Cinema and Nation

Mette Hjort, Scott Mackenzie, Mette Hjort, Scott Mackenzie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134618835
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Ideas of national identity, nationalism and transnationalism are now a central feature of contemporary film studies, as well as primary concerns for film-makers themselves. Embracing a range of national cinemas including Scotland, Poland, France, Turkey, Indonesia, India, Germany and America, Cinema and Nation considers the ways in which film production and reception are shaped by ideas of national belonging and examines the implications of globalisation for the concept of national cinema.
In the first three Parts, contributors explore sociological approaches to nationalism, challenge the established definitions of 'national cinema', and consider the ways in which states - from the old Soviet Union to contemporary Scotland - aim to create a national culture through cinema. The final two Parts address the diverse strategies involved in the production of national cinema and consider how images of the nation are used and understood by audiences both at home and abroad.

Part V: THE RECEPTION OF NATIONAL IMAGES

15: MIMETIC NATIONHOOD

Ethnography and the national

Scott MacKenzie

In recent years, the body of critical works which examine national cinemas has expanded greatly. However, far less attention has been paid to whether the category of ‘national cinema’ can be as easily applied to minor, third, alternative or aboriginal cinemas.¹ There are many reasons for this. One of the key descriptive categories to emerge from both industrialisation and colonialism is that of ‘nation’ and certainly, one of the tensions underlying the notion of the ‘national’ is its historical trajectory as a first-world concept intrinsically tied to colonialism and Euro-centrism. That said, a growing number of groups within cultures that are not typically considered ‘nations’ now invoke ‘nationhood’ in order both to address and challenge the dominant public sphere. Here I am thinking of ‘first nations’, ‘aboriginal nations’, or ‘queer nations’, all of which fall outside the modernist vision of the nation-state. I am also thinking of the growing number of critiques which point to the fact that discourses of ‘nationhood’ often elide questions of gender and sexuality (Bruce 1999; Hall 1999; Waugh 1999). Because of these exclusions, hierarchies and elisions, the invocation of ‘nationhood’ on the part of alternative and minority groups often functions as an inverted mirror-image of the structure of typical, late-modernist nationhood.² This mirror-like, mimetic image of the ‘nation’ is often appropriated by minority groups to challenge the precepts of the dominant public sphere. In this light, what I wish to explore in the following pages is the efficacy of applying categories such as ‘national identity’ or ‘national cinema’ to ethnographic film and video production, specifically in West Africa (Ghana), Latin America (Brazil) and—in order to provide a first-world example of a nation which often invokes the discourses of (post-) colonialism—Québec.

While there are a variety of contrasting theoretical approaches to the questions raised by nationalism and national identity, ‘modernists’ such as Benedict Anderson (1991), Ernest Gellner (1983) and Eric Hobsbawm (1992) more or less agree that the concepts of national identity and the nation arise with the advent of industrialisation, the formalisation of an official, ‘state’ language, the homogenisation of local cultures into ‘high’ cultures, and the emergence of the centres of power around which the contemporary nation-state are based. ‘Perennialists’ such as Anthony Smith grant that the current formation of the nation-state is distinctively different from the occurrences of ‘ethno-symbolic’ group formation which precede industrialisation, centralisation and widespread literacy (Smith 1999). It is therefore difficult, in the first instance, to address the production of visual culture both by and about aboriginal and colonised groups in terms of ‘nationalism’ and ‘national identity’, at least in relation to the ways in which the terms are currently understood.

Eric Hobsbawm has argued that the concept of the nation can only be understood in light of its intrinsic connection to modernity. He writes:

The basic characteristic of the modern nation and everything connected to it is its modernity. This is now well understood, but the opposite assumption, that national identification is somehow so natural, primary and permanent as to precede history, is so widely held that it may be useful to illustrate the modernity of the vocabulary of the subject itself.

(Hobsbawm 1992:14)

For instance, as Hobsbawm points out, in the Brazilian context, the word nation, before 1884, meant ‘“the aggregate of the inhabitants of a province, a country or a kingdom” and also “a foreigner”’ (ibid.: 14). This former definition is far more applicable to present-day aboriginal cultural formations than the first-world conceptualisation of the nation that currently holds sway, while the latter definition has little or no present-day currency.

If the term ‘nation’ had a substantially different meaning in pre-modern times, it can also be understood in a variety of often conflicting ways in postcolonial ones. As Anthony Smith notes (1991:106-10), present-day post-colonial nations are often built upon frameworks that are remnant of the colonial powers, which raises the question whether or not the nation, as the West understands it, is a valid form of self-representation for the post-colonial state. Indeed, it is the post-colonial recasting of the ‘nation’—the hybridisation of indigenous and Western European cultural and political formations—which frequently provides the former colonies with their political and cultural frameworks. In the Latin American context, the hybridised ethnic of much of the population—the mestizo in Mexico, for example—is a salient example of this process.

In order to examine how conflicting notions of national identity are understood at these points of contact between the coloniser and the colonised, I wish to examine the notion of mimesis and how it relates to questions of national representation in ethnographic endeavours. What interests me here is how colonised or otherwise oppressed groups can adopt through mimesis the trappings of nationhood in a series of both positive and negative ways in order to comment on, reinforce, or critique the (post-) colonial nation-state.

Mad masters and the mimetic faculty

Nature creates similarities. One only need think of mimicry. The

highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.

(Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, 1986:333)

In Mimesis and Alterity, Michael Taussig offers a highly peculiar example of the mimetic faculty. A photograph depicts a Nigerian mud sculpture of a white man in a pith helmet, with one fist raised in the air (Taussig 1993:239).³ It is hard to imagine why this totem was built and what exact function it served; nevertheless, it offers an eerie example of the art of the colonised ‘other’ staring back in ‘white face’. Why would Nigerians want to build a totem to white invaders? To answer this question, one must re-examine the often binary debates between ‘coloniser’ and ‘colonised’ and ‘self and ‘other’, so as to explore the mimetic interchange that often plays itself out in culture, through film, and more recently, through video.

The role played by mimesis and mimetic power in political resistance and in the construction of national identities in both the first and third-world orders is complex, for the mimetic faculty blurs simple distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. For instance, in the colonial and post-colonial contexts, is mimetic ritual an oppressive or emancipatory process? Who engages in mimetic activity and what is their relationship to institutional, cultural and state power? How do these issues relate to the question of national identity? In the following pages, I address the question of mimesis, drawing on debates within cultural anthropology and from a number of examples in visual ethnography which problematise ‘mimesis’, ‘mimetic power’ and the ‘mimetic faculty’. A shift seems to have taken place in the supposed global village: in the colonial past, mimesis was often used to subvert, scare and destabilise the coloniser; in the post-colonial world, with the advent of video technology and the ‘new’ world order of globalisation, the camera itself often becomes the instigator of mimetic practice. This shift points to the new ground that resistance is fought upon: resistance politics seem increasingly to relocate their focus to the realm of representation. Furthermore, the kinds of representations which are produced through this relocation are most often intrinsically tied to the concepts of national identity and nationhood.

Mimetic resistance is apparent in many of the rituals that developed within the colonised world. The totem described above is one example; another is the Hauka possession ritual. As Michael Taussig points out, the Hauka ‘begun among the Songhay people in 1925; [the participants] would dance and become possessed by the spirits of the colonial administrators’ (1993:240). The ritual itself is therefore intrinsically tied to the history of colonialism.

One of the key figures to document this ritual is the French film-maker and anthropologist Jean Rouch. In many ways, Rouch’s work rewrote the principles of ethnographic film-making in the 1950s and also greatly influenced France’s nouvelle vague (Marie 1979). Rouch’s Les Maîtres fous (France, 1954/released 1957),⁴ a ‘trance film’, documents the Hauka possession of Ghanaians mimicking colonialists, frothing at the mouth, and eventually sacrificing a dog, drinking its blood, boiling it and eating it.⁵ As the film begins, we are introduced to various Ghanaian workers. The workers, who are described as ‘normal’ in every way, depart for the weekend, in order to partake in the yearly possession ritual. Rouch documents each step of the process: the admittance of new members, the purging of the sins of the returning members, and the possession itself. At first, the film seems to uphold the construction of otherness that is so often found in ethnographic cinema: viewers watch a bizarre set of practices that seem totally alien to their own frames of reference, but are explained away by an authoritative voice-over; indeed, the film was attacked by African intellectuals upon its release for these very reasons (Cervoni 1996; Hennebelle 1996; Mayet-Giaume 1996; Rouch 1996).

But then a dramatic shift takes place, which throws into question any straightforward reading of Rouch’s ethnographic practice. Halfway through the film, Rouch compares the Hauka to the ritual pageantry of the British colonial soldiers. Taussig outlines the effect of this juxtaposition:

A man possessed by a Hauka spirit stoops and breaks an egg over the sculpted figure of the governor… that presides over the day’s event of Hauka possession. Cracked on the governor’s head, the egg cascades in white and yellow rivulets. Then the film is abruptly cut. We are transported to a big military parade in the colonial city two hours away. The film hurls at us the cascading yellow and white plumes of the white governor’s hat as he reviews the black troops passing. Those of us watching the film in a university lecture hall in New York City gasp.

(Taussig 1993:242)

On a formal level, this moment functions as a synthesis of Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of intellectual montage and Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ‘dialectical image’.⁶ This radical juxtaposition brings out the latent meanings in these images of first and third-world rituals; meanings that are typically left repressed and unspoken. The images of possession suddenly make sense, while the colonial pageantry seems denaturalised, its traditional signification of divine right turned into a parody of ritual.⁷ Denaturalisation, in this context, can be seen as a non-fictional counterpart to the self-reflexive distanciation (Verfremdungs or V-effect) proposed by Bertolt Brecht in his theory of the Epic Theatre, combined with the stripping away of aura which Benjamin postulated as an outcome of the advent of photographic reproduction.⁸

The rest of the film takes on a dramatically different tone, as both the Hauka possession and the British pageantry seem to explode with heretofore unrecognised meanings. Following Benjamin’s thesis on the philosophy of history, these meanings are not ‘constructed’ on the part of the film-maker, but are related to the repressed or ur-histories of both the colonialist and Hauka realities.⁹ After the cut to the British ceremony, the role of the mimetic faculty in the

Hauka ritual comes to the forefront. Each of the participants in the trance plays out a role derived from the British colonial hierarchy. There is the wicked major, the general, the general’s wife and many others, all of whom perform roles derived from the British hierarchy. André Bazin refers to this sequence of the film as a sort of commedia dell’arte (1983:186). Indeed, the nature of the ‘stock character’ in commedia dell’arte and the key function played by repetition and variance is easily apparent in the Hauka ritual.¹⁰ Eventually, the participants come out of the trance and resume their day-to-day existence. As the film ends, we see the workers back at work in their subjugated roles, with Rouch’s sardonic voice-over pointing to the fact that by acting out the roles of the colonialists, the Ghanaians stay sane, exorcising their white demons in the process. It is interesting to note that the power of mimesis lies not only in the editing of the film: the practice of the Hauka was so despised by colonial governments that practitioners were jailed.

Les Maîtres fous offers interesting insights into the mimetic faculty, both in terms of ritualised practice and the mimetic power of the cinema itself. Images which at first are unintelligible, showing the practices of a culture which Western audiences cannot immediately understand, are given a very specific colonial context halfway through the film; the Ghanaians are mimicking the often fearful and merciless power to which they are subjugated on a daily basis. The reference to the British colonial context (the marching bands, etc.) is not present to give the viewers a familiar frame of reference; the British pageantry does not explain away the Hauka. The flowing plumage and the running egg are present because they are part of the rituals themselves. The people of Ghana adapt the European ritual to their own ends and, in the process, recontextualise the symbols of the coloniser’s world, demonstrating both the pomposity and cruelty of the naturalised colonialist rituals. It is this act of denaturalisation the colonialists feared and despised, as Taussig writes:

The British authorities in Ghana banned the film. The reason? According to Rouch they ‘equated the picture of the Governor with an insult to the Queen and her authority’. But what was the insult? It turns out to be exactly that moment… where the mimetic power of the film piggybacks on the mimetic power of African possession ritual.

(Taussig 1993:242)

Colonialism, a concept that had been naturalised as an outgrowth of ‘progress’ and ‘civilisation’ is recontextualised into ritual, while ‘untranslatable’ ritual is transformed and re-constituted through the colonialist presence. Significantly, both Western colonialist pageantry and non-Western ritual are seen as escapes from the real, yet it is the non-Western ritual that, according to the voice-over, preserves the sanity of the people of Ghana.

The Hauka demonstrates how the explosive underpinnings of mimesis can emerge and recontextualise or reframe the meaning of a practice that is both a part of, and critique of, national identity within the colonial experience. Much the same way that the mimetic practice of the Hauka recontextualises the colonial experience for the people of Ghana, the juxtaposition of the Hauka ritual with colonial ceremony shocks the viewer into seeing connections they have not seen before; not only does the experience make the viewer aware of the relationship between the supposedly impenetrable cultural practice of possession and Western oppression, it also points to the more irrational elements of the colonialist ceremony.¹¹ Les Maîtres fous, then, functions as an indictment of ‘old’ world colonialism; in the ‘modern’ world, mimetic practice is seen unambiguously as resistance.

In Ritual and Process, Victor Turner contends that status reversal, similar to the kind found in Les Maîtres fous, is a type of ritual performed by the structurally inferior, or the permanently weak and marginalised members of a society. Turner defines ritual status reversal in the following manner:

At certain culturally defined points in the seasonal cycle, groups and categories of persons who habitually occupy low status positions in the social structure are positively enjoined to exercise ritual authority over their superiors; and they, in their turn, must accept with good will their ritual degradation.

(1969:167-8)

Turner contends that there are two contrasting social models in each human society: the structured, typically hierarchical, model of:

jural, political, and economic positions, offices, statuses and roles, in which the individual is only ambiguously grasped behind the social persona. The other is of society as a communitas of concrete idiosyncratic individuals, who…are regarded as equal in terms of shared humanity.

(ibid.: 177)

Most societies oscillate between structure and communitas; structure is the ordering principle, while communitas lends itself to social mobility, fluidity and individual idiosyncrasy. Each society consists of members who are structurally inferior and structurally superior social agents within the social structure. For Turner, status reversal, which he sees as connected to cyclical patterns of ritual or calendrical rites, do not provide the structurally inferior with access to power. Instead, status reversal temporarily grants the structurally inferior the fantasy of structural superiority. Role reversal realigns these opposing parts of the social structure. Mimetic power, then, is a force of stabilisation in culture, but the temporary power it grants the disenfranchised is planned and illusory. The structurally inferior can gain power within their grouping, but this power is on the margins of culture, reversed only during the proper calendrical period. Indeed, the structurally inferior exist as a group precisely because of their marginality. Turner summarises the process in the following way:

[T]he masking of the weak in aggressive strength and the concomitant masking of the strong in humility and passivity are devices that cleanse society of its structurally engendered ‘sins’ and what hippies might call ‘hang-ups’. The stage is then set for an ecstatic experience of communitas, followed by a sober return to a now purged and reanimated structure.

(ibid.: 185)

There are many similarities between this theoretical description of mimetic practice and the Hau...