The looking machine

Essays on cinema, anthropology and documentary filmmaking

David MacDougall

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526134110, 9781526134097
• eBook ISBN: 9781526134127
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

This new collection of essays presents the latest thoughts of one of the world's leading ethnographic filmmakers and writers on cinema. It will provide essential reading for students in cinema studies, filmmaking, and visual anthropology. The dozen wide-ranging essays give unique insights into the history of documentary, how films evoke space, time and physical sensations, and the intellectual and emotional links between filmmakers and their subjects. In an era of reality television, historical re-enactments, and designer packaging, MacDougall defends the principles that inspired the earliest practitioners of documentary cinema. He urges us to consider how the form can more accurately reflect the realities of our everyday lives. Building on his own practice in filmmaking, he argues that this means resisting the pressures for self-censorship and the inherent ethnocentrism of our own society and those we film.

Part I: Filmmaking as practice

1

Dislocation as method

AT my university I had a fencing instructor who taught us a tactic called second intention. It consisted of making an attack on one’s opponent not in order to score a point but in order to put oneself in a better position to do so. It created a new angle and a new opportunity. There are similar tactics in chess and, I would guess, many other games. Over the years I have wondered whether the principle of second intention might apply to filmmaking in some way. There are at least some parallels. When you are filming someone who is camera-shy, it’s quite natural to begin by focusing on something comparatively neutral, to put the person at ease. Or if you are filming a group of people, you may shift your camera to a new framing, not primarily for the sake of the new frame but as an intermediate step, to move more easily from it to a third frame. These things are done for social and aesthetic reasons, and they are not so different from what we do in many other situations in life.

But there is another sense in which the principle of second intention applies to filmmaking and I believe that it lies at the heart of the cinematic process – in what makes filmmaking fundamentally different from other forms of art or human enquiry. Cameras impose special ways of engaging with the world and these often force filmmakers to step outside themselves and adopt intermediate positions, not knowing the outcome. These changes in behaviour produce changes in perception, and sometimes new kinds of knowledge.

In science it is first intentions that generally matter most. If you don’t have some idea of what you are looking for, there will simply be a muddle of undirected interests. Rather than asking many questions simultaneously, it is far better to ask one question and then pursue whatever new questions arise from it. A kind of theoretical armature is established, around which the research takes place. This is normal practice, not only in the physical sciences but in many of the social sciences as well. The outcome can often be predicted from the questions being asked. Much of the work serves to test or substantiate conclusions already guessed at. Just occasionally this approach opens up some wholly new line of enquiry, but when that happens it is considered exceptional and not part of the original intention.

In music and literature, painting and sculpture, the approach is not so different, although sometimes left more open to chance. Artists may be less sure of their first intentions than scientists are, but they try to clarify them as their work progresses. Often an artist starts with only the barest idea – a germ or rough schema of what will be produced. In music this may be a phrase or a structure to be developed. In literature it may be a character who comes to mind or a situation to be explored. In sculpture it may literally be an armature, to which bits and pieces are added, or a sketch of something to be constructed. Then the process becomes one of elaboration and refinement.

There are resemblances between this process and anthropological research. The anthropologist goes into the field to learn how another group of people think, feel and do things, usually with some general questions in mind. These questions are almost always altered or replaced as time goes on. Things that at first seemed of crucial importance tend to be superseded by others. Fieldwork is not a tidy, coherent process, as most written accounts make clear. However, when anthropologists sit down to write a monograph or journal article, the process changes. Then they attempt to express their knowledge in a more systematic form, by presenting an argument or set of findings and supporting this with the observations and pieces of evidence they have gathered. At this stage the ideas are clarified and re-examined and are then rewritten in a form very different from the anthropologist’s field notes.

But if anthropologists try to film in this more systematic way, they often encounter problems and frustrations. The underlying structures they have identified remain elusive, and the visual evidence that crowds in upon them often seems too fragmentary to be conclusive. What they discover is that filming is more like the experience of fieldwork itself, more exploratory and less orderly. It produces material that generally fails to make the kinds of explicit points that they would like to make. Furthermore, the material it produces – the actual film footage – is unalterable; that is, the images cannot be rewritten, although they can be presented and edited in a variety of ways. One solution frequently found, often as a last resort, is to revert to a spoken commentary, for which the film material ends up serving primarily as an illustration.

These problems highlight the different qualities of film and written texts. Although film can demonstrate some kinds of findings, such as how something looks, or how something is done, or in a general way why someone did something, it is not essentially a theoretical or propositional medium. Indeed, it is relentlessly specific. Its attempts to generalise take the form of examples for which some sort of unity is implied, but these are far from definitive. Indeed, it tends to produce material no less complex and ambiguous than the subject it is exploring. Instead of stating relationships, it can only suggest them; and it is annoyingly inefficient at coming to conclusions. Thus, to an anthropologist, constructing models of society with images and sounds must seem very different from constructing them in writing. Unless film images are circumscribed by words, they tend to be awkward instruments for making anthropological statements.

This does not mean that these films lack intellectual purpose or are concerned only with immediate experience, or that they lack powers of explanation. When such films show how things occur, they often reveal why they occur and bring to light previously ignored factors. In fact, in an era in which society is thought to be governed largely by economics, politics and ideology, part of the value of film lies in drawing attention to causes that may have been overlooked, such as good manners, stubbornness and aesthetic choices.

One hope that used to be held out for film, although expressed less often now, is that it could provide accurate and comprehensive accounts of human events. This hope has been disappointed. Cameras, it could be said, are particular rather than catholic in their tastes. They see narrowly. What is put into a film is very different from what one sees in daily life. It is a set of brief glimpses squeezed into rectangular frames. To make any sense (in the sense that words make sense), the frames must then be arranged according to principles that are understood by the viewer. For those who don’t know the principles, or who are unsympathetic to them, the result may seem an incomprehensible jumble.

The counter-argument, of course, is that because cameras are made by human beings they are made to see like us as a species, rather than, say, like insects. The conventions (or grammars) that guide them are also human. Therefore film ‘language’ – if it can be called that – is a language anyone can learn because it is modelled on human perception and psychology. It is often pointed out that audiences all over the world, even if they’ve never seen another film, can immediately understand one about Charlie Chaplin.

And yet if film is a language, what a strange language it is. It lacks many of the abstract and descriptive qualities of writing or speech, and yet possesses qualities that they lack. A film cannot say ‘All oaks produce acorns’ or ‘This is not a pipe’ or (except in a roundabout literary way) ‘Someday I shall go to Venice’. But it can say ‘Look at this girl’s hair’ or ‘Look at that man’s eyebrows’. It can show the smoothness of glass and the redness of red. It can present the key steps in a process, or a complex group of simultaneous events. It can show, as words never could, the struggle to learn, as when a child attempts something repeatedly and finally gets it right. It can show us the fear on someone’s face or in someone’s posture, or a glance of understanding between two people. It can show us a stream of water disappearing into dry earth, a plant growing or a cell dividing.

Many of these achievements, nonetheless, are no more than mimetic or technical extensions of human vision. For many filmmakers, the most distinctive and important quality of film lies elsewhere, not in advancing the technology of vision but in transforming the positions from which human beings see. Most scientific and artistic activities are conducted from the relatively secure position of someone working with a known set of materials. In filming (unless we follow a script) we relinquish this first position of the self for a second position less in control of the situations it encounters. This is perhaps not so different from an anthropologist choosing to be immersed in the life of another society in order to learn more about it. The difference is that anthropological texts are created afterwards, in a process of reflection upon experience, a process that often has a reductive or normalising effect. In filming, by contrast, the final inscription occurs moment by moment in the filmmaker’s engagement with the subject and cannot be recast or recreated in retrospect. The materials may be shortened, juxtaposed and re-biased in various ways through editing, but they carry the indelible stamp of the original encounter and the decisions the filmmaker made at the time.

As a filmmaker, I can either resist this state of affairs or embrace it. If I embrace it, I will typically put myself in situations in which my expectations are upset, revised or superseded as I film. I choose to enter a zone of indeterminacy, not because I lack objectives but because I want my objectives to be recast by the particular experience. I make a wager this will happen. To some, this may seem an odd way of approaching knowledge, for knowledge – or at least scholarly knowledge – is supposed to be built up more systematically. Here the outcome is unpredictable and open to sudden shifts of direction. To work in this way often means entrusting yourself to strangers, and there is always the risk of becoming a stranger yourself. That may be why this approach is little favoured by thesis supervisors or television commissioning editors, who prefer their successes guaranteed in advance. But for the filmmaker it is more than a calculated risk: it’s a voluntary act of dislocation.

This kind of self-dislocation has something in common with the way in which our minds sometimes come up with a solution, or retrieve a word we have forgotten, only when we stop concentrating on it. Neuroscientists suspect that in these cases those parts of the brain that make unexpected connections temporarily overpower more literal thought processes.¹ This sidestepping of the logical processes of thought is capable of producing important insights in science (the ‘Aha!’ or ‘Eureka!’ moments) and powerful metaphors in the arts. Typically this occurs when the mind is relaxed and open to a wide range of connotative associations or homologies of form, as when we are just waking up, halfway between dreams and reality. Or it may happen when we are tackling a stubborn problem and, having exhausted all the conventional approaches, find ourselves at a dead end. What then takes place is a radical shift of perspective. We either see our way around the problem, or we realise that we were tackling the wrong problem all along. Just as the fully awake mind can sometimes inhibit our creative faculties, so too our familiar ways of seeing can make us blind to what we might otherwise have seen from the very beginning.

Filming produces ways of looking at the world that differ from the ways we conventionally see it. The differences are partly optical, partly social and partly structural. The optical differences are well known – the effects of different lenses on perspective, depth of field, magnification and so on. The camera itself produces these technical shifts in perception. Each filmmaker also inevitably sees the subject of a film more comprehensively than the viewer does when watching the film. These two visions are therefore in tension, since the viewer is always displaced from the filmmaker’s position. Dislocation one might say, both physical and perceptual, is already, even at this stage, at the heart of cinema. There is also the peculiar enhancement that filming imparts to ordinary objects, which the Surrealists called photogénie. This phenomenon results partly from the ways cameras produce images, but it is also caused by the way in which framing separates objects from their surroundings and intensifies our awareness of their foreignness, their indifference to our existence. This effect, of the material world revealed in its autonomy, is experienced not only by viewers of films but also quite frequently by filmmakers in the act of filming. Through the viewfinder, filmed objects and people can take on an unexpected beauty or significance.

The social differences, on the other hand, are bound up with the oddity of trying to interact with others while operating a camera; with the presumption of ‘taking’ their images; with the very idea of creating an image of the present to be seen in the future. Filming fixes, photographically or electronically, the process of looking, which was once an ephemeral activity considered as ordinary as talking or breathing. Now that freedom to look as we please is called into question. Looking has overspilled its boundaries as a local, personal act. Filming also induces in the filmmaker a hypersensitivity to others that seems to negate or bypass language and other cultural differences. It is not unusual for filmmakers to feel more affinity with complete strangers than with their own close relatives and neighbours.

The structural differences are perhaps the most radical. The process of filming restructures perception through the disciplines it imposes. Just as poets for centuries have expressed themselves through sonnets, triolets and octaves, so filmmakers filter their experiences through arrangements of frames, shots and sequences. Filming requires a constant stream of decisions about what to frame, how to frame it and how to relate it to previous and future frames. It produces an analytical mode of thought specific to film, in which the filmmaker is sensitised at every moment to the particular significance of an object, a movement, a word or a facial expression. These decisions are sometimes rational, sometimes intuitive. They involve the filmmaker’s body...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Filmmaking as practice
• Part II: Film and the senses
• Part III: Film, anthropology and the documentary tradition
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index