9th
RAI Festival of Ethnographic Film
18-21 September
2005
Organized
by the Royal Anthropological Institute,
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology,
University of Oxford and the Oxford Brookes
University.
Reviewed by: Aparna Sharma
Film Academy, University of Glamorgan
aparna31S@netscape.net
Visual Anthropology has been in the throes
of debate around documenting research
and encounters expressivelyat
best, confronting and problematising the
binary between observer and observed.
In the process, ethnographic engagement
that values the specifics of culture/s
has increasingly embedded that consciousness
with an imperative for dialogue introduced
at varied levelsbe it between
participants including the researcher,
visual regimens, or culturally informed
narrative and construction possibilities.
The 9th RAI Festival of Ethnographic
Film co-organized by the Royal Anthropological
Institute (RAI), the Institute of Social
and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA), University
of Oxford and the Oxford Brookes University
bore an indiscernible yet compelling strain
that reflected variegated contemporary
and complex socio-cultural possibilities
for ethnographic film.
Gathering a selection of films from across
the world, the festival reflected distinct
social and cultural motivations. In the
process, it offered a stimulating scope
for exchange between disparate subjects
as much as competing forms of documentation,
which served to approach questions of
documentation by conceding the imbrication
of content and formsituating
ethnographic practice as context-specific,
unbound by determinisms of form or content
in isolation.
Fittingly, the festival opened with Hugh
Brodys Inside Australia in
which we follow British artist, Antony
Gormleys sculptural installation
at Ballard, a salt lake in Western Australia.
Ethnography is doubly inscribed in this
filmfirst at the level of
content, Gormleys interaction with
the Menzies community, which his sculptural
installation commemorates, and second,
at the level of the film that traces the
evolution of Gormleys installation.
This double inscription of course enriches
the film but further sets up for us the
intricacies of the ethnographic process
that we find as dialogic, spontaneous,
and culturally nuanced on both levels.
The visual scope of the film complements
the films themes with its clear yet contained
use of sound and image. A visual spectacle,
Inside Australia is measured and
leaves the audience with necessary distance
to engage and reflect.
With a rather distinct visual formulation
yet expositing a similar possibility for
audience engagement was David MacDougalls
The New Boys, the fourth film from
his Doon School project. In this MacDougalls
camera is at its haptic best. The film
follows the first term of the fresh entrants
to one of Indias most prestigious
and elite schools, the Doon school in
Dehradoon, north India. Through the course
of the film we occasion moments that lend
to the narrative a depth and fullness
that balance the films sensual and
poetic tendency, subtly resuscitating
it from slipping into pure lyricism. Clearly
postcolonial, this piece enjoys critical
insight. The Doon School prides itself
with alumni including a former Indian
Prime Minister. As the film unfolds, the
elitism of this institution mixes with
a medley of philosophical underpinnings
suggested through the films characters.
Anyone with slight exposure to modern
Indian history and philosophy cannot evade
the rival discursive tendencies the film
traces, which then allow to better situate
and critique the absent-mindedly benevolent
and problematic liberalism that percolates
the elite Indian psyche.
Besides MacDougalls film, the festival
had a sizeable representation from the
Indian subcontinent. Two documentaries,
The City Beautiful by Delhi-based
Rahul Roy, and The Bond by the
Bombay team Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar,
cut right into the complexities of the
ethnographic and documentary project around
the subaltern subject. Both films center
on urban subjects. While Rahul follows
the tribulations of two families from
a working class colony on the margins
of Delhi, The Bond, is about conflict
resolution and communal harmony initiatives
from within one of Asias largest
slums, Dharavi in Bombay. Both films benefit
from sustained filming around the subjects
and very unabashedly they reveal the multifaceted
aspects of life at the margins. Clearly
contextualized, there is no air of exoticism
in either, even in moments such as the
trance sequence in Rahuls film.
And there is no deliberation on post-colonial
irony that is the usual prerogative of
an outside, often Western eye. In their
own ways, both films are self-reflexive,
and this aspect sets up a curious debate.
In The Bond, the filmmakers are
indicated to us through obliquely and
meticulously designed imagery comprising
objects metonymically evoking the filmmakers.
There is even a distinct voiceover-narration
pertaining to them that does not fully
interact with the rest of the film. At
once poetic and systemic, this reflection
is still problematic. The urge for ethnographic
self-reflexivity, which the filmmakers
announce at the start of the film, is
inviting being a confrontation of the
socio-economic and intellectual disparity
between themselves and the subjects of
the slum they film. Clearly Monteiro and
Jayasankar are conscious of the exclusivity
embedded in their intellectual privilege.
The stylized and metaphorical nature of
the self-reflexive sequences within the
film, however, disavows and obscures the
added function of reflexivity within the
defined context. The contrast between
the respective images is visually striking
but little possibility arises for dialogue
or to deconstruct the position of the
filmmakers and, through that, unlearn
their privilege, which the film is, in
some measure, a commitment towards.
Rahul Roy makes no announcement as Monteiro
and Jayasankar. But his film commands
very spontaneous moments of reflection
that surface in the dialogue with his
subjects. His brief and blatant interactions
are more intermeshed within the film and
leave the viewer better equipped to appreciate
the exchanges between himself and his
subjects. It cannot be emphasized adequately
how Rahuls film testifies some rare,
extremely human moments of relation realized
through the camera with the subjects including
womenthe dynamics of that
relationship being particularly socially
complex.
While almost all films at the festival
emphasized spontaneity during encounter
and documentation, one could not but note
clear distinctions in approach and discourse
that resulted in contrasting representations
of the subjects being examined. Lina Fruzetti
and Akos Ostors, Singing picturesWomen
Painters of Naya, is a gripping film
about the Patua community of painters
and singers from West Bengal, who sing
stories depicted on painted scrolls. This
film examines the contemporary state of
this enterprise by interacting with a
group of women painters who have formed
a cooperative to better compete and improve
their conditions. At the festival, this
film was screened along with Mainak Bhaumiks,
Gone to Pat, which interacts with
a wider community of the Patuas. Both
films are similar in subject but markedly
distinct in the visual regimes they employ
that in turn reflect their relative merits
and demerits.
Singing Pictures
relates
to women and weaves in how the folk tradition
has mixed with contemporary social conditions
and concerns. One senses a faint reminiscence
of Satyajit Rays rural Bengal and
in keeping with that there is a slight
orientalist naturalist tendency in this
film. The attention to minute detail achieved
through proximate imagery and perspectival
location synch sound, which itself parallels
some of Rays most celebrated expositions
of local cultures such as in his Aparajito,
from his acclaimed Apu trilogy, leads
Fruzetti and Ostor to attend the subject
more complexly and comprehensively than
Bhaumiksituating the oriental
as clearly local yet fully conversant
beyond.
Bhaumiks film heavily employs an
advertising aesthetic widespread in post-liberalization
India, which privileges lighting design.
This leads to visually rich images, but
the film remains meagre in visual focus
on the paintings and characters and weakly
posits the vibrant links between social
conditions and the folk form. The screening
of the two films in succession brought
forth the proximity between visual regimens
and the scope of the ethnographic text,
usefully foregrounding the import of the
discursive positionality of the ethnographic
filmmaker.
The festival went on to explore some rather
unconventional and particularly contemporary
encounters where the ethnographic method
had been employed. Several films come
to mind here. NFT graduate Daniel Vernons
Fountain of Youtha
film with a surreal edge exploring a community
of aged persons settled around a rare
natural spa in the Californian low desertand
My Brother My Enemya
collaboration between two NFT students,
Pakistani Masood Khan and Indian Kamaljeet
Negi, a powerful second-generation attempt
to confront the animosities between the
two nuclear neighbours in the backdrop
of the subcontinents two fanatical
passionscricket and Bollywood.
There were others, more politically overt
films such as Between Two Villages,
examining the steady displacement
of a village in Portugal consequent to
construction of a dam, and Promised
Land, which follows the patrons of
an American organization, Friends of
Israels Defence Force. Promised
Land is an argumentative film that
employs thematic juxtaposition to explicate
the convictions and motivations of valued
contributors of this organization, and
succeeds in situating them within a wider
regressively liberal US political context.
Particularly striking however, were two
films mapping very contemporary spiritual
encounters. NFT graduate, Mark Bouloss
The Gates of Damascus, which witnesses
a Syrian housewifes ecstatic visions
of Jesus and Mary during an Easter weekend,
and UK-based independent anthropologist,
Michael Yorkes journey with two
Indian ascetics on a pilgrimage in the
Himalayas, in Holy Man and Fools.
Both films, unusually daring, are smattered
with instances that invite discussion.
Boulos has some powerful imagery of Myrna
Nazzour claiming to experience visions,
along with the responses and hype the
annual visions have steadily come to invite.
But the film would have benefited with
discussiontheological, scientific,
or medical around Myrnas experiences,
so as to adequately explore and contextualize
her claims for healing.
Yorkes film, on the other hand cuts
into debates from varied philosophical
discourses of India. But Yorke maintaining
an outsider position ends up completely
bypassing these. The two ascetics, a Swedish
woman, Uma Giri and the young Vashisht
Giri, interact very closely through the
film and while they address much of Yorkes
inquisitiveness and reveal previously
unseen ascetic regimes and rare spiritual
instances, we barely glimpse the whole
experience from their position, a contention
Vashisht Giri indicated at the discussion
following the screening of the film at
Oxford.
Filming any spiritual encounter is a complex
proposition as spiritual discussion by
its nature enunciates positionality. Documentation
therefore calls for the mobilization of
distinct positions that compete with or
converge at the spiritual. While the spiritual
films planted interest for further discussions,
the RAI festival in its entirety, drew
attention to the increasing tendency for
defining the positionality of the ethnographic
filmmaker within practice.
This position, as one gathered from the
festival, is not simply that of a researcher.
But in that position are embedded ethnological
definitions that reveal and facilitate
the particularities of the ethnographic
text as constructed. The RAI festival
was provocative, proving itself as a rich
resource for ethnographers and anthropologists,
and a larger body of artists and film
practitioners contemplating the possibilities
of vision, position and the context for
practice. The exchange of discourses and
cultural imperatives in the various films
at once emphasize socio-cultural context,
but not in any reductive or determinist
manner. Rather in a spirit of critical
engagement and discursive appreciation.