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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 expressively——at 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 levels——be 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 form——situating ethnographic practice as context-specific, unbound by determinisms of form or content in isolation.

Fittingly, the festival opened with Hugh Brody’s Inside Australia in which we follow British artist, Antony Gormley’s sculptural installation at Ballard, a salt lake in Western Australia. Ethnography is doubly inscribed in this film——first at the level of content, Gormley’s interaction with the Menzies community, which his sculptural installation commemorates, and second, at the level of the film that traces the evolution of Gormley’s 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 MacDougall’s The New Boys, the fourth film from his Doon School project. In this MacDougall’s camera is at its haptic best. The film follows the first term of the fresh entrants to one of India’s 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 film’s 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 film’s 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 MacDougall’s 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 Asia’s 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 Rahul’s 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 Rahul’s film testifies some rare, extremely human moments of relation realized through the camera with the subjects including women——the 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 Ostor’s, Singing pictures——Women 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 Bhaumik’s, 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 Ray’s 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 Ray’s 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 Bhaumik——situating the oriental as clearly local yet fully conversant beyond.

Bhaumik’s 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 Vernon’s Fountain of Youth——a film with a surreal edge exploring a community of aged persons settled around a rare natural spa in the Californian low desert——and My Brother My Enemy——a 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 subcontinent’s two fanatical passions——cricket 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 Israel’s 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 Boulos’s The Gates of Damascus, which witnesses a Syrian housewife’s ecstatic visions of Jesus and Mary during an Easter weekend, and UK-based independent anthropologist, Michael Yorke’s 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 discussion——theological, scientific, or medical around Myrna’s experiences, so as to adequately explore and contextualize her claims for healing.

Yorke’s 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 Yorke’s 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.

 

 




Updated 1st November 2005


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