Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos - Softcover

Barbash, Ilisa; Taylor, Lucien

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520087607 ISBN 13: 9780520087606

Publisher: University of California Press, 1997

Synopsis

This extraordinary handbook was inspired by the distinctive concerns of anthropologists and others who film people in the field. The authors cover the practical, technical, and theoretical aspects of filming, from fundraising to exhibition, in lucid and complete detail-information never before assembled in one place. The first section discusses filmmaking styles and the assumptions that frequently hide unacknowledged behind them, as well as the practical and ethical issues involved in moving from fieldwork to filmmaking. The second section concisely and clearly explains the technical aspects, including how to select and use equipment, how to shoot film and video, and the reasons for choosing one or the other, and how to record sound. Finally, the third section outlines the entire process of filmmaking: preproduction, production, postproduction, and distribution. Filled with useful illustrations and covering documentary and ethnographic filmmaking of all kinds, Cross-Cultural Filmmaking will be as essential to the anthropologist or independent documentarian on location as to the student in the classroom.

About this title

About the Author

Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor have recently served as visiting professors at the Universite des Antilles et de la Guyane in Martinique. Taylor is the editor of Visualizing Theory (1994) and edits the journal of the Society for Visual Anthropology, to which both authors belong. Together they produced the award-winning video, In and Out of Africa.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Cross-Cultural Filmmaking

Handbook for Making DocumentaryBy Ilisa Barbash

University of California Press

Copyright © 1997 Ilisa Barbash
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520087606
1
Documentary Styles

Figure 1
Longole filming the filmmakers in  A Wife among Wives  (1981) by David and Judith MacDougall.

Documentary is evolving constantly. As you take up a camera you're coming in on the heels of over a century of documentary experimentation. What are the styles that have been spawned and spent over the years? Which will inspire you and which infuriate you? Which will you want to draw on and which to reject, which to use and which to abuse? You have an almost infinite variety of stylistic options to choose among. All of them are revealing about their filmmakers and their times, and all of them are interesting, in different ways, about their subjects. This chapter will give a brief (and inevitably selective) outline of documentary styles from Lumihre to our day.

The Birth of Documentary

Though the camera obscura extends back to the mid-sixteenth century, it wasn't until 1816 that the first paper negative was produced, and 1839 that the first positive image appeared on a silver plate (the "daguerreotype"). As the nineteenth century drew to a close, a Frenchman, Louis Lumihre, conceived of a way to project one image after another. For the next few years, from 1895 on, Louis and his brother Auguste, along with their camera operators, churned out film after film about apparently inconsequential moments of daily life: workers leaving their factories; a train arriving at a station; gondolas going down Venetian canals; a baby learning to walk; and blacksmiths, firemen, and lumberjacks all going about their work. Incredulous audiences from all over the world flocked spellbound to the public screenings of these first films, in some cases astounded to see themselves on the screen, filmed in the streets only a few days earlier. Cinema was born, and it was born with the documentary.

The early Lumihre films were only a minute longthat was all the reels could hold. Louis Lumihre thought that cinema should draw back from the dramatic conventions of theater. Motivated by "scientific curiosity," he was convinced that cinema should seek to capture real life sur le vif on the fly. He wanted spectators to witness "nature caught

in the act" and enjoy such simple pleasures as seeing "the ripple of leaves stirred by the wind."1

But even the early films reveal ambiguities about the camera's relationship to what it records. Once people on the streets recognized a camera for what it was, they began to wonder how they should react to it. Should they acknowledge it, or should they ignore it? Soon enough, people affecting to ignore it were doing so with a concentration of the mind that rivaled that of the people who were approaching and gesticulating self-consciously, or posing as if for a still photograph. Hidden within these various responses to the camera lies an important question, one that you'll also have to address yourself: should documentary depict life as it would have been had the camera not been noticed, or life as it actually goes on before and as affected by the camera? Different documentary styles implicitly answer this question in different ways.

As the Lumihre cameras were catching life on the fly, they were also beginning to tell stories, and some of these stories were told either for or by the camera. The comic L'arroseur arrosi (Waterer Watered, 1895) depicts a mischievous boy stepping on the hose of a gardener while he's watering his flowers. As the gardener turns the nozzle to his face to see what's wrong, the little boy takes his foot off and leaves the poor man drenched. The boy runs away, but the gardener catches up and spanks him. Some people think this film was the first to tell a "found story," that is, a story that exists in nature or real life, outside of the film.2 But it's difficult not to see it also as a specifically filmic story, one equally narrated by the filmmaker who recorded the images. Not surprisingly, other people feel it's the first fiction film. Here, too, there is a tension that has stayed with the documentary form ever since: if we are storytellers, are we telling our own stories or those of our subjects? Can documentary stories ever be completely "discovered"; are they not also always at least partly "contrived"? The Scottish documentary filmmaker John Grierson defined documentary as the "creative treatment of actuality," but what liberties are we allowed to take as long as we remain tied to documentary as something other than pure fiction? Again, different styles have their own answers.

There's a third way in which the early Lumihre films prefigure debates that are still raging among documentary filmmakers today. Their cam-

eras were hand-cranked, which meant that the operators could create special effects by speeding them up or slowing them down. Equipment operators also sometimes projected film in reverse, so that spectators would watch people walking forward and then all of a sudden retracing their steps. Playing with space and time in this way can reveal detail that goes unnoticed when film is projected forward at the "real time" speed. In fact, as soon as you, the filmmaker, make a cut, you're changing time, and as soon as you adjoin one shot to another, you're re-creating space. As the French anthropologist-filmmaker Jean Rouch has said, "Cinema allowed intervention into time , for the first time ever, permitting the construction of a wholly different object. It is this that has always appealed to me most about film."3 But other filmmakers have felt that documentary should not reassemble the fragments of recorded reality in a mixture of its own making. In order not to distort or synthesize, they shoot long, uninterrupted sequences. This tension around manipulating space and time has also been with documentary since its conception.

Documentary styles since the time of the Lumihre films can be categorized in umpteen different ways. For the sake of simplicity, this chapter distinguishes between four main styles. This framework is meant more as a rough guide to certain labels that filmmakers and critics use (labels that reappear in the following chapters) than as a hard-and-fast historical or theoretical taxonomy. The four basic divisions are expository, impressionistic, observational, and reflexive.4

Expository

Expository documentaries typically address the spectators directly, through either an on-screen commentator or a voice-over track (a narration by someone we don't see that's laid over the images). Neither the voice-over nor the on-screen commentator necessarily speak in the second person, literally to the spectators, but they both implicitly address an audience, and they both tend to be somewhat set apart from the rest of the film. They seem to comment on the action or the scene, rather than to constitute it or be part of it.

The meaning and point of view of expository films is thus elaborated more through the sound track than the images. Whereas the images in

fiction films tend to articulate a continuous time and space with the help of conventions of continuity cutting (see chapter 3), images in expository documentaries are edited as a complement or counterpoint to an argument being articulated in voice-over. The visuals are thus structured in accordance with a sound track which has a certain priority.

Expository documentary is sometimes called Griersonian, after John Grierson. Grierson looked on cinema as a "pulpit," and urged documentary filmmakers to consider themselves propagandists, making socially engaged films about "the drama of the doorstep" in the service of national culture. The documentary, he said, is not a mirror but a hammer. However, the films of Grierson and his disciples were as impressionistic as they were expository. Grierson's silent first film, Drifters (1929), depicted Scottish herring fisheries of the time as "an epic of steam and steel." Drifters stunned spectators with its dignified representation of a heroic working class. "Men at their labour," said Grierson, "are the salt of the earth,"5 and indeed his films were lauded as the first ever to show "a workingman's face and a workingman's hands and the way the worker lived and worked."6 Louis de Rochemont's March of Time series from the 1930s, John Huston's war documentaries of the 1940s (including The Battle of San Pietro [1944]), along with innumerable contemporary National Geographic and other nature films are more obviously examples of expository documentary.

Most of the documentaries that are still broadcast on television are, like TV news, expository. Since the 1960s invention of portable equipment able to record a sound track in sync with the picture, the expository style has accommodated itself to the interview format, enabling people other than the filmmaker-commentator also to address the audience more or less directly. Interviews, voice-over, and archival images are often combined in contemporary mainstream television documentaries, such as Ken Burns's The Civil War (1990) and Baseball (1994) series. However, as a style, expository documentary has fallen into disuse among ethnographic and independent documentary filmmakers, who want the visuals to have more autonomy and breathing space.

The arguments elaborated by expository documentary tend to be didactic; they seek to inform and instruct. Expository documentary is popular among television programmers because it presents its point of

view clearly, and leaves little room for misinterpretation (or interpretation for that matter). But this is exactly what some filmmakers have reacted against, describing disembodied voice-over as authoritative, "colonial," "an enemy of film," the "Voice of God," and even "the (non-existent) view from nowhere." They have reacted against the tendency of expository documentary to explain what the images mean, as if they don't explain themselves, or as if viewers can't be trusted to work the meaning out on their own. Indeed, the voice-over often seems to attribute a reduced meaning to the visuals; that is, it denies them a density they might have by themselves. Moreover, because the visuals are edited to the (non-synchronous) sound track, their meaning is determined by extrinsic elements. Left to themselves, expository visuals typically lack not only continuity but also cogency. This is why some people have described expository documentary as equivalent to an illustrated lecture.

But if, aside from television, infomercials, and industrial films, the expository style is no longer much in favor, that doesn't mean that it is all bad, or that you can't make good use of its elements in other ways. After all, there is nothing inherently didactic or authoritative about voice-over. Films as diverse as Luis Buquel's Land without Bread (1932), Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955), and Chris Marker and Resnais's And Statues Also Die (1953) show that you can as easily write narration in a style that undercuts itself, that is enigmatic or unsettling, or that offers a wry, self-reflexive commentary about the visuals, as you can in a style that pontificates pretentiously about the world. Likewise, voice-over needn't be moralistic: you can as easily write a voice-over track that is ambiguous and ambivalent about ethical matters as one that naively divides up the world into victims and villains, or heroes and antiheroes. Moreover, the visuals may be used, not just redundantly, to illustrate the sound track, but also as a counterpoint to or even a refutation of it: you don't have to say and show the same thing.

Thus, as you consider your stylistic possibilities, it helps to remember that even if you don't want to make a didactic or propagandistic film, and even if you want to make a film that is more evocative than it is argumentative, voice-over is not verboten . You may still want to edit your images at least partially to a non-sync sound track.

Impressionistic

Impressionistic films tend to be lyrical rather than didactic, poetic rather than argumentative. They imply more than they inform, and evoke more than they assert. They may be as socially engaged as expository films, but are less level-headed, hard-hitting, or solemn. They also tend to be more self-consciously stylized, more aestheticized. Their meaning may be oblique, even obscure. At times, though, the distinction between impressionistic and expository films is fuzzy, and, in fact, a number of the early films in the Griersonian tradition may be as properly described as one as the other.

Night Mail (1936), directed by Harry Watt and Basil Wright, was one of the most aesthetically acclaimed films of the Griersonian era. Like their "chief" Grierson, Watt and Wright sought to ennoble workers, in this case postal workers on the "Postal Special" night train from London to Glasgow. W. H. Auden wrote the narration and Benjamin Britten composed the score. The combined sound track was so powerful that it dictated the pacing of the pictureshots of mail pouches, mechanized pick-ups, and teams of efficient workers. Much of the drama and poetry of the picture stems from its being paced to the musical rhythms.

Another impressionistic film of the time that experimented with sound was Basil Wright's Song of Ceylon (1934), sponsored by the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board. The film had a multivocal sound track that articulated a complex and at times ironic counterpoint to the beautiful and impressionistic images of Ceylonese life and landscape. The voices that are laid over the images implicitly call the supposed benefits of Westernization into question. (The Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board was nonetheless gratified with the film because it was let off the hook: the film conveyed the board's esteem toward Ceylonese culture.)

Recent impressionistic documentaries often celebrate their own subjectivity to such a degree that they form a hybrid genre somewhere between documentary and fiction. Many of Jean Rouch's ethnopoetic films (like Moi, un noir [1957], and La pyramide humaine [195861]) blend his own and his subjects' playacting, so much so that it's hard for a spectator to separate out fact from fantasy. Rouch is an anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker, but he describes these films as works

of "ethno-fiction." Trinh Minh-ha's Reassemblage (1982) and Naked Spaces: Living Is Round (1985) combine gnomic sound tracks with stunningly beautiful visual fragments of West African architecture and landscapes. Much of the most interesting filmmaking today is happening in a fuzzy area between objective and subjective. The Passion of Re -

Figure 2
While shooting his film  Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask  (1996), 
director Isaac Julien reads on-camera from the Martinican revolutionary-
psychiatrist's book  Black Skin, White Masks . By interweaving studio 
dramatization and actuality footage, archival images and improvised acting, 
and interior speech and evocative music, Julien's films have rehabilitated 
an impressionistic style with hybrid forms that fuse fact and fantasy 
and blur the boundary between documentary and fiction.

membrance (1986) by Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, Testament (1988) by John Akomfrah, Dreaming Rivers (1988) by Martina Attille, Tongues Untied (1989) by Marlon Riggs, I'm British But (1989) by Gurinda Chadha, Imagining Indians (1992) by Victor Masayesva, and Fronterilandia/Frontierland (1995) by Jesse Lerner and Rubin Ortiz-Torresall these films combine poetry and performance with autobiography and archival footage in ways that sublate traditional distinctions between fact and fiction.

An impressionistic style gets away from the earnestness and argumentative qualities of expository documentary, and tends to highlight people's subjective feelings more than other styles. However, it is not without problems of its own. Documentary stakes some claim to representing the historical world, and it may be unclear what relationship an impressionistic documentary has to reality. Robert Gardner's work, particularly Forest of Bliss (1988), which depicts funereal rites in Benares, India, is not stylistically complex, but it has been particularly controversial in its impressionistic quality. Are the subjective states of mind evoked in an impressionistic documentary the filmmaker's, or are they attributed to the characters, or even to the viewers? Early impressionistic films (before the invention of portable sync sound) often reflected the artistic sensibility of the filmmakers more than the actual lived experience of the people they depicted, who were at times transformed into arresting patterns of light and shade, composition and movement, at the expense of their own particular humanity. These documentaries were often shot in part in studios, set up by an "art director." Indeed, a few impressionistic films are so stylized that some spectators, unsure of the films' relation to "reality," find them frustrating.

Observational: Direct and Viriti

Observational cinema was a movement of the 1960s that took advantage of technical developments in the recording and editing of sync sound. A reaction against both expository and impressionistic styles, it sought to be a mirror to the world rather than a propagandistic hammer, and in this it had precursors both in the first Lumihre films, catching life "on the fly," and in Robert Flaherty's work.

Prehistory: Robert Flaherty's "Slight Narratives"

Flaherty's most important film is Nanook of the North (1922), about the Hudson Bay Itivimuit Eskimos' struggle for survival. The film strings together a series of loosely linked vignettes. Each vignette tells a story of sortsthe building of an igloo, the spearing of a sealbut Flaherty doesn't try to fabricate one overarching, continuous narrative, as a fiction film would and as other documentaries of the period did. As Paul Rotha, a British documentary filmmaker and critic of the time, put it, Flaherty "prefers the inclusion of a slight narrative, not fictional incident or interpolated 'cameos,' but the daily routine of his native people."7

Flaherty did, however, partly adopt a film "language" that had been developing in fiction films ever since the days of the early Lumihre documentaries: a language consisting of diverse camera angles, shots and reverse-shots, establishing shots and close-ups, pans and tilts. (Chapter 3 explains these terms, in case they're new to you.) These are cinematic codes that had been created to articulate a continuous time and space. However, all the various camera angles spliced together in the editing room and the final film bear more of a resemblance to the perspective of a superhuman spectator than to that of an individual on the scene at the time. They let the film spectator be everywhere, all at once. But there are also quite a few long takes in Nanook , shot from an "objective" position that doesn't tie the viewer to the optical perspectives of the characters. While many filmmakersthen and nowuse short close-up shots of fragments of details and then create a sense of continuous space through montage, Flaherty at times follows action with long takes that include all of the relevant detail within the frame. (Later observational and neorealist filmmakers celebrated his work for this quality.) There is, for instance, a long and hilarious sequence of a seal hunt. Whereas other filmmakers might have cut between short close-up shots of various details of the hunt, Flaherty keeps the camera rolling and shows us Nanook, the ice hole, and eventually the seal, all in the same frame.

Flaherty was also quite a master of suspense, or what is sometimes called "slow disclosure." The film begins by introducing us to Nanook and his family as they emerge, one at a time, out of what looks like an

impossibly tiny kayak. It's almost as if we're watching a magic trick in a circus. And in the seal hunt sequence, we see Nanook tugging on a line going through an ice hole, but it is only at the end that we see what he was fighting: a seal. These suspenseful moments are what gives Nanook drama, and what holds the spectator's interest.

Nanook was remarkable not just for its style but also for its subject matter and approach to its subject. Never before had a non-Westerner been brought alive on the screen with such sympathy and humanity. "A story," said Flaherty, "must come out of the life of a people, not from the actions of individuals."8 Flaherty was a mining engineer and had lived among the Hudson Bay Eskimo for much of the decade before embarking on the film, and was there for a year during the making of the film itself. He was convinced that he had to live among his subjects for a long time before he would know them well enough to make a documentary faithful to their lives.

Flaherty also screened at least some of his rushes (the developed footage) for his subjects, eliciting their feedback and suggestions for future scenes that they could film. Although he may have transformed his subjects into actors in the process, he also actively collaborated with them to a degree that is still rare today. This kind of acting out was an inspiration to Jean Rouch, who has coined the concept of anthropologie partagie (shared anthropology).

Why the enduring appeal of Nanook? What was Flaherty's secret? "Non-preconception," his wife Frances said, "a method of discovery as a process of filmmaking . . ."9 Rather than scripting all the filming in advance, Flaherty would take each day as it came. At night he would write out in his diary the ideas he had for future sequences, and he would revise them as he went along. This is also a practice of observational filmmakers today. Moreover, while expository documentary seeks to impart information or make a case for some position or another, Flaherty filmed simply in order to explore and depict life itself. As Frances Flaherty suggests, his films "do not argue. . . . What they celebrate, freely and spontaneously, simply and purely, is the thing itself for its own sake."10

Of course this is only true up to a point, for Flaherty's films (like anyone's) celebrate his conception of "the thing itself." Within our conceptions are hidden arguments, and this is as true of an observational

Figure 3
Building an igloo for  Nanook of the North  (1922).

style as of any other, even if it is less obvious. Flaherty was a romantic, and has been called a rhapsodist of backward areas. The American documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio even charged that "[t]he charm and power of his camera are marred by distortions, lies, and inaccuracies which pander to a fake romantic, fake nature-boy view of society."11 Flaherty wanted to make a film about the majesty and nobility of the Itivimuit as they were in the olden days. His camerawork disguised some tricks: the igloo in the film was not only built especially large so that it could accommodate the camera, it was also initially too dark to film in, so they knocked one side down. Nanook and his family shivered away as they pretended to sleep in the half that still stood. The Itivimuit at the time used rifles more than they used harpoons, but the film gives no hint of this. Nanook may have tried to bite a gramophone record in the film, as if it were a novelty, but in reality gramophone players were already common in the Hudson Bay. John Grierson had this to say about Flaherty's brand of romanticism: "Consider the problem of the

Eskimo. . . . His clothes and blankets most often come from Manchester, supplied by a department store in Winnipeg. . . . They listen to fur prices over the radio, and are subjected to fast operations of commercial opportunists flying in from New York."12

As a mining engineer, Flaherty was well aware of this, but he found contemporary Eskimo life depressing, and its Westernization sullying. Because he collaborated with Nanook, it's possible that the nostalgia for old times was as much Nanook's as it was Flaherty's. Perhaps Nanook should have shared credit as filmmaker. That would have been difficult, however, as his real name was not Nanook at all. It was actually Allakariallak. Even his family was not in fact his own. It was cast by Flaherty.13

While these distortions discredit the film in many people's eyes, Nanook is still considered a seminal film in both ethnographic and documentary film traditions. In part this is because Flaherty showed more interest in the lives of indigenous people than any Western documentary filmmaker before him, and he collaborated with them to a degree that would still do many filmmakers credit today. But it is also because of his proto-observational shooting style and his attempt to allow events on the screen to unfold as far as possible at their own pace.

Technological Developments

Observational films were born in the late 1950s and early 1960s out of technological developments that affected both shooting and editing. Previously, sound had been edited using an optical track that ran alongside the picture. But in the 1960s, most documentary editors replaced the optical track with magnetic sound stock ("mag"). Because mag is separate from the picture, it can be cut and recut without affecting the picture, and may be laid over any part of the picture a filmmaker wants. For the first time it became easy and affordable to lay people's words over other images as voice-over. Previously this was so expensive and cumbersome that it was rarely undertaken. Now, if you interviewed someone, say, about a crucial local football match but didn't want your spectators to have to look at the person talking all the time, you could simply cut a few seconds of something else into the picture track (such

as shots of the game). This use of mag sound was immediately liberating for the editor and filmmaker, but it has had very different implications for film subjects, whose words could henceforth be combined with images of the filmmaker's rather than their own choosing. As documentary editor Dai Vaughan says, "Already the participants in a film are one step further from knowing what is being done to them."14

When you shoot film, the picture is recorded on one substance (a roll of film) and the sound on something else (a separate audio tape). However, while film moves at a constant speed, audio tape stretches and contracts, slows down and speeds up. This means that if you want to film and record someone speaking and for the spectators to both see and hear them at the same time, then you need to be able to sync the picture and sound up very precisely. Otherwise, the subject's lip movements and words will fail to match. Up until the 1960s, sync sound could only be recorded well with massive and extremely expensive equipment. This equipment was regularly used in fiction film studios but rarely wheeled onto a documentary location. Even when brought out for a documentary, it was so obtrusive that it usually transformed the social dynamics of the situation it was there to record. But within the space of a couple of years, a silent-running 16mm camera and a high-quality lightweight sound recorder had been invented. (If a camera isn't silent-running it drowns out dialogue in quiet settings.) This meant that documentary filmmakers no longer had to bring their subjects into a studio and interview them on a set; they could go anywhere in the world and record people speaking in their own words. As film historian Erik Barnouw has put it, "field footage began to talk."15

The result, all of a sudden, was a very different kind of documentary. Because we could at last hear people's words, commentary was felt to be reductive and restricting. Extradiegetic music fell out of favor for the same reason. Consequently, images and their sync sounds were given more freedom. Formal interviews were avoided, as the filmmakers were more interested in looking at people rather than simply listening to them, and they wanted to wait and see what people would say to one another rather than to the filmmaker. The idea was to film lived experience itself instead of summaries or reports on it as condensed in interviews. People were to be represented not as social types or aesthetic

patterns, as in some expository and impressionistic films, but as flesh-and-blood individuals. Films were edited to be more faithful to real time, with digressive long takes being left in the film rather than automatically shortened or cut out. Wide-angle lenses were used and apertures closed down to maximize depth of field and convey the impression of what it was really like to have been on the scene at the time. Because the new equipment was so portable, new arenas of human experience were opened up to scrutinyin particular, people's private and domestic lives. Cameras were often handheld, both because tripods are intrusive, and because a wobbly, handheld image somehow seemed less mediated, more authentic. As one advocate of observational cinema, Colin Young, has put it, in the 1960s it was "almost as if 'talkies' were starting all over again, but this time in the right way."16

Observational filmmakers initially saw themselves as reacting both against expository documentary and against the "Olympian omniscience" with which fiction films are edited. However, surprising as it may seem, most observational films are edited in a style that is closer to classic fiction films than to earlier documentary. Though they rarely have a single tight narrative, they are usually structured around a series of semiconnected scenes, which are individually often cut loosely according to the codes of conventional continuity. Observational filmmakers make a point of leaving jump cuts in their films (cuts that disrupt continuity), but their films are still shot and edited to fabricate a homogeneous space, more so than most expository films, which are designed instead to further the logic of the commentary or interview testimony. As with fiction films, observational documentaries let the spectators put the pieces together for themselves: they proceed by implication rather than demonstration, and so demand a more active viewing experience.

There are different schools of observational filmmaking. Direct Cinema is a movement that began in the 1960s in the U.S., with filmmakers like Frederick Wiseman (Titicut Follies [1967]), the Drew Associates, Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, and D. A. Pennebaker (Primary [1960], Don't Look Back [1966]), and Albert and David Maysles (Salesman [1969]). Films by the Drew Associates in particular typically build toward a crisis, not only because such a structure is inherently

dramatic, but also because in critical moments people reveal aspects of their character that are normally hidden in day-to-day life.

Direct Cinema filmmakers tend to be relatively noninterventionist and self-effacing, at times aspiring to be invisible flies-on-the-wall. By contrast, the French Cinima Viriti of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin (Chronicle of a Summer [1960]) is actively interventionist. While the Drew Associates waited around until a crisis happened, Rouch and Morin tried to use the camera itself as a catalyst to induce a crisis. The filmmakers deliberately provoke moments of self-revelation. As such, Viriti is much more interactive than Direct Cinema.17

An observational style has long been popular among ethnographic filmmakers. David and Judith MacDougall are extremely sensitive observers of daily life (e.g., Nawi [1970], Lorang's Way [1979]), concentrating on moments of informal conversation, interaction, and self-reflection that elude almost everybody else's cameras. They are equally sensitive to the manifold and subtle effects of their influence on what they film, and deliberately leave (or introduce) traces of this in their finished films. Although their style is much more relaxed than Rouch and Morin's, they too have modified an observational style by making it not only more participatory but also mildly self-revelatory.

John Marshall (The Meat Fight [195758]) and Timothy Asch (The "Yanomamo" Series [196976]) also adopted an observational style in shooting chronologically edited "sequence films" around "discrete events." The problem with this is that events are rarely discrete, and that most of social life is not made up of "events" anyway. Nonetheless, their sequence films reveal an attention to the lived world of non-Western people that is still rare today. Marshall's first feature-length film, The Hunters (1958), was rather more synthetic. It follows four !Kung hunters as they track a giraffe in the Kalahari Desert. While the film presents it as a single hunt, the footage is actually a pastiche of shots taken over several years. (If you look carefully you may notice that the number of giraffes sometimes changes between shots; occasionally even the number of hunters!) Its ethnography has since been shown to be wanting too: the film is very much a Flahertian struggle for survival, but we now know that the !Kung were more gatherers than hunters at this time, and were not as short of food as the film implies. It was, however, an im-

portant film, for although Marshall's voice-over attributed thoughts to the hunters that may sound patronizing and improbable to an audience today, it displayed an interest in the subjective lives of indigenous people that surpassed both anything in its day and Flaherty's Nanook a quarter of a century previously.

As a way of conveying the rhythms and texture of everyday life, a (modified) observational style is still unsurpassed. Like the other styles, however, observational filmmaking runs into difficulties of its own. Some of these turn on its relationship to reality. Direct filmmakers were often naive about their (lack of) effect on what they were filming, and spoke as if it really was possible to be flies-on-the-wall in intimate settings. At times they seem to have assumed that what occurred while they were there is what would have occurred had they not been there. More interactive (and Viriti) filmmakers have a slightly different problem. By conceiving of the camera as a deliberate provocation, they conflate social actors and filmic actors, and deflect attention from what life would have been like without the camera. Since the films are decreed to be about life in front of the camera, life as it would go on without a camera present is not a question that is even raised.

Moreover, although many observational filmmakers dispense with voice-over, claiming that they want a more democratic style in which the images speak for themselves, even images are shot, selected, and set in a sequence by the filmmaker. While sync images may seem to be objective or transparent to their object, they, too, display the invisible hand and authorial perspective of the filmmaker: they are not automatically elevated to some higher ethical ground.

Observational films are also largely confined to the cinematic present, except insofar as screen subjects reflect out loud on the past. They are sometimes criticized for not providing an historical or other context to the events they show. One response to such criticism has been an increasing use of interviews in documentary films. Interviews allow witnesses to say things to the camera that they wouldn't think of saying to their friends or family. They can also add a personal dimension, lacking in some observational films where the filmmakers seem to be very much outsiders to the lives they're depicting. A few innovative filmmakers,

like Emile de Antonio and Errol Morris, play with interview testimony, showing it to be partial and at times misleading. In many cases, however, the taking up of interviews has meant a return to an earlier expository style, with the interview segments standing in for the now forsaken commentary.

Reflexive

Another response to the limitations of the observational style was already evident in Viriti. Rouch and Morin's Chronicle of a Summer begins by asking people on the streets of Paris, vox pop style, whether they're happy (it's 1960, in the middle of the Algerian War). It goes on to show the subjects sitting in a theater, watching and criticizing an early version of the film, and ends with the two filmmakers walking the corridors of the Musie de l'Homme evaluating the making of the film as a whole. This self-conscious, or self-reflexive, style addresses the process of representation itself and foregrounds the relationship between the filmmaker and the spectators as well as between the filmmaker and the subjects. Though it extends back beyond the Russian revolutionary filmmaker Dziga Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), reflexivity has only recently become popular, with films like Jean-Pierre Gorin's Poto and Cabengo (1979), Trinh Minh-ha's Reassemblage , and Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line (1987).

Some reflexive films accentuate the interactive qualities of Viriti, and set them in the first person: the filmmaker may either appear on-screen, or talk to us (or him- or herself) in voice-over. Many autobiographical films, such as Ed Pincus's Diaries (197176) or Ross McElwee's Sherman's March (1985), seem to be fashioned as filmic analogies to a diary, conveying a similar feel for the contingent, personal, and meditative qualities of our emotional lives. Other films are more formally than personally reflexive, showing themselves to be constructed texts or high-lighting the relationship between cinema and the world.

Tim Asch and Napoleon Chagnon's The Ax Fight (1975) was one of the earlier explicitly reflexive ethnographic films. It is structured into five parts: (1) the sync "rushes" of a fight in a Yanomamo village; (2) a

black screen over which three bewildered men (Asch, Chagnon, and the sound recordist) try to make sense of what they've just seen, and Chagnon suggests incest as a cause; (3) intertitles and kinship charts explaining that the filmmakers' speculations were wrong and that the fight had to do with a lineage conflict; (4) the rushes are shown for a second time, though now with a voice-over commentary, slow motion, and pointers identifying individual protagonists; and (5) a shortened, edited version of the fight. The Ax Fight is subversive of mainstream documentary practice because the fifth section would normally be all that would make it through to the final film. By including the first four parts, the film highlights the condensation and reduction inherent in the editing process. The second part reveals the conjectures and refutations of the anthropologist-film team as they struggle to make sense of what's going on.

While a reflexive style fills in a gap that other styles tend to ignore, it has its own problems. It is occasionally accused of intellectual elitism and even narcissism. If a film is more formally than politically reflexive, it may lose sight of the historical world of which documentary tries to provide a record. Also, if all a film does is to remind spectators that they're watching a representation of reality rather than reality itself, then the filmmaker would seem to suppose, as film critic Louis Comolli has suggested, that spectators are "total imbeciles, completely alienated human beings, in order to believe that they are thoroughly deceived and deluded by (filmic) simulacra."18 Moreover, reflexivity does not provide the unassailable assurance of the filmmaker's morality or sincerity that some viewers might hope for. In Mitchell Block's No Lies (1973), a student filmmaker mercilessly interrogates a friend about her recent rape. Her seeming insouciance finally cracks under his barrage of questions, and she breaks down before his (still rolling) camera. It is not until the end credits that we learn that, despite the observational style of the camerawork, we have just watched a work of pure fiction. As this example shows, it's as easy (if not easier) to stage a reflexive scene as any other kind. There's nothing to stop you from scrupulously setting up a Viriti-style scene featuring yourself on-camera, listening to apparently innocent bystanders talking, supposedly spontaneously, about anything under the sun. You might even get away with it.

Movements and styles come and go. What is exciting initially soon becomes commonplace and exhausted, and other innovations are in order. But all four of these styles are still in use today, in countless different configurations. The challenge is to invent and improvise new twists to old styles, not for their own sake, but as you wrestle with and respond to your subject. Documentary is on an impossible and unending quest to depict the depth of life as it is actually lived. Life will always run away from our films, and exceed our grasp, but the task, however vain, is to run after it again.

Continues...

Excerpted from Cross-Cultural Filmmakingby Ilisa Barbash Copyright © 1997 by Ilisa Barbash. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520087607
• ISBN 13: 9780520087606
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 572