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.