Expanded Visions

A New Anthropology of the Moving Image

Arnd Schneider

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000390896
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book argues for a new anthropology of the moving image, bringing together an important range of essays on time-based media in the contemporary arts and anthropology.

It builds on recent attempts to develop more experimental formats and engages with debates on epistemologies of ethnography, relational aesthetics, materiality, sensory ethnography, and observational and participatory cinema. Arnd Schneider critically revisits Baudrillard's idea of the simulacrum and the hyperreal, engages with new media theory, and elaborates on the potential of the Writing Culture critique for moving image practices bordering art and anthropology.

This collection of essays is essential reading for anybody working across the fields of visual anthropology, film and media studies and visual studies. Schneider ambitiously considers the complex relationship between the moving image and anthropology, highlighting the potential for innovative approaches, experimental methods, and expanded perspectives in both fields.

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Expanded visions

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This is a book about what the moving image can do with anthropology, but also what anthropology can do with it. The book clearly locates itself within the spirit of expanded cinema, and by the same token is a call for an expanded anthropology. Just as Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970) ushered a new wave of criticism and scholarship on experimental film and new moving image media, so now a new expanded anthropology of vision is required. Thus, one aim is to prize open the huge and radical epistemological potential of expanded cinema and experimental film for anthropology. In this sense, the book continues and expands a number of arguments first developed in “Experimental Film and Anthropology” (Schneider and Pasqualino 2014), and the programmatic essay “Rethinking Anthropology through Experimental Film” (in this book as Chapter 3).

At the same time, it brings into contact the terrains of contemporary art, experimental film, visual anthropology, and critical ethnography of film production (the latter especially in Chapters 5 and 6) to inform the broader argument. However, rather than thinking of clearly distinct fields, here the intention is to open up a third space of practice and theoretical reflection, between art and anthropology, with moving image practices occupying a central role. Consilience is the term to think with in bringing these contact zones into emergence, similar to what has been proposed for the recent joining of forces between neurosciences and film studies (Smith 2020: vii).

Therefore, the moving image works (“films” writ large, and in all formats) discussed in this volume have a radical, perhaps even explosive potential for epistemological innovation, once they are brought into contact with current ethnographic practice and theoretical reflection. Think, for instance, about the revived anthropological interest in materiality, ruins, rubble, and the archive: how might this be rethought from the angle of experimental film (and vice versa)? The point here is not that ethnographic “reality,” in analogy to the material celluloid filmstrip (for those experimental film-makers who work with analogue film formats, and continue to do so in digital times), is to be simply manipulated (‘to be handled skilfully by hand’, from the Latin manipulus, ‘handful, sheaf, bundle’). Rather this “reality” is more like an unbound field with diffuse edges, open to social and material intervention. Artworks, then, and time-based artworks in particular (here: film, video, and multimedia, and by extension, all time-based artworks), come in between what were once conceived rather statically as the roles of the observer/ethnographer, and ethnographic “reality,” or the field, and a discreet, privileged monopoly on interpretation by anthropology. Certainly, the writing culture critique (Clifford and Marcus 1986) and the post-modern turn, acknowledging the crisis of representation, have done much to overcome this static set-up. However, the full promise and potential of that critique, that is to foment a broader experimental practice beyond words or scriptural practice, as yet, has not been fully exploited (cf. Marcus, 2006, 2010), including in visual anthropology. This is the reason why a more direct and radical engagement with the arts and moving image practice is necessary, both for visual anthropology and anthropology in general.

How can, then, the ideas and practices of experimental film be made productive for anthropology, and what is their radical epistemological potential? The question is perhaps (to return to our earlier examples of materiality, ruins, rubble, and the archive): how can ruins be moved?¹ How can rubble be reconstructed or reassembled? In other words, can there be an “imaginative use of debris,” as experimental filmmaker and anthropologist Kathryn Ramey (2016: 2) puts it, who works with the material leftovers from analogue film production. These are questions that not only concern those interested in contested heritage and how it can be artistically intervened upon (Schneider 2016, 2020d), but would impinge upon critical materialist studies in the social sciences, where an engagement with experimental film (and moving image work in the art field more generally) largely has been wanting.

Figure 1.1 The Visible and the Invisible Parts of a Body under Tension (section view of film strip), Emmanuel Lefrant, France, 2009.

Source: Courtesy of Emmanuel Lefrant.

Yet such engagement could turn out to be very productive. Think, for instance, of those experimental filmmakers and artists who have directly exposed the celluloid film strip to material exposure and decay, as with Emmanuel Lefrant’s film The Visible and Invisible Parts of a Body under Tension (2009) (Figure 1.1), which combined film stock left in the soil of Togo in West Africa and new shots from the same location, and Karthik Pandian’s artwork Unearth (2010) with film strips buried in soil, and later uncovered on an ancient indigenous site near St. Louis. This latter work has strong decolonial undertones, referring to the partly obliterated indigenous history of the area and its recovery and restitution to public exposure—a topic that will be revisited in Chapter 8 (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Karthik Pandian, Unearth, 2010, at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Source: Photograph by Sheldan C.Collins. Courtesy of the artist.

Thus, if following from such works, film, and analogue film in particular, can be thought of in sculptural terms (Ramey 2016: 28, 166), and art for Joseph Beuys was “social sculpture” (in some sense prefiguring arguably the notion of relational aesthetics; for which Bourriaud 2002), then the question is, why not also think of the mise en scène of the ethnographic field in sculptural terms? Some of this shines through in recent anthropological thinking and practice around design and scenography where the conceptual possibilities of theatrical and filmic sets have been explored for anthropological research (Cantarella, Hegel, and Marcus 2019; also Marcus 2010: 86, 175–176 note 7; Calzadilla and Marcus 2006).

Both anthropological practices of fieldwork and writing can benefit from a productive dialogue with experimental film practices and techniques employed in film production more generally. Consider, for instance, the “matte” technique in film production, where matte is “a kind of mask used to block out areas of the image, allowing a different image to be imposed” (Chambers English Dictionary).² How would this work in anthropology for ethnography and writing, and what does it mean for visual anthropology? Is there something to be gained by partially blocking out “reality,” obscuring it, making it opaque? Or, because direct descriptive or explanatory recourse remains impossible, might there be some benefit obtained in leaving deliberately such white/black spots in our ethnography and writing, in order to then superimpose another perception and description? Conversely, whilst in film “matte” is employed as a specific and deliberate technique for particular effect (that is to reduce or alter one representation of a constructed or staged reality, and then overlay it with another), it could also be employed as an analytic device (or tool) in an ethnographic field where certain parts of that “reality” are accessible to understanding, and others remain opaque and basically inaccessible (and this can change over time). A good case to try out a matte technique might actually be various forms of alterity and their partial transcendence, especially in relation to cultural appropriation in the arts and beyond (for which Schneider 2012b, 2017, 2018a).

With such “matte” works a fine line is to be tread, however. The “powers of unseeing” (writer John Meek in a review of a new translation of Alexander Pushkin’s prose works; Meek 2019: 26) might indeed become captivating or even overwhelming, hindering us to see (and then represent) the whole extent of reality. Meek writes: “Realism is not simply a question of the way one portrays the world but the breadth of world one seeks to portray. It’s not just the way you see, but what you see” (Meek 2019: 26).³

The “matte” parts of reality, or more closely, of the ethnographic “field,” and vice versa the implications for anthropological knowledge production, including in visual anthropology, can also be conceived of as the silences in the field, perceivable only through how the characters in film (or subjects in the field), “react to them as if they were audible sounds or material objects” (Schrader [¹1972] 2018: 56–57). Addressing such silences, encountered, or produced (often also co-produced) in the field in a kind of “matte-work,” also means to withhold (as well as withdraw from) the expected, and all-encompassing, panoptical gaze.

Similarly, in slow cinema, with the long take as its signature practice, the expected is withheld. In fact, as director Paul Schrader points out, the long take just needs to be longer than the expected (2018: 11). Thus, “(t)ime becomes the story,” as Schrader writes (ibid: 10). And it is the different aggregate states of time, or “time pressure (s),” in the expression of director Andrey Tarkovsky, which are important here. Like different water pressures in their natural states which Tarkovsky (1986: 12) lists: brook, spate, river, waterfall, ocean, so too, memory, in past, present, and future projection are expressed through the joining of shots (but crucially for Tarkovsky not in montage). The director, according to Tarkovsky, searches for time, and thus is “sculpting in time” (so the title of his important writings on cinema, 1986). By searching for time, the director also intervenes, indeed materially, in the memory landscape. Nowhere comes this to the fore more than in the following extract, referring to the shooting of Mirror (1975).

A field lay in front of the house; I remember buckwheat growing between the house and road leading to the next village. It is very pretty when it is in blossom. The white flowers, which give the effect of a snow-covered field, have stayed in my memory as one of the distinctive and essential details of my childhood. But when we arrived to decide where we would shoot, there was no buckwheat in sight – for years the kolkhoz had been sowing the field with clover and oats. When we asked them to sow it for us with buckwheat, they made a great point of assuring us that buckwheat wouldn’t grow there, because it was quite the wrong soil. Despite that, we rented the field and sowed it with buckwheat at our own risk. The people in the kolkhoz couldn’t conceal their amazement when they saw it come up. And we took that success as a good omen. It seemed to tell us something about the special quality of our memory – about its capacity for penetrating beyond the veils drawn by time, and this was exactly what the film had to be about: it was its seminal idea. I do not know what would have happened to the picture if the buckwheat had not grown … I shall never forget the moment it started to flower.

(Tarkovsky 1986: 132–133; italics in original; Figure 1.3)

Figure 1.3 Still frame from Mirror Andrey Tarkovsky, USSR, 1975.

Source: By permission of Andrey A. Tarkovsky/The Andey Tarkovsky International Institute.

The idea that one has to sow, and indeed grow again the seeds of memory arguably is also a provocation for fieldwork. The conundrum and paradox is how a memory of the past can become an action for the future, and how to precisely capture th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• A note on illustrations and copyrighted material
• 1 Expanded visions
• 2 Experimenting with film, art, and ethnography: Oppitz, Downey, Lockhart
• 3 Rethinking anthropological research and representation through experimental film
• 4 Stills that move: Photofilm and anthropology
• 5 On the set of a cinema movie in a Mapuche reservation
• 6 A black box for participatory cinema: Movie-making with “neighbours” in Saladillo, Argentina
• 7 An anthropology of abandon: Art—ethnography in the films of Cyrill Lachauer
• 8 Can film restitute? Expanded moving image visions for museum objects in the times of decolony
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index