylines that fits well into the narrative expectations of Western audiences, who will not be surprised by tales of Noble Savages or simply Savages whose lives are made better and more meaningful through contact with the West. There is also the accepted trope that is no more than simple ethnocentrism: There is certainly room for the filmmaker who produces ethnocentric movies that allow Western audiences to feel validated in the idea that their own culture is better than that of the people whose lives are being depicted.

A More Naive -- or Simpler? -- World

The roots of ethnographic film go deep into the world of the documentary made for scholars. Gregory Bateson began using film in the 1930s as a way to slow down the rituals that he was watching: Using a frame-by-frame analysis that was only possible through the use of film allowed him to derive meaning from a live event that was too over-determined for him to assess (as an outsider) without such a mechanical aid.

For Bateson, there was no question of whether his films of rituals were anything other than Bateson's own limited perspective of what he wanted to focus on. He did not have to consider any appeal of his images to a wider, lay audience.

But the use of film in ethnography began to shift almost from the very beginning of the medium so that the footage that anthropologists recorded in the field became films that were made by both scholars and filmmakers that were meant to introduce various "primitive" cultures to the "civilized" world.

The intent of many of these filmmakers was good as they wished to show the rest of the world the value of more traditional societies. There was, however, also an exploitative element of these films, at least as we view them retrospectively, since there was such a degree of power differential between those making images and those who were being depicted.

There was also, as noted above, the continuing differential between filmmaker and the filmed in terms of making a profit off of the movies.

In this sense the early ethnographic films made for a popular audience were caught in the same political, ethical webs that entangled the early written ethnographies, although in the case of the films these webs were even stickier and more tangled. (Again, it is important to note that these ethical considerations are far more apparent to us in the 21st century than they would have been at the time. This does not mean that ethnographers and filmmakers working in the first half of the twentieth century were less ethically aware than we are now; rather the prevailing ethical climate was fundamentally different.) Written ethnographers are clearly the work of the author: Nobody could read an ethnographic account by Bateson, for example, and not be constantly aware that there was a literal author to the text.

This understanding that the narrative reflected the view of an individual affects the way that a reader encounters the story presented by the ethnographer. Moreover, it is clear that the author is an outsider to the culture, a fact that might make the reader either more or less inclined to believe the truthfulness of the author's perspective.

However, people are generally more inclined to believe that a visual image (first photography, then film) tells something like the unvarnished truth. Films seem to convey to the world an unedited perspective.

This acceptance of the truthfulness of a filmed image was particularly true of the viewers of film from an earlier generation, before current digital technologies allowed for nearly seamless alterations of what had taken place in front of a camera lens.

There was also a generally greater acceptance of images that portrayed only a portion of a culture (or even an overtly biased view of a culture) in a world before the internet and globalization made the world more connected. This must be a constant consideration for the filmmaker: How much should she or he make the audience aware of the fact that what they are seeing is a particular story, not the whole of the culture.

Many people now have a far more knowledgeable and far more sophisticated understanding of how people in very distant parts of the globe live than was true three or four or five generations ago, which allows them to be more sophisticated consumers of visual images. This in turn has an effect on the ways in which filmmakers create their works. There is always a conversation between the makers and consumers of images.

However, the filmmakers' voices are much clearer and so they have a higher degree of responsibility. The maker of a popular ethnographic film should always make choices in as conscious a way as possible when balancing the rights of the people being depicted and the her or his own needs as a filmmaker.

Almost regardless of the level of sophistication of the audience for an ethnographic film, there will be an ongoing tension between the "ethnographic" part of a popular ethnographic film and the "popular" (or even "film") part of such an enterprise. Anthropologists, like other scholars, should be primarily concerned with telling the truth about their subject in a way that honors nuance and allows for the ambiguities of lived experience. (This is not to say, of course, that this always happens when anthropology is done.) Films can be made that reflect nuance and celebrate ambiguity, of course, but films are flatter than written narratives, and their focus (because of the way in which films proceed in a linear way through time and cannot be flipped back through the way that a book can) implies a certain singular way and a certain determined rate through which the world must be experienced.

Henley summarizes this duality, this tension at the heart of popular ethnography. He is referring to the Disappearing World program and similar programs.

… the films were made for a popular audience, who could not be expected to be familiar with even the most elementary of anthropological concepts. Therefore full explanations in the verbal commentary of the historical, sociological or symbological background to the visual material would necessarily have been particularly cumbersome and lengthy. The film-makers' counter-argument to the anthropologists, therefore, was that if the viewers with professional interests wanted more facts and figures, they could always look for them in the appropriate book or article, but to burden an ethnographic film with these details was to throw overboard the particular qualities that film has for achieving an understanding of other cultures. Not all professional anthropologists were convinced by this argument, whilst some went so far as to maintain that there is a basic and inevitable incompatibility between the objectives of anthropology and film-making.

BBC filmmakers (and their colleagues) would probably argue that there is in fact no fundamental incompatibility between ethnography as practiced by scholars and the kind of ethnographic film that they produce, while anthropologists are more inclined to see an important distinction between the two forms of enterprises.

The reason that there should be such a disagreement is easy to understand. An essential part of the appeal of a popular ethnographic film to the mass audience is that it conveys accurate and authentic information, that it is not simply entertainment but educational as well. Filmmakers appeal to audiences in no small part because they are offering a quality product, something very much distinct from ordinary Hollywood fare but that is, at the same time, accessible in a way that scholarship is not.

Scholars, on the other hand, have a stake in keeping a clear distinction between the kind of ethnographic work that they are engaged in and popular ethnographic film, for they want to stave off suspicions that non-scholars could do what they do. Popular filmmakers want (and may even need) the allure of scholarship while scholars do not need the allure of popularity.

The Conversation on the Screen

One of the central questions that arises with a film like Masai Women (and, again, these questions are far more obvious to us today than would have been generally true at the time) is to what extent the film reflects the culture or cultures being depicted and to what extent it reflects the culture of the filmmakers.

While the specifics of the lives of Masai women were very different from those of Western women, of course, the important moments in the lives of the women in these very different worlds, the Masai women also celebrated their own coming-of-age moments, the birth of their children, and the coming of age of their own children. Demonstrating the parallels between Masai and Western women was no doubt one of the major reasons that Llewelyn-Davies had in making the film, for one of the roles that popular ethnographic film has taken on is the goal of helping de-exoticize other cultures, to remind audiences that we all of us share a common humanity.

Ethnography has come to be seen as a form of conversation in which the ethnographer generally has certain kinds of power such as first-world political power and funding to make and distribute the project and the subjects of the ethnography have the power of knowledge. Another way of assessing this is that the ethnographer filmmaker and the subjects have different areas of expertise, with ethnographers knowing how to make films and ethnographic subjects along having all of the cultural knowledge needed to provide the material to make a film interesting enough to sell to an audience.

Natives to a culture -- the subjects of the films -- do not need to have their lives edited to make them meaningful, since this is precisely the definition of being a native. Outsiders (i.e. The audiences) do in fact need to have edited versions of other people's lives to find them meaningful. Popular filmmakers must constantly negotiate this issue, ensuring that the films that they make are sufficiently close to the lived reality of the subjects to convey a sense of authenticity to audiences who come to see an ethnographic film precisely because of its authentic view of another world.

Llewellyn-Davies's the Women's Olamal (1984) took her interest in how to allow her subjects to act as the experts on their own lives to an even more refined degree:

In effect, in Olamal, the Maasai become their own presenters, but they present themselves and their social life in such a relaxed, engaging way that far from isolating the viewer from the subjects of the film, this presentation to appreciate their true significance.

There are very clear differences between the type of film made by an anthropologist like Llewellyn-Davies and a film like Jamie Uys's the Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), which portrayed the "natives" as little too naive to survive an encounter with the world of the filmmakers. When a Coke bottle enters their world, they find themselves unable to deal with the possible advantages that a First World technology gives to some of them but not to others.

The movie can in fact be read (although there are certainly other readings as well) as a commentary on the part of the filmmakers about the ways in which films themselves become a form of technology that different parts of a community have unequal access to. Just as the individual with the Coke bottle in the film becomes the one with the advantage over everyone else, the one who controls the camera is also the one who has advantage over everyone else.

The Power of the Lens

The difference between the Coke bottle and the movie maker is an important one, for despite the similarities there is a key distinction. While the Coke bottle offers only a temporary advantage to the owner, the movie offers a long-lasting advantage to those who made the film. For many people, their view of the peoples of the Kalahari Desert will forever be primarily (or even solely) shaped by this very popular movie. The moviemakers created a narrative about a people that the rest of the world found palatable and appealing.

The Sho themselves might have been able to craft a narrative that was similarly appealing, although it is possible that this would not be the case because the narrative forms that the Sho would be engaged in would not necessarily resonate as well with Western audiences because they would not be, of course, because they are simply not derived from Western sources. Not only do traditional peoples not have access to the funds and technology that would allow them to make films about themselves, but they also do not conceive of themselves in the ways that would allow them to create books or films that could be seen in ethnographic terms.

For ethnography is, of course, a tool of the outsider. People do not write ethnographies about their own worlds, about their own communities. The stories we tell about ourselves are simply that: Stories. Or plays. Or biographies and autobiographies. Or history. Or journalism. Linguists have the concept of a "speech act," which is a recognized type of "text." Speech acts can include everything from a lecture to a sermon, but what is most important about the concept of a speech act is that each one has a different set of rules attached to it. The natives of a culture -- of a speech community -- agree to the rules of an type of speech act, so that (for example), people know that a sermon can only be interrupted for a very serious reason.

The kind of narrative that is created through an ethnographic film is the kind of speech act that can only be created and maintained through the kind of cultural, artistic, and linguistic conventions that exist in the West. There are certainly people from traditional cultures now that have the financial and organizational means to produce ethnographic films either about their own culture or another culture. But the making of ethnographic films is not a recognized speech text in most traditional communities and so there is no analogous power that members of ethnographized cultures can use on others.

The power to create images is an incredibly intoxicating one, and filmmakers have used this quality to craft visual texts that tell us about other parts of the world. The popular ethnographic film has been used to open up the experiences to Western audiences to the lives of other people, of Others. Many filmmakers have used this power to help make bridges and reduce intolerance. That is, indeed, one of the key elements of the popular ethnographic film: The makers of these films are often engaged in an intentional effort to help build ties among people.

Moreover, the popular ethnographic film has often been made as a way in which to empower people whom history, economics, and politics have otherwise robbed of their power and agency. It is in the end a complicated question as to whether the ethnographic film has in the end been beneficial to the people on the far side of the lens. Certainly, the fact of being the subject of such a film changes the people who are in it, making them aware of being the subject of interest in a way that most of us are not aware of in the course of our daily lives.

Filming daily life makes it into something other than daily life. The popular ethnographic film freezes daily life and so transforms it into a different kind of record, a different kind of speech act. Given the course and trend of history, the lives of traditional peoples would have been upended by the modern world. Perhaps the ethnographic film was one of the kindest ways in which different worlds could have met.