REVIEW ARTICLES

FROM OBSERVATIONAL CINEMA

TO PARTICIPATORY CINEMA - AND BACK AGAIN?
DAVID MACDOUGALL AND THE DOON SCHOOL PROJECT

ANNA GRIMSHAW

iNTRODlfT1O\

There is perhaps no other term in \ isual anthropol-

All of the film captures are courtesy of David MacDougall.
ogy that has been used and abused as much as "obser-
vational cinema.' E\ersinceColin Young! 1975(coined
it to describe a new kind of anthropological filmmaking,
it has pro\oked enthusiastic endorsement and scathing
critique. On the one hand, adherents claim obsen ational
cinema to be less about a set of techniques and more
about a distinctive philosophical orientation toward the
world; while on the other hand, its detractors dismiss the
genre as a kind of nai\ e realism that both objectifies and
dehistoricizes human subjects.
Forthreeorsodecades. Da\ id MacDougall has been
a central figure in debates about observational cinema.
Hisposition,howe\er.isparadoxical(Ta\ lor 1998). For
he is both one of the leading proponents and one of the
leading skeptics. Mac; knigall'sear)) film, To Lire With
Herds (1971), is often cited as a classic example of
observational cinema, while much of his subsequent
work (the Turkana trilou\ and the collaborations with
Australian AborigineI communities) is acknow ledged to
constitute an important critique of the genre. But. if
during the 1980s, MacDougall nun ed aw a\ from obser-
\ ational cinema tow ard participatory filmmaking lorms.
the pendulum has now begun to swing the other \\a\
Declaring his dissatisfaction with experiments in col-
laborate e authorship that confuse rather than clarified
the issues of pow er and representation, MacDougall has
more recently returned to making lilms that are at once
more explicit!} obser\ ational and more self-consciousk

80 Volume 18 Numbers 1-2 2002 Visual Anthropology Review

authored. His Sardinian tilm, TempuscleBatistas (1992),
announced the beginning of a new phase in MacDougall's
project of anthropological cinema. It was reflected, too,
in the changing concerns ot his critical writing.'
One of the notable features of MacDougall's career
is its distinctive phases or chapters that are associated
with a particular range of intellectual concerns and
cultural contexts. With each one, MacDougall focuses
his attention in a remarkably concentrated way. It is not
clear whether his decision to begin in a new tieldsite is an
intuitive one, emerging from personal curiosity and a
certain imaginative conception of the world, or whether,
as often appears, it is necessitated by the intellectual
agenda that he is pursuing. Whatever the motivation, the
different phases of MacDougall's trajectory share a
similar set of features a period ot extended ticldwork
resulting in a number ot films that represent a compre-
hensive exploration of selected theoretical and method-
ological concerns in anthropology. The sense of intellec-
tual coherence that marks each phase is further under-
lined by MacDougall's extcnsiv e written commentaries
on issues raised by the work. Beginning vwiih his African
ti!ms ot the 1970s, this is the pattern of MacDougall\
career. It is continued in the new project that he has
embarked upon in India, at the Doon School.
This essay is about With Morning Hearts (2QQ\ ),the
second film in the Doon School Project. It is part ot a sel
of five films through which MacDougal! intends to
explore questions of 'ideology, social aesthetics and
Anna Grimshaw is Senior Lecturer at the Granada Centre for Vi ual Anthropology, University of Manchester. She is
the author of The Ethnographer's Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology (Cambridge, 2001); and she is
currently drafting with Amanda Ravetz. Rethinking Visual Anthropology.
Visual Anthropology Review
post-colonial identity formation. The location for his
inquiry is India s most famous boarding school that has
been training, since the 1930s, a select constituency of
boys for life in public serv ice. O\ era period of two \ ears
between 1997-1999, MacDougall, w orking alone w ith a
digital video camera, filmed different groups of bo\ s at
the School. From the nearly 100 hours of footage that he
shot, MacDougall has begun to craft a number of
different films that include what he calls the 'public"
Doon School series and more informal pieces intended
for the boys and their families (MacDougall 1999:14-
16).
With \ loniingHearts offers us an interesting oppor
tunity to assess the direction in which MacDougalls
work is now moving. For the filmmaker's substantive
concerns and aesthetic approach establish an interesting
link with some of his earliest pieces, most notably To
Live with Herds and Kenya Boron. Has MacDougalPs
project now come full circle'1 Has he, at last, turned his
attention fully toward the question that keeps recurring
in his work the question of education'' First posed
poignantly by Moding, the son of one of the older Jie
women, whose "cleverness both separates him from
his mother (who asks MacDouszall to explain to her what
he does) and from his humanih the problem of school-
ing hascontinued to trouble MacDoutuill. Indeed it might
be considered to be an intensely personal preoccupation
(Ciiinishaw 2001). It is inescapably at the core of the
Doon School lilms. So. too, is (he question ofobserva-
Volume 18 Numbers 1-2 2002 81
tional cinema. But, in recognizing the centrality ot this
question to a proper appreciation of MacDougall's most
recent work, 1 am also aware of the considerable
confusion that is associated with such a filmmaking
approach.
Colin Young's classic essay, 'Observational Cin-
ema" (1975), was crucial in catalyzing debate about the
nature of anthropological cinema understood neitheras
a spurious kind of scientific documentation nor as just
another form of documentary, albeit with an exotic
focus. The debate was about how to forge a creative
synthesis between an anthropological sensibility and a
cinematic aesthetic. Although Young 's essay was richly
suggestive about the origins and potential of observa-
tional cinema, much of the subsequent discussion was
narrow and stifling. Today, however, the situation is
different. Any attempt to understand observational cin-
ema benefits from a change in the dominant theoretical
paradigms governing both anthropology and film stud-
ies. Renewed interest in phenomenological approaches,
the emergence of sensory perspectives, and a reconsid-
eration of the question of mimesis has greatly enriched
the intellectual context in which to locate any new
appreciation of observational cinema.
One of my objectives in looking closely at With
Morning Hearts is to try and clarity what might be
involved in describing it as a piece ot observational
cinema. Does the film represent MacDougall's abandon-
ment ot his commitment to participatory anthropology in
favor of a self-consciously authored project, founded in
a return to an approach he once found limiting? And if the
DOOM School project is about the rediscover} of obser-
82 Volume 18 Numbers 1-2 2002
vational cinema, how successful is the filmmaker in
convincing us that it constitutes a contemporary - rather
than an archaic, even obsolete form of anthropological
inquiry? This essay is exploratory. For, as I discovered.
II it/i Morning Hearts raises many morequestions than it
answers.
WITH MOR\I\G HEARTS
With Morning Hearts takes its title from a Doon
School prayer exhorting pupils to respond to w hatever
the day holds; "Call us up with morning faces And with
morning hearts Eager to labour, eager to be happy If
happiness be our portion/ And if the day be marked for
sorrow Strong to endure it. MacDougall's film fo-
cuses on a small group of boys newh arrived at Foot
House where, over the course of a > ear. thev begin to
adjust to life away from their families and to prepare
themselves for full immersion in the life of the school.
The film, running close to two hours, ends with their
move to the Main House. It is an upheaval that the boys
anticipate with considerable fear and excitement. Al-
though the boys progression from being neophytes to
fully initiated Doon School pupils provides an important
sense ofnarrative development, the film s different parts
are mostly comprised of extended observational se-
quences that convex the episodic rhythm of daily life.
Thereaieeijjhttitledchapteis: First Days; Housemaster:
"'Dame and Tutor; Living Together; Autumn: Trials and
Tests; Hid of Term Examinations; Spring Term: Fitting
In; Packing, The Last Day and Night.
The film opens quietly, a moon in the dark sk\.the
sounds ofearl) morning, until gradually the ringing ofthe
Visual Anthropology Review
 school bell break the daw n silence and v\ c mm e indoors
to watch the boys preparing for their day. Slow ly they
emerge from beneath the bedclothes, drow sj and low
One by one they begin their tasks dressing, making their
beds, cleaning their teeth, walking together across the
school grounds tor breakfast at long wooden tables. At
each stage, MacDougalTs camera is there, patiently
observing, never hurried or distracted but always ab-
sorbed in the details of the scene unfolding. But w hat the
opening sequences of With Morning Hearts reveal is
something more than just the filmmaker's interest in
detail. They reveal a very distinctive aesthetic framing of
these routine tasks. For MacDougall shows us not just
details, but theirarrangement. We begin to appreciate the
shape of a cup, the particular way that tea is poured, the
place of an egg on a plate, the layout of beds in the
dormitory, the pools of light in the school corridor.
Everything is respected in its own time and place. This
introductory section is especially important in establish-
ing the orientation of the filmmaker toward his subject.
The subsequent parts of the film document the stap.
adjustment as each boy adapts himself to the school
environment; but central to our understanding of the
process is an appreciation of the aesthetic nature of their
environment. It is not a neutral backdrop but it plays an
integral and active role in shaping their lives.
In the first two chapters of the film, MacDougall
intersperses observational sequences with informal in-
terviews. He presents Karam, one of the new boys, who
talks direct to the camera about arriving at Foot House,
his experiences of the first day, and his attempts to come
to terms with being away from family and home.
Although he is never properly introduced by name,
Karam gradually emerges as a sort of focus for the film.
Certainly it is hard not to respond to his appealing
vulnerability. Nevertheless, Karam is not fully dev eloped
as a key character in a com entional sense nor, indeed,
is anyone else. It is as if MacDougall is deliberate^
refusing to build With Morning Hearts around such
expectations. It would have been easy enough to follow
the process of adaptation to school through the contrast-
ing experiences of two or three boys; but there are no
such central subjects or stories u ith which w c identify
Everything about the film is much more diffuse. Hence,
despite the interest in Karam that MacDouaall uenerates
by returning to him, he is nc\ er a single focal point nor
is he presented in any straightforward wa\. We obser\ e
his actions, for example there is a long take of Karam

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 18 Numbers 1-2 2002 83

tnakinghisbed attending to every last detail or the action
that lasts foi almost a minute. We note his different
interactions with other boys. But MacDougall does not
seek to "explain" him in. familiar ways. In stead we are left
to judge the evidence that is presented to us in the form
of movements, gestures, actions, responses to people
and situations. Much of it is non-verbal and implicit. We
develop a sense of Karam as a person in the world
through the web of relationships that connects him with
people and things.
The third part of With Morning Hearts, "Living
Together," explores different dimensions of the boys'
socialization. For the boys' coming to terms with their
separation from family also involves coming to terms
with their fellow pupils. The adaptation process at Foot
House is both individual and collective. Through a
number of loosely connected scenes sharing tuck,
eating together, exercise, prayer, play - MacDougall
suggests different facets of the socialization process.
What the camera frames in such interactions is less the
details of verbal exchange (indeed, we often cannot hear
what is being said) and more the patterning of relation-
ships between boys within a particular landscape. This is
difficult to describe in words the point of MacDougall's
film inquiry itself. But I refer here to the choreographed
sense of the individual scenes. The camera creates an
awareness of posture, movement, configuration; and, as
the film unfolds, we recognize the recurrence and
transposition of certain shapes across the different
spaces of school life.
In the last scene of "Living Together, we return to
Karam. He is calling home, standing awkwardly, tele-
phone in hand as everyone in the room, filmmaker
included, listens to the stilted, one-sided conversation
that he is anxious to end. It is a poignant reminder of the
kind of emotional adjustment that Karam is forced to
make in adapti ng to the School, one underlined each time
we observe him pulling his oversized uniform over his
child's body.
MacDougal I opens the middle section oi'With Morn-
ing Hearts with the boys being drilled in a series of
elaborate formations on the sports field It is the public
counterpart to the daily donning of adult clothes that
constrain and Q\ envhelm the bodies beneath. This pro-
cess of incorporation is explored further in chapter 3 tour
and the of the film, when MauDougall follows Karam
and his tellow pupil s through a series of school tests and
examinations. As MacDougall's camera open.s out to

84 Vo ume 18 Numbers 1-2 2002 Visual Anthropology Review

include aspects of school life beyond Foot House, we
note a contrast between meaningless, abstract categories
of knowledge (for example, the list of racial types that
Karam is trying to cram into his head) and the informal
ways that the boys learn from and with each other.
The last three parts of the film build toward the
moment of departure, as the boys leave the "holding
house" for the Main House. The journey from one to the
other, by means of a tractor on which the boys and their
belongings are piled, is somewhat less dramatic than their
experience of the transition; and we contemplate their
fate in the hands of the unknown, but greatly feared,
seniors. Progressively, thefilmhas revealed the pressure
of this approaching moment. Tensions become ever
palpable; and the boys' spirits rapidly oscillate between
excitement and exhaustion, anticipation and sadness.
MacDougall exposes the emotional uncertainties of the
transition, an upheaval that is analogous to the first,
traumatic separation ofKaram and his fellow pupils from
family and home. This we did not witness at the begin-
ning of the film. Now we can begin to imagine it.
From the opening scenes of With Morning Hearts,
it is difficult not to think of MacDougall's early film, To
Live With Herds. There are many similarities in style.
These include: the use of chapters and intertitles; the
unusual texture of film emerging from sheer density of
detail, the long shots and extended sequences; the overall
structural elegance of the work; the different kinds of
relationships that create meaning, not through linear or
causal connections but by means of resonance or pat-
terning; the kind of engagement that thefilmdemands of
the viewer- patience, intelligence and empathy. In short,
the relationship between the two films seems to derive
from their shared observational qualities understood in
the original sense of Young (1975). These connections,
as I noted earlier, function at the level of substantive
concern as well as aesthetic approach. The Doon School
Project can be understood as an extension of the
filmmaker's long-standing interest in the question of
education; and, in returning to an exploration of this
central question, MacDougall also returns to a much
more markedly observational filmmaking stance. It is
interesting to explore why the two strands, content and
form, are so intertwined.
For David MacDougall, schooling has always been
something of a mixed blessing whether encountered as
an issue in the context of East African pastoralists or
Sardinian peasants. It is an important theme in his early
Visual Anthropology Review
work, To Live With Herds and Kenya Boran; and in the
film he made more than twenty years later, Tempus de
Baristas. The filmmaker's ambivalence is founded in an
awareness of what is lost or displaced by formal educa-
tion. And what is lost through formal education are other
ways of knowing and being in the world. MacDougall
brilliantly encapsulates the conflict through two ex-
tended scenes in To Live With Herds. The first involves
the District Commissioner lecturing a group of cattle
herders about the importance of sending their children to
school. The second, I noted above, involves Moding, a
man whose education elevates him into a position of
power that renders him largely indifferent to the plight of
his starving fellow Jie. There are perhaps fewer more
effective demonstrations of what an observational film-
making approach may yield than these two remarkable
scenes. For the argument is not made in any conventional
way. It involves no general statements. Instead it emerges
and coalesces by means of a web of relationships that are
woven from the different threads that constitute the film.
If the conflict between tradition and modernity,
people and the state, embodied practice and bureaucratic
knowledge is a recurrent theme in many ofMacDougall' s
films, including those he made in collaboration with
Australian Aboriginal communities, italso becomes trans-
posed, in the course of his career, into an anthropologi-
cally reflexive question. Hence Tempus de Baristas is
about the struggle between tradition and modernity in
Sardinia as mediated through the character of the seven-
teen-year-old Pietro Balisai. But it is about different kinds
of anthropological knowledge too. It is about discursive
and non-discursive ways ofknowing. Again MacDougall
presents Pietro's dilemma, a choice between higher
education and herding with his father in the mountains,
as a profound one. For it is about fundamentally different
ways of life, different ways ofknowing, different ways
of being in the world. Using the distinctive qualities of
film itself, MacDougall evokes these contrasts tempo-
rally and spatially. On the one hand there is the "time of
the barmen" and the cold, angular bureaucratic spaces of
school; and on the other hand, there is the time of the
mountains and the skilled craftsmanship of the
cheesemaker.
With Morning Hearts represents an important con-
tinuation of these preoccupations. Now, however,
MacDougall takes the primary site - education itself- as
the focus for his exploration of the conflict. The fate of
Karam, and that of his cohort in Foot House, is one
Volume 18 Numbers 1-2 2002 85
shaped by the conflicting pressures of socialization and
schooling. MacDougall's particular approach toward
documenting the process of the boys' adaptation to the
Doon School raises the question as to what will be lost
in their way of being in the world as they become
absorbed into the hierarchies of elite education. And it is
by means of his filmmaking techniques - techniques of
observational cinema - that MacDougall is able to pose
this question in its full complexity.
OBSERVATIONAL CINEMA
Colin Young's classic essay (1975) established the
distinctive features of observational cinema; and it was
suggestive as to the cinematic context from which the
new genre emerged. On the whole, however, critics in
their tendency to conflate observation with objectifica-
tion have interpreted observational filmmaking within the
framework of nineteenth century naturalism rather than
that of classical realism.4 Ironically, it was MacDougall
himself who opened up this avenue of criticism in his
essay, "Beyond Observational Cinema," that followed
Young's in the Hockings volume. Despite extensive
critique, Loizos argues (1997) that the observational
approach has nevertheless dominated anthropological
practice and its pre-eminence has served to seriously
inhibit the development of other filmmaking styles.
Although Loizos welcomes recent experiments that de-
part from "the austerities of naturalistic, observational
'plain style,'" he also anticipates the return of observa-
tional cinema, albeit in an "enhanced, more self-con-
scious form" (1997:101). David MacDougall's latest
work might be considered the evidence of such a move.
The Doon School Project is strongly suggestive of
a renewed interest in observational cinema, one that is
now focused conceptually around what MacDougall
calls social aesthetics or "culturally patterned sensory
experience" (1999:5). This concept echoes an earlier
notion, "ethos," developed by Bateson and Mead to
describe the intangible aspects of culture (Bateson and
Mead 1942). It also echoes recent anthropological inter-
est in "evocation" (Tyler 1986), "resonance" (Wikan
1992) and other non-discursive ways of knowing (Stoller
1989, 1997). But any understanding of observational
cinema as a contemporary mode of ethnographic inquiry
must also be built around a fuller appreciation of its
cinematic antecedents. For what I find especially inter-
esting in MacDougall's observational turn is that it makes
86 Volume 18 Numbers 1-2 2002
manifest the connection between a certain kind of
anthropological cinema and Italian neorealism.
Colin Young's suggestive history of observational
cinema, and, in particular, his identification of Italian
neorealism as its "godfather" is often cited (1975).
Surprisingly, though, his account has not been subject to
close critical scrutiny. The exact nature of the link
between observational cinema and Italian neorealism
continues to remain somewhat vague. With Morning
Hearts prompted me to look again at the films of
Rossellini and De Sica, and to re-read the classic essays
of Andre Bazin.5 Exploring this ground served both to
enhance my appreciation of the distinctive features at the
heart of MacDougall' s approach and to alert me to some
of the problematic aspects of his film project.
Bazin's keen interest in the cinematic renaissance of
postwar Italy was integrally connected to his more
general ideas about the evolution ofcinema. Critical to his
thinking was the distinction he drew between filmmakers
who put their faith in the image and those who put their
faith in reality (Bazin 1971:24). The former "added" to
reality, imposing their own interpretation ofthe world by
means of fragmentation and rearrangement. The latter
refused to break up the inherently continuous nature of
the real, seeking instead to render its density and ambi-
guity by means ofthe long shot or deep-focus photog-
raphy. Bazin contrasts, unfavorably, the montage-based
cinema of Eisenstein with the kind ofcinema he identifies
with Flaherty, Renoir, Rossellini, one that is built around
the centrality ofthe mise-en-scene.
The development ofBazin' s theory about the evolu-
tion of cinema was closely linked to Italian neorealism.
The films of Rossellini and De Sica represented an
important extension ofthe type of cinema that involved
revelations of the real, rather than interpretations or
explanations ofthe real. In reminding his readers ofthe
aesthetic basis of cinematic realism, Bazin identifies
those innovations in technique that distinguish such
classicfilmsPaisa, Bicycle Thief"and UmbertoD. But his
discussion does not overlook the sheer difficulty that
confronts the director committed to working with the
real. Indeed it involves a new understanding ofthe role
of director itself. The neorealist filmmaker is now less a
director and more a kind of filter, serving to "channel,
shape and select the ontological materials which appears
in his or her film" (Aitken 2001:188). On the whole, as
Bazin himselfrecognized, the postwar Italian filmmakers
failed to satisfactorily resolve the problem ofhow to give
Visual Anthropology Review
 form to found material, how to reveal rather than to
create, and they were often forced to resort to estab-
lished narrative convention, especially melodrama, as a
means tor shaping the real.
Observational cinema, when it emerged in late 1960s
and 1970s, was an important de\ elopment of the Bazinian
aesthetic. It was predicated upon the repudiation of an
earlier kind of anthropological filmmaking practice that
fragmented ethnographic reality as a preliminary to
reassembling it in accordance with a conceptual frame-
work that originated elsewhere. Central to the new
observational approach was the image fact, a fragment
of concrete reality in itself multiple and full of ambiguity,
whose meaning emerges only after the fact, thanks to
otherimposed facts between which the mind establishes
certain relationships" (Bazin 1997:37). It was one of the
distinctiveelementsin Italianneorealistcinema,dislodg-
ing conventional points of dramatic focus and disrupting
straightforwardly causal or linear narrative. The early
observational films were often distinguished b\ their
texture, too, and by theiropen-ended qualities that imited
activeaudienceengagement. But in abandoning abstrac-
tion and generalization in favor of an interest in detail,
context and particularity, the observational filmmakers
confronted the same problem as their Italian counter-
parts how to give shape to found materials while
respecting the inherently conlinuous and ambiguous
nature of the real.
Although David MacDougall quickly emerged as a
central figure in the observational movement, it is impor-
tant to recognize that there have always been important
differences of interpretation and practice. The distinc-
tion Bazin draws between the central figures ofearl\ and
late neorealism is especial ly valuable in clarifying some of
the particular features of MacDouaall's project. Bazin
writes "Rossellini s style is a \\a\ of seekig, while De
Sica"s is primarily a way of feeling. The rnise en scene of
the fonner lays siege to Us object from outside. 1 do not
mean without understanding and feeling but that this
exterior approach offers us an essential ethical and
metaphysical aspect of our relations in the world." B\
contrast, Bazin argues that De Sica \N oiks in the opposite
way, moving from the insideoutuaids and as such, his
mise en scene appears "to take shape after the fashion of
a natural form in liviniz mattei (\\ C'2" d2-63).'
1 rom the outset. MacDougall's anthropological cin-
ema has been marked by an unusual synthesis of detach-
ment and empathy. This qualit\ is akin to w hat Bazin

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 18 Numbers 1-2 2002 8/

calls the "psychological objectivity" ofRossellini's films
(1997:124). Feeling for human subjects is always filtered
through a rigorous intelligence, such that it never slides
into cheap sentimentality. It involves the close observa-
tion of people in the world; and yet a refusal to reduce the
ambiguity of this relationship to psychological explana-
tion. MacDougall's observational cinema is, I suggest,
an important continuation ofthe Rossellinian project. For
To Live With Herds and With Morning Hearts are marked
by a particular sensibility, one that echoes Bazin's char-
acterization ofthe Italian director: "Rossellini is perhaps
the only filmmaker in the world who knows how to get
us interested in an action while leaving it in its objective
context. Our emotion is thus rid of all sentimentality, for
it has been filtered by force through our intelligence. We
are not moved by the actor or the event, but by the
meaning we are forced to extract from the ac-
tion"( 1997 • 124). And it is the Rossellinian dimensions of
MacDougall's anthropological cinema that also brings
into focus the central problem of authorship.
FROM OBSERVATIONAL TO PARTICIPATORY CINEMA -
AND BACK AGAIN?
Today David MacDougall is one of visual
anthropology's most prominent figures. His high profile
derives from the consistency and innovative quality of
his film output, and from the extensive body of writing
through which he has addressed issues raised by his own
work as well as broader questions about the visual in
anthropology. Certainly his insight, thoroughness and
intellectual rigor make the job of critics like myself
considerably more difficult. Nevertheless there are a
number of features of MacDougall's new India-based
project that are troubling and invite closer scrutiny.
These are related to the observational turn in his work -
and involve what might be called the shift from collabo-
rative authorship to authored collaboration.
Since the mid-1970s, David MacDougal 1' s approach
as a filmmaker has been marked by his commitment to
the development of collaborative practice. Its origins lay
in dissatisfaction with earlier experiments in observa-
tional cinema. First explored within the context of East
Africa but later more fully elaborated within the highly
politicized setting of Australian Aboriginal politics,
MacDougall pioneered a form of anthropological inquiry
that aimed to be both participatory and reflexive. Increas-
ingly the intersubjective basis of ethnographic knowl-
88 Volume 18 Numbers 1-2 2002
edge came to be inscribed at the heart of the films
themselves - so, too, the particular political and historical
circumstances in which that knowledge was produced
The Doon School Project, however, appears to represent
a significant break with this model, raising important
questions about what has been gained - and lost - in the
abandonment of a certain kind of participatory anthro-
pology. With Morning Hearts presents us with a valuable
opportunity to examine what is both intellectually chal-
lenging and limiting in this latest twist to MacDougall's
distinguished career.
The Doon School Project is anchored in a set of ideas
that MacDougall seeks to explore by means of film. It is
a reflection of his long-standing commitment to the
intellectual seriousness of visual anthropology and the
potential of film to open up new areas of ethnographic
understanding. Hence, in approaching With Morning
Heart, itisimportanttobearthisinmind. For MacDougall
makes very particular demands of his audience. He
refuses to produce a film that explains - rather he
produces a film that inquires. This inquiry is integral to
the aesthetic of the film itself.
MacDougall's documentation of the process by
which Karam and the other boys of Foot House develop
into Doon School pupils is pursued by means of obser-
vational filmmaking techniques. Hence there is close
attention to detail; subjects are understood within the
context of their lives (understood in a material as well as
a social sense); there is a refusal to simulate "drama" or
"crisis"; and there is an open-ended episodic quality to
the narrative. Meaning inheres in relationships, not in
discrete entities. With Morning Hearts demands an
active, engaged audience, one that is sensitive to the
"resonances" within and between the film's extended
scenes.
Observational cinema is a particular way of know-
ing. One of its great strengths is the communication of
experiential or situated knowledge. MacDougall's return
to an observational approach enables him to reveal the
process of socialization as considerably more complex
than merely about formal instruction. It involves the
phenomenological as much as the discursive; and, as
such, it necessitates innovation in established techniques
of inquiry and modes of representation. With Morning
Hearts is about the disruption of conventional anthropo-
logical perspectives, foregrounding what is usually back-
ground, dislodging familiar points of focus from indi-
viduals to relationships and context, and valorizing the
Visual Anthropology Review
 texture of social life over its development. The film
serves as an important reminder that anthropologists'
almost exclusive concern with the discursive involves a
dramatic reduction in the complexity of human experi-
ence. One of the challenges facing the modern discipl ine
is how to explore and represent other ways of knowing
and being in the world.
For MacDougall, the Doon School Project has
become a significant site for the development of certain
ideas about the visual in anthropology (1997). It serves
to focus his investigation of particular areas of social
experience that hitherto slipped through the framework
of conventional social science. But this raises a number
of problems about how such an intellectual agenda is
pursued and the kinds of research relationships upon
which it is built. For however much we might admire and
appreciate the abstract qualities of With Morning Hearts,
it nevertheless makes for uneasy viewing. What are the
sources of this unease? Is there a problem with the
particular representation of the Doon School itself- or
with the techniques ofinquiry? Or both? Does MacDougall
succeed in transcending those limitations in the observa-
tional approach that he was among thefirstto admit? And
what might the return to observational cinema mean for
the project of collaborative anthropology? Is it a regres-
sive step?
Before addressing these questions, I want to note a
number of unusual features about With Morning Hearts.
The boys of Foot House, including Karam, are never
named in the film. There are no subtitles; and in many
places it is difficult to hear or understand what is being
said. A critical section of the film involves the boys'
collective and individual performance of a song that is not
translated. MacDougall focuses his attention almost
entirely on the boys themselves and although there are
glimpses ofother adults in their world these relationships
are rendered marginal or somewhat awkwardly inte-
grated by means of an "interview." Indeed it is an
interesting departure for the filmmaker that he depends
on interviews to provide information rather than his more
familiar device of informal conversation. The filmmaker
does not draw attention to his presence in Foot House;
and the boys, including Karam, rarely acknowledge the
camera. Occasionally they refer to MacDougall as "sir."
With Morning Hearts adds up to a very wholesome
view of India's premier boys' school. There are no
conflicts, no rebellions, no hints or glimpses of a poten-
tially explosive institutional world that erupts within
Visual Anthropology Review
Lindsay Anderson's classic film If. In significant ways,
MacDougall follows the line of inquiry first established
by Okely in an early piece of auto-anthropology (1978).
His conclusions, however, could not be more different.
If MacDougall's film quietly resonates, Okely's depic-
tion of boarding school life is more akin to a shriek of
terror and outrage. Her account of the social aesthetics
of the total institution is not a celebration of their creative
shaping of the social personality; but rather of the sheer
oppression of mind and body that the social landscape
constitutes. Indeed, in her most recent essay she refers
to it as a "colonizing territory of terror" (2002). It might
be argued that the observational style of With Morning
Hearts both produces and reflects a fundamentally be-
nign, ahistorical view of the Doon School. Certainly it is
impossible from the film to learn anything about the
particular location of the School within the historical
landscape of colonialism and nationalism; nor can we
grasp anything of its contemporary social and political
standing. Moreover, the ways in which these forces
continue to be played out within the life of the School,
how they are embodied in the relationships and in the
landscape itself, lies beyond the frame of the camera.
The sense of a timeless, orderly world that is the
Doon School finds expression in the aesthetic unity and
completeness ofthefilm.Although the aesthetic pleasure
to be derived from such a finely crafted piece will
undoubtedly arouse suspicions among academic anthro-
pologists, I, for one, very much welcome this aspect of
With Morning Hearts. That anthropological cinema might
properly take its place as cinema, rather than exist as its
poor cousin, condemned to the worthy and informative,
has been a long, uphill struggle for filmmakers such as
Rouch or Gardner and, of course, MacDougall. But there
are questions to be addressed about auteurship and the
consequences for the intersubjective basis of ethno-
graphic understanding.
From the beginning, films made according to the
principles of observational cinema were supposed to take
their mandate from their subjects (Young 1975). There
was no conventional director as such. But films were still
authored. The filmmaker now sought to immerse himself
or herself completely in a particular ethnographic situa-
tion; and, from within that space and the relationships
that constituted it, s/he crafted a work that both embod-
ied intersubjective experience and constituted a reflec-
tion upon it. Establishing a creative tension between
participation and observation has always been the central
Volume 18 Numbers 1-2 2002 89
challenge of working operationally. It involves
'authored collaboration, for, unlike the other partici-
pants, the ethnographer seeks to draw meaning from the
collaborative experience; and, unlike the conventional
director, such meaning can only be achieved through the
act of participation.
With Morning Hearts raises important issues about
the film's authorship and the kind of collaboration upon
which it is built. It is a paradox that the use of visual
technologies in tieldwork both renders transparent and
opaque the nature of participation and consent. This is a
problem that MacDougall encountered in his Australian
work, but shifting his focus to the very different context
of the Doon School has not made it go away. Indeed it
has only served to sharpen it. Debates about the nature
of collaboration are central to those engaged in child
focused research. There is a growing dissatisfaction
with established research hierarchies; and there is in-
creasing concern about the understandings and condi-
tions under which children consent to research partici-
pation. It is impossible not to reflect on such problems
when watching With Morning Hearts. The importance
of this film for anthropology surely lies as much in its
ethical dimensions as in its conceptual, epistemological
or ethnographic qualities.'
Collaboration is clearly at the heart of the Doon
School project; but it is of a profoundly different kind
from that explored in other contexts. Moreover it has
now become harnessed to an explicit intellectual agenda.
Although MacDougall's interest in social aesthetics
emerged in the course of his work at the Doon School,
it is not one that is shared with the film's subjects. The
problem of observational cinema lies in the relationship
forged between experience and representation, between
the intersubjective relationships at the heart of ethno- • ; • -

graphic practice and the interpretative framework that

gives them shape. The balance between the two elements
must be finely tuned. In withdrawing from collaborative
1
authorship, MacDougall has freed himself to develop
anthropological cinema in the conceptual and aesthetic
directions of his own choosing, bul the control he has
thereby regained may be at the cost of the unusually
innovative spirit that has previously animated his work.
For that spirit was sparked by the location of his work in
society, rather than in the academy. Although 1 suspect
that the filmmaker would dispute it, the ground appears
to have substantially shifted. With Morning Hearts indi-
cates the new direction in which David MacDougall's

Volume 18 Numbers 1-2 2002 Visual Anthropology Review

 work as an anthropological filmmaker is developing, but
whether it represents an advance or a retreat is a matter
for debate.
The American film critic Pauline Kael apparently
once remarked that Rossellini was 'a great filmmaker
who never made a great film'(quoted in Pere/ 1998:41).
We glimpse moments of greatness in films like Pahu, but
they are rarely sustained. One could perhaps say the
same thing about observational cinema. There are many
unforgettable moments in important films ot the genre,
but there are few works that are not flawed. For.
contrary to much critical opinion, observational cinema
is actually very difficult to realize. It is not about the
achievement of an accurate transcription of the world,
instead it hinges upon an imaginative connection, ex-
pressed in an almost intangible, empathic moment. Ren-
dering that moment tangible is the central problem that
faces the filmmaker.1 One can argue, perhaps per-
versely, that the abandonment of observational cinema is
because it is too difficult to w ork with, rather than it is
too undemanding. David MacDougall is one of the tew
figures who has remained creatively engaged w ith the
genre. If his new film. With Morning Hearts, is a
problematic piece, it nevertheless serves as an important
reminder of the continuing potential indeed challenge-
of observational cinema.

A t KNOW LEDCMFNTS

1 am greatly indebted to David Polonoff and Amanda

Ravetz for their close critical reading of this essay and for
their invaluable editorial suggestions. I am also grateful to
Faye Ginsburg and Fred Myers for a lively, early discus-
sion of ideas prompted by the Doon School films.

NOTES

I. Although this essay is about David MacDougall. 1 am

aware that a great deal of his w ork has been carried out
in collaboration with Judith MacDougall. Her contribu-
tion has clearly been critical in shaping their filmmaking
project. However, it is Da\id MacDougall who has
sought to clarify and articulate the intellectual questions
that animate the work.
2 Further details about the Doon School and the \ ideo
project can be found in MacDougall 1999.
3.1 refer here to the renew ed interest in the film criticism
of Andre Ba/in (1997): and the work of Marks (2000)

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 18 Numbers 1-2 2002 91

and Perez (1998); and Jackson (1989), Stoller
(1989,1997) and Taussig (1992).
4. See Loizos 1997 and Winston 1995. This distinction
is taken from Marcus's discussion of realism in the
contextofpostwarltaliancinema(1986:7-l 8). Although
I cannot develop this point further here, her exploration
of different interpretations of the concept is valuable in
any attempt to rethink observational cinema.
5. Bazin's influence, if largely unacknowledged, is dis-
cernible in the writing both of Young and MacDougall.
6. See Mermin 1997.
7. In linking MacDougall to the early neo-realism of
Rossellini, I would suggest that the work of other key
figures in early observational cinema, Herb Di Gioia and
David Hancock, more closely resembles the cinema of
De Sica and Zavattini.
8. The influence of Basil Wright remains both tangible
and enduring.
9. See my forthcoming essay, Moving the Goalposts:
using photography in research with children and young
people.
10. The problem of communication is also, of course,
central to Rossellini's cinema (Nowell-Smith 2000:11)
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