Transcultural Cinema

David MacDougall, Lucien Taylor, Lucien Taylor

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400851812
• Categoría: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoría: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

David MacDougall is a pivotal figure in the development of ethnographic cinema and visual anthropology. As a filmmaker, he has directed in Africa, Australia, India, and Europe. His prize-winning films (many made jointly with his wife, Judith MacDougall) include The Wedding Camels, Lorang's Way, To Live with Herds, A Wife among Wives, Takeover, Photo Wallahs, and Tempus de Baristas. As a theorist, he articulates central issues in the relation of film to anthropology, and is one of the few documentary filmmakers who writes extensively on these concerns. The essays collected here address, for instance, the difference between films and written texts and between the position of the filmmaker and that of the anthropological writer.In fact, these works provide an overview of the history of visual anthropology, as well as commentaries on specific subjects, such as point-of-view and subjectivity, reflexivity, the use of subtitles, and the role of the cinema subject. Refreshingly free of jargon, each piece belongs very much to the tradition of the essay in its personal engagement with exploring difficult issues. The author ultimately disputes the view that ethnographic filmmaking is merely a visual form of anthropology, maintaining instead that it is a radical anthropological practice, which challenges many of the basic assumptions of the discipline of anthropology itself. Although influential among filmmakers and critics, some of these essays were published in small journals and have been until now difficult to find. The three longest pieces, including the title essay, are new.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

The Fate of the Cinema Subject

A PERSON I HAVE filmed is a set of broken images: first, someone actually seen, within touch, sound, and smell; a face glimpsed in the darkness of a viewfinder; a memory, sometimes elusive, sometimes of haunting clarity; a strip of images in an editing machine; a handful of photographs; and finally the figure moving on the screen, of cinema itself. It is Mataki, Logoth, Losike, Lorang, Arwoto, Francis, Geraldine, Ian, Sunny, Jaswant, Miminu, Franchiscu, Pietro. Each name lifts my spirits but also disturbs me. Film gives us the bodies of those we have filmed, yet those same bodies dissipate or are transformed before our eyes. I want to try to grasp the sense of this—if not to find the person among the phantoms, then perhaps to find some reasons for my puzzlement. If images lie, why are they so palpable of the life between us? I want to look, sometimes sidelong, at the spaces between the filmmaker and the subject: of imagery and language, of memory and feeling. These are spaces charged with ambiguity, but are they not also the spaces in which consciousness is created?

James Agee’s Despair

And so in this quiet introit, and in all the time we have stayed in this house, and in all we have sought, and in each detail of it, there is so keen, sad, and precious a nostalgia as I can scarcely otherwise know; a knowledge of brief truancy into the sources of my life, whereto I have no rightful access, having paid no price beyond love and sorrow.

—James Agee¹

James Agee has perhaps best expressed the passion and uncertainty of documentary—the “effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is” (Agee and Evans, 1960: 11). Throughout the great and overwrought work that he produced with Walker Evans, his self-reproach and despair at the inadequacy of his writing surges up like an obsession. Some undetermined logic links the work to the fate of its subjects. Knowing that “words cannot embody,” he still desperately means them to. If he persists it is because he has stumbled upon a mystery. He fears the blunting of our sensibilities, and his own. He is at war with language and with all representation that dares to speak for the lives upon which it trespasses. His anger and turmoil are those of someone who has been moved by both art and life but can no longer see where they meet. In the end he can only write, “somehow I have lost hold of the reality of all this, I scarcely can understand how” (p. 414).

1. A sharecropper family, Alabama, 1936. Photograph by Walker Evans from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1960 edition).

At times in his collaboration with Evans, Agee seems to find solace in the photographs, a grip on reality that the writing misses. In photography, he observes, much of the difficulty of words, perhaps especially their “inability to communicate simultaneity with any immediacy,” is “solved from the start.” Yet it is “solved so simply ... that this ease becomes the greatest danger against the good use of the camera” (pp. 236-37). Indeed, the camera’s misuse has “spread so nearly universal a corruption of sight that I know of less than a dozen alive whose eyes I can trust even so much as my own” (p. 11).² In this broad indictment, Agee is no doubt thinking of Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs in You Have Seen Their Faces, which both he and Evans considered an outrage.³ But even a photographer like Evans makes a perilous bargain with images, as a writer makes with words. [Figure 1.]

During his career Agee wrote film criticism and screenplays and made two documentary films with Helen Levitt, In the Street (1945-46) and The Quiet One (1948). He was to discover that films bring together the concreteness of photographs with the fluidity of language, but with no lessening of the attendant risks of inadequacy and corruption. Indeed, in articulating their shots and sequences, films take on much of the clumsiness of language. Can documentary filmmakers, then, be any more sanguine about their work than Agee or Evans were about theirs? Does the mixture of photography, movement, and editing make film any more truthful than writing? How many filmmakers could maintain this and still look their subjects in the eye?

If some documentary filmmakers seem complacent about their work, many others, I suspect, are engaged in a secret struggle with their films: with the immediacy that hides a hundred evasions, with the luck that looks like forethought, with the skill that produces its predictable effects. Perhaps most keenly they feel the stifling domestication of film, which by its naming and cosseting of life shields viewers from the very things they are meant to discover. This struggle produced in Agee a streak of cruelty toward himself and his audience, as it did in Baudelaire and Artaud and filmmakers such as Franju and Buñuel. This emerges partly in an onslaught on the senses, and in a taunting of conventional writing. But one finds it also expressed more humbly in gaps and puzzled silences, and a calculated bluntness that reminds one of the practice of Indian temple carvers, who would strike off a toe or finger from a figure rather than risk the anger of the gods.

Compound Visions

Film is the only method I have to show another just

how I see him.

—Jean Rouch⁴

First premise: The filmmaker can never see the film as others see it. This is easily overlooked, for films are more easily thought of as concrete works than as complex crossing-points of thoughts and feelings. As an object, a film may be fixed on a piece of celluloid, but to its viewers it is neither fixed nor even whole. It may be remembered for no more than a half dozen scenes out of a hundred, and those scenes may be different for every half dozen people who see it. It may be admired for a variety of socially consecrated reasons and yet actually be valued for quite different ones.

The filmmaker’s response is in many ways the reverse of that of other viewers. For the filmmaker, the film is an extract from all the footage shot for it, and a reminder of all the events that produced it. It reduces the experience onto a very small canvas. For the spectator, by contrast, the film is not small but large: it opens onto a wider landscape. If the images evoke for the filmmaker a world that is largely missing, in the spectator they induce endless extrapolations from what is actually seen. The spectators glimpse a world opened rather than limited by the rectangular frame of the image. Like literature, the film’s effect is to stimulate a work of their own imaginations. But for the filmmaker the same images only reaffirm that the subject existed. Instead of imagining, there is remembering; instead of discovery, there is recognition; instead of curiosity, there is foreknowledge and loss. To be sure, the filmmaker’s remembered world is also partly imagined, but it may be years before the filmmaker, looking at the film, is able to see this.

Most people see a film only once, and so, as in Zeno’s paradox of the runner who never arrives, they never actually see it. Viewing a film for the first time is a continuous unfolding that is only complete when one reaches the end. At any point one knows only what has gone before, never what is to come. Thus, throughout the viewing of a film, it remains incomplete; but once it is over, it is gone, to be grasped in its entirety only in memory. Even as the film progresses, its effect is not to coalesce step by step into a single entity, for its meanings are constantly in flux, altered by the addition of each new scene. Viewing it is more like a journey through a series of rooms, in which one is never sure where one has been before. A second or subsequent viewing, however, is fundamentally different from the first. As with a poem or novel, each part takes its place in the remembered work as a whole. Yet even here the work is never quite what one expected: some things have been misremembered, and one is struck by the things that went unnoticed before.

For a viewer, the structure of a film, in the absence of any alternatives, is something given, but for the filmmaker it is the structure that survives after a series of conscious and unconscious rearrangements and amputations. The film has finally come to this. It may have found a certain form and been saved from its worst blunders, but in the process it has sacrificed the many other films that were always latent in the rushes. A film sustains a hundred deaths and a hundred-and-one rebirths, but its last birth prepares a death of its own. The same images that come alive for the spectator are now already for the filmmaker gradually becoming representative. They may be the preferred images (although there are always regrets for things left out, defeated by the film’s logic), but they are also only extracts from the more varied view of the subject that exists in the rushes. The scenes have begun to lose something even as they emerge for the viewers charged with a first-time freshness and promise. To the filmmaker, they look increasingly like film, not life.

There is, nevertheless, a countercurrent to this, like a reversed polarity, in certain responses of the filmmaker. A few shots that are perhaps of no more than passing interest to the casual viewer resonate with a special significance: a day remembered, an object actually handled, some characteristic of a person that is particularly cherished. Films thus confirm the compound qualities that Gilbert Lewis has remarked upon in paintings: “that what the artist tried to put in his painting—the perceptions, feelings, thoughts that lay behind his work— . . . [are] always more than any particular beholder does draw from it; and yet . . .the ideas, impressions and feelings that the painting calls forth from the beholder always go beyond what the artist intended” (1980: 38). Here, writ large, is Roland Barthes’s punctum: “It is what I add to the photograph and what is nevertheless already there" (1981: 55).

Second premise: The subject is part of the filmmaker, the filmmaker part of the subject. In this may be found one of the causes of the confusion that many filmmakers feel in the presence of their films. The film subject has a multiple identity—as the person who exists outside the film, in his or her own being; as the person constructed through interaction with the filmmaker; and as the person constructed once again in the viewers’ interactions with the film. We can say that in the last two cases, the film subject is the product of a kind of investiture: it is what is added to the person that is already there, even if by “there” we mean only in the film’s traces. More to the point, it is what is already there in the filmmaker and viewer. We have certain ways of being human, but they are made concrete largely through their presence and reaffirmation in others. To the filmmaker, then, image-making is largely a form of extension of the self toward others, rather than a form of reception or appropriation.⁵ The film subject comes into being through a process of identification and sensing—what might be called ostention, applying Michael Polanyi’s concept of “tacit knowledge” (1966). This is knowledge we cannot “tell” in the abstract; it is knowledge we can only convey by showing—by expressing our relation to it in a manner that allows others to enter into a similar relation to it.⁶ Film is deictic: the act of making a film is a way of pointing out something to oneself and to others, an active shaping of experience. We reach out to others with our senses as a sort of probe (in films, through the extension of the camera) and make sense of them through what we contain in ourselves. Our knowledge is transposed, or displaced, toward them, so that it appears to be of them. We are using our bodies and cameras as kindred instruments, in somewhat the sense that Marcel Mauss meant when he wrote of the “techniques du corps” (Mauss 1973).

This kind of vision, however, is beset by inconsistencies. The filmmaker sees the subject framed in two radically different ways: first through the viewfinder of the camera and later through the images on the film. The first view, although it may resemble the film image, is ontologically different from it, and different again from the image as it will seem, cut shorter and surrounded by other images, in the finished film. It takes place in an ephemeral zone in which life has yet to accumulate meaning and a future. The subject moves in and out of the miniature frame of the viewfinder, breathing the same air as the filmmaker and surrounded by the same objects and sounds. They await the same things—a door opening, unexpected arrivals and departures, the coming of night. In these moments, the subject’s existence and the filmmaker’s are closely interwoven. To speak of the film subject at all is to speak of this shared space, willed with such intensity into the camera. It is so distant from the film that follows, and yet so instrumental in it, as to seem hallucinatory at the time. Film, filmmaker, and subject are drawn together in a fusion from which they are destined to be forced apart.

This comingling is compounded by the spectator’s vision. A film that I make results from my immediate engagement with the world, and I am its first viewer. The spectator, coming upon the film as a second viewer, becomes entangled in my vision and my intention. There is an intimation of the subject’s life beyond the film, but always infused with myself. Later on I may look at the film with an audience, and I may then have the curious experience of viewing myself viewing.

The spectator is, although indirectly, linked to the film subjects through the filmmaker’s vision, since this is never independent of what it sees. At every moment the filmmaker’s vision is defined and constituted in relation to its surroundings. The film subjects themselves, in their responses to the world, affect the filmmaker’s way of seeing them. The filmmaker’s subjectivity is thus variable, sometimes standing apart, sometimes joining with the subjectivity of others at the moment of filming, always ebbing and flowing. For this reason the filmmaker, seated with others watching the film, is influenced by their subjectivity and at times experiences their very different way of seeing it.

The Fugitive Subject

[Shot] 392 MS. from the shore below. Antoine descends a huge open stairway. He reaches the beach and runs towards the sea. The camera tracks back with him. The tide is out and the beach is long and flat. He is alone. He reaches the surf and walks into the water; it circles around his shoes and he looks down, surprised. He turns and walks in the water parallel to the beach. Taking a look over his shoulder at the sea, he turns back to the shore. The camera approaches him and the shot freezes into a still—Antoine Doinel, the sea behind him.

—From a post-production script of Les Quatre cents coups⁷

The closing freeze-frame of Truffaut’s film is perhaps too well known, often remembered only for having prompted a cinematic cliché. Yet the scene presents us with a moment of cinematic complexity, in which it is possible to read an invisible writing of pleasure and pain. It is as much about film as about life: about the contact with life that films create and the sense of loss they also engender. It touches upon the relations between ourselves and all persons in films, both fictional and documentary.

2. Jean-Pierre Léaud / Antoine Doinel in Les Quatre cents coups (1959).

This freeze-frame activates several levels of our consciousness. By freezing the moving image it returns film to the status of still photography, from which cinema was born. Seized out of the flow of events, the photograph excludes us from the film and bears us away from the story like passengers on a train, leaving someone behind on a station platform (precisely the older cinematic convention that this image replaces). The character’s life in the film may go on, but for us it must stop, to be replaced by a memorial image, like the snapshot of a loved one. [Figure 2.] Such a transformation of the cinematic into the photographic confronts us with the essential contradiction of photography—its intimation of life perceived in a present that is simultaneously past. It produces the effect of living unknowingly within a photograph up until the very moment it is taken, a sensation perhaps only comparable to awakening suddenly from a dream. That is the initial, disturbing effect of Truffaut’s ending.

Considered a few moments later, the photograph takes on a different aspect. As it recedes into the past it becomes an increasingly poignant emanation from the past—the figure of Antoine Doinel pinned helplessly against the sea, his unknown future before him. The scene repeats in a different key an earlier scene in the film in which he is spread-eagled against the wall of the Rotor at the fun fair. Thus within a f...