saintadatha

Warning: Irritated Academic/Artist at Work!

There's been an ongoing debate within anthropological film, centred around its crisis of identity, over the last thirty-odd years. This was undoubtedly sparked somewhat by anthroplogy's own existential dilema, itself driven by the (I feel, irritating) tail-chasing of postmodernist reflexivity (what right have we to anaylse them? who are they? how can one tell their tale without it becoming ours? blah-blah-blah).

Within these contexts, ethnographic film (ethno "people" - graphos - writing or recording), emerged almost as soon as the filmic medium did (cf. Flaherty, Vertov, even the Lumieres and their damn train), and has developed recently with the promise of potential salvation. Revolutionary filmmakers like David MacDougall and Jean Rouch have spearheaded the evolution of this combined/developed medium with their attempts at films that did more than just observed (the crime of "salvage" anthropological films is amongst the worst in this postcolonialist day and age), but the involved their subjects, and relinquished the hidden superiority of the film-maker/author.

As with so much (post-)postmodernist theory, putting it into practice proves somewhat harder, as so much of both the cinematic and anthropological disciplines is based on colonial superiority and Western, post-enlightenment positivism.



I want so much to make films. The value of the cinemtic form lies, it should go without saying, in all that it can do, that the written word cannot! How can words unveil the nuances of movement? of actions that contradict words? of uncomfortable body language? of specificity of colour?

But then, as MacDougall warns, when an ethnographic film is made (and this is part of what distinguished it from mere documentary) it is not so much a record of a people, as a record of the sociohistorically specific interaction between that culture and the filmmaker...

So how? So how how how!?

Shit I want a go at this!


(Sorry. x)