The postcolonial and post-Cold War era also generated much work that combined an autobiographical impulse with a historical reexamination. Filmmakers turned to the personal essay form to challenge official amnesia in Africa. David Achkar’s father, a prominent Guinean official, had fallen from favor and died in prison. Achkar’s Allah, Tantou (1991) mixes reenactment, family letters, home movies, and newsreel images to challenge the public version of his father’s disappearance. The film, as much meditation as memoir, provided a counter to the mythology surrounding revolutionary leader Sekou Touré and generated controversy in Guinea and worldwide. Haitian Raoul Peck, whose family had served Patrice Lumumba’s government in Congo, made Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (1992). The documentary—Peck later made a fiction film of the same name—weaves together Peck’s family’s home movies, his own video diary of his fruitless search for archival images of Lumumba that had been suppressed by Lumumba’s killer and successor Mobutu, interviews, and news footage. Cameroonian Jean-Marie Teno made a sharply voiced series of personal films, linking colonial history with present brutalities, including Afrique, Je Te Plumerai (Africa, I Will Fleece You, 1992).
The end of Latin American dictatorships also brought forward the theme of memory and history. Brazilian Eduardo Coutinho in Cabra Marcado para Morrer (Twenty Years Later, a.k.a. A Man Listed to Die, 1984) returned to a site where, twenty years earlier, his film crew had hastily buried film cans from a cinema novo project about the murder of a peasant land reform leader. The project had been halted abruptly by a military coup. Coutinho then tracked down the peasant’s widow and eight children. The result was the story of a generation of loss told through the experiences of one shattered family. Chilean director Patricio Guzmán in 1997 made Chile, Obstinate Memory, a memoir of his journey home to show The Battle of Chile—banned until then—for the first time to his own people.
10 and 11. Patricio Guzmán’s epic The Battle of Chile (1976), top, about the downfall of the Allende government, was not shown in Chile until his return 30 years later—a visit recorded in Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997), bottom. Directed by Patricio Guzmán.
Personal films have also been a vehicle for reviving public memory of the unthinkable or unbearable. Holocaust memoirs and memory films proliferated in the 1990s: Mira Binford’s Diamonds in the Snow (1994), Ilan Ziv’s Tango of Slaves (1994), Amir Bar-Lev’s Fighter (2001), Oren Rudavsky and Menachem Daum’s Hiding and Seeking (2004), among many others. Descendants of Holocaust survivors, and sometimes survivors themselves, sought answers, closure, or resolution by returning to the sites, encounters with other survivors, or even confrontation with those from the past. Also exploring the power of private memory to inform the public’s knowledge of the past is the work of Hungarian Peter Forgács, who reworks amateur and family footage to create meditations on forgotten and suppressed eastern European history of the 1930s.
Finally, personal-voice and home movies have been interwoven into reexaminations of popular culture. Stacy Peralta’s Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001), an engaging and lively history of skateboarding culture, tracks its evolution from the gritty side streets of Santa Monica to a billion-dollar business, some of whose celebrities (such as Peralta himself) came from those streets. It interweaves home movies with reminiscence and contrasts both with verité material from the fast-paced and commercialized world of competitive skateboarding. Danish filmmaker Anders Høgsbro Østergaard’s Tintin and I creates a sensitive psychological biography of the Belgian writer and artist Hergé, matching intimate audio interviews from the 1970s with animation drawn from contemporary video footage of Hergé and animating his comicbook illustrations as well. Understanding Hergé’s journey from Catholic ultraconservative to nearly New Ager through the Cold War period also makes for a reanalysis of his popular comic books.
The growth of personal documentary has provoked scholars to explore the relationship of memory to truth. Linda Williams argues that such films challenge viewers to recognize that truths exist in a context, in relationship to lies, and are selected from other truths. Going beyond reflexivity (that is, calling attention to the fact that the film is a film), such films posit that there are important truths to be revealed and that they can be revealed in spite of—or even by calling attention to—the partiality of our understanding. Thus, such films offer another approach to the problem of how documentaries can be truthful. Bill Nichols states that personal documentaries often “perform” the filmmaker’s state of mind and associations, documenting an intimate kind of reality. Michael Renov writes that the often-confessional tone of personal documentaries brings viewers actively into the construction of the film’s meaning, thus heightening empathy.
Usable for whom and for what?
Documentarians sometimes chafe at the notion that they must become historians in order to make a historical film. And yet a filmmaker’s responsibility to users is a large one. Not only is each documentary taken by viewers and later filmmakers as an accurate representation of the history it shows but also historical knowledge shapes users’ understanding of who they are in the present. Jon Else, in making Cadillac Desert (1997) about water politics in the United States, said that although many dams looked alike, he insisted on absolute accuracy because he knew that later filmmakers would quote his work rather than going back to the sources he originally used. Every historical film occurs within an ideological frame that deserves to be understood at the very least before being presented to viewers.
If all history is useable history, then what is relevant about a particular story, and to whom is it, and why? These are good questions to ask for makers and viewers alike.
Ethnographic
Ethnographic film is a term with many connotations. Festival programmers, such as those at the standard-setting Margaret Mead Film Festival held each year in New York at the American Museum of Natural History, usually define ethnographic film as one about other cultures, exotic peoples, or customs. Television programmers commission under that rubric documentaries that entertain, whether charmingly or shockingly, with exotic cultural material. Independent filmmakers such as Les Blank, who has explored musical and food subcultures worldwide with empathy and respect, are happy to show their work under that banner. Anthropologists would like to see the term used more scientifically. Anthropologist Jay Ruby argues that only if a film is produced by a trained ethnographer, using ethnographic field methods, and with the intention of making a peer-reviewed ethnography should it be called an ethnographic film.
Linking these various interpretations is the notion of otherness—that ethnographic film is a look from outside a culture, giving you a glimpse inside it. Such a claim raises the stakes on the usual ethical questions of documentary. The relationship between filmmaker and subject is particularly fraught in ethnographic cinema because the subjects are more often than not members of cultural groups with less power in society and media than the filmmaker. Anthropologists relish the story that anthropologist-filmmaker Sol Worth told about Sam Yazzie. Worth, along with John Adair, conducted the Navajo Film Project in the 1970s. The project strove to teach Navajo Indians techniques of filmmaking without imposing aesthetic or ideological filters. Elder Sam Yazzie, when the project was described, asked, “Will making movies do the sheep any harm?” When the filmmakers assured him that no harm would come to the sheep, Yazzie asked, “Will making movies do the sheep good?” “Well, no,” they replied. “Then why make movies?” Worth wrote, “Sam Yazzie’s question keeps haunting us.
Making money
The early answer to the “why make movies” question was straightforward: to make money. The exotic adventure film, with crossovers to anthropological practice (chronicling “primitive” cultures, living with subjects, sharing the crafting of narrative with subjects), was established in this period. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North inspired later anthropological filmmakers. Merian C. Cooper, who had already co-produced an impressive but financially failed travelogue film, Grass (1925), about a nomadic tribe, made the box
-office hit Chang in 1927 and produced the hugely successful King Kong (1933). Drawn from an eighteen-month stay with Lao people in northern Siam, Chang constructed a viewer-friendly narrative out of daily life. Villagers fight off threats from a leopard and tiger; after a wild elephant stampede (a staged event), the villagers tame the elephants and use them to reconstruct their peaceful jungle life.
The exotic adventure film led to fantasy-filled jungle movies and to “shockumentaries” such as the 1962 Mondo Cane and its sequels. In Mondo Cane, shocking scenes such as New Guinea tribesmen clubbing a pig to death cut to silly scenes such as elderly students awkwardly learning the Hawai’ian hula dance, with narration and a soundtrack smoothing over incongruities.
More upscale films offered viewers an experience of other cultures, without claiming ethnographic insight but often benefiting from the association. In Dead Birds (1963), about life and death in Western Irian Jaya, artist Robert Gardner used license learned from Flaherty to weave a “true story” out of “actual events.” Critics heralded his poetic sensibility and his ability to touch on universal themes, and often called his work ethnographic (something Gardner never did). In Forest of Bliss (1985), about death rituals and daily life in and around Benares, Gardner created an idiosyncratic but compelling and sometimes gruesome meditation on death and the meaning of life. It was screened for audiences in the global North, who were largely ignorant about the practices shown in the film; South Asians, Hindus, and anthropologists wrung their hands at the lack of cultural context.
Grappling with conventions
As the broadcast television market burgeoned in the 1960s and 1970s, so did series on exotic cultures such as the British Granada TV’s Disappearing World (1970-93), and the Japanese Nippon TV Our Wonderful World (mid-1960s-1982). Viewers were often encouraged—despite the howls of anthropological consultants and sometimes members of the cultural groups themselves—to believe that they were watching uncontaminated cultural practices that one touch by the modern world could destroy.
Most documentaries on cross-cultural issues today do not make clear claims for their purpose. They are typically shown to audiences in the global North about people in other parts of the world. Some of these entertain with good-looking characters, colorful practices, and narratives driven by crisis, ghoulishness, or disaster. They often claim to rescue for civilized viewers a last glimpse of a passing exotic culture, as The Story of the Weeping Camel does. The National Geographic Taboo series (2003 on) shows viewers bizarre body-decoration practices around the world on one week, and weird food people eat on the next. Other work strives to take viewers inside someone else’s experience unpretentiously. For example, Dutch director Leonard Retel Helmrich’s Shape of the Moon (2004), follows, in cinema verité style, a widowed Christian woman in Jakarta as her son converts to Islam, giving Western viewers a glimpse of cultural conflicts they may not even have imagined.
Most producers on cross-cultural subjects find themselves bound by the conventions of mass media, which work against reflexivity, experiment, and open interpretation. The work of Australians Robin Anderson and Bob Connelly is interesting as a healthy struggle with the limits of the commercial medium. In their widely broadcast first film, First Contact (1983), they brought to Papua New Guinean villagers footage of the first time whites—male prospectors—had encountered them. The prospector’s record of their exploration was re-seen through the eyes of the villagers. The film also traces the ever-widening consequences of the encounter, which brought the Papuans unasked-for pregnancies, diseases, machinery, and a tourist economy.
First Contact, which had two sequels, fascinates for its deft juggling of reflexivity within realist conventions. It asks viewers to critically reexamine the early footage and also reassures them of a stable meaning in Anderson and Connelly’s own footage—through its editing, its tight narrative focus, and its explicit and implicit explanations of what viewers saw.
Scientific?
Social scientists first imagined ethnographic film as a scientific tool. Early anthropologists, such as Franz Boas (founder of the field), Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson made short, purely descriptive films of discrete routines and acts. For decades, the Göttingen Institute for Scientific Films in Germany commissioned five-minute sequences, accompanied by written texts, on specific rituals and production techniques. Substantial archives of such material exist internationally today. However, these archives raise questions that were not always obvious to those recording the images at the time. What do these acts mean to the people doing them? What kind of inquiry does this information serve? Were the people reenacting something or being caught in the act of doing something they always do?
Anthropologists and anthropologically trained filmmakers soon began exploring these questions. As a privileged teenager on safari with his father, the American John Marshall first became familiar with Kalahari nomads. A few years later, he made The Hunters (1957) from silent footage he took with the San (known as Bushmen to whites in South Africa at that time). He openly aspired to be the Flaherty of the Kalahari, celebrating the successful struggle of the nomads against nature. A commercial hit and widely seen in classrooms, the film was also criticized for its romanticism. The controversies provoked rethinking, and Marshall recut his footage into a series of educational films with, among others, the young photographer Timothy Asch, who then pursued an anthropology degree. Single-focus, short films accompanied by discussion material became popular in teaching.
Marshall went on to work with pioneers of the cinema verité movement, including Fred Wiseman (for whom he shot Titicut Follies), D A Pennebaker, and Flaherty’s protégé Richard Leacock. In 1980, with Adrienne Linden, Marshall made a biography of one of his South African subjects and incorporated footage he had taken of her over three decades in which the rights of the San had badly eroded. N!ai: The Story of a !Kung Woman (1980), made for American public TV, contrasted sharply with the romantic isolation of his first film and chronicled Marshall’s growing awareness of the power of the filmmaker in relation to the subject.
After his work with Marshall, Tim Asch went on to collaborate with anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who worked in lowlands Brazil with the Yanomami tribe. There, he and Chagnon produced a large body of work and also explored how to represent their own understanding and experience of Yanomami culture. The Ax Fight (1975) was a triumph of their collaboration and a critique of ethnographic film approaches up to that time. In the film, Asch and Chagnon witnessed and filmed two-thirds of an ax fight in a village. Asch provided several versions: a simple presentation of all the footage he had; a version that used slow motion and guiding arrows to show more clearly participants and events; an analysis of kinship relations; and a smoothly edited narrative reminiscent of what students had been used to seeing. Thus, The Ax Fight forced viewers to ask themselves how they would interpret what they saw. Although it did not result in many imitators (possibly because the model was not commercially viable), it precipitated an anthropological debate about how best to use film.
Jean Rouch
From the 1960s, disenchantment with claims of scientific objectivity created turmoil in the discipline of anthropology. At the same time, ethnographically inclined filmmakers were fascinated by cinema verité. Riding these two waves was anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch, one of the most creative forces in ethnographic film and one of its most vigorous challengers.
Rouch, an engineer whose work in West Africa prompted him to study anthropology on his return to France, ultimately made more than one hundred films, many of them in collaboration with his subjects. He drew inspiration from both Flaherty and Vertov. He respected Flaherty’s affectionate relationship with his subjects and his participatory approach; he admired Vertov for his passion for capturing life as it was, and then seizing the right to edit that reality, forcing the viewer to acknowledge the presence of the filmmaker.
Rouch’s first major film caused him to rethink his earlier approach. Les Maîtres Fous (1955) t
ook viewers inside a weekend spiritual ritual in which West African migrant workers in Ghana went into trances, playing roles that imitated colonial officials. Rouch’s ending narration suggested that this ritual was both an expression of and a temporary release from their colonial existence. The film shocked Europeans and horrified Africans, who were afraid that Europeans would see them as uncivilized. After the end of colonialism, leftist critics excoriated the ending as patronizing.
Although Rouch never repudiated the film, he began to work more collaboratively with his subjects. He also unceasingly experimented with how to explore their subjectivity, often turning to fiction, fantasy, and role-playing. For instance, in Moi, un Noir (1957) young Songhay men assumed the roles of characters they created—out of the fabric of their own lives—in a collaboratively made film about a week in the life of a migrant worker. Rouch had begun to articulate an approach that used the camera as a provocation or catalyst to reveal social tension, one he took further in looking at his own “tribe” of Parisians in Chronicle of a Summer.
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