Ethnographic Films Capturing Their Souls

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.

Blending Different Typologies of Visual Narrative

After Bateson pioneered what would become known as ethnographic film (which is aligned with visual anthropology, although this term tends to be more associated with still photography), the field began to expand. Among the most important films made was John Marshall's the Hunters, which documented the !Kung-San people of the Kalahari during the second half of the twentieth century.

One of his films, Nai, the Story of a !Kung Woman, blended ethnographic film conventions with ones drawn from mainstream film traditions because it not only documented the cultural context of her life (thus following the norms of ethnographic films) while also focusing on the biographical and psychological details of the protagonist's life, a focus on the heroic arc of an individual depended on tropes from both Western filmmaking and more generally from Western narrative traditions.

Other important ethnographic films -- important in terms of establishing narrative and aesthetic traditions for the form and thus expectations for the audiences of these films -- included Napoleon Chagnon and Tim Asch's 1960s films the Ax Fight and the Feast that documented aspects of the Yanomamo, a group that lives in the Amazonian. Robert Gardner and Karl Heider made another important shift in terms of the ways in which filmmakers (who were sometimes also anthropologists or other scholars and sometimes not) in the ways in which ethnography-as-cultural-tool was shifted into a form of entertainment that paralleled other forms of documentary filmmaking.

The two used both filming and the editing of visual images as a key research tool while at the same time using the images that they created as a way to convey to audiences other than themselves and other scholars. They made the creation of visual images a central part of their research rather than an adjunct to written records (or audio recordings) to produce the 1963 film Dead Birds.

This film was an important step in that it provided cultural perspectives from a number of different viewpoints, a narrative (and epistemological) technique that was becoming increasingly important within other film traditions at the same time. The effect was both a more visually rich product as well as a film that suggested that a multivalent view of a culture (including "primitive" cultures) was more accurate than a singular perspective. However, it was also a shift toward the techniques and conventions of commercial filmmaking, and by using these techniques the two were making important decisions about the goals that they were aiming for and where their loyalties lay.

David Mayberry-Lewis extended this emphasis on creating popular ethnographic films from (literally) multiple perspectives when he used a number of different cameras simultaneously to film the same event from a range of different views, allowing the viewer of his films an even greater sense that they were actually in the field, seeing a culture not just as an insider might but rather as a range of different insiders might be able to see key events. This too can be seen as a decision to move towards Western narratives and commercial filmmaking (and television) techniques. These movies are certainly ethnographic in a general sense, but the ethnography is becoming secondary to the filmic narrative.

Who Is Speaking?

Relatively early on in the field of ethnographic film, the filmmakers became concerned with questions of authority at various levels.

This concern probably arose in part from the fact that when one is filming other people, there are clear dynamics of power that need to be negotiated throughout the entire process. Rather than being able to retreat to one's tent at the end of the day and write up one's field notes in solitude (as would have traditionally been the case with an anthropologist creating a written ethnography).

The question of who had authority -- not simply legal authority but also moral and cultural authority -- to depict the lives of other people on film is one that must as noted be negotiated on a continual basis.

But ethnographic filmmakers in the 1970s and certainly the 1980s were also being deeply affected by larger internal shifts in the world of ethnography as a whole.

The field, prompted in part by the retirement of a generation of anthropologists trained before World War II and their replacement by scholars who had been politically sensitized to the dynamics of the post-colonial world, began to examine in an unprecedented way the rights that first-world people had to investigate and document the lives of people with less power.

While the process of writing about or filming another person or group of people is never a purely egalitarian act, the power differential between the creator of images and the subject of that image-making, the balance of power in the ethnographic relationship has become much more equal in the past several decades. This trend toward honoring the rights and agency of the subjects of all forms of ethnographic research and documentation can be seen in the 1974 film Masai Women by director Chris Curling working with anthropologist Melissa Llewelyn-Davies.

The Masai are an East African pastoral society in which all wealth is composed of and calculated through the ownership and trading of cattle, which are the sole property of women. Llewelyn-Davies explored the consequences of the fact that women are excluded from the only significant source of wealth. Masai women (as is true of women in other patriarchal societies) are dependent on men throughout their lifespan on fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons. Llewelyn-Davies examined the ways in which women struggle to create and maintain and a sense of both integrated and independent self.

Llewelyn-Davies's ethnographic voice is clear throughout the movie as she examines the ways in which femaleness and femininity are socially constructed in Masai culture and the ways in which this social construction is a locus of both struggle and connection. Her insights into Masai culture thus both reflect concomitant negotiations in the United States and Europe for women in this same generation and helped to inform those negotiations in the West. Llewelyn-Davies demonstrated in a way that remained unobtrusive throughout that there were important parallels between African and Western family dynamics.

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.