Principles of Visual Anthropology

Paul Hockings. (Ed.). 2003. 3rd Ed. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Camera and Man (Jean Rouch, 79-98)

When Rouch mentions in this chapter that we owe all we try to do to Dziga Vertov and Robert Flaherty, who worked in different continents without connections in the 1920s, he has in his mind “the participant camera” as a way of expressing reality. The ways the camera participated are different and Rouch explains: For Flaherty, it was a way of recounting a story collaboratively with Nanook because a camera let ‘Nanook see his own pictures from the very moment of their conception (p.82)’. For Vertov, on the other hand, it is rather of ‘recording small elements of reality’ through a camera lens. Rouch quotes:

“I am the ‘cine-eye,’ I am the mechanical eye; I am the machine that will show you the world as only the machine can see it. Henceforth, I shall be liberated from human mobility” (1923:34; cited on page 83)

Rouch explains Vertov’s idea of cine-eye as seeing with the camera, recording on film and editing. This idea is better explored through thematic reality that Vertov tried to construct:

“…in its willingness to reveal people with absolutely no pretense, to catch them at any moment, to stop as soon as they leave off complaining, to imprison their thoughts…But is not sufficient to present fragments of reality on the screen to represent life by its crumbs. These fragments must be elaborated upon so as to make an integrated whole which is, in turn, the thematic reality…”(1940: 443-444; cited on page 83).

Rouch rightly argues that with extraordinary equipment available today we must re-invent a new language of doing ethnography. In particular, it is important for him that ethnographic films meet the public in their own right. In order to become so, he asserts, the anthropologist needs feedback from the group they research as if a stimulant for mutual understanding, through which he can finally come down from his ivory tower. Rough extols the participant camera as the only tool which allows the anthropologist to communicate with the group they study, as Vertov and Flaherty did without being conscious of what they were doing.

Observational Cinema (Colin Young, 99-113)

Young recalls a conference in 1968, where the point is made that film is not objective but may objectify. In other words, “the camera tends to lie but the audience tends to believe” (p.100), he explains. He reveals the limit of observational cinema, or its ideology through the comment Herb Di Gioia made: each occasion of being shut-out or of missing things dramatized the limitation of the observational method and justified a more fictional approach. In his conclusion, Young argues that conferences about method are arguments about power and representatives of one approach are racist about all others. He suggests that we just need to learn other rules to avoid confusion if different languages are used.

Beyond Observational Cinema (David MacDougall, 115-132)

MacDougall writes beyond observational cinema lies the possibility of a participatory cinema, which gives its subjects access to the film for correction, addition and illuminations. He contends that through such an exchange a film can begin to reflect the ways in which the subjects perceive the world. In his emphasis of a researcher’s role as a cultural catalyst, he writes:
“The values of a society lie as much in its dreams as in the reality it has built. Often it is only by introducing new stimuli that the investigator can peel back the layers of a culture and reveal its fundamental assumptions” (p.127).

On the other hand, he explains the importance of the subjects’ involvement as follows:
“[T]he fleeting recognition of the film crew which gives a sense of candor but really reveals nothing. For a film to gain meaning from the breakdown of old narrative conventions, that recognition must develop into a genuine conversation” (p. 127).

Into the end of this article, originally published in the mid-1970s, he added a postscript in 1994. In this postscript, he states that the borderline between observational and participatory cinema now appears more blurred and suggests a principle of multiple authorship that leads to an intertextual cinema. There is no much explanation in depth about the intertextual cinema in this postscript, but he argues that through such an approach ethnographic film may better address conflicting views of reality between observers and observed, and reciprocal observation and exchange among them will increasingly matter. [ A new way of participation needs to be explored. So far, the participation is in a way very limited like giving a seat to the subjects in a round table of filmmaking. ]