on claiming reality

The Little Dear, 1946. Frida Kahlo

When Breton saw Frida's work, he declared her a surrealist.

Frida said, "I paint my own reality."

She is also rumored to have said, "They are so damn 'intellectual' and rotten that I can't stand them anymore....I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those 'artistic' bitches of Paris."

Frida was en ethnographer in her own right, I think. She invested herself deeply in the folkloric of Mexico, and who else better to learn about embodied knowledge, than from someone whose body was mutilated and constantly reproduced through the image?

your FACE is surrealist!

“Ethnography combined with surrealism can no longer be seen as the empirical, descriptive dimension of anthropology, a general science of the human. Nor is it the interpretation of cultures, for the planet cannot be seen as divided into distinct, textualized ways of life. Ethnography cut with surrealism emerges as a theory and practice of juxtaposition. It studies, and is part of, the invention and interruption of meaningful wholes in works of cultural import-export” (147).

What does a surrealist ethnography look like? Or an ethnography that uses elements of surrealism? What is surrealist about Land Without Bread? Or better yet, how does Land Without Bread demonstrate a surrealist way of knowing? (I’m really posing these questions—answer me!)

Clifford notes, “I am using the term surrealism in an obviously expanded sense to circumscribe an aesthetic that values fragments, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions—that works to provoke the manifestation of extraordinary realities drawn from the domains of the erotic, the exotic, and the unconscious” (118). I think Clifford is explaining that his conception of “surrealist ethnography,” or their intersection, or their mutual abilities to generate new meanings of self and other, doesn’t necessarily have to do with what we think of as “surrealist” art per se. In other words, I need not summon images of French aristocrats inspiring themselves with the wealth of spiritual and exotic outlets so many primitives may lend them. Right?

He wants to view surrealist as a way of seeing, that in turn will produce knowledges. Land Without Bread confused me though, because it seemed straightforward in its ethnographic methodology, whether it’s meant to be parody or not. When I first thought of “surrealism” and “ethnography” as related concepts, Juan Downey’s Laughing Alligator came immediately to mind. If surrealism is about being open to other realities, breaking down the whole and seeing the fragments, and juxtaposing those fragments in new ways, then Downey’s film seemed to demonstrate this well. The aspect of Laughing Alligator that appealed to me so was that it supposed that Yanomami consciousness, and sub-consciousness, aught to be explored, even through the somewhat cheesy tricks of late 70’s video art.

If we are not to think of surrealism in this context as directly aligned with the artistic movement of the same name, and more of an attempt to use “the full human potential for cultural expression,” then putting a surrealist label on ethnography seems to me to be more of a symbolic act than an actual practice (129). In practice, I hope, ethnographers have been attempting to see or capture alternate realities for a long while.

At the same time, I know Clifford is not advocating that we put a surrealist label on ethnography. He draws a distinction between ethnographic surrealism and it’s converse, surrealist ethnography (146). Yet I don’t understand what methodologies might support a surrealist ethnography. He states, “An ethnographic surrealist practice…attacks the familiar, provoking the irruption of otherness—the unexpected. Two attitudes presuppose each other; both are elements within a complex process that generates cultural meanings, definitions of self and other” (146). This is an interesting juxtaposition with MacDougall’s Transcultural Cinema, which seemed to want us to look for the similar, the familiar, to find that the other and ourself were/are not so different or apart. Might MacDougall and Clifford be saying essentially the same thing, but phrasing it in distinct ways?

Clifford closes his essay by using two examples that demonstrate “juxtaposition and intervention in the modern world system” (147). The first is the typified surrealist scenario—Picasso sees an “African” mask and voila—cubism! Clifford writes, “Something new was occurring in the presence of something exotic,” or, being exposed to something new but that also is a expression of the human experience will lead us to understand others, but mostly ourselves, in a fresh and meaningful way (148).

The second example is more specific. Trobriand islanders, handed the colonial practice of playing cricket, end up playing the game in the post-Malinowski era, but in a tricked-out, carnivalesque, and basically Trobriand way. So humans will ingest, invert and subvert the cultural mandates given to them; even the colonized are actors with agency and the power to negotiate meaning. For Clifford, the blue plastic Adidas bag from which the Trobriand shaman-umpire extracts his betel nuts can be viewed in a similar vein as Picasso’s African masks—and this exemplifies ethnographic surrealism. I see this interplay as less surrealist per se, and more of a plain old example of why we cannot talk about the tribe any longer. Ethnographic objects cross boundaries, are re-positioned, invested with new meanings, are re-presented.

I’m not doubting (read: criticizing) Clifford’s connections between surrealism and ethnography. I just need to understand more fully what he means when he writes of a surrealist ethnographic attitude.

LA CIÉNAGA de Lucrecia Martel

Lucretia Martel is an Argentinian filmmaker whose fictional works are often mistaken for documental footage. I think that she employs sound as a way of immersing us in the perceptual, similar to the MacDougalls. She also uses a long-shot style, (althought I'm not sure it's as apparent in this clip), that is unusual in feature film. In this excerpt from La Cienaga, notice how the sounds inform our knowledge of the situation. In this media manipulated age, in which we see and believe, how might sound come to be the special refuge of the enthonographic filmmaker intersted in multi-voiced objectivities?

To give some background, this is a highly cerebral movie about Argentine cultural psyche, social decomposition, class, etc. It concerns a family of pepper-growers in the northern province of Salta, and what happens after the mother falls and cuts her chest on broken wine glasses.

View and (hopefully) love:

ohhhh, so this is Ethnographic Film!

Long before the Lumiere brothers, long before Guttenberg and his fantastic printing press, long before the Chinese rice paper—how did we know? How did we learn? How did cultures, such as Lorang’s people, the Turkana, persist in their beliefs, mythologies, ideologies and traditions without a material medium in which to record them?

Oral culture. The act of story telling. To listen closely to the words—cadence, sounds, and gestures—of the teller. Receiving information aurally, just knowing in this most ancient of ways, has almost been entirely lost today. The storyteller becomes invisible, fades into the background, when positioned amongst the images, texts and commentary that accompany his/her telling. The story-teller in a modern-day elementary school assembly is brought around because they are entertaining; but also because they impart knowledge, and a way of knowing, that the children will not get from Sesame Street, and later from documentary film. To sit in silence, to listen (not just hear) words that carry in them the significance of knowledge confirmed by the practice of its constant reiteration, knowledge that will be lost if the cycle is not repeated; this is an uncommon experience today.

David MacDougall’s essay Transcultural Cinema is indeed a treatise on the potentialities and importance of making use of anthropology of the visual, but it is also a manifesto of his personal filmmaking ethic. MacDougall states, “If social experience cannot finally be translated, except by being first conceived linguistically, it can be made perceptible in images and sounds. But how well we perceive the experience of others depends upon the fields of consciousness we share with them” (272). This idea triggered for me two of the most solid conclusions I have come to thus far in my exploration of ethnographic film: that seeing (as opposed to reading an ethnographic text that has been legitimized by the academic institution) is another valid way in which to establish knowledge about the world, and the most successful ethnographic films are dependent on and aware of the intense bonds between subject and filmmaker, making use of this bond to increase both the epistemological and objective integrity of the film.

The MacDougall’s usage of the continuous shot, sound, and interaction between subject and filmmaker go a long way in allowing the viewer to perceive the situation. I want to think of perception in this context as something entirely different from the way we usually intake media information. Perceiving knowledge, in the case of the MacDougalls’ films, seems to require a suspension of the usual modes in intake. For example, we are conditioned to understand the different documental sources of information in Bus 174. Documents from the court system underscore our trust in the rule of law. An interview from a social worker alerts us to the potent words coming from an authority or expert. We connect these knowledges to what we’re hearing/seeing; essentially these forms of information are filtered before we think about them.

However I think David MacDougall wants to bring us back a little, not in a nostalgic or romanticizing way, but in a practical way. He wants us to consider what knowledge we may come to possess as listeners to storytelling. He wants us to immerse ourselves in sensory intake. Somehow, he believes, this will take us closer to the subject, and thus closer to an understanding. “A significant feature of filmic representation,” MacDougall notes, “approached by only a few ‘first-person’ ethnographies, is a sense of the unique personal identity of social actors” (257). Continuing:

It is not uncommon for anthropologists, after a long period in the field, to observe that someone looks or talks or relates to others exactly like a remembered friend or teacher, even though the two belong to quite different societies and speak different languages. This has implications for what features of personality we consider culturally specific or typical of certain societies, and how we assess the sense of self and autonomy of individuals (257-258).

This experience seemed rather obvious to me, but nonetheless MacDougall is exposing the sense of identification viewers can feel when they are allowed to see ethnographic subjects in natural (not hyper-mediated) contexts. In the continuous shots of Lorang and his son talking, we get to see their movements, glances, sly smiles—we get to see how their bodies move. All of these details inform how we understand their words. Because so much of an oral culture is imbued in the performative aspect of the transfer of knowledge—not in the ways we read that culture as anthropological text.

Watching Lorang talk about his life, I was struck by how his gestures and way of speaking reminded me of friends I’d known in Argentina (Argentines also love to use their hands when talking). I was struck by how his gestures, moving his hand in a large circle, communicated distance, space, and excess. Somehow, although I’m not quite sure, these gestures informed me that the Turkana have a sophisticated practice of telling. There seemed to be a lot of nuance in the way Lorang or his friend (filmed at the table), told a story.

In general, the MacDougall method seems to reinforce the authority of the subject (as actor who knows more than all about his/her own life), and allows the filmmaker to tell [the subjects’] stories on the subjects’ terms. The beginning scene of Lorang’s Way is a perfect example. Omnipotent, and aged, Lorang’s voice acts as the narrator of a powerful natural scene, and his words, combined with the image, convinces the viewer of his wisdom and knowledge about the themes we are about to embark upon discovering.

Surely there must be problematic aspects of the MacDougalls’ approach, but the film paired with the essay was a lovely way to realize the awesome (in the sense of “awe”) potentials of ethnographic film. Done with careful stylistic and ethical choices in mind, the viewer is forced to abandon other taught ways of knowing. We are drawn into a scene as fellow spectators, if not acquaintances. As cheesy as it seems, no one can hold onto false ideas for long if we meet and come to know well someone who defies those ideas. So ethnographic film, as practiced by the MacDougalls, allows us to be immersed in the experience of perceiving, getting to know Lorang or whoever it may be, intaking information in a way that may not lead us to the same conclusions as a written text.

The Laughing Ethnographer

I interpreted Juan Downey's The Laughing Alligator as a relatively straight-forward critique of ethnography and of the history of anthropological practice around the Yanomami. Downey seemed to be telling two parallel narratives--one concerning the Yanomami themselves, and the interactions between outsiders; the other his own history, the history of a white South American and his relationship to the Others that have informed his acculturation. I appreciated many aspects of this short film, particularly the way Downey de-scientizes his portrait of the Yanomami, using what were at the time, "experimental" video techniques. Downey positions his camera as a weapon, going so far as to stage a shoot-out between himself with his camera, and his Yanomami guides holding a spear and shotgun. This simple but symbolic positioning is an excellent antidote to the view of Yanomami as violent. Might the camera's (i.e. institutionalized ethnography's) intrusion into Yanomami culture be as violent as a war between villages? In another bit, we see Downey dressed as a Yanomami--or at least donning the garb of an imagined Indian--and some Yanomami holding and looking through the lenses of cameras. Downey's willingness to exchange roles strikes me as uniquely gutsy, if not radical. When, in A Man Called Bee, we see Chagnon don Yanomami gear and strike a pose, we interpreted it as mockery. I felt that Downey chose instead to mock himself, his need to discover the mythological, to be free "physically as well as psychologically." When Downey presents his information wearing a suit, with a microphone, he seems to be asking, "In the role of incorporated ethnographer, why would be seek freedom in the experiences of a people ultimately relegated to the periphery?"

Overall, I enjoyed this work because of it's highly ambiguous nature, the merging of the anthropolgical and the autobiographical. It seems to contain many of the same themes as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez Pena's work in Couple in the Cage.