A Brief Survey of Ethnographic Film in the West® Professor André Singer Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Word Count 6,465 Abstract Ethnographic Film has developed in parallel with the development and use of film technology from its beginnings at the turn of the 20th Century. Its pedagogical value has been much debated as pioneers of the use of film in anthropology, particularly in the US, France, Australia and the UK, tackled societies and cultures from different perspectives, The story of ethnographic film has been one of exponential growth from it having been regarded as an adjunct to empirical field-work in the 20th century, to it having a significant role in anthropology as technology has brought it within the grasp of ethnographers everywhere. Main Text Ethnographic Film, Ethnography is a means of collating, structuring and communicating information about society and culture by as scientific method as possible; in the past generally through field participation and observation and relayed via text. It forms the essential foundation upon which analysis and theory can take shape; it is the factual bedrock upon which anthropology has been based ‘Nearly a century ago, one of the greatest of the early ethnographers, Bronislaw Malinowski, succinctly outlined what he thought the goal of ethnography should be for those early field-workers: “This goal is, briefly, to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him. ‘most intimately, that is, the hold life has on him.” (Malinowski, 1922). Achieving this aim has never, given the multiple human elements in the mix, been straightforward, and although rigour surrounding the practice of ethnography has evolved over the years, questions over the objective veracity of fieldwork reports can never be entirely dismissed. ‘Throughout much of the first half of the 20th century the principal tool wielded by the ethnographer was the pen, sometimes supplemented by sound recording devices, © RRM + ERG (Professor André Singer) WHWAK “WAGER. RAEI SI fei” ——HUGR MARS 2018 HE BIRT. ‘The Keynote Speech of International Forum on Visual Anthropology: Ethnographic Fi lanaking, Ethnic Mewory and Cultural Heritage 2018, Yunnan University. 36Information was gathered through observation, interview, participation, and discourse and collated in diaries, field-notes, surveys, and on tape recorders. The quantity of information fathered was invariably far in excess of any single initial analytical target but by gathering an extensive body of material the field-worker provided a reservoir upon which both he or she and others could subsequently draw, seeking further pattems and meanings elusive whilst in the field. In parallel with this process, film was following its own developmental path, and as it advanced it came under consideration as a tool for anthropologists in the field. Most of the early film shot in the field was in 1898 Alfred Haddon, WHR Rivers and Charles Seligman, all three to become formative figures in the history of British anthropology, used ‘a camera on the Torres Straights Expedition of 1898 resulting in four and a half minutes of film of traditional dance; in 1901, Sir Baldwin Spencer, the Anglo-Australian biologist and anthropologist, with his local collaborator Francis Gillen, filmed Australian Aborigines for the first time and pioneered the use of wax cylinders for sound recording. During these early years longer form efforts were of limited anthropological interest; for example Workers Leaving the Lumiére Factory 1895 by the Lumiére Brothers, It wasn’t until Robert Flaherty tackled Nanook of the North in 1922 (the same year Malinowski was publishing his Trobriand Island fieldwork) or Dziga Vertov was filming life in Soviet factories or on the streets of Moscow for Man with a Movie Camera in 1929, that the real potential of film as an ethnographic tool became apparent. Vertov in particular believed that the camera can capture “life as itis” or “life caught unaware”. From his often dogmatic stance in the 1920s followed a line of film practice and theory still adhered to by many practitioners to the present day - namely that film can capture truth (in his words and that of his movement in post Revolutionary Russia, “Kino Pravda” or ‘Cinema Truth’). Many of the world’s great documentary filmmakers followed a similar creed, leading to the Direct Cinema movement in the US, and the Cinéma Verité movement following Jean Rouch in Europe. Ethnographic film in the United States. Robert Flaherty and his ‘reconstructed’ Inuit film Nanook of the North, or Merian Cooper and Emest Schoedsack’s Grass, filmed among the Bakhtiari nomads of Iran, were to have a far greater impact than anything that had come before in influencing how anthropologists viewed film in the first part of the 20th century. However, its debatable whether the label ‘ethnographic film’ is attributable to either work; despite Flaherty’s lengthy stay in Inuit territory, neither of these films were associated with any detailed field-work and they were, like most films from that era, produced as entertainment rather than for academic analysis. ‘Now viewed as little more than historical curiosities, they did act as catalysts, playing an important role in demonstrating the potential of the moving image and sparking interest in the use of film as a serious consideration for anthropologists in the field. Only when anthropologists and filmmakers subsequently joined forces (or one learned the skills of the other) did film became a targeted part of field-work; only then could ethnographic film 37‘genuinely claim to have been born as a discipline in its own right. There can be no single useful date for this genesis as it was a developing process, unfolding over the first decades of the 20th century. It is, however, safe to say that by the end of, the1930s, with field-work established as a critical feature of anthropology and the choice of a movie camera as a tool to capture field imagery widely accepted, the conditions were in place for film to become a serious part of analytical fieldwork. Perhaps the most comprehensive, and certainly most important stage in the process was the attempt to integrate film, photography and text in the work undertaken by the British social scientist and anthropologist Gregory Bateson and his wife, the American anthropologist Margaret Mead. They did joint fieldwork in Bali between 1936 and 1939, resolving to use film not just as images to illustrate field notes, but as part of the ethnography itself. This decision can be traced to their own anthropological training, in which film and photography had played a crucial part, Bateson was a student of and was mentored by Alfred Haddon who founded anthropology at Cambridge University and whose use of film in the Torres Straights was regarded as the earliest directly anthropological film on record. For her part, Margaret Mead was a colleague and friend of the man seen by many as the father of American anthropology, Franz Boas. In 1930 at the age of seventy, Boas had been to the Kwakwaka'wakw Indians on the North West Coast of America and had filmed their dances using 16mm film with the purpose of using the material as part of an on-going cultural study. Bateson and Mead resolved to move on from partial recording to a more comprehensive approach. The extent to which the couple used both the still and moving image as an integral part of their research remains unsurpassed. Alongside the mass of field texts and still photographs, Bateson and Mead filmed 22,000 feet of film, not as a separate entity to be regarded in its own right such as the work of Flaherty, but as an integral part of the study of Balinese society with particular reference to childhood. In search of data for a comparative study they then travelled to the Sepik River region of New Guinea and filmed a further 11,000 feet of film among the Tatmul. From their collaboration emerged two major texts (Bateson and Mead, 1942; Mead and MacGregor, 1951) incorporating photographs and seven films (Bateson and Mead, 1951-52 and 1957) that remain seminal in demonstrating how film can be both ethnographic in its ‘own right, as well as a part of wider ethnography when combined with text and Photographs. Also innovative in their work in the 1930s was the consciousness that film should not be structured by the filmmaker and that its efficacy as anthropology would be greater if used without, as far as possible, any interference in the activities under scrutiny. “We tried to shoot what happened normally and spontaneously” explained Bateson in 1942 “rather than to decide upon the norms and then get Balinese to go through these behaviours in suitable lighting. We treated the cameras in the field as recording instruments, not as devices for illustrating our theses.” (Bateson and Mead, 1942 :49), Uniquely, it was the visual components of their work that formed the ethnography, showing that film could be ‘more than merely an illustration of text. 38