BAD FILM HISTORIES

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BAD
FILM
HISTORIES
Ethnography and the Early Archive
KATHERINE GROO

University of Minnesota Press | Minneapolis | London

Portions of chapter 1 were published in a different form in “The Maison and
Its Minor: Lumière(s), Film History, and the Early Archive,” Cinema Journal
52, no. 4 (2013): 25–­4 8; copyright 2013 by the University of Texas Press;
all rights reserved. A portion of chapter 1 was published in a different form
in “The Human Zoo and Its Double,” in The Zoo and Screen Media: Images of
Exhibition and Encounter, ed. Michael Lawrence and Karen Lury (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 43–64; reprinted with permission of Palgrave
Macmillan. A portion of chapter 5 was published in a different form in “Alice in
the Archives,” in New Silent Cinema, ed. Paul Flaig and Katherine Groo (New
York: AFI/Routledge, 2016), 17–37.

Copyright 2019 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

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permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Groo, Katherine, author.
Title: Bad film histories : ethnography and the early archive / Katherine Groo.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2019] | Includes
bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018028406 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0032-8 (hc) |
ISBN 978-1-5179-0033-5 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Ethnographic films—History. | Motion pictures in ethnology—
History. | Visual anthropology.
Classification: LCC G347 .G76 2019 (print) | DDC 301—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018028406
UMP BmB 2019
For Nathaniel, Alma, and Nicola
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CONTENTS

Introduction: Untimely Historiographies,  1

Ethnographic Particularities

1 Of Other Archives: The Excursive Minors  43

of La Maison Lumière and Les Archives
de la Planète

2 Historical Figures: Dance and the Unlettered Line 105

3 Following Derrida: Ethnocinematic Animals,  157

Death Effects, and the Supplement of
Expedition Cinema

4 Language Games, or The World Intertitled 211

5 Ethnography Won’t Wait: New Media and  255

Material Histories

Acknowledgments 291
Notes 295
Index 339
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INTRODUCTION
Untimely Historiographies,
Ethnographic Particularities

This project began by accident, or by way of an accident that posed

a set of critical questions about the practice of film history and our
understanding of moving image archives and artifacts. At the time, I
was a graduate student in the early stages of research with broad inter-
ests in early ethnographic cinema, film history, and the avant-­garde.
I had contacted the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)
and ordered, among other titles, Martin and Osa Johnson’s Simba:
King of the Beasts (1928). When the film arrived—­a DVD copied from
a Betamax tape—­it carried with it an unexpected surplus. Another
film preceded the Johnsons’ dreamscape of African adventure. This
second film was not mentioned in any of the loan documents. It had
no title, no intertitles, no credits, no identifying paratexts of any kind.
The anonymous bit of film lasts just over four minutes. It begins, as
so many ethnographic films often do, with a map. The camera zooms
in upon a silhouette of the African continent, eventually landing on
the portion labeled “Belgian Congo.” The map dissolves, and the film
cycles through a series of landscapes—­t he rushing waters of (one
presumes) the Congo River and elephants meandering through the
grass—­before shifting its attention to the bodies of (again, one pre-
sumes) Congolese people: a hunter tracks and kills a deer, women
prepare food, and a crowd of dancers run and leap in circles, lift-
ing their arms high as they pass by the camera, their skin seemingly
pressed against the lens.
Shortly after my first viewing of the film, I contacted an archivist
1
 2 Introduction

at the AMNH in an effort to resolve the mystery of its provenance. I

learned that the AMNH collection contained numerous untitled and
anonymous films and film fragments, many of which had been ag-
gregated and transferred to tape simply to ensure that they were pre-
served, even if we had no way of knowing what exactly “they” were.
I would later learn that other archives had a similar policy for man-
aging misshapen ethnographic documents. At the EYE Filmmuseum,
the orphaned and unusual are gathered together in a multivolume
collection called Bits & Pieces. At the Centre national du cinéma et
de l’image animée (CNC), they become Et cetera.
What surprised the archivist I consulted was not that I had come
across this material but that it had hitched a ride with Simba, one of
the most popular and well-­k nown films in the collection. This con-
tingent encounter had revealed—­and blurred—­the dividing line be-
tween good and bad objects, between the “real” (desirable, nameable,
archivable) collection and the ethnographic scrapheap. As a viewer,
it was difficult not to read these two films together: the one a com-
mercially successful narrative feature that circulates widely in eth-
nographic film history and scholarship, the other an uncategorizable
unknown that presses against the narrative constructions and visual
conventions of silent-­era ethnographic fiction films. The untitled film
surfaced like an uncanny or spectral remainder. It was the too-­close
and confrontational body that had been excised from the Johnsons’
film only to return in this awkwardly proximate and anticipatory
position, the unwieldy counterpart to tidy narrative tellings, the un-
necessary extra that fashions a productive counterreading.
To be clear, one does not need an ethnographic orphan to critique
the ideological thrust of ethnographic feature films. Several years
before I began this research, Fatimah Tobing Rony had already dis-
entangled the lines of scopic power and colonial force that intersect
at nearly every site of ethnographic image production, and Catherine
Russell had reclassified the Johnsons’ safari film as a form of exploi-
tation cinema that “incorporates the crudest form of American rac-
ism, which it awkwardly maps onto ‘ethnographic’ footage.”1 What
emerged out of the collision between these two films nevertheless
exceeds a critique of ideology or genre. The anonymous and untitled
bit of footage opens onto the vast margins of the archives. These early
ethnographic documents dislocate those that have dominated our
 Introduction 3

histories of ethnographic cinema and, along with them, the frame-

works that have guided our understanding of the practice. These films
do not simply propose another history that needs to be recovered and
written but instead present us with a different kind of moving image
artifact. They are what one might call, following Hayden White, meta-
historical documents, that is, ones that make the structures of film-­
historical imagination and practice available for thought, critique,
and, potentially, revision.2
Bad Film Histories examines the ways in which early ethnographic
films produce meaning and what these unusual visual artifacts mean
for film history, historiography, and the archive. The project is guided
by a few key questions: What kind of artifact is an early ethnographic
film? What kind of historical claims do these films make? and What
kind of archive(s) do they combine to form? The answers to these
questions tell us something about early ethnographic cinema, but
these questions also aim for film history, a field that eerily echoes
ethnographic discourses of salvage and preservation while simulta-
neously overlooking the visual frenzy born of these discourses in the
ethnographic archives. Ethnographic cinema overflows disciplinary
taxonomies, crosses and combines genres, and constructs a poten-
tially limitless catalog of films that wander and waste time. Put sim-
ply, these films resist our efforts to write and recover film history and,
in so doing, challenge the concept of the archive and the recuperative
historiographies that have shaped film history for more than three
decades. This project does not offer a critique of bad film histories or
errant historians but a theory of bad history and an argument for the
necessity of imprecision. Rather than filling holes, this work tries to
theorize the emptiness.
In this introduction, I first endeavor to define—­and linger on the
difficulty of defining—­what it means for a film to be both “early” and
“ethnographic.” In this first section, I also explain the evaluative term
embedded in the book’s title and just what a “bad” history might
have to offer to the “good.” In the next section, I shift to consider the
key debates, concepts, and methodological commitments that have
shaped the field of film history since the 1970s, paying particular at-
tention to the distinction that film historians make between “empiri-
cal” and “empiricist” practices. This review prepares the way for me
to establish, in the third section, how my own work intervenes in the
 4 Introduction

field. In the fourth and final section, I cycle back to the particulari-
ties of ethnographic cinema and frame these moving images as visual
supplements to the poststructural critique of history.

Naming and Necessity

At the center of this book is the term early ethnographic cinema, a
clumsy and imperfect name for an unwieldy category of moving im-
ages. While the term early was obviously never used by those who
made these films, the term ethnography was also uncommon. Both
terms remain infrequently invoked by contemporary archival insti-
tutions and visual anthropologists. Words like colonial or anthropo-
logical, for example, are more familiar. (I learned this lesson most
acutely in France, where I was gently informed that the combination
of “early” and “ethnographic” moving images simply did not make
sense. The word ethnographique had become synonymous with Jean
Rouch and the postwar visual experimentations that followed in his
wake. Ethnographic cinema, therefore, could not possibly be early.)
As Rony reminds us, the term ethnography derives from the Greek
words ἔθνος, or “ethnos” (i.e., people, nation, class, tribe, race), and
γράφω, or “graphy” (writing). 3 For her, ethnographic cinema pre-
supposes a very particular spectatorial relationship between white,
Western, urban viewers, on the one hand, and nonwhite, non-­Western,
rural subjects, on the other. It is, she argues, a cinema defined and
rigidified by the racist and imperial ideologies of those who made it.
While the films I gather together in this book share the expectation
of a certain kind of viewer and frequently betray the racism, ethno-
centrism, and violence of their ideological underpinnings, I define
early ethnographic cinema differently (and in a way that is well moti-
vated by the films themselves). I understand this cinema as an excur-
sive or digressive practice, that is, as a tactic of representation defined
by departures both physical and conceptual, actual and disciplinary.
The result, as I will argue, is a distinct lack of epistemological cer-
tainty rather than a clear expression of ideological force or a stable
difference between spectators and subjects-­on-­screen.
In my own view, the term ethnography usefully reverberates against
photography and cinematography, those neighboring nineteenth-­and
turn-­of-­t he-­t wentieth-­century appellations that similarly misname
 Introduction 5

the visual or conflate it with a practice of writing (i.e., -­graphy). In re-

taining the term, I want to hold on to the awkward or inappropriate
name, to the tensions between writing and image, or writing as image.
I excavate these particular tensions in my third and fourth chapters;
they are crucial to understanding what ethnographic cinema does and
means, how it intervenes in the natural and social sciences as well as
the practice of historiography, or the writing of film history. The term
ethnography also cuts across disciplinary and discursive boundaries,
across “colonial” and “anthropological,” reminding us that these im-
ages do not belong to any one place or practice but are instead joined
together as the diverse evidence and effects of a decentered, excursive,
and decidedly undisciplined cinema.
I do not therefore suggest that the films I explore here constitute a
comprehensive or exhaustive view of early ethnographic cinema; nor,
I argue, would this be a desirable, or even possible, approach to under-
standing these particular moving image artifacts. In each of the book’s
five chapters, I emphasize the boundaries of my arguments, what re-
mains missing, as I draw on a small and necessarily contingent sample
of ethnographic films and film fragments, from Lumière actualities
and the Albert Kahn photo-­fi lm tours to dozens of American, Dutch,
British, and French colonial and expedition films from the 1910s and
1920s. These films represent a fraction of the early ethnographic
collections of numerous North American and European archives,
including the AMNH, the Human Studies Film Archive, the EYE
Filmmuseum, the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée,
and the British Film Institute. Across these moving images, one finds
radically disjunctive editing patterns, multilanguage intertitles, and
running times that range from a few seconds to many hours.
The idiosyncratic qualities of ethnographic cinema extend to its
preservation. These films inhabit the vast margins of the archives:
like the scrap of cinema that circulates unannounced and uninvited
alongside Simba, they are frequently untitled, unauthored, seemingly
infinite in number, and unrestored even in their digital afterlives.
Early ethnographic films escape our drives and demands for stable
visual evidence. Each chapter therefore tempers the lure of archival
evidence, foregrounding the challenges that these images pose to
both our conception of film-­h istorical artifacts and the methodologi-
cal mythologies of archival encounter.
 6 Introduction

The practice of ethnographic filmmaking emerged at the periph-

ery of anthropology during the late nineteenth century, in the hands
of scientists, entertainers, amateur explorers, and colonial bureau-
crats. These films were often constructed before and beyond the
circuits of narrative film production and distribution, in and for un-
usual and interstitial spaces: the personal archive, the academic de-
partment, the natural history museum, and the colonial government.
Many early ethnographic films were meant to operate as “pure” docu-
ments, as indices of bodies and events with a unique purchase on his-
tory. But early ethnographic cinema mingles the force of actuality and
indexicality with racial fantasies and cultural fictions as well as absent
and empty frames. As cinema turns toward narrative expression in
the 1910s and 1920s, ethnographic filmmaking continues to wander
through space and extend across time. These films are at once con-
densations of sensation and visual fragments lacking good sense. In
this way, the ethnographic image is a precursor to the unproductive
energies of Jean-­François Lyotard’s acinema, wherein the “fortuitous,
dirty, confused, unsteady, unclear, poorly framed, overexposed” coun-
ters the hegemony of “productive/consumable objects.”4 Early ethno-
graphic films drift across the earth’s surface, scavenging for the sites
and signs of difference well into the late 1920s and early 1930s.
In this way, too, the early of early ethnographic cinema deviates
from the most common conceptions of the term in film studies as well
as the familiar film-­h istorical taxonomy of attraction, transition, and
narration. A handful of ethnographic narrative feature films (like the
Johnsons’ ethnofiction adventures) have disproportionately repre-
sented the first decades of ethnographic film production in both film
scholarship and contemporary circulation (e.g., film festivals, DVDs).
These examples obscure the many ethnographic moving images that
never make the transition to narrative coherence. The “early” films I
examine across this book do not neatly map onto the era of early cin-
ema or the visual expressions of nonnarrative attractions. Early eth-
nographic cinema begins at the earliest possible moment—­at the end
of the nineteenth century, in the very first years of film production—­
and continues quite late, well beyond the fledging first decade of mov-
ing images. Still, I insist on the term early here as the easiest way of
distinguishing these films from the reflexive ethnographic experi-
mentations of the postwar period (though there are points of contact
 Introduction 7

there, too) and also as a way of signaling their provenance in the si-
lent era.
My use of the term early is also a productive catachresis, a depar-
ture from normative usage in film studies that draws attention to the
deviation, to the contingencies of our terms and the fact that early
could always mean otherwise given a different set of cinematic prac-
tices. One might also usefully take the term as an example of what
Rick Altman calls “crisis historiography” or the “crisis of identity”
coincident with every new technology; while early ethnographic cin-
ema is not a technology per se, these practices, like the sound tech-
nologies Altman explores, would not have been called “early ethno-
graphic cinema” at the time of their production, nor do we really have
the language in contemporary film studies to adequately name them. 5
This usage also presses against the linear narrative structure and pro-
gressive temporality embedded in film-­h istorical periodization and
its terms. What if the so-­called early never ends or becomes some-
thing else? What if early never gives way to the stasis of right on time
and well developed? Or what if the early of ethnographic cinema, as
I will join others in arguing, more closely resembles the late of other
film practices?
A final word on my own terminology. The evaluative term embed-
ded in the title of the book—­the “bad” of its film histories—­is a nod
to a crucial point of reference for the project: the multivalent mal of
Jacques Derrida’s archive theory and the destructive operations he at-
tributes to every effort to remember. The title is also intended to cap-
ture something of the acinematic deviations I have begun to describe
(via Lyotard) and to which I will frequently return in my encounters
with early ethnographic cinema.
Perhaps most obviously, the title is a provocation. It implies that
there are good artifacts and good film-­h istorical practices (espe-
cially, as will I soon argue, in the study of early and silent-­era cin-
ema), that a dominant regime of film-­h istorical thought exists, and
that this regime might usefully be challenged. I anticipate that, for
some readers, the title only confesses the obvious failures of the book:
measured against the standards of contemporary film-­h istorical
scholarship, what unfolds in the pages that follow is straightforwardly
and un­ironically bad. For others, I hope, the book will contribute
productively to a growing field of comparative film scholarship that
 8 Introduction

endeavors to renew or re-­present questions about film historiography,

the methods underlying those writing practices, and the historicity of
our moving image artifacts (i.e., the properties of film that contribute
to its being historically meaning bearing and the particular relation-
ship that film bears to past time).
Importantly, I do not propose a substitution of bad artifacts or
methods for good ones (i.e., that what one might perceive as bad is,
in fact, good). Nor will I argue that the fragments of ethnographic
cinema are just as good—­just as worthy—­of historical study as, say,
feature-­length American studio films from the silent era (to take just
one example). In other words, I will not make the case that we recu-
perate this body of films from obscurity and fill in yet another gap in
what we know. I will instead argue against the implicit standard of
the good that so often operates in film-­h istorical studies and against
the rigid binaries that this standard introduces. If there is a reversal or
substitution at work here, it is not one that transforms bad into good
but one that subverts the mythology of the good altogether and al-
lows for a plurality of conceptions of film objects and methods, no
one more or less rigorous (or contingent) than the other. In other
words, there is not one kind of bad history but rather a spectrum of
approaches. In the study of ethnographic cinema, this plurality makes
room for the decidedly unaffirmative and rigorously negative, a histo-
riography that does not save or salvage but instead acknowledges the
permanent absences and “powers of the false” that ethnographic film
artifacts make possible.6
This book models what I have come to call a particularist approach
to film historiography. Particularism takes the relationship between
artifacts and methods to be one of mutual dependence and co­
determination. The particularities of any given moving image artifact
could include not just the most common foci of film history—­where,
when, how, and by whom a film artifact was produced; its audio­
visual topoi; its routes of circulation and points of reception; and its
social and industrial lines of influence—­but also the materiality, or
particulate matter, of the artifact itself, its physical condition (in the
present), its routes of circulation through an archive, its restoration or
reformatting, or indeed the absence of identifying marks or paratexts.
Particularism is not necessarily incompatible with the most com-
mon tendencies of film historiography, which I outline and discuss
 Introduction 9

in the next section. It simply does not presuppose these frameworks

or apply them indiscriminately to every moving image artifact or
historical telling. Particularism is responsive to the diversity of our
artifacts and to the contemporary technologies and archival institu-
tions that structure our relationship to them. In Bad Film Histories,
I take the absences, imperfections, and discontinuities of the ethno-
graphic image as crucial concepts and methodological coordinates
rather than obstacles to be overcome or resolved. While the project
responds to the specificities of ethnographic film practice, it also nec-
essarily implies multiple film-­h istorical methods and a broad range of
possible historical epistemologies.
There is, then, a strong rhetorical reason for keeping the evaluative
term bad in play: it helpfully reminds us that the historiographic pro-
cess will be messy, imperfect, and open to revision, especially as our
artifacts change, degrade, and disappear from the archives.
The ethical imperatives of historiographic practice also press against
the title of the book and its play with evaluative distinctions. One
might argue that the kind of bad film history I defend here necessarily
ignores the ethical demands of historical practice, what Paul Ricoeur
succinctly describes as the historian’s “debt to the past, a debt of rec-
ognition to the dead.” 7 In this view, the task of the film historian is
to do justice to history, to the events that constitute film history, to
the objects teetering on the brink of archival annihilation, and, per-
haps even most importantly, to the people who participated in mak-
ing film history. In calling the category of the “good” into question,
I am not advocating that we abandon history for free play, nonsense,
or nothing. The imprecisions and contingencies of a particularist
approach are not incommensurate with our ethical obligations but
essential to meeting them, to making visible and apparent the histo-
ricity of film artifacts and the processes of film historiography. Put
otherwise, we do not (or not always) need to recuperate objects and
identities to do justice to them. After all, historical recuperation can
do its own kind of harm.

The New Nineteenth Century

Beyond the acinematic deviations of early ethnographic cinema are
other motivations for my taking these moving images in particular
 10 Introduction

as a starting point: among them, the resemblance between the dis-

cursive fields of the nineteenth-­century natural and social sciences,
on the one hand, and the post-theory wave of historical studies often
referred to as new film history or new historicism, on the other. If, as
I argue, ethnographic cinema serves a critical function in relationship
to the former, it also, in turn, disrupts our understanding of the latter.
In this section, I sketch the strains of historical thought in film stud-
ies that share this discursive inheritance. I begin with a brief gloss of
Alison Griffiths’s extraordinary history of ethnographic cinema. The
coincidence between methods and matter in this work demonstrates
the deep and often de facto structures of nineteenth-­century epis-
temology that underlie the practice of contemporary film history. I
therefore pivot from this example to the larger field of new film his-
tory and the specters of nineteenth-­century thought that haunt the
formation of this field in the twentieth century.
For all its strengths (and there are many), Griffiths’s history of eth-
nographic cinema is itself indebted to the very regimes of nineteenth-­
century discourse it aims, in part, to analyze. In Wondrous Difference,
Griffiths identifies the problems that ethnographic cinema poses to
the empiricism of turn-­of-­the-­t wentieth-­century disciplinary forma-
tions, including anthropology and history. On the very first pages,
she describes an object always moving beyond her reach, slipping
through her fingers and out of view: “I soon realized that the terrain
I was entering . . . was amorphous and potentially boundless. In my
pursuit of precinematic antecedents . . . and institutional horizons for
ethnographic film, cinema sometimes seems like a vanishing point on
an ever-­receding landscape.”8 And yet, this reading of the ontologi-
cal and artifactual instability of ethnographic cinema—­even as these
qualities impress themselves upon her research—­does not unsettle
the historiography or metahistorical commitments of the project.
Griffiths charts a path “based upon information gleaned from promo-
tional materials, critical reports, and from the surviving print itself,
including the demeanor of the filmed subjects, the degree of appar-
ent staging, and the position of the camera as an index of social re-
lations.”9 Her insistence upon the self-­evidentiary historical value of
original documents and contexts, along with the spectatorial author-
ity she assumes in reading a subject’s demeanor or a camera’s position,
echoes realist strands of nineteenth-­century historiography, which
 Introduction 11

understand the practice of history as a re-­presentation of “what ac-

tually happened” using the raw materials of historical evidence and
the nebulously objective powers of an observer-­h istorian.10 It also re-
stores the empiricist epistemologies—­the view that knowledge can
only be acquired through sensory experience—­that, as she herself
argues, ethnographic cinema undermined at the turn of the twentieth
century.11 A deep irony thus emerges in the text: as Griffiths traces
the challenge that ethnographic cinema posed to turn-­of-­the-­century
science, she neglects the encounter between these films and her own
historical methods. The methodology that produces this history of
ethnographic cinema remains unable to engage the ambivalences of
the ethnographic image, to say nothing of the startling blind spot
that this methodological repetition creates in a sustained critique of
nineteenth-­century thought.
Griffiths’s attention to the conflict between nineteenth-­century
images and institutions illuminates the anachronistic inheritance of
her own historical practice in ways that few other film histories do.
The inheritance itself is nevertheless distributed across the disci-
pline and shared by nearly every contemporary contribution to film-­
historical knowledge. Indeed, Wondrous Difference rigorously adheres
to a set of methodologies developed during the late 1970s and 1980s
in early and silent film studies and standardized in the years that fol-
lowed. This broad field of film scholarship is often referred to as “new
historicism” or “new film history,” though both appellations do not
adequately capture the diverse ensemble of practices that have been
in circulation for more than three decades. Even in the moment of
their inception, these practices aimed at adjusting the field’s theoreti-
cal commitments as much as they were intended to introduce a new
set of historical ones, poised against the undersourced surveys and
celebratory accounts of film directors that had previously passed for
historical scholarship. The “new” of film history here should also not
be confused with the other “new” histories, the linguistic and post-
structural turns that were unfolding elsewhere in historical and liter-
ary studies with seminal contributions by scholars like Hans-­Georg
Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Paul
Ricœur, Michel de Certeau, Hayden White, and Dominick LaCapra.
(I will soon take up the question of just what this other “new” histori-
cal scholarship might have to offer to the practice of film history.) The
 12 Introduction

historical turn in film studies instead draws on a small range of meta-

historical arguments and methodological standards that were, at the
time, already quite old.
New film history has numerous origins (and origin stories) scat-
tered across the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps the most well known among
them is the 1978 International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF)
conference Cinema 1900–­1906, in Brighton, which brought early
film scholars and archivists together to screen nearly six hundred
early films from archives around the world.12 As Richard Abel notes
in the introduction to his Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, the so-­called
Brighton Conference “probably did more [than the 1990s centennial
celebrations] to revive interest [in cinema’s origins]” and “soon led
to long-­term archive efforts to collect, preserve, and restore as much
as possible of what early film material has survived.”13 The Brighton
Conference has become a standard starting point, a tidy tale of how
it all began, for introductions to the field of early and silent film his-
tory.14 It is a mythology of beginnings, compulsively and symptom-
atically repeated. Mythologies aside, the archival impulse to “collect,
preserve, and restore” film intensifies in the post-­Brighton decades.
This era unites archivist and historian in a shared commitment to the
preservation of film artifacts and the intrinsic value of a recuperative
historical project.15
The archives of Screen in the 1970s—­then one of the most influen-
tial and unapologetically theoretical journals in the field—­a lso bring
the contours of new film history into sharp relief, precisely because
the deep theoretical commitments of the journal and the burgeon-
ing methodological ones of film historians were so often at odds.
In their history of film historiography, Annette Kuhn and Jackie
Stacey argue that Douglas Gomery’s essay “Writing the History
of the American Film Industry,” in the spring 1976 issue, hinted at
the discursive shift under way.16 In the essay, Gomery laments that
film historians failed to follow elementary rules of historical schol-
arship: they did not consult primary archival materials, and their
publications included few, if any, footnotes.17 Gomery takes direct
aim at Edward Buscombe, one of the editors of Screen, who had pub-
lished “Notes on Columbia Pictures Corporation 1926–­1941” the
previous year (described by Gomery as disappointingly “note free,”
despite the promise of the title); but the essay also strategically
 Introduction 13

under­cuts Jean-­Louis Comolli and apparatus theory, one of a hand-

ful of theoretical frameworks developed across the pages of Screen.18
If our histories of film technology were wrong, Gomery asked, could
apparatus-­oriented claims about the ideological implications of that
technology still be right? That summer, four members of the edito-
rial board—­Edward Buscombe, Christine Gledhill, Alan Lovell,
and Christopher Williams—­resigned. In their departing statement,
they cited disagreements about the direction of the journal, includ-
ing the publication (in winter 1975) of a two-­volume issue dedicated
to psychoanalysis, another of the journal’s theoretical cornerstones.19
The departing editors argued that Screen had become “unnecessarily
obscure and inaccessible,” a perspective shared by many film histo-
rians. In his account of Screen in the 1970s, Philip Rosen suggests
that the journal’s “profound transformations in film culture and film
studies”—­its radical mix of Althusserian Marxism, textual semiot-
ics, and Lacanian theories of the subject—­begins with Sam Rohdie’s
chief editorship in 1971 and concludes by spring 1979 (“something
had indeed changed”).20
The origins of new film history also include a handful of foun-
dational monographs and collections. Among them were Robert C.
Allen and Douglas Gomery’s Film History: Theory and Practice (1985),
a textbook that redefined the film artifact as a constellation of social,
aesthetic, economic, legal, and technological forces and, in turn, en-
couraged a new generation of film historians to trace the interactions
of these forces across a broad range of nonfilmic primary sources, and
Barry Salt’s Film Style and Technology (1983), a microcosmic approach
to film form that (contra Allen and Gomery) concentrated almost
exclusively on the moving image and generated comparative statisti-
cal analyses of shot lengths and cinematographic techniques.21 While
Salt’s statistical method attracted few disciples, scholars like Stephen
Bottomore, Ben Brewster, André Gaudreault, and Dai Vaughan joined
him, more broadly, in writing histories of early film form, technique,
and narrative expression by attending carefully to the evidence of ar-
chival moving images. In his 1986 Sight and Sound review of key con-
tributions to “The New Film History” (incidentally, one of the earliest
appearances of the phrase in publication22), Thomas Elsaesser identi-
fies a third methodological thread suspended between Steven Neale’s
Cinema and Technology (1985) and Elisabeth Weis and John Belton’s
 14 Introduction

Film Sound (1985).23 In addition to their shared investments in the

history of sound technology, both projects pursued the historical ex-
perience and reception of film by spectators. This orientation opens
onto questions of pleasure and phenomenology as well as the “imagi-
nary space in which [film] places the spectator.”24 In other words,
here, new film history seems to retain a place for theory or, at least,
to remain entangled with theories of the subject. When Elsaesser
published his own anthology of early film-­h istorical scholarship at
the end of the decade, these major tendencies of new film history
(e.g., economic–­industrial, textual–­formal, exhibitionary–­spectatorial)
cut across the tripartite structure of Early Cinema: Space, Frame,
Narrative.25
New film history influenced the field of film-­historical practice for
decades, animating the production of rigorously sourced accounts of
early and silent-­era film industries, images, and spectatorial experi-
ences. However, the promise that the field might allow for theories of
history, an ongoing critique of methods, and robust debates about the
historicity of film artifacts or the spectatorial experience of the film
historian has gone, with few exceptions, largely unfulfilled. The field
swiftly settled on a few methodological commitments, including a
privileging of primary sources and archival research, an empirical ap-
proach to those artifacts and archives, and an objectivist understand-
ing of the film historian.26 Elsaesser offers an indirect explanation
for this conservative posture in his introduction to the field, one he
would return to and reformulate some two decades later in his writ-
ing on early film history and new media.27 He writes, “The cinema is
undergoing its biggest changes for many decades. A new interest in
its beginnings is justified by the very fact that we may be witnessing
the end: movies on the big screen could soon be the exception rather
than the rule.”28 Far from a moment of methodological experimenta-
tion or turns toward anything “new,” then, film history arrives as a
way of protecting film against a range of perceived threats: not only
the monoliths of “Grand Theory” (e.g., Marxism, psychoanalysis, se-
miotics) and archival decay but also the rise of television, video, and,
eventually, digital media.
The many potential death(s) of cinema scattered across the late
twentieth and early twenty-­fi rst centuries sustain a taxidermic histo-
riography, that is, a practice that strives to preserve (embalm, mum-
 Introduction 15

mify) moving images against the ravages of contemporary time. The

obligation to save film, always teetering on the brink of archival or
technological annihilation, recalls yet another discourse of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Film history rehearses the
urgent rhetoric of salvage ethnography, an anthropological mode that
sought to produce written and visual records of ethnographic sub-
jects endangered by colonialism, global travel, and, paradoxically,
the ethnographic encounter itself. Film history exchanges the frag-
ile bodies of the world’s “primitive” peoples for the celluloid stored
in the world’s archives. Like the salvage ethnographer, this paradigm
presupposes something like a pure historical origin and frames film
material as the victim of external forces (e.g., time, neglect, accidents,
mishandling, technological change, new media). From the start, this
salvage historiography forecloses any conception of film as essentially
and necessarily impure, fragmentary, or even immaterial.
Even as the first wave of new film historians explore the impre-
cise and fluid movements of film practice from the fairground to
the music hall, from nonnarrative attractions to the consolidation
of commercial narrative cinema, the instability of film objects and
the assumptions underlying film-­h istorical methodology often go
uninterrogated, when they are not wholly invisible. For example, in
his monumental inventory of the first decade of American cinema,
Charles Musser glosses the “staggering array” of changes that define
this early period only to bring the potential flux that those changes
might pose to film-­historical methods to a standstill. He writes, “This
volume does not dwell on the theoretical and methodological frame-
work. In some respects it remains rather ‘old-­fashioned’ in that it is
very concerned with who did what, where, and when.”29 Musser’s nod
to the inherent anachronism or old-­fashioned quality of his approach
implies that film history (or Musser) trails behind historical studies
elsewhere—­and is perhaps in the process of catching up—­but it also
sidesteps the specific features of early film artifacts and the interpre-
tive work of the film historian. Musser’s concern “with who did what,
where, and when,” along with the central methodological tenets of
new film history, recalls the nineteenth-­century historical practice
of Leopold von Ranke, an advocate of a particular strain of positiv-
ist “historical science.” Ranke rejected historical theory, insisted on
the use of primary sources, and entreated historians simply to narrate
 16 Introduction

the facts wie es eigentlich gewesen (as they really were).30 He was com-
mitted to historical explanation by narration and a correspondence
theory of historical truth: history relays facts about people who
really existed and events that actually took place. 31 Correspondence
theory exists in tandem with an objectivist view of the film historian.
Historical facts exist independently of contemporary human culture
or mind (i.e., the historian). The historian mediates or transcribes,
as objectively or neutrally as possible, facts that have been formed
elsewhere. As Hayden White argues, Ranke’s historical imaginary
presupposes the determinacy of truth and the certitude of his own
position: “To Ranke, the constitution of self-­regulating nation-­states
united in a larger community of self-­regulating power relationships
represented an end to history as men had known it up to that time. In
short, history ended in the present for him.”32 Ranke’s theory of his-
tory was countered by many of his contemporaries in the nineteenth
century, including Johann Gustav Droysen and Friedrich Nietzsche
(“Objectivity and justice have nothing to do with one another”), and
by waves of historians and critics in the decades thereafter. 33
David Bordwell sets aside these “old-­fashioned” concerns for
seemingly ancient ones. In his essay “Historical Poetics of Cinema,”
Bordwell begins with the Aristotelian concept of poiesis, or “active
making.” He notes, “The poetics of any medium studies the finished
work as the result of a process of construction.”34 What, then, is a
historical poetics? Bordwell claims that the adjective historical simply
narrows the field, directs our attention to two sets of historical ques-
tions that a poetics of cinema enables us to answer: “What are the
principles according to which films are constructed and by means of
which they achieve particular effects? How and why have these prin-
ciples arisen and changed in particular empirical circumstances?”35
In other words, Bordwell proposes a poetics of cinema as historiogra-
phy rather than a historical poetics, whereby we might be encouraged
to consider history itself as the result of a process of construction,
making, or fabrication, as a text shaped by discursive principles and
subject to change. Bordwell further defines his poetics as an empiri-
cal system that “places great emphasis on the facts” and establishes
a range of normative patterns and “constructional options.”36 In an-
other echo of Rankean historiography, then, Bordwell insists that
his poetics approximates a scientific methodology and, in so doing,
 Introduction 17

resists the imprecise doctrines of film theory. 37 Bordwell argues that

this system, like those that structure inquiry in the sciences, draws
no conclusions in advance and remains open to adjustments in light
of the available evidence. Crucially, Bordwell rejects the notion that
historical poetics involves any interpretation on the part of the his-
torian: “[A historical poetics] does not constitute a distinct critical
school; it has no privileged semantic field, no core of procedures for
identifying or interpreting textual features, no map of the flow of
meaning, and no unique rhetorical tactics. It does not seek to produce
interpretations.”38
Miriam Hansen deftly critiques the historical and methodologi-
cal concealments at work in the appeal to a concept of “classical”
cinema: “the temporal dynamics of the term ‘classical’ as applied to
the cinema is retrospective; the emphasis is on tradition and conti-
nuity rather than newness as difference, disruption, and change.”39
Bordwell’s appeal to Aristotelian poetics—­a system that assigns the
value of the beautiful to those objects exhibiting order, balance, and
unity—­betrays a similarly retrospective aesthetic judgment.40 It nar-
rowly determines the scope of Bordwell’s historical scholarship and
suggests a line of continuity from Aristotelian poiesis to moving im-
ages. His poetics cannot accommodate the nonnormative or the ir-
regular, the unprincipled or dynamically unstable objects of history.
It cannot engage early ethnographic films or any of the other “minor”
or marginal works that proliferate in the silent era.
The preferences of the “classical” camp notwithstanding, early
and silent film historians are drawn toward the tattered margins of
the archives and the irregular objects of history. The era encompasses
a diverse assemblage of visual forms, technological developments,
industrial and nonindustrial practices, and modes of exhibition. It
is also defined by archival absences, partial documents, and deterio-
rating film stock. Not surprisingly, then, one finds a tendency in this
historical scholarship to import methodological structure as a way of
bringing the material and historical excesses of cinema under con-
trol and concealing its yawning archival gaps. Charlie Keil’s history
of the transitional period, for example, takes the nineteenth-­century
art historian Heinrich Wölfflin as a guide in making sense of cinema.
Wölfflin, Keil reminds us, understood that while historical mate-
rial is never finished, “we must make up our minds to establish the
 18 Introduction

distinctions at a fruitful point, and there to let [distinct periods, his-

torical units of style] speak as contrasts, if we are not to let the whole
development slip through our fingers.”41
Barbara Klinger banishes the threat of incomprehension with a
recuperative historiographic model.42 Drawing on Fernand Braudel
and the Annales school of history, she advocates for histoire totale,
a comprehensive or totalizing approach to film history. Klinger’s
method presupposes that history is a totality and that the task of the
film historian is to pursue that totality. She writes, “Exhaustiveness,
while impossible to achieve, is necessary as an ideal goal for historical
research.”43 The Annales school comes into contact with several eth-
nographic projects in the early twentieth century, including Albert
Kahn’s elaborate Archives de la Planète, which I examine in my first
chapter.44 In this way, Klinger’s total history uncannily reiterates the
aims of ethnographic salvage—­“ impossible, but still”—­and enjoins
film historians to aim impossibly, feverishly, at a reconstitution of the
missing whole.
As I have begun to outline here, specters of other disciplines and
discourses are scattered across film history. And yet, many among
the first wave of new film historians take great pains to distance their
practice from one anachronistic paradigm in particular: empiricism.
Indeed, many film historians argue that their early and ongoing con-
flicts with film theorists owe to a category mistake: in this view, film
theorists uncharitably and derogatorily label historical scholarship as
“empiricist” when, in fact, the historical work simply uses “empirical”
evidence to support its claims. In brief, empiricism is a broad family
of views within epistemology, developed by philosophers like John
Locke and David Hume in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
and later adapted by positivists in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries; in general terms, the empiricist view holds that all knowl-
edge about the world is acquired a posteriori, through sense experi-
ence.45 In other words, empiricism is a theory about how subjects
come to have knowledge about the world. The most common counter-
point to empiricism is “rationalism.” The rationalist view allows for
innate and intuitive knowledge, in short, for an understanding of the
world that does not—­or does not always—­derive from sense experi-
ence.46 Nowhere in the history of philosophy does a separate “empiri-
cal” view develop.
 Introduction 19

Allen and Gomery first insist on the distinction between empiricist

and empirical in Film History; their work is “empirically grounded”
without being empiricist.47 Allen returns to the “problem of the em-
pirical” in 2006, defining empirical evidence as those materials “out-
side of the film ‘itself ’” and empirical approaches as inclusive of “re-
search on exhibition, spectatorship, the audience, reception, and/or
social experience of moviegoing.”48 While Bordwell, Gomery, and
Allen agree on the importance of maintaining a clear separation
between the two terms, they seem unable to settle on what the one
means without the other. For Gomery and Allen, empirical describes
evidence outside of the film itself; for Bordwell, empirical describes
evidence available outside of the mind of the inquirer:
Many adherents of Grand Theory have confused empirical
inquiry with empiricist inquiry. Empiricism names a philosophi-
cal tradition that places primary emphasis upon experience
in explaining how humans acquire knowledge. Historically,
empiricism has often embraced views that the mind is a passive
receptacle and that concepts may be reduced to aggregates of
sense impressions. No one in film studies espouses an empiri-
cist position. An empirical inquiry is one which seeks answers
to its questions from evidence available outside the mind of the
inquirer. Film history is empirical in just this way.49
That an “empirical inquiry” distinguishes itself by searching for an-
swers in evidence acquired outside of the historians’ minds—­say,
through films—­is either false or only trivially true. Bordwell him-
self seems to admit the latter. After all, what film historian does not
appeal to this kind of evidence? However, his definition suggests a
more radical “outside,” one in which evidence is sought and found and
speaks for itself, uncorrupted by the film historian.
Noël Carroll refuses to define his terms altogether. He responds
to “ridicule by film theorists” by ridiculing them right back: “There is
no necessary connection between the philosophical doctrine of em-
piricism and an empirical research program. . . . It is just a howler to
respond to requests for empirical evidence on the grounds that since
the philosophy of empiricism has been discredited, evidence is tacky
or out of style.”50 Kuhn and Stacey repeat the distinction between
empiricist and empirical in their introduction to the field: “During
 20 Introduction

the years of ascendance of ‘high theory’ . . . work in film history was

always at risk of being labeled ‘empiricist’ or ‘historicist.’ But the new
film history, while always advocating empirical research, was never
empiricist: this was indeed a central tenet of its revisionism.”51
It is hard not to hear Lyotard in Bordwell’s claim—­and grammati-
cal tangle—­that a historical inquiry “seeks” evidence outside or be-
yond the mind: Can history go on without a mind? Or a body? Does
the historian not contribute anything to history?52 And, in the face of
Carroll’s howling, it is hard not to find some amusement in his (and
others’) italics: “empirical,” not “empiricism.” Technical terms are ar-
bitrary, and so we can define them however we want or, as an intellec-
tual community, agree on a shared usage. What separates these two
terms, however, is not apparent in some subtle difference between
-­cal and -­ism. Both suffixes are etymologically derived from Greek,
and the differences between them are slight. The suffixes establish an
association with another term: the one is adjectival, the other nomi-
nal. And both terms—­empirical and empiricism—­remain joined to
the very same Greek root, ἐμπειρία, roughly “experienced” or “experi-
ence.” What defines empirical against empiricist, then, is not contained
or explained by its suffix.
I agree that empirical can be meaningfully distinguished from em-
piricist and that empirical film scholars are not empiricist in the sense
they describe. Indeed, a careful analysis of their claims shows that
their view is not only distinct from empiricism; it is also opposed to
the spirit of empiricism. Still, there is occasionally something of a dia-
lectical sleight of hand at work in their responses. Sometimes they use
the term empirical to mean something quite weak, such as evidence-­
based arguments (i.e., the kind of practice in which any rigorous and
legitimate form of scholarship should engage). But, of course, no one
in this debate denies that historical argumentation ought to be evi-
dence based, or empirical in the sense of dealing with the kinds of ar-
tifacts we find in archives. The debate is rather about how we interpret
that evidence and the particular approach we take in engaging with
what we find in the archive (and what we do not find). At other times,
empirical film scholars are more transparent about precisely what is
at stake. They reveal that they are using the term empirical to make a
very strong, metaphysical claim about the objective existence of the
artifacts they study. In this view, film-­h istorical evidence (its nature
 Introduction 21

and status as evidence) exists independently of the intervention of the

historian. In other words, they are not using the term empirical to pick
out an epistemic property of evidence; it is not a claim about how we
acquire knowledge or what would justify our film-­h istorical beliefs.
Rather, it is a metaphysical claim about the nature of film-­h istorical
evidence. I strongly disagree on this point. But this point of disagree-
ment notwithstanding, the empirical view introduces far more ques-
tions than it answers (e.g., What kinds of things are objective film
objects? If these objects are truly independent of human experience,
couldn’t we be totally mistaken in our historical beliefs about film?
Why should we think that human experience and sensory engage-
ment with archival objects are reliable ways of coming to know things
about these objects?).
From here, we are in the position to understand how the empiri-
cal view is at odds with empiricism. Empiricism has historically been
motivated by a worry about skepticism, a worry that we could be sys-
tematically mistaken in an entire range of beliefs about the world.
And the empiricist response has generally been epistemic modesty,
one that restricts knowledge claims to things we can experience with
our senses. In their more radical moments, however, this response has
also involved a metaphysical turn, one that pivots from the objectivity
of external objects (i.e., things to which we could in principle have no
epistemic access) to subjectivism or “idealism.” The latter view holds
that the existence of objects depends on the condition of their observ-
able verification. This kind of position is radically at odds with the
form of objectivism being proposed by new film history.
There are important ways in which my own view offers a critical re-
sponse to the more extreme modes of empiricism. Others, especially
in the field of philosophy of science, criticize this kind of empiricism
for its inability to explain or adequately account for unobservable en-
tities that are nevertheless real (e.g., electrons and black holes). 53 This
is also a relevant point for film history. One would expect an empiri-
cist film historian to either neglect or struggle to explain the aspects
of film history that are not readily observable (e.g., the occurrences
of certain absences in the archival record). As I outline in the section
that follows, my work joins that of numerous feminist film scholars
in redressing this limitation. Despite this criticism of empiricism, I
also, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, want to make the case for
 22 Introduction

retaining something of the empiricist view, namely, its openness to

theorizing our sensory or spectatorial encounter with the world.
In the claims that the term empirical describes evidence outside
the experience of seeing film (Allen) and outside the mind of the in-
quirer (Bordwell), one notes an effort to subtract the historian from
the processes of acquiring historical knowledge. Carroll’s claim that
“empirical” just is “evidence” without the historical baggage of em-
piricism, as I have noted, implies a similarly controversial view about
the nature of evidence, one that he never adequately defends. The
“empirical” view posits that evidence exists “out there” in the world,
independent of the contemporary historian, uninfluenced by present
time. Whereas empiricism holds that knowledge of the world can only
be acquired through our senses, empirical film history posits that his-
tory exists without us, outside of us, beyond the senses. Crucially, the
empirical view is a theory about how we ought to understand evidence
and, in what it excludes, the film historian. It is a theory that presup-
poses something like “pure” artifactual forms (whatever those might
be in the field of film studies) and an objectivist conception of the film
historian. Understood in this way, the empirical view does indeed re-
ject “old-­fashioned” philosophical empiricism. It is worth noting here,
too, that empirical film history (unlike empiricism) does not commit
its practitioners to excluding unobservable evidence from analysis.
Hence, to the extent that they do exclude these kinds of evidence—­
and they almost always do so—­they employ a methodological pattern
entirely unjustified by their own theoretical commitments.
What nevertheless remains deeply confusing about “empirical”
film history—­about the term itself—­is the etymological trace of “ex-
perience” that stubbornly persists despite every italicized effort to
deny its metahistorical or theoretical value. The ostensible occlusion
of the film historian is also deeply confusing given the commitment of
the field to understanding the historical experience, or reception, of
film by its spectators. If the “experience” of empirical evidence be-
longs to the artifacts themselves, this view brings new film historians
into an unlikely alliance with contemporary object-­oriented ontolo-
gists: perhaps evidence has a life of its own. 54 More likely, as I have
suggested, the exclusion of the historian presupposes an objective or
neutral point of historical reception. In other words, the empirical
 Introduction 23

view simply reconsolidates spectatorial power where it has been for

centuries: in the eyes of the most privileged (white, male) beholder.
It is difficult to reconcile the empirical film-­h istorical view with
the kind of evidence that surfaces in the study of early ethnographic
cinema. To return to the film with which I began this introduction,
the orphan images that collide with Simba do not exist as ideal or
independent forms. They are not suspended outside or beyond the
archive that they inhabit, their wildly contingent routes of contem-
porary circulation and reception, or even the accident of their recep-
tion (by me). They are produced in the present as historical evidence
through this chain of institutional and individual impressions. Like
so much contemporary moving image evidence, these ethnographic
images index other copies in the archive, in other formats, unattached
to the Johnsons’ feature-­length film. But these other formations do
not guarantee or guide us toward another or “better” film, toward a
historical origin in which these visual fragments are identified, made
whole, or made to mean more coherently. They are instead evidence
of a practice bound by visual and narrative discontinuities and evi-
dence of their contingent preservation and reformation in the archive.

Who’s Bad?
Bad Film Histories joins a range of critical responses to the “old-­
fashioned” or conservative (i.e., Rankean, empirical, etc.) tenden-
cies of new film history. Indeed, if there is a recuperative operation
at work in this book, it is oriented toward the seeds of counterobjec-
tivist thinking that proliferate in the 1970s (both within and beyond
film history) and intermittently bloom in more proximate moments.
These seeds can be found in Noël Burch’s foundational essay on the
ambivalences of early film objects and authors (a point compellingly
revisited more recently by Jane Gaines); in the various adaptations
of Foucault’s conception of the dispositif (a term that has also been
revived in recent theories of archival reception); and, more broadly,
in studies of the historical experience of cinema and the imaginative
dimensions of spectatorship. 55
In his essay “On History and the Cinema,” for example, Geoffrey
Nowell-­Smith explicitly recasts the task of the film historian against
 24 Introduction

the demands of recuperation and salvage, against the impossible ef-

fort to recapture the names and events of film history and re-­present
them wie es eigentlich gewesen, “as they really were.”56 Nowell-­Smith
follows Elsaesser (as well as Gramsci and Nietszche) in understand-
ing history as a form of knowledge produced in and of the present
and, in the case of moving images, therefore deeply intertwined
with contemporary technologies and multilayered sites of reception.
Writing at the end of the 1980s, Nowell-­Smith takes up the transfor-
mations in cinematic historicity that television makes possible as it
combines the moving images of popular culture with “a million-­and-­
one images referring to or evoking layers of pastness.”57 In his view,
television remixes film history with the radically new and invites
viewers to engage in a form of comparative decoding. What film his-
tory requires, then, is not only reference points and empirical data—­
what he describes as “good histories of cinema”—­but also “theories of
fantasy” and “a history of subjectivities,” including the subjectivities
of then-­contemporary television viewers. 58 Nowell-­Smith’s work, like
many historiographic approaches to spectatorship and reception, also
suggests ways in which historians might pivot to consider the meta-
historical relationship and sites of reception that conjoin contempo-
rary historians, film artifacts, and archives.
Tom Gunning’s work similarly locates the limits of empirical evi-
dence and the need for theory in the study of film-­h istorical specta-
torship. His canonical concept of nonnarrative “attractions” names a
mode of moving image enunciation, a speculative claim about the em-
bodied experience of film’s first decades, and a crucial metahistorical
tool. For Gunning, attractions are neither “early” nor “primitive” but a
mixture of discursive influences and impulses, including, remarkably,
his own contingent reception of these artifacts in the present. Indeed,
less frequently noted in glosses of the concept is Gunning’s descrip-
tion of its “pseudomorphic” relationship to other visual practices like
the postwar avant-­garde. The “pseudomorph” implies an unsettling
resemblance between two phenomena: “The relationship of a pseudo-
morphic to an authentic paradigm is that of a counterfeit to an origi-
nal: a surface deceit that conceals a number of internal differences.”59
Gunning never clarifies which is the authentic paradigm and which is
the pseudomorph in this relationship. The simulacral energy between
original and repetition, which I will call upon in my own analysis of
 Introduction 25

early ethnographic cinema, moves incessantly, erratically, between

attractions and the avant-­garde. They are conjoined by resemblance
in nonhierarchical and nonchronological ways. Crucially, Gunning
notes that he saw early cinema anew only after he had encountered
the work of Ernie Gehr, Hollis Frampton, and Ken Jacobs. The com-
plex temporality and anachronistic qualities of “attractions” are often
overlooked; the concept of “attractions” has instead become a tool
for neat historical teleologies, a shorthand for the images that arrive
“before” narrative cinema. These images nevertheless represent the
“after” of Gunning’s encounter with the avant-­garde and, in turn, the
reflexive production of film history in the present. 60
Other countercurrents in film historiography draw attention to
the manifold identities and communities that either fail to mate-
rialize in the archive or get occluded in the search for “major” film
practices (e.g., their names, dates, events). Miriam Hansen’s study
of early film spectatorship turns to the Frankfurt school at the limits
of the archive and the practice of social history. Hansen reads an ab-
sence in the archive—­the absence of working-­class testimonies and
traces—­as evidence that early cinema functioned as a proletarian
public sphere.61 She further refashions our understanding of the cine-
matic public sphere to include the interaction between the moving
image and the minds of spectators. As historian Robert Sklar points
out, Hansen’s research crucially underscores that, “whatever cinema
was as this type of social experience, it was also a mass communica-
tions medium with esthetic, ideological and psychological dimen-
sions. Its social contestation ultimately arose in relation to film spec-
tatorship as a mental experience.”62 Hansen’s attention to the mental
experience of particular cinemagoing subjects aims at precisely the
kind of history—­and historical evidence—­that empirical approaches
tend to miss or disregard. Her work betrays a deep ambivalence about
the archive, at once indebted to its holdings and skeptical of what or
how those holdings might mean. This view resonates with numerous
poststructural theorists of the archive. Perhaps most closely related
is Gayatri Spivak’s search for the rani of Sirmur, an unnamed widow
of the raja of that region, who comes into and out of view in the impe-
rial archives.63 The rani is a specter and symptom of patriarchy and
colonialism, constructed through absences and negation, there in the
archives but never really there at all. Hansen’s view also anticipates
 26 Introduction

Catherine Russell’s fabulative flâneuse, the female counterpart to

Baudelaire’s figure of modernist male subjectivity and a placeholder
for the seeing subjects that film history and its archives regularly
exclude.64
The work of Hansen and Russell (and surely, were it not for dis-
ciplinary boundaries, Spivak) equally belongs beneath the umbrella
of feminist film historiography, out of which the most radical and
sustained critiques of film-­historical methods, in general, and empiri-
cal approaches, in particular, developed in the decades following the
historical turn. The field of feminist film scholarship has generated
some of the most urgent questions for film-­h istorical thought. While
I cannot do justice to this vast field of scholarship—­which includes
foundational contributions from Giuliana Bruno, Mary Ann Doane,
Anne Friedberg, Jane Gaines, Annette Kuhn, Judith Mayne, Jackie
Stacey, Shelley Stamp, Angela Dalle Vacche, and Patricia White, as
well as recent work by Jennifer Bean, Amelie Hastie, Kara Keeling,
Jacqueline Stewart, and Yiman Wang (among others—­the list goes
on)—­I would like to underscore that feminist historiography not only
acknowledges the lack of empirical documentation for certain kinds
of marginalized subjects but also insists on retaining, against the em-
pirical historians’ distaste for “Grand Theory,” the necessity of theo-
rizing the subject, of asking after the difference that gender makes
both at the site of cinematic reception and in the production of film
history.65 As Patrice Petro argues in Aftershocks of the New, this ori-
entation of feminist historiography deepens the rift in film-­historical
studies, at once gendering the divide between different kinds of his-
torical labor and confirming, crucially, that the split is both method-
ological and deeply political:
The repeated call for greater rigor in film studies, an argument
typically cast in terms of a need for archival research and hard
empirical study, has had the additional effect of implying that
feminists working in film theory have had relatively little to
say about questions of film history. As a result, it would appear
from the writings of some film scholars that a certain division
of labor has come to characterize film studies as a discipline
in which “historians” pursue the realm of the empirical, the
quantifiable, the concretely known (the realm of history
 Introduction 27

proper) and “feminists” explore the more intangible realm of

theoretical speculation (the realm of interpretation).66
In other words, feminists have been doing “bad” history (and “good”
theory) for a long time. For her part, Petro rejects the conception of
history as a series of shocks or significant events, objectively told; she
instead proposes “boredom,” a gendered phenomenological experi-
ence that annihilates the familiar rhythms of historical time.67
While I am indebted to these seminal historiographic models and
their dismantling of the empirical project, this book focuses on a dif-
ferent site of reception: the archive of early ethnographic cinema. This
shift (from cinema to archive, historical spectator to film historian) is
motivated by a particularist commitment to understanding, on the
one hand, the formation of film artifacts in the present and, on the
other, the particularities of ethnographic cinema: many of the ex-
amples I explore in the chapters that follow either were not screened
at the time of their production or left no records of their circulation.
In addition to examining the undertheorized encounter between film
historian and artifact, this project analyzes the historicity of several
crucial visual topoi and considers the vectors of power that meet in
the ethnographic image. These vectors include the manifold oppres-
sions of patriarchy and imperialism, but they also exceed these ex-
pressions of cultural force and require a comparative attention to the
interactions of language and image, photography and cinema, human
and nonhuman agency, analog and digital indices, and geographic
stasis and excursion. As I will argue, the historicity of ethnographic
cinema owes to its own particular combination of temporal, spatial,
cultural, material, and archival forces—­a combination that it does
not share with other film practices and, moreover, a combination that
is not evenly distributed across the category of early ethnography.
In this way, I endeavor to heed Alison Butler’s call that film histo-
rians “contend with the differences within cinema, rather than repro-
ducing [cinema] as one or another homogenous version of the desired
object.”68 Butler’s is an indirect appeal for methodological diversity
that, as I have suggested, is inseparable from historiographic particu-
larism. Contending with the differences between our artifacts, ensur-
ing that we do not smooth over essential differences in the process
of understanding them, requires that we expand our methods and
 28 Introduction

broaden the spectrum of how we can know these objects, and indeed
what we want to know of them. It also demands that we “recall our at-
tention to the fact that it is artificial to separate theory from history.”69
Simply put: there is no such thing as a history without a theory; there
is history that obscures its theoretical and metahistorical commit-
ments, reproducing the same through repetition (more than rigor),
and there is history that confesses these commitments, attends to
the diversity of its artifacts, and invites a transparent comparison of
methods.
My own intervention in these debates arrives decades after the
most vigorous exchanges in the field, when history and theory seem
to have settled into separate epistemological territories and film his-
toriography has narrowed, constricted into a practice of preserving
the dead. I am guided here by Nietzsche’s own untimely response to
nineteenth-­century scientists of history (like Ranke) and his concep-
tion of historical practice as vital, ongoing, and bound to the living.
Nietzsche writes, “History become pure, sovereign science would be
for mankind a sort of conclusion of life and a settling of accounts with
it. The study of history is something salutary and fruitful for the fu-
ture only as the attendant of a mighty new current of life.” 70 Put in
slightly more measured and discipline-­specific terms, the question of
film history and historical practice requires an open and ongoing in-
terrogation of its relationship to the present, that is, an understanding
of history as a practice in and of the present, especially as our artifacts
continue to transform (decay, degrade) in contemporary archives and
find new routes of circulation and spectatorship, as every artifact of
early and silent-­era cinema straddles a division between what once
was and what is happening right now.
I am not alone in this view of film historiography. In her recent de-
fense of a renewed philosophy of film history, Jane Gaines expresses
puzzlement at the historical turn of events, at what happened—
or failed to happen—­in film-­h istorical studies after the 1970s.71
She recalls Vivian Sobchack’s claim that “the once arcane lesson of
[Hayden] White’s Metahistory—­that historiography is about arrang-
ing and telling stories, not about delivering objective truth—­is, by
now, . . . common knowledge.”72 One might quibble with Sobchack’s
gloss of White, but Gaines is more concerned about the claim that
White’s views are “common knowledge” among film historians. For
 Introduction 29

Gaines, the field of film studies has gone quiet on questions of his-
tory, on the turns that took place in historical studies, and what film
studies might have retained or refashioned from them. One symptom
might just be that Sobchack’s reference to White’s work arrives in
1996, more than two decades after the publication of Metahistory, a
structural analysis of nineteenth-­century historical writing and the
historical imaginaries this writing constitutes. If, as she suggests,
White’s lessons were already known to film historians, surely the
field would have a range of more recent metahistorical references all
its own. Gaines writes, “My skepticism should not imply that, in tak-
ing the ‘historical turn,’ we took the wrong turn, but rather that we
didn’t ask enough questions about where we were going.” 73 Among
these questions, one might consider, What are the metahistorical
taxonomies of twentieth-­century film writing? What are its rhetori-
cal or structural tics? What are the imaginaries that extend across the
first century of film-­h istorical practice? What is film historiography
now compared to when it was new? and, perhaps most fundamentally,
What is the difference between film artifacts and other historical
documents?
Archivist-­h istorian Paolo Cherchi Usai takes one of the few radi-
cal metaphysical views of film artifacts and archival encounters. In
turn, his work has generated a set of important historiographic provo-
cations. In The Death of Cinema, he dispels the myth of the “model
image,” or a film artifact untainted by accidents, failures, loss, decay;
he reminds us that “no such thing as film history would be needed
or possible” without the degradation of the image.74 And in his hand-
book for film archivists in training, Silent Film: An Introduction, Usai
argues that every original film is fractured into multiple copies that
have been circulated and seen and come to rest (or deteriorate) in an
archive. He uses the term internal history to describe the history of
a particular celluloid copy, which includes “the history of the places
where it was shown and kept,” the history of its preservation, and “the
history of the changes that have taken place within the object.” 75 In
other words, Usai’s concept of history, like my own, attempts to en-
gage the specific demands of film as an archival object; it threads to-
gether the idiosyncrasies of celluloid, the erratic pathways of archival
circulation, and the interventions of film preservation.
For all that distinguishes his conception of film artifacts from
 30 Introduction

those that circulate in early and silent cinema studies, however, Usai
ultimately recuperates the moving image and the practice of history
beneath a set of incompatible but familiar historical signs: the self-­
evident and the sacred. He argues, “Whatever archive we have de-
cided to visit or conceptual tool we have adopted, the one thing which
should never be questioned is that films are given a chance to speak
for themselves.” 76 And yet, just a few paragraphs later, he describes
film as an enigmatic and incommunicative form; only the most faith-
ful visionaries can understand it: “Herein lies the challenge of study-
ing silent cinema: both the greatest discipline and a visionary mind
are needed in order to bring back to life something which is relatively
close to us in time. It is closer than prehistoric art or the music of
ancient Egypt, but it can be no less mysterious and elusive.” 77 Usai’s
methodology ultimately echoes nineteenth-­century travel writing—­
its heroic explorers replaced here by the intrepid historian—­more
than twentieth-­or twenty-­fi rst-­century historical thought.
In making the film artifact visible and conceptual, Usai neverthe-
less spurs a set of historiographic questions that cannot be solved by
the autonomous voices of film or the visionary mind of the historian-­
seer. If we understand that a film is composed of multiple copies, each
of which is in a state of continual becoming (decayed or restored,
fragmented or whole), how, then, do we ever come to know film, and
what kind of knowledge do we have when we do (or when we do not)?
And if we are separated from film artifacts and audiences, what is the
imaginative or dialogical work that takes place across the distance?
What new historiographic modes (ambiguous, fabulative, specula-
tive) do these artifacts and our separation from them demand? These
are pressing questions in the study of early and silent-­era film his-
toriography and the historicity of ethnographic cinema, where the
physical, fragile, and fragmentary qualities of film impress themselves
upon the surface of every image, demanding to be read.
As Gaines reminds us, however, these questions rarely penetrate
contemporary film-­h istorical studies. In 2004, Cinema Journal gath-
ered a series of essays on the state of the field from a diverse range of
film historians. Taken together, the contributions reconfirm the sta-
bility and hermeticism of contemporary film history, even as they call
for intertextuality and comparative methodologies. The essays hum in
a kind of collective agreement about best practices and the small chal-
 Introduction 31

lenges facing the field. They portray a discipline without any difficult
questions to answer and no significant crises to theorize, analyze, or
debate. Instead, there seems only more and more history to write and
only incremental adjustments to be made in how one goes about this
process of limitless historical production.78 Only Gaines and Robert
Sklar sketch possible lines of flight out of a field that cannot seem to
engage the contingency of its own becoming nor think the dialogism
of its historical methodologies. Gaines proposes a feminist histori-
ography that would not only recuperate the histories of women but
also challenge the linear narratives that dominate film history and
conceal their absence.79 Sklar makes a stronger claim about the his-
tory of the field. After attending a conference with film historians in
the 1980s, he noted that these newcomers “had not yet fully recog-
nized that the practice of historiography is fundamentally dialogi-
cal.”80 Sklar thought that film history, like any other historical field,
would eventually reflect on its own methodologies and encounter a
series of metahistorical crises. He predicted that “in several decades’
time emerging film historians would ask new questions about the past
and debate new perspectives that were likely to be substantially dif-
ferent from those that scholars of the 1980s had valorized. Film his-
toriography almost certainly would have moved on to territories as
yet uncharted.”81 Those crises and questions never came. While film
history has expanded to include the previously excluded (women,
racial and ethnic minorities, queer communities), the discipline has
never stopped celebrating its first revolution, and the territory of the
discipline has never been deterritorialized (and re-­formed). He con-
cludes, “What remains lacking is a discourse on metahistoriographic
perspectives that might pull together multiple strands and reorient
the field. . . . This is not the time for whigish self-­satisfaction about
film historiography. It is the nature of the subject that there will never
be such a time.”82
This book takes up the task that Sklar (and Gaines) set for film
historians, reorienting the field around a minor film practice and
a set of metahistorical concerns. I counter the discipline’s empiri-
cal model of film history not by ignoring facts or sacrificing analytic
rigor but by examining the multivalent forms of historical expression
embedded in the early ethnographic image. My concern with the his-
toricity of ethnographic cinema overlaps with Philip Rosen’s Change
 32 Introduction

Mummified. 83 The scope of Rosen’s project is, however, much wider

than that of my own. Whereas I focus on the relationship between
early ethnography and film historiography, Rosen examines the con-
tact between cinema (writ large) and modern historical practice and
thought (in general). For Rosen, a special relationship binds the prac-
tices of making film and writing history together. In the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, he writes,
historical discourse, based on rigorous documentation, was an
increasingly familiar as well as prestigious form of knowledge,
while indexical media of photography, cinema, and (later)
video became ubiquitous markers of modernity. Automatically
produced indexical images and historiography: these were two
regimes of the indexical trace, two masteries of time and past-
ness, two experiences of knowledge, two kinds of spectacle.84
In Rosen’s view, cinema and modern historiography belong to the
same discursive regime, one obsessed with the preservation of past
time and the authority of the indexical trace. Both engage in pro-
cesses that systematize and rationalize the disordered rhythms of
modern time. However, Rosen’s argument frames cinema not only as
a form of mechanical reproduction that represents time and history
but also as a mass medium, enmeshed in the institutions of capital-
ism and the ideologies of late modernity. In other words, cinema does
not simply show us history; it participates in the very systems that
determine how one thinks and writes about history in the twentieth
century. For Rosen, “the fact that mainstream film was and is con-
ceived as the production of a leisure-­time activity aligns commercial
cinema with the socioeconomic rationalization of time on many lev-
els. These include production and exhibition, filmmaking standards
and spectatorship.”85
My research concentrates on a form of film practice that neither
produces the visual and narrative forms of rationalized time nor is pri-
marily produced by the rationalizing systems of capitalism and com-
mercial cinema. Early ethnographic film deviates from mainstream
aesthetic and narrative standards as well as the concomitant modes
of production, distribution, and spectatorship. In this movement to
the margins, Bad Film Histories sketches several sites of opposition
between the historicity of film objects and the historiographic de-
 Introduction 33

mands of film scholarship. However, if Rosen’s account of the discur-

sive intersection between mainstream cinema and general theories of
history is correct—­and there is ample evidence to suggest that it is—­
then the implications of my own claims are potentially more expan-
sive. The ethnographic model of cinematic historicity stands in con-
tradistinction not only to Rosen’s broad category (i.e., mainstream
cinema) but also to the discursive field of nineteenth-­and twentieth-­
century historiography. Here the symbiotic interactions between the
moving image and historiography come undone. Ethnographic cin-
ema disorders time, disrupts the index, negotiates multiple subject
positions, and makes visible the gaping distance between the artifac-
tual past and the living present. In short, its relationship to historical
methods and thought is a critical one. This revelation is all the more
startling when one considers the disciplinary proximity between his-
tory and anthropology. Ethnographic cinema was meant to serve an
evidentiary end, much more so than, say, commercial narrative cin-
ema. And yet, it manages to circumvent these ends over and again.
This book shares terrain with several foundational studies of
ethnographic cinema, including Catherine Russell’s Experimental
Ethnography. Russell also draws ethnography and film history into
close methodological proximity, and we agree in understanding eth-
nography as a marginal and “inherently contradictory mode of film
practice”; however, Russell ultimately defines ethnography quite
broadly—­as “the discourse of culture in representation”—­and trains
her attention elsewhere: on the explicit interpenetration of ethnog-
raphy and the avant-­garde, beginning in the 1920s and 1930s and re-
emerging in the reflexive ethnographic practices dispersed through-
out the latter half of the twentieth century. 86 Russell also turns to
Benjamin’s historical materialism—­a view that brushes nineteenth-­
century historical models “against the grain” and offers, instead, an
image of history that is fragmentary, dialectical, and built upon the
wreckage of the early twentieth century—­as a framework for reading
the expressions of the ethnographic avant-­garde.87 My own scholar-
ship engages the margins of the already marginal practice of ethnog-
raphy and the experimentations that escape the interventions of the
avant-­garde. Moreover, as I argue throughout the book, ethnography
is not defined by what representation includes or contains (i.e., dis-
courses or images of culture) but by what it fails to contain, what it
 34 Introduction

lacks, and by the processes of supplementarity and excursion that

endeavor to conceal these absences. And while my own thinking on
history is no doubt influenced by Benjamin, by his conception of the
dialectical image, whereby the past “flashes up” in the present, by his
critique of the “false aliveness of the past-­made-­present,” by his em-
phases on the arrests of time more than its continuities, and by his
attention to the errant particularities of history over its universal
generalities, Benjamin’s modernist philosophy of history is not suf-
ficiently fine grained for analyzing the historical expressions of early
ethnographic cinema, beyond the avant-­garde.88
Bad Film Histories also draws on and departs from several me-
ticulous histories of ethnographic cinema. In addition to Alison
Griffiths’s Wonderous Difference, these works include Fatimah Tobing
Rony’s The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle and
Paula Amad’s Counter-­Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s
Archives de la Planète.89 Unlike these antecedents, my own work is not
a history of ethnographic cinema or any one archive but a study that
takes ethnographic cinema as a site of metahistorical critique. While
I am deeply interested in visual ontologies and comparative onto-
logical approaches (e.g., What difference does ethnographic cinema
make to the study of history? How does ethnographic cinema differ
from ethnographic writing?), I am less compelled by explanations
grounded in a monolithic ontology called “cinema.” This project in-
stead explores a set of fissures that internally divide the concepts of
cinema and the moving image archive. In other words, I understand
the ontology of cinema as inherently multiple and unstable. In Bad
Film Histories, I therefore try to respond to a particularist set of on-
tological questions: What is an ethnographic archive? What kind of
artifact is an ethnographic film? What forms of history does ethno-
graphic cinema tell or allow us to write? These are questions that not
only splinter the concept of film ontology but also necessarily desta-
bilize the tradition in early film studies that privileges time spent in
the archive as a de facto historiographic method and early film as a
self-­evidentiary historical tool. They are also questions that allow
me to pivot from the specificity of the ethnographic image to a set of
meta­h istorical concerns.
I am similarly unconvinced by the technodeterminism of recent
media archaeology, though I value the field’s attention to the contin-
 Introduction 35

gent, disjunctive, and discontinuous routes of media history as well

as its reflections on how contemporary media might reshape what we
know of film history.90 One of the most insightful ontologists of the
moving image, David Rodowick, begins and ends his Virtual Life of
Film with a media-­archaeological claim about the stakes of new media
for analog cinema. He writes, “Film studies’ confrontation with the
digital and the electronic . . . has made us more attentive to the history
of cinema itself, of its methods and questions in relation to an ever-­
changing object.”91 And yet, Rodowick suggests that while new media
may bring significant changes to the materiality of film (i.e., its photo-
graphic substrate and chemical processes), along with an opportunity
to ask after film-­h istorical methods and questions, their arrival does
not portend the death of cinema—­its becoming-­history, once and for
all—­as so many film historians fear. Rather, crucial aspects of the
moving image persist precisely because film has always been a hybrid
form, at once a physical object and a virtual spatiotemporal experi-
ence, and the concept of cinema has never been secure. Rodowick ar-
gues that “the difficulty of placing film as an object grounding an area
of study does not begin with the ‘virtualization’ of the image. Indeed
one might say that the entire history of the medium, and of the criti-
cal thought that has accompanied it, has returned incessantly to film’s
uncertain status.”92 Rodowick thus sketches an archaeology of film
in which the ontological and historical boundaries between old and
new media dissolve. New media are not a break, a rupture, or even
fundamentally “new”; they simply offer an opportunity to reassess the
instabilities of moving image media that have been there all along.
My own work shifts the site of historical and epistemological inse-
curity from new media to early cinema. Here I agree with Rodowick’s
claim that cinematic uncertainty precedes the virtual image. Indeed,
uncertainty follows the moving image everywhere it goes. However,
my own argument is less concerned with those material and indexical
tensions that belong to every film. I set aside the foundational insecu-
rities that spread across the whole of film history and separate cinema
from other forms of representation, other aspects of modern visual
culture, other discourses and disciplines. Rather, I am interested in
those instabilities that erupt within the concept and practice of cin-
ema, within the boundaries of its archives and the iteration of its own
histories. I attend to a set of internal instabilities that separate cinema
 36 Introduction

from itself, that open up what Thomas Elsaesser describes as a “zero

degree” or “imaginary place” from which we might begin to critique
our archival and historiographic orders from a position carved out in-
side of them.93
This methodological distinction invites a final question: how does
early ethnographic cinema—­t his particular mode and moment in
film practice—­serve the ends of a metahistorical project?

Supplementing the Supplements

In his seminal lecture “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Jacques Derrida
grounds the first structural rupture in the discipline of anthropol-
ogy, for it “could have been born as a science only at the moment . . .
when European culture . . . had been dislocated . . . and forced to stop
considering itself as the culture of reference.”94 For Derrida, anthro-
pology takes clear structural differences (us and them, Europe and
elsewhere) as first and essential conditions for scientific investiga-
tion and then proceeds to trouble those differences, travel between
them, and blur the space that separates them. In this way, the disci-
pline paradoxically guarantees its own undoing, its own undisciplin-
ing. It also contains the seed of deconstruction as a critical practice.
Anthropology recognizes an autonomous self and then moves out-
side of it, beyond the center and the boundaries of the self-­structure.
These fundamental dislocations disrupt the stability of anthro­
pology’s organizing structures from the very start. They mark a move-
ment away from structures toward a decentered and disorganized
play of differences.
The impact of this canonical critical turn reverberated across the
humanities and social sciences. It demanded a reconsideration of the
epistemological aims of reading, writing, and interpretation; it in-
vigorated an era of experimental and reflexive ethnographic practice,
especially in the field of visual anthropology; and finally, it spurred
the reconceptualization of anthropology as an academic discipline,
the categories of difference it presumed to be true, and the neat bina-
ries frequently marshaled to organize the outcomes of ethnographic
study. Just two decades later, Malcolm Crick attributed the radical
disciplinary shifts that inevitably arrived to poststructuralism.95 For
James Clifford, the discipline collapses in the wake of certain his-
 Introduction 37

torical conditions—­“tourism, migrant labor, immigration, urban

sprawl”—­rather than, as Derrida argues, because of incompatible
structural demands (i.e., the discipline presupposes stable categories
that it destabilizes in ethnographic practice).96 Still, Clifford describes
precisely the effects of the decentered structure. In his account, dis-
ciplinary methods become haphazard bricolage: “The ‘exotic’ is un-
cannily close. Conversely, there seems no distant places left on the
planet. . . . ‘Cultural’ difference is no longer a stable, exotic otherness;
self–­other relations are matters of power and rhetoric rather than of
essence.”97
Early ethnographic cinema escaped these far-­reaching upheavals.
Teetering at the edge of an unsteady discipline, it was excluded from
the structures of anthropology as well as the poststructural reconsid-
erations of language, representation, and history. For postwar visual
anthropologists like Jean Rouch and David MacDougall, ethno-
graphic cinema offered a “new” mode of ethnographic mediation and
a critical response to centuries of ethnographic writing. In their view,
however, ethnographic cinema begins in earnest only during the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century.98 This historical revision evacuates
the first decades of ethnographic filmmaking (often with the very
same ethnocentric teleologies that this new wave of ethnographers
claimed to critique). For example, MacDougall dismisses early eth-
nographic cinema as a “dark age” in visual anthropology wherein
filmmakers “could do little more with a camera than set it on a tripod,
point it at something of possible interest, and turn the crank.”99 His
own practice happily arrives at the end of decades of what he de-
scribes as both a natural evolution and a civilizing mission: “We have
the great advantage of imagining the outcome as a sophisticated form
of communication, with a hundred years of cinematic experimenta-
tion and convention to guide us.”100
The discipline of early and silent film studies, as I have argued, also
largely escapes the reach of poststructuralism, in particular the crises
that redefine historical studies in the late twentieth century. It side-
steps the “linguistic” or “discursive” turn, the reformation of histori-
cal studies that begins with Foucault and Derrida and expands across
philosophies of history. Taken together, this scholarship extricates
historical studies from the sciences (both natural and social), brings
the discipline into contact with concerns in the literary humanities,
 38 Introduction

and reconsiders history’s formation in the present tense and its obliga-
tions to past time.
Bad Film Histories takes the marginal place of early ethnographic
cinema as a framework for understanding its function and force. As
a secondary and supplementary practice, this cinema welcomes the
unexpected and the incoherent. It contributes yet another order of
displacement and decentering to a set of practices that are always
operating on unstable ground. It is precisely these destabilizing ener-
gies that make the ethnographic image a useful point of departure for
challenging the rigid structures of film historiography. Early ethno-
graphic films unsettle the authority of the archive and the seamless
narrative shapes we spin around our found objects as much as they
disturb the coherence and stability of the ethnographic project. These
films are “bad” objects: they play tricks on the fevered; they wander
and waste time; they rip holes in the history that they are meant to
restore. This cinema also overwhelms early film efforts to recuperate
and preserve, but, in so doing, it opens onto the possibility of a new
kind of film historiography, one that turns toward the free play of con-
tingent documents and archival encounters, one that attends to the
dialogical particularities of film material, and one that abandons the
search for historical wholes and engages the absences at the center of
the early film archive.
In taking up a set of metahistorical concerns, Bad Film Histories is
fundamentally about the methodological commitments that inform
our histories of early cinema and the alternative ways of thinking and
theorizing these histories that the ethnographic image makes visible.
In each chapter, I focus on a different constellation of film-­h istorical
concepts—­including the archive, supplementarity, language, indexi-
cality, and materiality—­as they are defined by distinct sites of early
ethnographic film practice, from the iconic Maison Lumière to Albert
Kahn’s Archives de la Planète; from the amateur dance films of the
French Ministère des Colonies and the British missionary George
Thomas Basden to the bloody wildlife expedition films funded by the
AMNH; from the polyglottic intertitles of the Dutch colonial admin-
istration to the multimedia ethnographies of the contemporary EYE
Filmmuseum. Bad Film Histories crosses disciplinary boundaries,
scavenging from scholarship in film and new media studies, historical
studies, anthropology, and continental philosophy. It reroutes several
 Introduction 39

strands of poststructural thought through the ethnographic image,

including key arguments from the “linguistic” or “discursive” turn in
historical studies. This approach at once challenges the methodologi-
cal hermeticism of early film history, responds to the discursive tangle
of ethnographic image production, and articulates an alternative ap-
proach to both film history and its archives. It does not, however, pro-
duce an exhaustive study of ethnographic film or historical methods.
Each chapter proposes just one revision to film-­historical practice or
thought, one intervention among so many others. This history—­l ike
any film history—­could easily have been otherwise.
In chapter 1, I explore the concept of the archive in the context
of early cinema and two early film archives in particular: the Maison
Lumière and the Archives de la Planète. I begin with the “new ar-
chivist” of the twentieth century—­M ichel Foucault—­before shifting
to close readings of the fissures that define these two archival sites.
As I argue, Foucault lays an important foundation for rethinking the
structure of the archive and the sources of its instability. His work
demands that we consider the processes of departure—­d isciplinary
and discursive—­that shape turn-­of-­the-­t wentieth-­century visual cul-
ture. Both the Lumière and Kahn archives exemplify these processes.
Indeed, both try to construct reassuring visual heterotopia, those
condensed reflections of who “we” are and what “we” desire that seem
to hang, stable and unsullied, outside of real space and time. They are
nevertheless archives deeply influenced by the actual, ripped apart by
paths of global expedition and the visual differences of ethnographic
representation. In chapter 1, I take departure or excursion as a his-
torical fact—­w ith real visual consequences—­and as a critical tool for
understanding the very particular expressions of early ethnographic
cinema.
In chapters 2 and 3, I concentrate on two of the most common visual
conventions of early ethnographic filmmaking: scenes of dance and
death. Chapter 2 analyzes the dancing body as a figure of histori-
cal practice and thought. The popularity of dance in ethnographic
cinema emerges, in part, out of the impulse to penetrate the surface
of the everyday and reach the exceptional interiors of ritual and re-
ligious gesture. The dancing body is also an energetic site of racial
and sexual difference, a symptom of the desires that motivate turn-­of-­
the-­t wentieth-­century discourses in the human sciences. I begin by
 40 Introduction

tracing the epistemological challenges of dance and the dancing body,

as they are defined in canonical anthropological writing, the expres-
sions of the interwar avant-­garde, and early twentieth-­century popu-
lar culture. I then pivot to consider what dance does, what it performs,
in the first decades of ethnographic cinema, specifically how these
scenes unsteady the temporal and indexical operations of the moving
image. I draw on a diverse set of examples, including ethnographic
dance films by anonymous and amateur filmmakers, the Citroën-­
sponsored “croisière” across Africa, and, perhaps the most well-­k nown
title mentioned in any of my chapters, Edward S. Curtis’s In the Land
of the Head Hunters (1914). Across all of these works, dance poses
foundational problems to the empiricism and ocular-­centrism of eth-
nographic practice; it also upends familiar tropes of historical time.
The body-­in-­motion encourages reformations of time that disrupt
the lines of causal continuity and the notion of a historical whole that
can be recuperated, articulated, and made to mean. I pivot from this
reading of dance as an intracinematic function to consider its extra­
cinematic dimensions, specifically the ways in which dance disrupts
the conceptualizations of time in film-­h istorical discourse.
Chapters 3 and 4 move comparatively between language and
image, written and visual ethnographic practices. Chapter 3 examines
the relationship between ethnographic writing and cinema, particu-
larly as these distinct tools are brought to bear in the representation
of animal death. What difference does cinema make? What does the
moving image do to writing? This chapter follows three distinct lines
of thought through the work of Derrida. The first includes his foun-
dational critique of anthropological discourse, which offers a crucial
framework for understanding the interaction between ethnographic
writing and cinema and for thinking about the effects of cinematic
supplementarity. The second strand pertains to Derrida’s concep-
tion of the archive and, more specifically, the destructive “mal” or
death drive of archival preservation. The archive of expedition films
I focus on here nevertheless exceeds the annihilation of origins and
artifacts, dismantling at once the ethnographic subject and the logo-
centric model of ethnographic practice. Third and finally, I follow
Derrida on his trajectory of following that “wholly other they call
animal.” Animals populate the frames of expedition filmmaking in
overwhelming numbers. They not only confuse the boundaries be-
 Introduction 41

tween ethnographic and zoographic categories of otherness but also

exemplify the “diabolical death drive” of the ethnographic archive as
their bodies are hunted, slaughtered, and dismembered on-screen. The
animals of expedition ethnography offer a striking counterpoint to
the resurrections of the animal body that gather in the glass enclo-
sures of the natural history museum, and they also refute the theo-
ries of taxidermy and salvage that circulate so widely in studies of
ethnographic cinema. In pursuit of Derrida, I argue that the scenes
of animal death in expedition cinema make visible the ambiguities
of hunting, whether the subject of the hunt happens to be animal or
historical.
Whereas chapter 3 examines ethnographic writing and cinema
as distinct disciplinary practices, chapter 4 considers how image and
language meet in the intertitular practices of ethnographic cinema.
I begin by examining Stanley Cavell’s writing on cinema and ordi-
nary language. Cavell’s work provides a way of approaching or think-
ing about ethnographic cinema as a determinative and very specific
context for language. From there, I concentrate on several patterns of
interaction, including (1) deixis, in which the intertitle names what
we see; (2) translation, in which a multilanguage intertitle manifests
the otherness of the ethnographic image; and (3) utterance, in which a
written text cites spoken language (or sounds). The aim of this chap-
ter is to begin teasing out just some of the ways intertitles work as,
with, and upon ethnographic images, and how these images work
upon them in turn. The language of ethnographic intertitles often
echoes the rigid racial binaries of turn-­of-­the-­century anthropologi-
cal and colonial discourses, but these texts also babble and stutter as
they try to describe the erratic wanderings of the ethnographic cam-
era, address multiple imagined spectators, and “speak” simultane-
ously for the ethnographer, the ethnographic subject, and the sounds
of the ethnographic scene. The interaction between text and image
is imprecise, imperfect. It produces slippages, repetitions, and sub-
stitutions (of text for image, writing for speech, the graphic for the
phonic). Moreover, the language of these films incessantly gestures
beyond the limits of both text and image. That is, it makes their lim-
its visible and legible as it draws our attention to the sounds, speech,
and voices that we cannot hear. In chapter 4, I draw upon theorists
of media mixture and pursue alternatives to Christian Metz and the
 42 Introduction

lineage of cinesemiotics. I argue here not only that language cannot

be reduced to langue but also that the encounter between language
and moving image cannot be adequately analyzed with the broad and
rather clumsy category of “cinema.” The intertitular expressions of
ethnographic cinema show us what might be gained with a narrower,
or particularist, purview.
In my fifth and final chapter—­and by way of a kind of (bad, imper-
fect, or open) conclusion—­I expand my focus beyond what we might
describe as the “internal” features of ethnographic cinema to consider
the “external” signs left on the surfaces of these films: the evidence of
decay and mishandling, the rips, tears, and textures that mark these
films as film-­h istorical detritus and mediate our archival encounters
in the twenty-­fi rst century. This chapter presents two related claims.
First, I argue for a nonindexical understanding of the ethnographic
film artifact and its relationship to historical meaning. I make this
argument by comparing the landscapes we see in ethnographic cin-
ema to the landscape, or physical surface, that film itself actually is.
Second, and following from the first, I argue that once we start attend-
ing to the surface of film in this way, we will recognize that the nor-
mative ways of distinguishing between analog and digital media are
insufficient. I pursue both of these claims in two different ways. In the
first part of chapter 5, I focus on several films from the Netherland’s
EYE Filmmuseum. I explore the landscapes in these films and the
ways in which these particular images index the force of things, ob-
jects, and environments. I argue that the representation of these land-
scapes is doubled, echoed in the surface of celluloid itself, in the ma-
teriality that adjoins these images of nonhuman materials. Together,
I argue, these surfaces disclose the absences in our understanding of
film artifacts and film-­historical telling. In the final pages, I shift away
from the dialogue between these surfaces to consider the role that
contemporary archives play in recirculating early ethnographic cin-
ema. The processes of contemporary digital re-­presentation at once
emphasize the materiality of the celluloid surface and the immateri-
alities of film-­historical practice, that is, the creative, playful processes
that contemporary moving image historiography requires. If there is
an annihilating operation at work in digitization (or the digital), I
argue, it is aimed at our approach to film history, not at the artifacts
that constitute it.
 CHAPTER 1

OF OTHER ARCHIVES
The Excursive Minors of La Maison Lumière
and Les Archives de la Planète

Michel Foucault seldom uses the term archive in his writing. It ap-
pears in a few introductions and footnotes as a proper noun, tied to
physical and geographic locations (e.g., archives nationales, archives
parlementaires, archives municipales), and in two metahistorical essays:
“The Historical A Priori and the Archive” and “Of Other Spaces.”1
This absence seems extraordinary when one considers the place of the
archive in Foucault’s thinking. After all, his writing on the clinic, the
prison, the mental hospital, and the academic discipline are at once
histories of archival institutions and theories of archival orders, that
is, of what and how the archive means. This occlusion owes, at least
in part, to the slipperiness of the concept that Foucault attaches to
the term. The archive is a set of relations in which we are entangled
and an external site from which we are excluded. It is a blind spot that
informs our perception and a silence that determines how we speak.
In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault interrogates what he
calls “discursive formations” and “rules of formation” or groups of
things and the word-­systems that produce those groups of things. At
the center of the Archaeology is a claim about language and knowledge
in the human sciences. Foucault argues that language produces the
very objects it seems only to represent. Language is not a neutral or
independent mode of transmission; it is always entangled in a regu-
lating system that it can never wholly escape, describe, critique, or
unravel. Foucault collapses the boundaries between language and
objects, words and things. Both, he claims, are part of and produced
43
 44 Of Other Archives

out of discursive systems that bind them together and define their en-
counter. Foucault thus encourages us to dispense with “the enigmatic
treasure of ‘things’ anterior to discourse” and abandon our incessant
search for origins, or what he describes as “the ground, the founda-
tion of things.”2 He redirects our attention to the rules that produce
discourse.
The archive is one such set of rules. It does not recuperate history
or secure its artifacts but rather constitutes a certain arrangement of
past time and a particular formation of objects. Foucault explains,
“Instead of seeing, on the great mythical book of history, lines of
words that translate in visible characters thoughts that were formed in
some other time and place, we have in the density of discursive prac-
tices, systems that establish statements as events . . . and things. . . .
They are all these systems of statements (whether events or things)
that I propose to call archive.”3 In this re-­formation of historical prac-
tice and knowledge, the archive surrounds us and yet remains un-
available to us. Foucault also ascribes a kind of agency to the archive.
It does not receive our active, visual search (on the great book of his-
tory) but rather acts upon us and determines this encounter. The ar-
chive does not passively transcribe the contents of history but engages
in a process of translation and transformation (of language, objects,
historical events, and present subjects). This conception of the archive
anticipates one aspect of Jacques Derrida’s multivalent (and untrans-
latable) mal d’archive. 4 The archive instantiates the mal—­the danger,
threat, evil—­of state authority and power. It is the place where com-
mandment commences, where the law begins and builds. The archive
expresses “the violence of a power which at once posits and conserves
the law.”5
The archive likewise belongs among those floating, wandering loci
that Foucault calls heterotopia in his 1967 lecture “Of Other Spaces.”
There Foucault revises the relationship between the system and the
subject, the archive and the world. While he had always argued that
“discourse and system produce each other,” the heterotopian archive
appears to be a system in flux, far more visible, vulnerable, and open
to external influences.6 The archive no longer operates as an unseen
system of control or a unidirectional line of force that regulates the
subject and determines what can be said. Rather, these sites are en-
folded in a process of dynamic and dialogical exchange. While het-
 Of Other Archives 45

erotopia exist “outside of all places,” they nevertheless function in

relation to real space and time; they are hyperbolic or microcosmic
expressions of a culture’s discourses and desires. For example, in the
archive, one can detect the modern impulse to accumulate and en-
close time, to construct “a place of all times that is itself outside of
time and inaccessible to its ravages.” 7 Like all heterotopia, however,
the archive exceeds this reflective function. It is a space of conver-
gence, contestation, and inversion. The archive does not reiterate or
repeat our image but “exerts a sort of counteraction on the position
that [we] occupy.”8 If the archive is any kind of mirror, it is one that
returns us to Lacan.9 It is the look that looks back and disrupts our
conception of self and world. In the heterotopian mirror, “I discover
my absence from the place where I am. . . . It makes this place that I
occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once abso-
lutely real . . . and absolutely unreal.”10
A particular formation of the subject and the world interacts with
and informs the heterotopian archive. Foucault begins this lecture
with a broad historical distinction. The nineteenth century, he claims,
was defined by its obsessions with history. The twentieth century, by
contrast, is an era of spatial concerns. Linear structures and causal
continuities give way to fragmentation, networks, and simultaneity:
“We are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far,
of the side-­by-­side, of the dispersed.”11 This shift from time to space
implies a concomitant change in how we understand the archive.
And yet, Foucault’s emphasis on the historical division between these
two centuries simply reinstalls a nineteenth-­century historiography
wherein clearly demarcated events follow one after another. This ap-
peal to a familiar kind of history conceals the specific spatial coordi-
nates that reorient the concept of the archive and surface obliquely
throughout the lecture. The title “Des espaces autres” (“Of Other
Spaces”) suggests the spaces of others and summons the specters of
colonialism, anthropology, and global travel. Alongside the hetero-
topian spaces of the library and the museum, Foucault positions the
colony, the brothel, the Oriental garden, the Muslim hamman, bed-
rooms in South America, Polynesian vacation villages, and, finally,
the boat at sea. Indeed, it is the fantastic figure of a ship in continuous
motion—­not the fixity of an architecture or institution—­that stands
in metaphoric, proximate relation to this spatial category. But it is also
 46 Of Other Archives

the actual, spatial encounters and continuous movements of global

excursion that transform the archive from the panoptic of state power
into a site of radical difference, into the mirror-­image that fractures,
inverts, and counters our own position.
This chapter traces two ships at sea, two early film archives that ex-
emplify the accumulative and totalizing impulses of late nineteenth-­
and early twentieth-­century visual culture as well as the destabilizing
effects of visual imperialism. These archives contain multiple sites of
departure, migrations from the discursive centers of European mo-
dernity to their physical and figural peripheries. These movements
mark the ethnographic search for non-­European alterities and the
archival drive to catalog the world. However, these departures also
produce a set of internal fractures that fundamentally undermine the
stability of the European self-­center and the hegemonic powers of the
archive.
I begin with the beginning privileged above all others in film stud-
ies, with the global filmmaking operation directed by Auguste and
Louis Lumière. Between March and December 1895, the Lumière
brothers produced roughly two dozen vues (views) during their pro-
motional campaign of France and Belgium.12 These films are among
the most recognized and analyzed of the entire collection.13 Workers
spill out of a factory. New parents feed their child. A gardener gets
hosed. A train arrives at the station (in January 1896). These images
surface over and again in the central debates that shaped early film
scholarship in the post-­Brighton 1980s and 1990s.14 By the end of
1895, mere months after the Lumière brothers had revealed a ma-
chine that could record, process, and project moving images, the
Maison Lumière—­a common name for the global film enterprise that
evokes domesticity and handicraft, eliding any ties with the industrial
factory—­began training a team of filmmakers in the idiosyncratic
operations of the cinématographe. The following year, the operators
took over, demonstrating the features of the Lumière film camera in
London, Rome, New York, Frankfurt, Madrid, Moscow, Budapest,
Mexico City, Sydney, Algiers, and Saigon. At each new location, the
operators exhibited the machine and projected several vues. They also
recorded on-­site and, in so doing, expanded the geographic scope
of the Lumière collection. When the operation ended in 1905, the
 Of Other Archives 47

Lumière archive contained 1,428 films. More than eight hundred had
been gathered on image-­making expeditions around the world.
As the Lumière brothers were unveiling their cinématographe, the
eccentric banker and world traveler Albert Kahn began developing an
elaborate set of intersecting heterotopian projects on a small patch of
Paris just south of the Bois de Boulogne: a garden of global “scenes”;
a society of international artists and intellectuals; a travel program
for graduates of France’s most elite universities; and an archive of
color autochromes and 35mm films, gathered during more than two
decades of image-­making excursions throughout France and around
the world. Kahn’s global photo-­fi lm project began in 1908 as an ama-
teur adventure before Jean Brunhes, chair of human geography at the
Collège de France, took over its direction in 1909. The project would
come to be known as the Archives de la Planète.15 Kahn understood
this archival enterprise as a means by which “to fix, once and for all,
the appearance [aspects], practices, and modes of human activity
whose fatal disappearance is only a matter of time.”16 This mission
statement rigorously adheres to the paradigm of salvage ethnography,
which conceives its subject as always and necessarily on the brink of
existential annihilation.17 Like the Maison Lumière, the Archives de
la Planète was an industrial-­scale visual project that employed more
than a dozen operators, scattered simultaneously across the globe.
When operations ended in 1931, Kahn had collected more than
72,000 autochrome photographs, 4,000 stereographic images, and
183,000 meters of unedited black-­and-­white film, all neatly cataloged
in drawers and on shelves. These materials were rarely seen by anyone
outside the elite cultural network that frequented the Kahn estate.
Louis Lumière was among those privileged visitors.18 He in-
vented the autochrome process—­the first full-­color form of glass plate
photography—­that all Kahn operators were trained to use.19 Despite
these historical and technological entanglements, Kahn scholars
often emphasize the differences between the two archives rather
than their points of contact.20 The Maison Lumière was a for-­profit
commercial enterprise whose routes of global travel were designed to
market the Lumière hardware (i.e., the cinématographe) and promote
the Lumière catalog, while simultaneously expanding its selection of
vues. This strategy produced a global distribution network for moving
 48 Of Other Archives

images, cameras, film stock, and other visual technologies and acces-
sories.21 By contrast, so the argument goes, the Archives de la Planète
was a philanthropic project, funded by Kahn with his own personal
wealth. It was designed to bring the world’s diverse cultures into con-
tact and to unify these differences on the shelves of his Boulogne-­
Billancourt estate. Moreover, and in marked departure from the
Lumière films, the processes of global circulation and interaction
concluded once the films and photographs were made and trans-
ported back to Paris. The Archives de la Planète thus functioned as a
closed system. Images were collected, and then they simply collected
dust, lying in wait of some future audience or historical function.
I am not persuaded by arguments that separate the Lumière and
Kahn archives on the basis of the (capitalist or humanitarian) ends
that they were intended to serve. The ends that these archives in fact
served and the images that they ultimately generated should, in my
view, outweigh the mythologies of their auteurs and the motivations
so often attributed to them. Moreover, in emphasizing the utopian
and humanitarian foundations of the Archives de la Planète, Kahn
scholarship leaves the influence and infrastructure of French colonial-
ism underexplored. The empire of the Third Republic depended upon
the expansion of the French financial industry throughout the nine-
teenth century, including the Goudchaux bank where Kahn served
as director.22 Kahn earned the fortune that eventually funded the
Archives de la Planète through investments in Japan and Indochina,
gold and diamond mines in South Africa, and mining companies in
the Congo.23 The pathways that Kahn operators traced around the
world would not have been possible without his role in global finance
and attendant influence throughout imperial Europe. Put simply: both
the Lumière and Kahn archives owe something to the expansive reach
of capitalism and colonial politics, no matter the aims and ends their
founders envisioned.
This shared ground notwithstanding, the Maison Lumière and the
Archives de la Planète belong to different orders of film practice and
are consigned to different positions in the hierarchies of film history:
the one is canonical, the other marginal, a virtually unseen photo-­
film hybrid. In bringing these two archives together, I trouble the
center of early film practice and consider what the minor archive illu-
minates of its major counterpart. But this chapter also aims beyond a
 Of Other Archives 49

simple reframing of these archives in relation to one another toward a

rethinking of the archive itself and the fault lines that mark the event
of departure and the “spaces of others.”
Both the Maison Lumière and the Archives de la Planète are exer-
cises in the impossible task of preserving everything, that is, the diver-
sity of the world’s inhabitants and cultural practices. These archives
share in the colonial impulse to capture and catalog a global totality,
whether this impulse ultimately serves the ends of commercial distri-
bution or philanthropic preservation. They also appeal to a utopian
understanding of mechanical reproduction: the camera opens onto
the world as it is rather than the world as it has been transfigured by
technology and the distorting rhythms of repetition. These archives
try to construct that stable “place of all times” that exists outside of
time, the uncomplicated and seamless mirror-­image that reiterates
and reassures. They instead produce a place torn apart by the paths
of global travel and the visual differences of ethnographic representa-
tion. One can trace a dividing line across the Maison Lumière and the
Archives de la Planète, a line that distinguishes between the fixity of
land and the boat at sea, between the European self and its colonial
others, between the utopian mirror that reaffirms a fantasy and the
heterotopian countersite that refracts this image, shatters it to pieces.
I devote the first portion of this chapter to the ethnographic un-
derbelly of the Maison Lumière. The films that I engage adhere to an
altogether different visual logic than that of their canonical counter-
parts. They abandon the tidy choreography of domestic life and lei-
sure and embark upon a deterritorializing and contingent search for
any-­image-­of-­d ifference along the way. First, I examine the spatio-
temporal divisions and resistant subjectivities of the Village Ashanti
series, filmed at the 1897 Colonial Exposition in Lyon. Next, I com-
pare street scenes from the urban metropole with the haptic approach
that frames city life in Egypt and Tunisia. Finally, I bring Repas de
bébé (France, 1895) into contact with Repas d’Indiens (Mexico, 1896)
and consider the simulacral energies that destabilize the surface of
individual films and the coherence of an entire archive. Drawn from
human expositions and expeditions to non-­Western corners of the
globe, these films manifest the colonial impulses that underpin the
Lumière project and allow me to interrogate the difference that these
global encounters make to the structure and stability of the archive.24
 50 Of Other Archives

This chapter then shifts to consider the Archives de la Planète,

where a set of technological divisions joins the geographic ones. For
Kahn and Brunhes, the combination of autochrome photography
and 35mm film held out the promise of a more rigorous and complete
visual reproduction. The autochrome process would produce stillness
and surfaces in color. Cinema would capture motion and duration in
black and white. Each method would constitute one part of a more
perfect, visual whole. Roughly half of the archive’s photographs and
films belong to what one might call a “domestic” collection. This seg-
ment of the archive includes images of Paris and other French cities,
the Kahn estate and gardens, and the towns and villages of rural
France. The rest of the archive’s images were gathered on journeys to
Western Europe and North America, and to the Balkan Peninsula,
South and East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. I
argue that these geographic halves correspond to separate ways of
seeing and signifying the world. On the journey to elsewhere, pho-
tography and film become uncertain, experimental forms.
This chapter not only reroutes the concept of the archive through
two sites of early ethnographic practice; it also intervenes in the con-
siderable body of scholarship dedicated to the Lumière and Kahn
archives. In early film studies, the global operation that the Lumière
brothers administered for nearly ten years recedes from view, over-
shadowed by a domestic canon of arrivals, departures, street scenes,
and family meals. Lumière scholarship takes similarity as a starting
point for evaluating the expressive (e.g., narrative, nonnarrative,
epistemological) possibilities of the Lumière films, thereby exclud-
ing the fundamental differences that characterize the archive and the
visual instabilities born of geographic displacement. For example,
in his foundational series of engagements with narrativity and early
cinema, André Gaudreault defines the Lumière films as “micro”
narrative structures, or the smallest possible narrative film unit. 25
For Gaudreault, all films belong somewhere along a wide spectrum
of narrativity, from monstration (showing or exhibition) to narra-
tion (telling). Whereas multishot filmmaking implies a process of
concealment—­the “obliteration” of first-­order narrative units—­the
single-­shot Lumière conceals nothing. 26 It opens up, spills its con-
tents, and shows the viewer. Tom Gunning understands the mon-
strative qualities of single-­shot cinema as manifestations of a very
 Of Other Archives 51

particular mode of spectatorial address rather than an effect of cine-

matographic structure. The Lumière films exemplify the “cinema of
attractions,” a canonical film-­h istorical concept that resists histori-
ographies of narrative progress and reclaims early cinema for turn-­
of-­the-­century nonnarrative amusements (and the postwar avant-­
garde).27 Gunning positions the single-­shot view alongside a wide
range of early films and film practices that “rush forward to meet their
viewers,” from Georges Méliès’s multishot magic shows to the spatial
fantasies of Hale’s tours.28 In her study of cinematic time, Mary Ann
Doane insists on the temporal consistency of the single-­shot archive,
a kind of redundancy or homogeneity born of the uninterrupted fifty-­
second filmstrip. She notes, “All the Lumières can do is multiply the
number of such moments, seemingly indefinitely, and produce a se-
ries of catalogs containing 1428 films, dividing the films (vues) into
such categories as ‘vues militaires,’ ‘vues comiques,’ ‘vues diverses.’
Theoretically, the topics are inexhaustible.” 29
Theoretically, the Lumière films could vibrate into infinity, un-
categorizable and uncontrolled. However, in the practice of early film
scholarship (Doane’s included), the Lumière films appear decidedly
under control, familiar, and disciplined. These films work together,
exhibiting the micronarrative kernels of a cinema to come, the exhibi-
tionist order of the cinema of attractions, and the temporal limitations
of single-­shot structure. Framed by narrative and historical questions,
bound by shared technology and visual culture, these autonomous
énoncés emerge as a coherent and collective entity. Indeed, few film
histories or theories are more stable than those that circumscribe the
Lumière archive. The films gathered during foreign excursions sur-
face here and there (mostly in area studies departments and origin
stories of national cinemas), but they never threaten our Lumière
mythologies, nor do they contradict our concept of the archive.30 This
chapter brings the domestic and excursive collections together and,
in so doing, redefines the archive against the figures of similarity and
coherence that circulate in discussions of Lumière.
Kahn scholarship similarly overlooks the specific fissures that
emerge out of the ethnographic image. In recent decades, a small col-
lective of scholars have tried to find a point of entry into the Archives
de la Planète. These engagements with the unwieldy contours of
Kahn’s heterotopian imagination have produced a set of secondary,
 52 Of Other Archives

experimental archives, touched with the same fever that defines their
archival object. For his part, Sam Rohdie takes the unstructured,
wandering, and digressive quality of the Archives de la Planète as a
model for thinking and writing about the archive itself. 31 Rohdie fash-
ions his study as a kind of perpetual digression away from the archive
at its center toward other moments and manifestations in the history
of the human sciences, ethnographic practice, and the twentieth-­
century avant-­garde (e.g., Michel Leiris, André Gide, Luis Buñuel,
Jean Rouch). He frames his oblique, ludic approach as one that over-
turns or undoes the positivist aims that guided Albert Kahn and
Jean Brunhes. For all that is radical and experimental in his writing,
Rohdie generates a speculative ethnography of himself—not unlike
that of Michel Leiris, which I discuss in chapter 2—more than he in-
terrogates the discursive instabilities at work in the archive. That is, he
does not fully explore the possibility that the Archives de la Planète
may have escaped, undermined, or shattered its positivist foundations
well before his intervention.
Paula Amad opposes this historical and theoretical emplacement.
In her view, the Archives de la Planète betrays an alternative history
of French modernity, one in which the moving image both receives
and transforms positivist conceptions of the archive. Amad also reads
the archive through the lens of Foucault’s heterotopia and the com-
pelling figures that define the concept, as I do. 32 But she ultimately
puts pressure on the specificity of cinema, its errant mobilities, and
its capacity to overwhelm archival order with “uneventful moments,
ordinary gestures, and casual occurrences.”33 Indeed, a broader con-
cern with film’s automatic and potentially infinite approach to the
everyday underpins her understanding of the idiosyncratic Kahn film
collection. She argues, “Once translated into the age of cinema, the
archive thus mutated into the counter-­archive, a supplementary realm
where the modern conditions of disorder, fragmentation, and contin-
gency came to haunt the already unstable positivist utopia of order,
synthesis, totality.”34 Amad thus extends Doane’s reading of film on-
tology and temporality beyond the limitations of the single-­shot view
to cinema writ large. The Kahn archive is the hyperbolic and excep-
tional part that stands in synecdochal relation to the whole of film
practice and its counter-­archival effects. While I agree that the “age of
cinema”—­however indiscriminately this phrase describes a broad ex-
 Of Other Archives 53

panse of time and a diverse set of technologies—­necessarily changes

the archive and how we understand it, this argument, like Rohdie’s,
misses the instabilities embedded within the cinematic archive and
irreducible to a technohistorical origin. In particular, it misses the
specificity of the ethnographic image.
There is another synecdochal operation at work in Amad’s re-
search worth briefly pausing to consider: the film collection stands
in for the whole of the Archives de la Planète. While Amad acknowl-
edges that one cannot “appraise the autochromes in isolation from
the films, nor vice versa,” she nevertheless takes the latter tack. 35 She
divorces the films from the curious glass plates produced alongside
them and considers the counternetworks of stasis and mobility as
they shape the moving image alone. Amad describes the autochromes
as signs of an “exaggerated stillness” and “a pre-­industrial phase in
photography,” whereas the films seem to spin out of control, announc-
ing a “future-­oriented culture of movement.”36 In her reading, film
was Kahn’s medium of choice for recording the “dynamic evolution
of human activity.”37 Amad also argues that this focus on the films
redresses the disproportional popularity of the autochromes images.
They have been the “privileged, indeed fetishized, object of study,
publication, and especially exhibition for the Kahn museum since it
opened in the 1980s,” while the films remain “the ugly duckling of the
Archive.”38
Neither explanation for excluding the autochromes makes much
sense. Kahn invested in the autochrome process for more than twenty
years, a fact that would seem to confirm his commitment to photog-
raphy. But let’s set Kahn aside. Given the many ways in which Amad
thinks against the grain of origins and auteurs, this appeal to Kahn’s
vision as a methodological justification seems strangely misplaced. As
for the supposed attention heaped upon the autochromes, the little
work that has been done on the Archives de la Planète bends in pre-
cisely the same direction as Amad’s argument. 39 More important than
the explanations for excluding the autochromes is the effect of their
omission. Amad uncovers a medium that mutates the concept of the
archive and challenges the positivist–­utopian understanding of the
document. She nevertheless curates her evidence in a way that de-
termines her conclusions in advance. The counter-­archival forces that
Amad tracks across the Archives de la Planète can only ever lead us
 54 Of Other Archives

back to the moving image, for that is the paradigm privileged above
all others and the only path available to us.
In this chapter, I shift the terms of the debate away from the his-
torical, formal, and ontological continuities that bind each archive
together and instead examine the excursive sites that tear them apart.
In the Kahn archive, these sites straddle the division between pho-
tography and film. I argue, against Amad, that one cannot link these
archival instabilities to the essential ontological features of the mov-
ing image, for the excursive collections actually call the ontologies of
cinema and photography into question. In my reading of the Maison
Lumière and the Archives de la Planète, I take departure as a histori-
cal fact with visual consequences and as a critical tool for understand-
ing the contents of each archive. Both the Lumière and Kahn opera-
tors left France for the colonies, the familiar home and factory for the
fantasy of the unfamiliar. These are physical and geographic displace-
ments that simultaneously mark conceptual shifts and separations.
In other words, the operators traced errant paths across the earth
and early cinema. These manifold departures not only contribute to
the internal disunity of each archive but also produce sites of resis-
tance or lines of flight. Certainly there is a kind of inherent disorder
or transgressive quality at work in these early archives, born out of
the boundlessness of their archival tasks and the limitless duplication
that mechanical reproduction makes possible. Both Doane and Amad
make arguments in this direction. It is reasonable enough to reframe
our understanding of the archive by gesturing toward this repetitive
visual abundance. But the departures that organize these archives
offer another order of transgression, one that approximates the aim-
less wanderings of Foucault’s heterotopian vessel. Arguments about
the ontology or visual excesses of cinema miss these alternative sites
of encounter and instability.
A note on my own terminology: I use the terms domestic and ex-
cursive to refer to visual materials from the Kahn and Lumière ar-
chives, to name a division internal to them both. In the case of the
Maison Lumière, the terms displace more familiar and far more gen-
eral categories like “actualités” or “travel films.” The term excursive
derives from the Latin verb excurrere (to go out of or beyond the or-
dinary path, to digress, to go to an extreme). Excursive describes the
nature of physical excursions (wandering, prone to stray, erratic) and
 Of Other Archives 55

a desultory or digressive way of reading. These terms allow me to sim-

plify my descriptive references to the Lumière and Kahn archives and
establish, from the start, a relationship between them. More impor-
tantly, however, the term excursive suggests something of the stakes of
my own argument in its joining together the physical act of departure
and the critical acts of seeing and reading.

Acinématographie: Village Ashanti,

Afrique, Mexique, 1896–­1897
On April 18, 1897, an article in the Lyon républicain announced the
arrival of a new spectacle in the Parc de la Tête d’or. A former naval
engineer, Ferdinand Gravier, had delivered a group of Africans from
the Gold Coast to the French city. In this anonymous text, one can
detect the contradictory forces that meet on the ground of ethno-
graphic display. The announcement erects a firm divide between the
local and the foreign while simultaneously domesticating the spec-
tacle through categories of turn-­of-­the-­century daily life:
The two hundred Africans that M. Gravier has brought to Lyon
are from the Ashanti province of the Gold Coast, a British
possession. They are, for the most part, of a beautiful type.
Their skin is more bronze than black. All are barefoot. All ages
are represented. None of them communicate in French. They
speak only their native tongue, the “Ga” dialect. The tribe’s
chief is a robust fellow in his forties with an air of intelligence;
he responds to the name of Botchey. His wife, one of the most
beautiful women in the tribe, is twenty-­t hree. Her name is
Akossia. . . . The women busy themselves with the children and
cooking. Some of them make music, singing and tapping their
arms against the tambourines as accompaniment to the dances
of a fetisher, whose face is painted white. A distinctive quality:
none beg. Morality reigns as much as cleanliness in the village.
Moreover, their chief requires them to wash at least two times
a day. Families can venture to the negro-­v illage, without risk of
finding themselves in the presence of sights that offend them.40
At each turn, the Républicain tempers the sites and signs of differ-
ence. While the Ashanti lack the French language, they have an air of
 56 Of Other Archives

intelligence. Their skin is more bronze than black. The strange white
face of a fetisher meets the purity of modern hygiene. With a few rhe-
torical adjustments, the promise of radical difference transforms into
the assurance of family-­f riendly entertainment.
This strategy of “making familiar” inflects the organization and
textual framing of the Village Ashanti film series. Between open-
ing day and May 17, a rotating cast of Lumière operators made four-
teen films of the exposition, including Danse du sabre I and Danse du
sabre II. In addition to displays of dancing bodies, the Ashanti col-
lection includes parades, family meals, and children at play. And yet,
the descriptions that accompanied these films in the original Lumière
catalog refuse to elaborate on their visual contents or distinguish be-
tween them.41 For each film, it reads the same: “This vue was taken
during the Ashanti village exposition, located in Lyon. The title is suf-
ficiently explanatory.”42 No need for further description; the title says
it all. Never mind that the term sword dance would have conjured little
more than gauzy fantasy, the titles fail to describe the most basic fea-
ture of the films: the movement of bodies, change over time. The titles
and descriptions work in conjunction to imbue the Ashanti collection
with a manageable stillness. The subtle insistence (through recurring
themes, titles, and descriptions) upon resemblance and similarity per-
haps reached outward to reassure the turn-­of-­the-­century filmgoer.
These textual cues also retroactively create an undifferentiated archi-
val surface wherein no film or set of films flaunts its distinguishing
marks. Even the more recent production catalog, published by the
Centre national de la cinématographie and the Bibliothèque du film,
adheres to this logic of the same. For example, both sabre films are de-
scribed thus: “Two armed men mime a curious combat to the sound
of a tom-­tom drum and hands clapping.”43 This description obscures
any distinctions between the two films and returns to a common re-
frain: the Lumière vues are short and simple records of continuous
time, more structurally similar than they could ever be different.
In viewing the Ashanti films, one finds a clear incongruity be-
tween the redundant descriptions that introduce the images and
the complexity that materializes on-­screen. The Ashanti dance films
share in a visual composition torn between different times, places,
and forms of representation. The camera rests directly in front of the
subjects, flattening the image and re-­creating the conditions of a the-
 Of Other Archives 57

atrical space. This position directs our gaze toward the center of the
frame, where the dancers perform. But our gaze never rests there for
long. Behind the dancers, a large group of Ashanti men and women
stands and stares directly into the camera. Their position establishes
a visual divide between foreground and background, movement and
stillness. Against the erratic gestures of the dancers’ bodies, this
arrangement re-­c reates the standard composition of nineteenth-­
century ethnographic photography and casts a spectral pall across
the frame.44 The sheer visibility and visual pleasure of dance is perfo-
rated with stillness, while moving limbs and twisted torsos obstruct
the unmoving bodies of the gathered crowd. The films contain a kind
of lingering photographic residue, which inflects and influences the
cinematic image, while the films’ uninterrupted flows counter the
perpetual past tense of “this has been.”45
Visually torn, the Ashanti films depart from the eruptive tempo-
rality and pure present tense that Gunning ascribes to the cinema of
attractions. Rather than a discontinuous sequence of instants, “now
you see it, now you don’t,” a dialectic of presence and absence, move-
ment and stillness, unfolds between the two visual layers, joining
them in perpetual tension within the same instant and image. These
films represent Bazin’s dissonant phrase—­change mummified—­in a
striking way. “The disturbing presence of lives halted . . . , freed from
their destiny,” expands over time, and cinema comes to a standstill.46
For Bazin, cinema’s photographic mummies are always there but
never visible. The moving image escapes these origins, thanks in no
small part to the complicity of the viewer, who “needs to believe in the
reality of what is happening while knowing it to be tricked.”47 These
acts of denial or disavowal are nevertheless tenuous. The slightest
photographic provocation reminds us of the preservative processes
under way and the stillness that dwells underneath. The Ashanti films
thus break the spectatorial contract that Bazin reserves for cinema.
In most of the Ashanti films, another spatial division joins this
temporal split. Just beyond the gathered tribe, above the tops of the
“authentic” village huts, the camera captures the ornate buildings
of 1897 Lyon. Like the motionless crowd that frames the dancing
bodies, the combination of city street and African village produces
a startling visual juxtaposition: the modern cityscape meets its colo-
nial imaginary. The nineteenth-­century facades confront one’s gaze
 58 Of Other Archives

in much the same manner as the stoic community, mitigating the im-
mersive experience of racial display and cinematic representation.
This visual divide emphasizes the construction of the image and the
fragility of this ethnographic spectacle. One cannot dwell too long in
this dreamscape of premodernity without engaging the social space
out of which and for which it was produced. Doubling the intrusion of
photographic time, this sliver of Lyon disturbs the fantastic no-­time
of the ethnographic exposition and the uninterrupted flow of single-­
shot cinema, relentlessly reminding viewers that “this has been,” that
these films were made on a particular day, some hundred years ago.
But what is so “curious” about the dances that unfold across these
images? Curiously, the dance is really no dance at all but a set of vio-
lent confrontations with the camera, operator, and future spectators.
In Danse du sabre I, two men move in the center of the frame; each
one holds a sword and threatens the other. Their bodies exchange
places several times as they move in a circular, counterclockwise di-
rection. One of the men thrusts his sword forward, while the other
man steps back. This push-­and-­pull, give-­and-­take rhythm continues
for almost the entire fifty-­second vue. During the first thirty or so sec-
onds of the film, one of the men intermittently turns his head to face
the camera. He takes a step, drives his sword toward his partner, and
looks back. Just before the film concludes, this same man turns his
body to face the camera and threatens it with his sword (Figure 1).
The other man continues to shift his body back and forth, but the
shape of their movements and the union between the two men col-
lapse. In Danse du sabre II, the same men are centered in the frame.
This time, however, both face the camera, their looks joining those of
the crowd behind them. They gesture at the device that records them,
stabbing at it with their swords. But there is no rhythm, at least none
that recalls the cyclical turning of the previous film. They stab incon-
sistently, sometimes in unison, sometimes taking turns. The film ends
with both men in midgesture.
To the disruptive axes of past–present time and other–real spaces,
the “dances” contribute yet more sites of conflict and oppositional
force. The layered happenings and visual disorder of a single shot
forcefully oppose the framework of micronarrativity. The dancers
combat with one another, with the voyeuristic desires of the audi-
ence, and with the easy exhibitionism implied by early film concepts
 Of Other Archives 59

FIGURE 1
A confrontation with the camera in Danse du sabre I (unknown operator, 1897, Lyon, cours
du Midi, present-­day cours de Verdun). Catalog Lumière no. 441.

(e.g., monstration, attraction). In the Danse du sabre films, the danc-

ers’ confrontations with the camera not only suspend the cyclical
motion of the dance but also acknowledge the act of representation
under way, an acknowledgment that comes in the form of a long
blade, jabbed repeatedly in the direction of the lens. The dance be-
tween the two men collapses only to continue as a “dance” between
the men in the frame and those who have gathered to watch. We be-
come the threatened partner(s), implicated in the performance. The
dancers challenge the camera’s intrusion and disrupt the continuity
of the film; they create “cuts” with their blows, returning the violence
of an uninvited witness with the violence of a deftly handled blade.
The Ashanti films break with the familiar and thwart expectations
(of dance and daily life). They produce stray moments and blades and
the surprise of a violent encounter. These sudden shocks return us to
the cinema of attractions, as well as to the Lumière canon.
Any and all nonnarrative thrills seemingly unite beneath the ex-
pansive reach of Gunning’s term. Against the “temporality of surprise,
shock, and trauma, the sudden rupture of stability by the irruption
 60 Of Other Archives

of transformation or the curtailing of erotic promise,” Gunning op-

poses the reassuring rhythms of classical narrative film.48 He com-
pares the spectator of narrative to Little Hans, a figure who masters
the traumatic departure of his mother through the predictable out-
comes of his fort–­da game. Early cinema, by contrast, is a spool out
of control: “If the classical spectator enjoys apparent mastery of the
narrative thread of a film . . . the viewer of the cinema of attractions
plays a very different game of presence/absence, one strongly lacking
predictability or a sense of mastery.”49 Trauma, shock, surprise, the
thrills of Coney Island, a single-­shot vue, or one of Méliès’s carefully
orchestrated screen shows—­a ll equally “smack of the instant.”50 The
cinema of attractions is a grab bag of visual (and bodily) stimulations
as Gunning resists distinguishing between these radically different
kinds of early film experiences. He traces the historical how and why
of these instants through the turn-­of-­the-­century filmgoer. Why
did these shocks and thrills shape early cinema? Because the public
wanted them. Indeed, one cannot disentangle the attraction from its
audience. In his outline of “inherently” attractive themes, Gunning
proposes “dependently” attractive ones, grounded in the desires, in-
terests, fascinations, and obsessions of their spectators:
We could list a number of inherently “attractive” themes in
early cinema: a fascination with visual experiences that seem
to fold back on the very pleasure of looking (colors, forms of
motion—­t he very phenomenon of motion itself in cinema’s
earliest projections); an interest in novelty (ranging from actual
current events to physical freaks and oddities); an often sexual-
ized fascination with socially taboo subject matter dealing
with the body (female nudity or revealing clothing, decay, and
death); a peculiarly modern obsession with violent and aggres-
sive sensations (such as speed or the threat of injury). All of
these are topoi of an aesthetic of attractions, whether of the
cinema, the sensational press, or the fairground. Attractions’
fundamental hold on spectators depends on arousing and
satisfying visual curiosity through a direct and acknowledged
act of display, rather than following a narrative enigma within
a diegetic site into which the spectator peers invisibly. 51
 Of Other Archives 61

Gunning’s theory disputes the mythology of the naive early filmgoer

who flees theaters and trains. He redefines this figure as a fully aware
and autonomous agent who takes pleasure in being tricked, shocked,
and shown. 52 But in so doing, Gunning muddles the dividing line be-
tween early and narrative film, contingency and control. The analogy
of Little Hans bleeds across the attraction–­narration divide. Within
Gunning’s own logic, the consumers of both forms of film make de-
cisions (to be out of control or under control), and both knowingly
participate in games of visual pleasure.
What Gunning gains by foregrounding the early film spectator
and redefining this figure as self-­aware and in search of shocks he
loses in the specificity and disruptive possibilities of the early film
image. The cinema of attractions is a mode of reception in which
spectator and image appear like interlocking pieces, symbiotically
suited the one to the other. Gunning posits a tidy visual economy
wherein spectators desire curiosities and early cinema supplies them
in spades. His lexicon of pleasure (e.g., lust, attraction, arousal) envel-
ops the distinct topoi of cinematic curiosities—­from color to death—­
and minimizes the remarkable differences between them. In framing
early cinema as a circuit of consumption, wherein every and any early
film curiosity satisfies spectatorial desire, Gunning’s system inadver-
tently evicts the early film image that genuinely traumatizes or shocks,
that cannot be named or known in advance, or that simply cannot
be recuperated by the regulating order of desire–­satisfaction, fort–­da.
Despite Gunning’s claims to the contrary, the early film attraction be-
comes a kind of repetitive and pleasurable play that always aims to
meet the demands of its anxious spectators and thereby mimics the
consumer-­oriented paradigms of classical narrative cinema. The cin-
ema of attractions ultimately excludes the radical break, the message
to no one, the image that refuses to please or play games, the unplea-
surable or intolerable image.
A number of early film scholars attribute a similarly expansive
reading of early film thrills to the technology of early cinema, and
one Lumière vue in particular. In his reading of Barque sortant du
port (France, 1895), Dai Vaughan argues that the earliest film images
overturned the idea of “controlled, willed, and obedient communica-
tion.”53 As a wave crashes unexpectedly against a boat and threatens
 62 Of Other Archives

two men rowing against the tide, Vaughan recognizes a form apart.
No other mode or moment of visual representation could escape the
control of its creators and threaten real risk in quite the same way.
In this moment of collision, the differences between human subjects
and inanimate objects diminish; the rowers and their boat are equally
exposed to external forces and the camera’s indiscriminate lens. Mary
Ann Doane returns to Vaughan’s reading and Barque sortant du port
in her study of early cinema and temporality, reframing the sudden
crash of the wave as evidence of the contingencies of real time and
single-­shot filmmaking. Doane explains that the anxiety provoked by
Barque sortant du port “would be that of sheer undivided extension, of
a ‘real time’ without significant moments, of a confusion about where
or why to look.”54 For Doane, nothing stands between the uninter-
rupted duration of the Lumière vue and the unexpected threats of
the natural world. The transition from single-­to multishot cinema
signals a necessary movement away from the impossible archive of
“real time.”
The Ashanti films demand that we refine our understanding of
contingency and single-­shot cinema and consider the risks of “real
time” alongside those of real bodies and places. Doane describes a
kind of even instability, stretched equally across the uninterrupted
expanses of Lumière vues. But as I understand them, not all Lumière
films pose the same kinds of threats, with equivalent force. In the
Ashanti films, the straw huts could collapse or rain could begin to fall.
These threats exist as they do for all single-­shot, unedited cinema. But
there is a difference between the unexpected events that ultimately
contribute to a canonical film like Barque sortant du port and those
that emerge in the Village Ashanti collection (to say nothing, just yet,
about the gaping distance between a choreographed domestic scene
like Repas de bébé and the excursive Repas d’Indiens).
These films are distinguished by markedly different orders of the
unexpected and different relationships to the natural world. In Barque
sortant du port, human subjects become objects, equal in front of the
camera’s lens and the waves’ impending crash. In the Ashanti films,
objects become subjects. That which escapes the control of the op-
erator or camera is not simply “real time” and the inevitable accidents
of uninterrupted duration but the resistant subjects it mistakes for
equal objects in a mise-­en-­scène of otherness. In these films, the un-
 Of Other Archives 63

expected erupts, not in the unanticipated instant of a world beyond all

control and visual construction, but out of autonomous and cognitive
human subjects, their bodies decidedly under control. The Ashanti
dancers resist the expectation of stable, malleable, and meaning-­
bearing forms. The sites and signs of this resistance include sudden
departures from the frame and swords pointed at the operator, as well
as far more subtle expressions: a look or gesture. The Ashanti films
gather at the poles of mobility and immobility, illustrating what Jean-­
François Lyotard terms acinema: “instead of good, unifying, and rea-
sonable forms,” these films display the unproductive and incoherent
energies of bodies that spin in place, of “vain simulacra, blissful in-
tensities . . . real diversions or wasteful drifts.”55
To be clear, I am not suggesting that the single-­shot form man-
ages to overcome the ideological and physical forces at work in eth-
nographic expositions and global image-­making operations. This
confrontation between the Ashanti tribe, on the one hand, and tech-
nological and colonial power, on the other, fails to shift the balance in
ways that really matter. The Ashanti men and women remain confined
to a strange pseudovillage, with their only paths of escape leading out
of a film frame. Rather, I am insisting that the Ashanti films record
and re-­present the inherent instabilities of visual and physical appro-
priation. These films capture the traces of conflict and resistance—­
some small, others large—­that emerge between ideology and real
subjects and spaces. That is, these films do not overcome ideological
strictures but make them visible. I am also arguing that it could not be
otherwise. The visual excesses and immobilities that characterize the
Ashanti films are not the unexpected accidents of uninterrupted time,
though the temporality of single-­shot filmmaking secures these traces
in place, but the reliable consequence of bodies taken for objects and
put on display. 56
In the Ashanti films, a fault line emerges. It marks the insecurity of
an encounter between bodies and gazes joined in tension. This fault
line expands, moving across the whole of the Lumière archive, distin-
guishing the “good, unifying, and reasonable forms” of the domestic
films from those that communicate too much or nothing at all, from
bodies that block the camera and mouths that will not chew. In the
street scenes from Cairo and Tunis, which I consider next, the resis-
tant subjectivities that characterize the Ashanti series coincide with
 64 Of Other Archives

a visual approach that approaches, that moves in close and tries to

touch, that trades architectural monuments for bodily wonders that
wander away, into, against the lens.
Mythologies aside, the Maison Lumière never invented much in
the way of cameras and projectors. More likely, the engineer of the
operation, Louis, tinkered with technologies that were already in
place by the 1880s and produced a machine of unrivaled flexibility.
Lumière historian Jacques Aumont thus prefers the term interven-
tion to invention when describing the cinématographe. He writes,
“The key to the machine’s commercial and practical success (all that
initially concerned Lumière) was its simplicity and adaptability. A
single relatively light and portable machine performed the task of
taking pictures, their projection, and even the printing of positives.”57
The Lumières’ modest adjustments to film technology nevertheless
wrought radical ontological and conceptual shifts for cinema. Rather
than capturing the movements that happened to cast across its lens
(à la Edison’s Black Maria), the cinématographe was made to move.
Each piece of the Lumière ensemble—­c amera, operator, film—­
traveled. If the cinématographe was not aboard a train, boat, or trol-
ley, watching places come into and go out of view, it was firmly fixed
on a street corner, on a train platform, or at a boat harbor, witnessing
the constant flow of arrivals and departures, tourists and locals, lei-
sure and work rhythms. 58 The cinématographe presented viewers with
far-­flung touristic destinations. It also encouraged them to reimagine
the domestic as foreign. Films made abroad were frequently screened
in Paris or Lyon, but they could also surface as part of a Lumière
program in an entirely different city on the Lumières’ international
map. 59 The cinématographe transformed the world on-­screen into one
of seemingly endless geographic permutations.
The most popular themes in the Lumière collection—­arrivals, de-
partures, street scenes, panoramas, and processions—­also traveled.60
The repetition of visual categories and compositions across radi-
cally different parts of the world balanced the infinite difference of
global exploration with a structure of the same. The operator expedi-
tions guaranteed the global simultaneity of cinema’s arrival and pro-
duced a collection of urban spaces and urbanized happenings from
(approximately) the same historical moment. For example, between
1896 and 1903, operators filmed nearly the same “arriving train” vue
 Of Other Archives 65

in La Ciotat (France), New York City, Melbourne, Cairo, Kingstown

(Ireland), Nagoya (Japan), and Jaffa (present-­day Tel Aviv). These
visual repetitions affirmed the “sameness” of life elsewhere, or per-
haps the equivalent strangeness, as cities across the globe digested
new forms of technology and travel and the Lumière brothers syn-
chronized their appearances on-­screen.
The excursive collections from Egypt and Tunisia repeat with sig-
nificant differences, divided from the standard scenes of urban life
by far more than their natural separations in space and across time.
Indeed, they shift from the city to the body, from dense perspec-
tives to thin surfaces, from precise military processions to the crush
of a disordered crowd. These films were made by Alexandre Promio,
one of the first and most traveled Lumière operators. At the time of
his expeditions, Egypt was a British colony and Tunisia was under
French control; the capital cities of Cairo and Tunis had been shaped
by European architecture and infrastructure. Promio nevertheless
trained his lens on the outskirts of the colonies and constructed
fantastic Orientalist tableaux. In his films, the streets of Cairo are
made of dirt rather than concrete. Tunisians are always barefooted
and robed. Camels cross the frame more frequently than carriages.
Beyond this approach to mise-­en-­scène, Promio filmed the streets of
Egypt and Tunisia much like the Ashanti series: frontally and without
attempting to deepen the visual field. He also positioned his camera
in the middle of busy pathways, a fixed entity among the endless flow
of bodies, objects, and animals. In Rue El-­Halfaouine (Tunisia, 1896)
and Rue Sharia-­el-­Nahassine (Egypt, 1897), for example, Promio
placed the camera in the center of the streets, facing the action of
oncoming foot traffic. Not only does this particular position flatten
the frame and its visual contents; it also creates multiple visual ob-
structions. Individuals and animals emerge out of and disappear into
the camera. Bodies fragment into parts or abstract into a surface of
skin or cloth. In Rue Sharia-­el-­Nahassine, the camera sits beneath an
awning or canopy, eerily transforming passersby into shadows before
the figures disappear altogether.
The placement and proximity of the cinématographe also draws at-
tention to the curious machine and the operator in everyone’s way.
Many films among the Egyptian and Tunisian collections capture
little more than the exchange between subjects and camera. Among
 66 Of Other Archives

them is Un enterrement (Egypt, 1897), a film that opens onto the on-
coming crush of a funeral procession. In the distance, a spire wrapped
in cloth extends above the crowd, marking (one presumes) the casket
in the crowd. Like so much ethnographic cinema to come, Un enterre-
ment promises to penetrate the surface of the everyday and reach the
exceptional interiors of ritual and religious gesture. It also circum-
scribes the exotic image with death. However, the scene is obscured
too soon to read the ritual, orient oneself in space, or catch a glimpse
of the dead. As the spire approaches, a series of faces move into the
frame in extreme close-­up. They press against the camera and block
our view of the crowd and the casket (Figure 2). Each passing face
returns our look and disrupts our desire to see. These looks are more
than faces and flesh, more than eyes that join our own. These are the
objects of our gaze that make objects out of us. They alert us to our
own visibility and that of our visible-­presence-­by-­proxy, Alexandre
Promio. While the Lumières famously welcomed the attention of
passersby, these familiar glances are peripheral in the domestic canon.
Onlookers gather at the edges of the frame, but the camera focuses
away from these engagements, beyond them, and the composition
guides our vision toward another subject. More important, perhaps,
the camera stays out of the streets.
For some, these obstructions typify the hazards of single-­shot
filmmaking. Images can be disrupted, undone, or redirected. A
scene of daily life can become a vibrating field of partial forms, and
a monument can collapse into a tense exchange of gazes. These are
the “primitive” manifestations of a too-­early cinema, unable to pause,
rewind, undo. And I agree. The unexpected events and visual failures
that litter the excursive collection are born of the very particular limi-
tations of the single-­shot form. But these films also actively court con-
tingencies. The returned gaze only confirms the disorienting presence
of Promio in the streets, disrupting the city’s daily traffic, trying to get
close. Indeed, these films reflect a compulsion toward proximity and
immediacy. They turn away from urban geography and engage the
body, its physicality and force, the minutiae of its movements, and the
surface of its skin. We lose visual coherence for abstraction; we lose
the body for parts; and we lose the long shot for the extreme close-
­up. This visual surplus communicates a kind of no-­place-­and-­time, a
flattened surface of unreadable texture that intersects with the visual
 Of Other Archives 67

FIGURE 2
The crush of a procession in Un enterrement (Alexandre Promio, Cairo, 1897). Catalog
Lumière no. 369.

approach that Laura Marks describes as “haptic.” She writes, “Optical

visuality depends on a separation between the viewing subject and
the object. Haptic looking tends to move over the surface of its ob-
ject rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish
form so much as to discern texture. It is more inclined to move than
to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze.”61
The haptic image gets close and makes contact, but it also lacks
meaning-­bearing bodies and forms. As viewers, we don’t know where
or why to look, or what meets our gaze when we do. The haptic image
reflects a kind of physical desire for the body-­as-­object that paradoxi-
cally destabilizes viewing relations and refuses visual knowledge.
 68 Of Other Archives

Alison Griffiths locates a similar form of visuality in the ethno-

graphic films from Alfred Cort Haddon’s Australian expedition to
the Torres Strait in 1898: bodies fragment into parts, confront the
lens, and dance out of frame. She writes, “Looking at Haddon’s film of
the Malu-­Bomai ceremony, one is struck by the tactile quality of the
cinematic image, the way in which the flat spatial composition and
surface textures of the image seem to drift out.”62 For Griffiths, the
unbound tactility of Haddon’s cinema undermined the visual posi-
tivism of turn-­of-­the-­century ethnographic knowledge, threatening
science with sensorial dreamscapes. In these images, the performers
“come across as individuals with subjectivities and cultural identities
rather than objects reified by the dehumanizing gaze of the ethno-
graphic sideshow.”63
Marks and Griffiths understand the effects of the haptic image in
slightly different ways (a contradiction that betrays the ambiguity of
the concept). For Marks, the haptic renders the body a physical thing,
more material than the objects of optical inspection; it is a thin tex-
ture, a surface without depth, impenetrable and resistant to visual ap-
propriation. For Griffiths, the mobile bodies of early cinema oscillate
between two and three dimensions, communicating the dynamism
and autonomy of human subjectivity. Like the Village Ashanti series,
the haptic image overwhelms us with sensory detail, with subjects
that refuse to stand in place and be scrutinized. We need not choose
between interpretations, as Promio’s excursive films pivot between
haptic expressions. Bodies become illegible surfaces, pressed against
the lens. And subjects confront our gaze and drift into our space,
registering their physicality and human dimension. The impreci-
sion of the haptic image speaks to a shared fumbling for a concept
that captures an alternative to regimes of scopic power. In the context
of Lumière, the haptic image also forcefully disrupts the repetition
of the same, as well as the seeming homogeneity of the early archive,
equally threatened by contingency across its single shots. These im-
ages testify to a distinct way of seeing and signifying the unfamiliar,
an approach that lunges and tries to touch, that forgoes visual coher-
ence for physical proximity, and accepts absence and excess in the
exchange.
I would like to consider a final touch (grab, slap) and canonical
countersite before shifting to the visual and geographic departures
 Of Other Archives 69

that define the Archives de la Planète. While all of the excursive films
that I have discussed thus far disrupt the repetition of the same (e.g.,
attraction, urban tourism, optic visuality), a single-­shot sliver from
Gabriel Veyre’s expedition to Mexico repeats one of the most iconic
films in the Lumière collection, not only overturning a way of seeing
and filming but directly addressing and critiquing one of the founda-
tional mythologies of the Lumière archive.
Veyre traveled to Mexico City from New York on July 24, 1896,
accompanied by Claudio Fernando Bon Bernard, director of Lumière
operations in Mexico, Venezuela, Guyana, and the West Indies.64 Ac-
cording to historian John Fullerton’s account of their trip, the pair
spent the month of August introducing the cinématographe to a
small and privileged circle, including expatriates living in Mexico’s
French colony and the elite strata who were literate and able to ac-
cess the country’s daily press.65 On August 21, L’Echo du Mexique an-
nounced a program of Lumière films and encouraged its French read-
ers “to patronize the invention of their celebrated compatriot from
Lyon.”66 Two days later, Veyre and Bernard screened a series of vues
in the home of President Porfirio Díaz. Thereafter, Fullerton notes,
“a series of weekly gala presentations was introduced with an admis-
sion charge of one peso. Such rates for admission were high, compa-
rable to a seat in the shade in Mexico City’s bullring or in the stalls of
Teatro Arbeau.”67 On September 6, Veyre shot Repas d’Indiens. A few
days after it was made, the film was exhibited during one of the gala
presentations.
Repas d’Indiens presents a group of Native American men, women,
and children, cross-­legged on an earthen floor. They wear wide-­
brimmed hats that cast shadows across their faces. Plates of food are
positioned in front of them. A crowd of men in European-­style dress
stands and sits behind them. Those gathered on the ground look away
from the camera, out of frame or toward their meals. Some eat. An
onlooker in the far left corner of the frame throws food at the children
who gather in the center, disrupting the composition and blocking the
view. Just before the film concludes, Bernard stands and grabs the face
of a woman, displaying it for the camera. Others join in, grabbing the
hats of those beside her, exposing their faces to the cinématographe.
Time runs out, and the film freezes these violent gestures: hands on
heads, faces pulled back, expressions of shock or pain (Figure 3). On
 70 Of Other Archives

FIGURE 3
Claudio Fernando Bon Bernard grabs the face of a woman eating in Repas d’Indiens
(Gabriel Veyre, Mexico, 1896). Catalog Lumière no. 351.

the eve of the film’s French debut in February 1897, the Lyon répub-
licain printed a description of the film that indirectly acknowledges
the community’s refusal to engage the camera. The announcement re-
casts this feature of the film as a rare glimpse of life caught unawares:
“It is to an Indian shanty that the cinématographe first leads us. We are
shown a very unique meal without the Indians noticing the indiscrete
lens.”68
More than any other Lumière film, Repas d’Indiens hinges upon
the representation of authority and resistance, a kind of visual call-­
and-­response that triangulates among the spectators in the frame,
the Indians on the floor, and the camera. The film mirrors the mise-­
en-­scène of the Village Ashanti series and, as the catalog description
 Of Other Archives 71

seems to insist, is equally coded as spectacle. The seated subjects cre-

ate a semicircular “performance” space in the foreground of the image,
but this space remains empty, and the subjects refuse to perform. Like
the Ashanti films, Repas d’Indiens oscillates between movement and
stillness, the cinematic and the photographic. The erratic gestures of
the crowd collide with subjects that mimic the immobility of a pho-
tographic portrait.
But the significance of this film expands beyond its internal ten-
sions. Repas d’Indiens explicitly references a tradition of “family meal”
films that began on March 22, 1895, when Louis Lumière filmed Repas
de bébé. The latter film features Auguste Lumière, his wife, Marguerite,
and their young daughter Andrée, all gathered around a lunch table
at the Lumière studio in Lyon. Auguste feeds Andrée, his wife sips
tea, and both fawn over their young child. In subsequent years, the
Lumière children (and pets) starred in a number of cloying depictions
of daily life in the film family, including Repas en famille (1896), Repas
des chats (1896), Enfants aux jouets (1897), Le goûter des bébés (1897),
and Déjeuner des deux bébés et du minet (1898). Subtle variations dis-
tinguish these films—­adults feed babies, babies feed pets, babies feed
each other—­but everyone eats without being forced. The Lumière
family films are copies of the original meal, “well-­founded pretenders,
guaranteed by resemblance.”69 They make a good-­faith effort to adhere
to the genre and complete the re-­presentation.
Repas d’Indiens digresses and swerves. It supplies an errant copy
or simulacrum, “built upon dissimilarity, implying an essential per-
version or deviation.” 70 While the simulacrum is born of an original
(idea or image), it fails to repeat or remain faithful. The simulacrum
becomes something else, something perverse. It upends the original,
distorting and disturbing its contents. Where once a happy baby in
a white frock was encouraged by her parents to eat lunch in the cool
breezes of a European afternoon, a group of adults and children are
flanked by an aggressive crowd and almost force-­fed their meals.
The simulacrum mutates the encouragement of loving parents into
the monstrous aggressions of the leisure class. Reframed in this way,
there are “good, unifying” reasons to deny that these differences exist,
to impose a limit and enforce similarity, or to tuck these images away
in the endless depths of an archive. The simulacrum bears a family
resemblance. It directly addresses the model and its copies, maintains
 72 Of Other Archives

contact, remains tied. The simulacrum threatens the correspondences

between them and the stability of the whole. Once a film like Repas
d’Indiens slips to the surface, it inserts itself between every variation
of model and copy, disturbing the serenity of baby’s first (second,
third) meal with the ethnographic underbelly of the bourgeois every-
day. It also disturbs the coherence of the entire archive. The images
that rise from the depths do not fill in or make whole but deviate and
disassemble. What other vues depart from the same in search of dif-
ference? What images remain to be overturned that will overturn us
in turn?
Setting aside the ways in which Repas d’Indiens troubles and trans-
forms our contemporary conception of the Lumière archive and
its canonical scenes of daily life, this film invites a number of (per-
haps unanswerable) questions about the fleeting historical moment
in which French citizens and Mexico’s privileged class gathered
to watch a program of Lumière vues. Repas de bébé was screened at
nearly every gala presentation in Mexico, along with other family
films, such as Repas en famille, Scène d’enfants (1896), and Baignade
en mer (1896). What did spectators see in these images? What kinds
of messages did they receive? Remarkably, on August 23, 1896—­t wo
weeks before the local premiere of Repas d’Indiens—­one of Mexico
City’s papers, El Mundo Ilustrado, transformed Repas de bébé into an
expansive set of “pruebas sucesivas” (successive frames or proofs).71
Fifty-­five images of the Lumière family spilled across the newspaper’s
pages, re-­creating the successive still motion of chronophotography
and drawing readers’ attention to the photographic base of the ciné-
matographe. Fullerton reads this extraordinary newspaper feature as
part of a broader cultural fascination with the shared vocabularies
and boundaries between film and nineteenth-­century forms of visual
representation. This obsessive deconstruction of the Lumière family
film likewise seems to suggest not only that Repas de bébé was familiar
to the literate Mexican public who attended these events from August
to December but also that the film operated as a kind of privileged
model, an arche-­cinema, against which all other Lumière vues would
be judged. The gala exhibitions seemingly invited spectators, however
briefly, to compare models, copies, and simulacra. One must wonder,
then, whether this local program occasionally pushed against the
pleasures of new machines and arriving trains, discomforting specta-
 Of Other Archives 73

tors as the evening’s images shifted from familiar scenes of domestic

stability to the violence of its cracked reflection.

Inverted Worlds, Itinerant Ontologies

Thus far, I have extracted several sites of departure and visual excur-
sion from the Lumière archive. These sites contest the popular my-
thologies that circumscribe the Maison Lumière as well as the con-
cepts of attraction and repetition that dominate Lumière debates
in early film studies. More importantly, these sites overturn several
prevailing theories of the archive, including the Foucauldian frame-
work, which privileges the hegemony of discursive authority (before
Foucault adjusts his view in “Of Other Spaces”), and the Derridean
framework, which equates the archive with the indiscriminate mal of
state power. The ethnographic images that circulate in the Lumière
archive at once make these expressions of authority visible and coun-
ter them with an unstructured system of visible differences.
In the Archives de la Planète, our attention shifts from the center to
the periphery, from the canon of film history to the margins of early
film practice. At this remove, the stakes change. The Kahn archive
does not overturn any mythologies or destabilize a vast and canoni-
cal literature. It simply has not been circumscribed by discourse in
quite the same way. From this peripheral position, the Archives de la
Planète refashions the concept of the archive, along with the practice
of both photography and cinema. A new dividing line emerges here,
one that separates major cinema from a minor photo-­fi lm venture on
the outskirts of Paris.
Before transitioning to consider the images that emerge at the his-
torical margins, I would like to offer a few brief notes on the contem-
porary Kahn archive and the conspicuous absence of its images in the
pages that follow.
I began conducting research at the Musée Albert-­K ahn in 2007,
when I was a graduate student just beginning to write my disserta-
tion. I made my final visit in 2014, when I was preparing the manu-
script for this book. When I contacted the archive at the start of 2015
to secure image permissions, I was informed that the archive had
temporarily suspended the issuance of commercial licenses. A major
renovation of the museum, its grounds, and its digital collection was
 74 Of Other Archives

under way (and had been since 2013). I inquired again in fall 2015,
and still, no licenses could be granted. I tried again in spring 2016.
I made my last effort in 2018. The renovation project continues, and
there is (or was, at the time of publication) no estimated date at which
the archive expects to resume granting commercial licenses for image
reproduction.
The contingencies of archival circulation and the absences in our
understanding of these institutions are among this chapter’s central
concerns. It is fitting, then, that these concerns should materialize
so concretely at the very site of their articulation. That Albert Kahn
himself envisioned the Archives de la Planète as an archive for the
future, as an archive open and accessible to future audiences, even as
he limited access to the archive during his lifetime, reminds us of pre-
cisely the discursive forms of power that obtain in any/every archive.
It is a future of the archive forever deferred. After all, even if I had
been granted permission to reproduce images from the archive, those
permissions would have been narrowly restricted. Many of the im-
ages to which I refer in this chapter—­especially the images of young
girls photographed by Léon Busy—­were noncirculating even before
renovations began. No rights to reproduction would ever have been
granted.
In preparing this manuscript, I considered a series of potential
provocations—­hand-­drawn renderings of the photographs, photo-
graphs of photographs, empty frames—­that would have liberated the
images from the archive or, at least, underscored their absence. In the
end, I settled on this explanatory interruption. In what follows, I in-
clude catalog numbers of the autochrome images whenever possible
and as much identifying information as I can for the film footage.
Anyone who visits the archive should be able to locate these materials
in the Fonds Albert-­K ahn Informatisé pour la Recherche (FAKIR)
research system, and I hope that the new digital platform will make
more of the autochrome images and film footage available to a public
who cannot travel to the archive. Until then, some of these images cir-
culate online, either through the vestiges of the Musée Albert-­K ahn’s
interactive “mappemonde” or via other unauthorized venues.
In March 2015, I received an anonymous email from what ap-
peared to be a disposable email account: the address was a series of
numbers, and the domain did not seem to exist. The email included
 Of Other Archives 75

no message at all, but attached, I found a single, high-­resolution image

from the Archives de la Planète, an image of a young Dutch woman
titled Jeune fille en costume traditionnel (Stéphane Passet, August 31,
1929, inv. A 61910). In the image, the woman stands in front of some
kind of patterned textile, one arm on a chair, the other draped across
her waist. Bits of sunlight illuminate the bright whites of her intricate
lace headdress and the cloth around her neck, but her face, arms, and
torso are dark with shadows. She stares at the camera, at the viewer,
but you cannot really see her face. Although I had never written about
the image, or requested permission to reproduce it, I had lingered
over it on several occasions during my final trip to the archive. How
had this woman found me? I wanted to include her here, at the very
start of the book or this first chapter, the ghost in the archival ma-
chine, the patron saint of minoration, the one who appears and yet
still recedes from view. Alas, I know where she belongs, even if I don’t
know where she came from.

In November 1908, Albert Kahn undertook what he called a “vaste

enquête de réalités,” the first stage in developing the Archives de la
Planète.72 Kahn held a distinctly utopian view about just what this
archive might mean. He believed in the transformative effects of
visual experiences, and he described global travel as an occasion
to “enter into sympathetic communication with the ideas, feelings,
and, in short, the lives of different people.” 73 Joined by his chauffeur,
Albert Dutertre, Kahn visited the United States, Japan, China, Sri
Lanka, Egypt, and Italy before returning to France on March 11,
1909.74 Kahn outfitted Dutertre with an array of visual equipment.
Remarkably, it fell to the chauffeur to record the “realities” of their
trip. Dutertre dutifully produced stereoscopic images, short films,
and sound recordings (from a recording phonograph and cylinders he
carried in his luggage). He also kept a detailed journal of his travels with
Kahn and the images that he produced along the way. Though his ef-
forts were met with inconsistent success—­K ahn allowed Dutertre
only three months of practice before their departure—­this collec-
tion of images and sounds combined to form the first contribution to
Kahn’s global archive.
Dutertre’s foundational role in the archive underscores Kahn’s
unusual approach to visual technology and epistemologies of vision.
 76 Of Other Archives

Dutertre made no claims to professional training or scientific objec-

tivity. His perspective was that of the amateur: an unguided, personal
communion with the places and lives he encountered. Amateurs con-
tinued to circulate in the Archives de la Planète well after this initial
excursion. Kahn’s Autour du Monde scholarship fund awarded fifteen
thousand francs to male graduates from France’s most elite universi-
ties; each year, the boursiers (scholarship winners) joined the Kahn
operators in gathering photographs and films for the Archives de la
Planète.75 When an anxious young boursier named James Dickinson
asked Kahn to clarify precisely what would be expected of him, Kahn
replied, “All I want you to do is keep your eyes open.”76 Anyone could
contribute to the project so long as he had eyes to see the world. In a
letter to one of France’s education administrators, Louis Liard, Kahn
further explains the collective and collaborative ends that the fund
was meant to serve: “I hope that from this large inquest, renewed year
after year, one will begin to see some very general ideas emerge, capa-
ble of usefully influencing the direction of our country’s activities.” 77
And yet, the inclusion of these uninstructed young amateurs, eyes
open everywhere they went, stands in distinct opposition to Kahn’s
vision of a unified totality or a structure of general patterns. Each
operator introduces distinct visual patterns and the contingencies
of their unstructured paths. Kahn’s methodology of any-­operator-­
whatever collides with the any-­image-­whatever of mechanical repro-
duction, opening onto a field of infinite variation.
Concrete preparations for the Archives de la Planète began upon
Kahn’s return from his excursion with Dutertre. In 1912, Kahn hired
the human geographer Jean Brunhes as the director of the archive.
Brunhes had traveled extensively and had recently published the first
volume of the Atlas photographique des formes du relief terrestre, a ste-
reoscopic study of the earth’s surfaces, and La Géographie humaine:
Essai de classification positives, an introduction to the burgeoning disci-
pline of human geography.78 The latter text positions the discipline at
the intersection of the natural world and human activity, a seemingly
boundless domain that overlaps with the imprecise and expansive
reach of the Archives de la Planète.
Brunhes’s research also privileges the power of vision and visible
evidence.79 In a remarkable 1911 review of Géographie humaine, Mark
Jefferson at once summarizes Brunhes and mimics Albert Kahn: “The
 Of Other Archives 77

spirit of geography indeed is to get one’s eyes open and learn to see.”80
In conjunction with his position at the archive, Brunhes served as the
chair of human geography at the Collège de France. Kahn funded
this position as a way of securing the scientific credentials of the
Archives de la Planète and establishing a route of exchange between
the archive and the academic community in France.81 As director of
the archive, Brunhes’s responsibilities included hiring and training
operators, developing an archival method, and maintaining the col-
lection of photographs and films.82 The fiercely private Kahn quickly
receded from the managerial fore.83 Brunhes took over most of the
duties related to the Archives de la Planète, while Kahn guaranteed
its financial support.
The discipline of human geography developed alongside the late
nineteenth-­century expansion of the second French colonial empire
and in the aftermath of the country’s crushing defeat in the Franco-­
Prussian War; both historical strands encouraged the discipline’s
impulse to map, measure, and catalog the world and invigorated its
interest in the land, national boundaries, and human culture.84 Paul
Vidal de La Blache founded the French school of human geography;
Brunhes was one of his students. In his seminal Atlas, first published
in 1894, Vidal frames the discipline as an integration of the physi-
cal and social sciences. Indeed, he argues that “the political map of
the country to be studied is accompanied by a physical map; they
throw light upon each other.”85 Both Vidal and Brunhes studied the
mutual exchange between the physical world and its human inhabi­
tants. They examined the modes of human life that develop out of and
in relationship to a particular terrain as well as the impressions that
human culture leaves upon the earth. In defining this new field of re-
search, Brunhes stresses the spatial figures that inhabit human geog-
raphy and the privilege that the discipline assigns to regimes of visual
knowledge. He invites his readers to “cast a general glance over the
earth” and “see a whole new and very extensive series of surface phe-
nomena,” which include cities, railroads, cultivated fields, quarries,
and irrigating canals, to name just a few examples. Brunhes describes
the earth as a “harmonious whole” or “terrestrial unity,” comprising
visible surfaces, layers, slices, and crusts.86 Furthermore, he refers to
human beings as “surface facts,” situated between the ground and
the atmosphere: “As for human beings, . . . they express in the highest
 78 Of Other Archives

degree that imperious localization of life within two thin, concentric

slices—­a slice of rock or water and a slice of atmosphere—­portions
of the universe extremely small in comparison with the earth, and
smaller still in comparison with known space, but portions favored
above all others.”87
Human geography flattens the density of the earth into a unified
visible surface. Its objects of study—­whether the signs of human
activity or groups of actual human beings—­appear equally two-­
dimensional, suspended upon or between geographic layers. This
conception of the earth as a composite of visible strata not only fore-
grounds a methodology of visual encounter (i.e., the human geog-
rapher glances over the earth and sees its surface phenomena) but
also appoints the human geographer to the unique perspective of
the aerial view.88 Brunhes writes, “Suppose we rise in a balloon or an
aeroplane some hundreds of yards above the ground, . . . and, with
our minds freed of all that we know of men, let us try to see and note
the essential facts of human geography. . . . From such a supposed ob-
servatory, what is it we see? Or, better still, what are the human facts
that a photographic plate would register just as well as the retina of
the eye?”89 For Brunhes, the aerial view was more than a mental ex-
ercise or a “supposed observatory.” An actual aerial photograph of
the Limmat River and the city of Zurich accompanies this passage.
Brunhes scattered aerial images throughout the Géographie humaine
and experimented with the technique in his management of the
Archives de la Planète. The aerial view lifted the observer above and
beyond the earth, producing the ideal perspective from which to see
those thin, overlapping layers down below.
But the aerial perspective also stands in metaphoric relation to the
broader aims of the discipline. The aerial view purifies the mind of the
observer and unifies the geographic surface. In turn, it detaches both
from the entanglements of other disciplinary formations. Human ge-
ography inspects the totality and the whole, “the main features and
large masses.”90 The discipline interrogates systems of relation and
interaction, turning away from the microperspectives and rigid tax-
onomies of zoology and botany.
The emphasis that Brunhes places on visibility and presence, em-
bodied by the figure of the aerial view, also defines human geography
against neighboring fields in historical studies. Rather than plumbing
 Of Other Archives 79

the depths of past time, human geographers observe the present sur-
face. Instead of digging through the archives, geographers scan the
earth’s crust and construct an archive of their own. In championing
fieldwork and direct observation, human geographers nevertheless
align themselves, perhaps unintentionally, with at least one turn-­of-­
the-­century field: anthropology.
Brunhes’s description of the aerial view also conflates physical dis-
tance with visual objectivity. The hot air balloon or airplane lifts the
observer outside of himself, beyond the subjective surface, toward the
Archimedean point. As we rise above the earth with Brunhes, becom-
ing ever more able to see the facts of human geography, we reach great
heights of detachment. The farther we travel, the less we belong to
the “surface facts” of other human beings. But even if we make the
journey—­reorienting ourselves in space—­another bodily adjustment
might still be in order: Brunhes suggests we swap human vision al-
together for the photographic camera. This machine of mechanical
reproduction, in his view, improves upon the machines of mechani-
cal flight, increasing the distance between the human geographer and
his object(s) of study. While the photographic plate registers “just as
well” as our retinas, Brunhes prefers the visual object (“better still”)
to the supposed objectivity of human sight, a point upon which he
and Vidal part ways.91 For Brunhes, geographable facts were visible,
superficial, and eminently photographable. At the time of his appoint-
ment to the Archives de la Planète, Brunhes was a well-­k nown enthu-
siast of visual technologies, and he supported the use of photographic
images as disciplinary tools.92 Photography not only improved upon
the imprecision of human vision but also preserved the surface for
future study and compensated for the failures of present knowledge:
“The photographic negative would record [the marks of human toil],
even when we remained unaware of the effects that brought them
about.”93
Shortly after Brunhes accepted the directorship of the Archives
de la Planète, Albert Kahn wrote and explained his expectations for
the project. The letter reiterates the principles of human geography,
save one minor adjustment: Kahn replaces the natural region with the
national territory. He writes, “We must try to render an exact account
of the role that diverse nations play on the surface of the globe, deter-
mine their diverse aspirations, and see where these aspirations lead
 80 Of Other Archives

them.”94 Like Brunhes, Kahn conceptualizes the planet as a record-

able, archivable surface. Traces of human activity and interaction are
left upon that surface, visible to any observer who goes in search of
them. Kahn’s letter also implies that this process of observation will
occur over time, a suggestion that counters the tidy demands of sal-
vage ethnography to fix the earth and its inhabitants “once and for all”
before time obliterates their traces. Rather than protecting the world
against time and removing it from time, Kahn proposes a process of
continuously unfolding observation. Brunhes overlaps with Kahn
here, too. Central to the study of geographical facts is the “principle of
activity,” which Brunhes defines: “Everything about us is under­going
transformation; everything is increasing or diminishing. Nothing is
really motionless or unchanging.”95 While geographers may depart
from historical methodologies to scan the present, visible surface of
the earth, that surface gives way to a complex temporal depth that
both extends backward in time and opens, in perpetuity, onto the
future. Considered within the context of these shared frameworks,
the Archives de la Planète is designed to preserve the instant, as well
as movements, duration, and change. The archive also expands, in-
finitely, in two directions. The limitlessness of surfaces (i.e., visible
subjects) joins the boundlessness of time.
In contradistinction to the Maison Lumière, whose fraternal found-
ers become a single and stable entity in mythologies of early film
history, the Archives de la Planète is fractured from the very start,
a creaking, heaving assemblage of competing impulses, ideological
frameworks, and disciplinary commitments. This archive is not only
torn between Kahn and Brunhes but divides along manifold fissures:
the amateur and the human geographer; the individual path and the
collective pattern; the utopian imagination and positivist science; the
visual surface and temporal depth; the natural world and the political
domain.
Paula Amad gathers many of these divisions beneath the umbrella
of the “counter-­archive,” an elastic concept that “collapses two terms,
the archive and its contradictions, in order to connote two directions
in the archival conceptualization of film that form an underlying
struggle in the Kahn Archive and film in general.”96 Amad grounds
the concept of the counter-­a rchive in the moving image, namely,
those aspects of film that held out the promise of positivist histories,
 Of Other Archives 81

objectivity, and order, only to then counter that promise with the an-
archic disorder of mechanical reproduction. In other words, Amad
reconceptualizes the archive qua film archive. The counterforces of
the Archives de la Planète, she argues, emanate from its moving im-
ages, from all moving images. The Kahn archive is just an example of
a larger film phenomenon, and cinema is the origin of a new, counter-­
archival order.
The concept of the counter-­archive is a diagnosis of the Archives
de la Planète. It explains both the archive’s internal divisions and its
departures from other, precinematic archival structures. However, as
I have noted, this diagnosis overlooks the division and interaction be-
tween photography and film. Amad reconceives the archive as a col-
lection of contradictions and opposing energies but, in so doing, estab-
lishes a solid ground, an origin called “film” where none really exists.
Moreover, in developing a concept of the archive that reliably accom-
modates its opposition and subversion, Amad produces yet another
set of blind spots. Her reading of the Archives de la Planète excludes
the possibility of the antiarchival or nonsensical image, that line of
force that radically refuses, transgresses, or subverts both the naive
positivism that motivated the development of the Kahn archive and
the binaristic logic of the counter-­archive. Put differently, the tools
that Amad offers for understanding archival instability are too blunt;
they do not allow us to see or read the abundant “counter”-­images,
which I will soon examine, that gather in the Archives de la Planète
and cannot be recuperated by the explanatory force of film.
In my own reading of the Archives de la Planète, neither film nor
photography forces a new conception of the archive, at least not in the
totalizing and radical way that Amad suggests. They are not causes or
catalysts, in part, because they do not consistently function as clear
ontological categories. They are fluid forms of visual representation
whose boundaries often blur. These ontological insecurities are symp-
toms of an archival rupture that originates in the ethnographic search
for “diverse nations” and signs of difference.
Overlooking the blue forest of his Boulogne-­Billancourt estate, ad-
jacent to his family home, Albert Kahn constructed a laboratory for
the processing and storage of his autochrome and film collections. In
this building, a team of technicians organized the tens of thousands
of fragile autochrome plates that the operators produced during more
 82 Of Other Archives

than twenty years of archival expedition. On the bottom floor, book-

cases spanned floor to ceiling in a large, open room. Each shelf con-
tained a row of wooden boxes with a dozen autochromes or so stag-
gered inside. A handwritten label was pasted to the front of each box:
“Europe,” “Chine,” “Japon,” “Afrique,” and so on. Until very recently,
researchers who visited the Musée Albert-­K ahn worked in this room,
surrounded by boxes of countries and continents. The sheer material-
ity of this architecture forcefully suggests a way of seeing and reading
the archive. It insists on the security of cultural and political bound-
aries as well as the shared properties of place. It also establishes a
surface of visual equivalences. All of the boxes look exactly the same.
With each autochrome doubly enclosed (in a box and on a bookshelf),
the system discourages comparison and cross-­referencing, not to
mention alternative forms of organization. The images belong to their
boxes, and viewers should find meaningful points of contact close by.
While the autochromes have since been moved, the museum has been
careful to maintain this original taxonomy in its digital restoration
and reorganization of the Archives de la Planète. Both the FAKIR re-
search system and the museum website distribute the autochromes
geographically.97 Contemporary viewers must navigate a world map
to browse the collection. Virtual borders eliminate the need for actual
boxes, but place continues to order the archive.
When one surveys the autochrome collection, sifting country by
country through the archive, patterns begin to materialize that dis-
close distinct ways of photographing and filming the world. A pat-
tern of exclusion structures the domestic autochromes, a collection
that includes images of the capital and other French cities, Kahn’s
Boulogne-­Billancourt estate, and the French countryside. These pho-
tographs rarely contain human subjects. They are strange, unpopu-
lated images whose contents and compositions only accentuate their
conspicuous absences. For example, Le salon de la société Autour du
Monde (unknown operator, May 1913, inv. A 197) offers a glimpse
of an empty room in the Kahn mansion. The image includes a large
stretch of the hardwood floors and rugs, the high ceilings and walls.
A row of windows faces the camera. Sunlight and shadows gather on
the ground. One can clearly see the bushes and trees outside, a living
abundance that only emphasizes those signs of life that are missing
indoors. In the background, a long table sits beneath one of the win-
 Of Other Archives 83

dows. Behind the table, a row of chairs secures this perspectival edge.
The title of the image refers to the international society of politicians,
scientists, entrepreneurs, writers, and artists who met at the estate
nearly every Sunday for discussions of cultural and current events
(and the occasional autochrome projection).98 This image neverthe-
less omits any signs of the social collective, save perhaps the empty
table and chairs. Indeed, one gets the distinct feeling of having ar-
rived too soon or too late to the event. Le salon de la société Autour du
Monde misses or mistakes its subject. It emphasizes lines and shapes,
an architectural form, over and above “modes of human activity.”
This erasure of human subjects inexplicably expands to the auto-
chromes of Paris. These are not images of the everyday, nor are they
images of a particular event in the city—­no people sitting in cafés
or brasseries; no couples or families in parks. The archive includes
almost no images that bring to mind the modern bustle of an early
twentieth-­century European metropolis. The autochromes of Paris
instead depict a vacant city made all the more strange by their utterly
modern and perfectly rendered color. La place de la Bourse, vue de la
rue Notre-­Dame-­des-­Victoires (Georges Chevalier, June 5, 1914, inv.
A 7557) and Le Moulin Rouge,  boulevard de Clichy (18°) (Stéphane
Passet, June–­July 1914, inv. A 7462) exemplify the visual practice.
Both images reflect the photographers’ attention to the spaces and
shapes of the city rather than its actions and events. In La place de la
Bourse, Chevalier captures the street-­side view of a newsstand, plas-
tered with brightly colored advertisements. Like Le salon de la société
Autour du Monde, the title fails to accurately describe the content of
the image. A thin vertical column—­part of the elaborate exterior of
the Bourse de Paris—­provides the only visual coordinate in a scene
otherwise devoted to a deserted scrap of the city. When one consid-
ers its title and just where in the city the photograph was taken, the
lack of human activity seems all the more peculiar. The Place de la
Bourse was the financial center of Paris, a site where bodies, capital,
and material goods were in continuous circulation. In this image,
however, we have a bourse, or stock exchange, without financiers
or businessmen; a newsstand without readers; and advertisements
without consumers. Le Moulin Rouge similarly evacuates one of the
most crowded sites in the city. The large red windmill dominates the
frame, and deep blue posters yell from both sides of the entrance:
 84 Of Other Archives

“moulin rouge—­l a revue, cache ton nu.” And yet, no one

lingers near the famous cabaret. No dancers make an appearance.
Passet foregrounds the broad street and sidewalk as they recede into
the distance, both empty. This autochrome transforms the Moulin
Rouge into an unusual object, an artifact simultaneously removed
from history and preserved against the passage of time. This image
also anticipates Frédéric Gadmer’s autochromes of the city’s maisons
closes (brothels), a series shot in October 1920. Gadmer titled each
image with an address (e.g., no. 54 rue Mazarine [inv. A 24092], nos.
3 et 5 rue des Quatre-­Vents [inv. A 24052], no. 122 rue de Provence [inv.
A 24068]) but included no other distinguishing marks in the actual
autochromes: no patrons on their way to or from the establishments;
no women in windows or doorways. As viewers, we can look for the
address and study the exterior (some ornate, others unassuming), but
we can never enter or see inside. And very often, we cannot tell which
building corresponds to the address we have been given.
Beyond the brothels and the Bourse, one finds a catalog of quaint
streets, colorful corners, and spectacular monuments, including the
Eiffel Tower, Place de la Concorde, Pont Neuf, and the Panthéon. All
of these autochromes are precisely composed and technically beau-
tiful. Taken together, they form a fantastic, posthuman, impossible
Paris. Rarely does the body in motion disrupt the still plasticity of
the city, nor do the realities of urban life intrude. This Paris con-
tains no signs of poverty or filth, no nude dancers or prostitutes. The
Moulin Rouge appears a family-­f riendly splash of reds and blues, and
the neighborhood brothels could be mistaken for hotels or store-
fronts. The autochromes renovate Paris, excise its human shapes,
and reconfigure its many wandering paths and winding streets into
sharp lines and neat rows. Shouts of color are the only signs of the
city’s dynamism and disarray. The autochromes fix a city that does
not exist, or to put it slightly differently, they fix fragments of the city:
its tangible materials, physical structures, and built environments. In
this way, the autochrome departs from the photographic processes
of automation and duplication, those essential ontological features
that, for Susan Sontag, “courted accidents, welcomed the uninvited,
flattered disorderly presences,” and drew the photographic image into
affinitive relationships with French surrealism.99
And what of those spaces outside the city? What do the auto-
 Of Other Archives 85

chromes capture of the country’s diverse rural regions? Here the

collection includes wide, yawning views of mountains, fields, rivers,
and seas. In Bretagne, Georges Chevalier photographed the beach of
Saint-­A nne and the island of Tomé. In Auvergne, August Léon vis-
ited the Lac de Guéry and the forest near Lorian. And in the Rhône-­
Alpes, Frédéric Gadmer captured the Aiguille des Grands Charmoz
at sunset, radiating orange and yellow. One might easily confuse the
granular texture of these colored landscapes for the strokes of a paint-
brush. Among the autochromes of the French countryside, one also
finds those sites of greatest concern to Jean Brunhes, where human
activity and the physical world converge in the cobbled streets of
small villages, in the distinct regional styles of churches and homes, in
ports, farms, vineyards, canals, bridges, and roads. Operators sampled
local architecture and infrastructure everywhere they went. But they
also kept their distance, photographing the “main features and large
masses,” whole structures and surfaces.100 The autochrome camera
rarely lingers on small details or leaves the street to cross a threshold.
In contrast with the images of the capital city, the archive of rural
France also includes portraits of local farmers and peasants. These
subjects pose outdoors for the camera in traditional dress, hold-
ing tools from the field, crops from their harvest, or other identify-
ing objects. In Geispolsheim, Bas-­R hin, 8 Décembre 1918 (Georges
Chevalier, inv. A 15221), two young Alsatian women face the camera.
One stands inside a cottage, her upper torso, face, and hands visible
through a window; another stands outside. The women wear the same
costume: a blue blouse, floral apron, and elaborate red bonnet.101 As
the title of the image suggests, these anonymous women represent
a particular time, place, and cultural practice. Like the houses or
churches of Alsace, they are regional “types,” evidence of the inter-
actions between humans and the land and, more recently, between
Germany and France. Although these portraits introduce the human
subject into circulation, they do not threaten the archive with move-
ment, contingency, or even subjectivity. The bodies in these portraits
are signs or “surface facts,” carefully costumed and composed in pic-
turesque tableaux of rural life and labor.
Finally, the domestic collection contains numerous aerial photo-
graphs of the cities, villages, and countryside. These views transform
the world into an abstract map of human progress that, Brunhes
 86 Of Other Archives

insists, we can read all the more clearly without the chaotic inter-
ruptions of actual human activity. Considered against the other
images from France, however, the aerial autochrome is not a visual
exception, a perspective that removes us from other ways of seeing
or thinking. Rather, the aerial view simply repeats the patterns that
unfold elsewhere in the archive’s images of France. For example, in
Panorama pris de la tour Eiffel en direction des Invalides (Stéphane
Passet, date unknown, inv. A 13803), a clear diagonal stretches from
the bottom left corner of the frame to the midpoint on the right side
of the image. Neat rows of buildings fill the upper left portion of the
image; green grass and trees bloom in the bottom right. An even sliver
of sky stretches across the upper edge, framing the contents below.
The golden dome of the Invalides lures the viewer. It breaks from the
buildings and pierces the sky, a small visual distraction. Below, the
gray of the city’s streets and buildings meets the green of the Champ
de Mars: two perfect, unpeopled visual halves, highlighted in blue.
The aerial view, like so many in the collection, adheres to a rigid visual
grammar of perspectival composition, clean lines, strong forms, and
repetition.
More importantly, Panorama pris de la tour Eiffel en direction des
Invalides neatly reveals the forms of national power and visual control
that structure the whole of the domestic collection. The title of the
image acknowledges the presence of a photographer, notes his pre-
cise location, and gestures toward the very act of “taking” a photo-
graph. The title also describes a particular line of sight. The image was
taken from the top of the Eiffel Tower, the most recent architectural
addition to the city’s skyline and an iconic embodiment of France’s
industrial and cultural strength.102 The photographer looks toward
the dome of the Invalides, where the remains of Napoleon were in-
terred in 1861. This gaze, from the tower to the dome, thereby extends
from the present of French industrial power to its past of military
and colonial force. A third site of French cultural history straddles
the distance between them and makes this perspective possible: the
photographic camera. From its great architectural heights, the aerial
view brings the power of the French state into sharp relief. It repre-
sents the Foucauldian principle of power—­that is, an automatic and
institutional “distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes”—­while
at the same time producing the panoptic effects of this distribution.103
 Of Other Archives 87

In other words, the aerial view makes the extraordinary power of the
state visible as it enacts those powers to scan the city and discipline its
image. While very few of the domestic images participate in this aerial
process of making visible, almost all of them bear the trace of a disci-
plinary gaze that imposes extraordinary institutional and visual con-
trol upon the domestic surface. In their startling visual similarities,
one can also detect the “homogeneous effects” of panoptic power.104
One might reasonably read the consistency and stasis of these
images as the necessary consequence of the autochrome process.105
After all, the colored glass plates took fifty times longer to expose than
monochrome photographs. Motion of any kind posed the risk of ruin-
ing the image with an indecipherable blur. Still, autochromic immobil-
ity does not extend across the entire archive. Before exploring these
visual counterpoints, I would like to consider the contribution that
35mm film makes to archiving an image of France.
As I have argued, the domestic autochromes share in a disciplin-
ary gaze that exiles the human subject, orders the visual surface, and
controls the contingencies of mechanical reproduction. The archive’s
moving images invert these visual and expressive structures, coun-
tering the absence of the subject with human presence, balancing the
rigidity and restraint of the photographs with movement and dyna-
mism. The footage from the Archives de la Planète is largely unedited.
The films contain very few titles of any kind, almost no signs of post-
production efforts to organize the reels. This unfinished quality fur-
ther distinguishes the films from the autochromes. The one is fluid,
open, and unformed; the other is sculptural, permanent, and fixed.
And yet, these moving and still images are separated most clearly by
their actual visual contents and their distinct relationships to histori-
cal time. The films index national and newsworthy events, including
state visits, inaugurations, celebrations, strikes, natural disasters, and
accidents. In this way, they keep time, preserve time, and offer it up to
the empty and atemporal surfaces of the autochrome images. For ex-
ample, a short film titled Paris: Inondations (Camille Sauvageot, 1924)
records the aftermath of heavy rains in late December, when the Seine
overflowed its banks. The film consists of a swift montage: several still
shots of flooded streets; multiple pans of the Seine’s rapid waters; trav-
eling shots of shops and homes taken from a boat; and a final still shot
of a father and son rowing past the camera. The speed with which this
 88 Of Other Archives

range of cinematographic and editing techniques emerges and dissi-

pates lends an additional layer of motion to an already active visual
content (flowing waters, bodies in boats). Inondations lasts a brief but
captivating three minutes. Another film, titled Mi-­Carême (Lucien
Le Saint and Camille Sauvageot, 1922), captures the annual parade
and celebrations in Paris during the third week of Lent, complete with
elaborate floats and masked participants. Like Inondations, the film
combines rapid cuts with a variety of camera movements. It opens
with steady medium shots of the parade, taken from the perspective
of the crowd at different heights, angles, and positions. The camera
then shifts its point of view and films the crowd, cheering and danc-
ing. Mi-­Carême concludes with a shot of several cameramen standing
on a raised platform as they film the parade.
Both films distill events from the city’s history into an energetic
handful of shots. The final image of Mi-­Carême—­multiple camera-
men, all filming the same parade—­explicitly ties the moving image
practices of the Archives de la Planète to the French newsreel tradi-
tion.106 Cameos from the major commercial companies are not un-
common in the Kahn archive, particularly in its collection of domes-
tic films. The development of the Archives de la Planète coincided
with the establishment of newsreel departments at Gaumont, Pathé,
Éclair, and Éclipse. One of Kahn’s principal cameramen, Lucien Le
Saint, worked for Gaumont newsreels before taking up the position
at the Archives de la Planète. Kahn’s own interest in mass media and
news communications exceeded photography and film. Each morn-
ing, he read multiple newspapers, clipping articles and headlines from
their pages. Kahn published these aggregations of the daily news in
the form of an annual “bulletin,” a kind of retrospective of the year’s
significant events.107 Between 1917 and 1931, Kahn distributed a total
of fourteen bulletins among the social and political circles that fre-
quented the Kahn estate. More pertinent to our understanding of the
moving images, Kahn’s daily ritual of reading the newspaper likely
determined the focus of the domestic films, especially those shot in
and around Paris. Kahn selected the most significant headlines and
told his cameramen where to go and what to film.108 While these mov-
ing images lack the structure and mass circulation of commercial
newsreels, they nevertheless participate in the practice of document-
ing current events and indexing historical time.
 Of Other Archives 89

Not all of the domestic films preserve events ripped from the head-
lines of the daily news. The collection also contains many reels of the
ordinary and the everyday. In Marseille, Camille Sauvageot trained
his camera on the city’s bustling street corners and port. Crowds
enter and exit the frame, a woman sells flowers, and fishermen unload
their catch from the boats. Sauvageot also visited the thermal springs
of Auvergne and captured throngs of tourists on the streets, as well
as couples dancing at an outdoor café. At the Jardin du Luxembourg,
Lucien Le Saint recorded children pushing their toy boats into the
Grand Bassin as onlookers stared directly into the camera. While
filming around the Boulogne-­Billancourt estate, Le Saint docu-
mented the arrival of Kahn’s guests, their leisurely post-lunch strolls
along the garden paths, and Kahn’s desperate attempts to evade the
cameras. And on the streets of Paris, an anonymous operator filmed
the negotiations between two soldiers and a prostitute on the thresh-
old of a maison close.109 Considered in sum, these films repopulate
the deserted landscapes of the autochrome photographs. They intro-
duce the actions and movements of human subjects to the stillness
of Le salon de la société Autour du Monde and the facades of the city’s
brothels. Without supplementary details, one may not know precisely
where or when these images were recorded, but one can easily recog-
nize the gestures and actions that unfold on-­screen. And while this
footage may not index national or newsworthy events, its engage-
ments with the rhythms of daily life contribute signs of past presence
and movement to the ahistorical autochrome.
For Paula Amad, these scenes exemplify “the raw, unarranged,
‘natural material’ of on-­the-­spot cinematic recordings as opposed to
the interpretive rearrangement” of visual materials by filmmakers in
the burgeoning documentary tradition.110 Amad argues that the Kahn
footage inherits and extends the Lumière practice of single-­shot, non-
narrative filmmaking. She further claims that these moving images
typify the predocumentary style that Tom Gunning terms the “aes-
thetic of the view.”111 This aesthetic inscribes the act of looking within
the visual field; that is, it takes the processes of seeing, observing, and
showing as its primary visual concern. In turn, it invites spectators to
partake in the simple pleasures of sight and the unstructured visual
consumption of the world. Open your eyes and enjoy what you see.
In this view, the Kahn footage privileges description and monstration
 90 Of Other Archives

above explanation or narration. The films are burdened only by the

imperative to see and to show. Their broad visual scope convenes the
significant events of state history alongside the small, stray moments
of daily life. The films deliver both ends of this historiographic spec-
trum in scrappy packages of unedited footage.
Understood in this way, the Kahn films inherit their open and
imprecise reach, along with their unfinished aesthetic, from the ori-
gins of cinema. These films lead us back to a historical starting point
and tell us something about the foundations of film and the ontology
of the moving image. They also go some way toward explaining the
counterforces at work in the moving image archive. Indeed, Amad
explains that the “cluttered frame of single-­shot actualities” and the
unfinished footage of the Archives de la Planète reflect the “excessive,
unordered, and non-­h ierarchical nature of the medium’s informa-
tion.”112 This reading conflates a particular formation of cinema (i.e.,
single-­shot actualities) with the ontology of cinema (i.e., the nature
of its information). It also presumes a stable site of instability called
“early cinema” or “Lumière.” As we have seen, however, not all ex-
cesses and disorders are the same, nor do they spread evenly across
the early archive.
The Kahn films suggest something about cinema itself, a medium
freed from both the plastic arts and photographic mummies. Read in
isolation, one can easily overestimate the contingencies of the mov-
ing image and the explanatory powers of visual ontologies. Read in
tandem, the photographs and films belong to a coherent structure,
one that separates the two media into distinct visual tasks. The pho-
tographs represent spaces and surfaces; they are sites of radical still-
ness, emptied of both historical and social signs. The films represent
time and history; they are records of significant events and the cy-
clical rhythms of daily life. Rarely does this boundary between pho-
tography and cinema collapse. At a first pass, there is nothing all that
remarkable about the distinction. Photography and film seem to
separate along ontological lines (e.g., stillness and movement, space
and time, control and contingency). However, this division is not the
necessary or natural outcome of distinct visual ontologies, even if we
could disentangle cinema from its photographic substrate. Their tidy
separation instead suggests a structure imposed from without. The
photographs may discipline the visual surface, and the moving im-
 Of Other Archives 91

ages may disorder it, but this compartmentalization of their respec-

tive functions demonstrates the panoptic regime that controls them
both. This order comes undone in the geographic shift from France
to other spaces.
In her study of ethnographic taxidermy, which I discuss at length
in chapter 3, Fatimah Tobing Rony describes the colonial autochromes
as lovely “snapshot jewels” whose “pale colors lend the images a
ghostly, precious air.”113 Rony reads the Kahn autochromes within
the traditions of salvage ethnography and the picturesque, both of
which claim to protect their subjects against the ravages of time while
simultaneously enveloping them, gauzelike, in death. These modes of
ethnographic practice ultimately protect the viewer from the auton-
omy of the subject by exiling these agents to the stillness of memory
and past time. These are ideological exertions and expressions of force
inscribed within turn-­of-­the-­century ethnographic discourse and, in
the case of the Archives de la Planète, upon the surface of the photo-
graphic image. Perhaps most intriguing, Rony’s description conflates
the autochrome-­as-­object—­that is, the physical qualities of the glass
plates—­w ith a set of ethnographic ends. In her reading, the pale and
precious materiality of the autochromes can only ever represent their
subjects as delicate decorations, always on the brink of collapse, if not
already dead.
One can gather ample evidence of these ethnographic traditions
from among the excursive autochromes, specifically in its expansive
catalog of portraits. In many ways, these images overlap with the por-
traits of rural French peasants, a site of contact that subtly implies
an internal division between the French capital and its countryside.
Here, too, one finds subjects in traditional dress, posed with their en-
tire bodies in full view. The images are always taken outdoors, a strat-
egy that binds the body to the earth, to the natural world, and imposes
a context against which that body (or that patch of land) must be read.
The titles of these photographs name ethnicities, geographic loca-
tions, and, in some instances, trades (e.g., weaver, shepherd, healer).
The seeming objectivity of this approach notwithstanding, the auto-
chrome portraits reiterate many ethnocentric and gendered tropes (of
the desired and dangerous other). Moreover, in excluding the proper
name, these images frame their subjects as representatives of a place
and a people, as parts standing in for some whole, as types without
 92 Of Other Archives

any distinguishing marks. Jeune fille mauresque (Frédéric Gadmer,

Algeria, 1924) and Bédouin d’origine soudanaise (Paul Castelnau,
Jordan, 1918, inv. A 15536) typify the visual grammar of excursive
portraiture. In the first image, a woman poses against a crumbling
clay wall and rows of red, orange, and yellow flowers. The flowers
match her head scarf and dress, its straps sliding down her shoulders.
She faces the camera but looks outward, past the frame, beyond the
viewer. One can consume her image unobstructed, without meeting
her gaze. In Bédouin d’origine soudanaise, a man sits among rocks in
the desert. He wears a formal uniform—­a beige suit, black cape, and
red headdress—­and stares directly into the camera. His large body
fills the frame, a potential force undone by the power imposed upon
him. Both of these portraits echo the rigid stillness of the domestic
photographs and the “ghostly air” of salvage methodologies. They
discipline their subjects, transform them into spectacles of color, ob-
jects among so many others in the natural world (rocks, trees, grass).
If these portraits exhausted the visual breadth of the excursive au-
tochromes, one would have good reason to dismiss them as little more
than stable expressions of disciplinary force or decorative accompani-
ments to ethnographic salvage. These portraits are instead vestiges of
a visual practice that the excursive collection turns on its head. The
clear categorical differences between stillness and movement, pho-
tography and film, dissolve in the distances of global travel and the
ethnographic efforts to visualize the world. A series of images from
Tlemcen, Algeria (Frédéric Gadmer, May 27, 1929, inv. A 60637–­43),
offers an initial point of access into the archive’s photographic play
with movement and duration. The images were taken successively
during a tour of the ornate Grande Mosquée de Tlemcen. The first
image shows the exterior of the mosque. The next presents a long
interior corridor of elaborate archways. With each subsequent auto-
chrome, a physical and narrative path develops. Gadmer walks down
the corridor. He inspects the columns, the walls, and then the chan-
deliers. These photographs counter the immobility and sculptural
singularity of the domestic autochromes, along with their claims to
objectivity and neutrality. As a sequence of still images, they also put
the physical and historical foundations of cinema on display. The au-
tochromes combine to form a chronophotographic series, reminis-
cent of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-­Jules Marey’s experiments
 Of Other Archives 93

in recording time and bodily locomotion.114 Of course, the crucial

difference between these photographs and their turn-­of-­the-­century
counterparts is the absence of human or animal subjects. These im-
ages thereby invert the logic of chronophotography. They map the
movements of a body that cannot be seen. They track the photogra-
pher’s position in space—­and mark the subtle differences between
images—­through changes in distance, scale, and composition. In
trading the visible absence of the human subject for an invisible pres-
ence, these photographs shift our own attention away from the un-
populated world before the lens to the operator behind the camera.
They likewise recall Alexandre Promio’s haptic vues of Egypt and
Tunisia. They disclose a tactile encounter with the world, an effort to
lunge and touch, an observing body whose proximity exchanges the
clarity of optic visuality for the sensations of the textured surface.
During his expedition to Indochina, operator Léon Busy also
created several chronophotographic series. These autochromes take
the human body as their subjects, thereby deviating from both the
domestic collection and Gadmer’s series from Algeria. In these im-
ages, the visibility of the human subject in front of the lens insists
not only upon the observing presence of the photographer but also
upon his voyeuristic and ethnocentric desires. In Jeune fille chiquant
le bétel (Indochina, 1916, inv. A 7764–­75), for example, Busy photo-
graphs a young girl in medium close-­up, seated at a table. Her mouth
opens and closes across twelve autochromes as she chews the leaves
of a betel plant. The deep red pigment of the betel gradually dyes her
lips and tongue. In another series of autochromes, collectively titled
Jeune femme revêtant le costume traditionnel (Léon Busy, Indochina,
1926–­2 8), a naked woman gathers her long hair into a bun and
then puts on a ceremonial robe. Early cinema scholar François de la
Bretèque argues that these latter images reveal ethnographic knowl-
edge about the processes involved in getting dressed and undressed.115
While this may be true, the images also make other, more important
forms of ethnographic knowledge visible. They reveal the ideologies
of domination and control—­as well as the forms of sexual desire and
violence—­that motivate the production of ethnographic images.
The proximity between the photographer and the world further
defines the excursive autochromes. In both chronophotographic se-
ries and individual images, Kahn photographers abandon exteriors,
 94 Of Other Archives

the long shot, and the aerial view. This world is represented in small
details and bodily fragments, as in the image of an Indian fortress
that Roger Dumas frames so tightly that we lose all perspective or in
the image of a disembodied pair of hands, writing, that Léon Busy
photographs in Vietnam, the curvature of long fingernails catching
sunlight. The excursive operators cross thresholds, enter homes, and
explore deep interiors. This shift in the archive betrays a desire to
get close, a ravenous appetite for the sites and signs of the unfamil-
iar that, ironically, sacrifices visibility. In Stéphane Passet’s portrait
of Chinese men and women titled Groupe au Hongnengong (China,
1913, inv. A 1341), taken from inside the Temple de la Porte Rouge
(Red Gate Temple) in Guangdong province, almost no light breaks
through the thatched roof. The darkness conceals all but the most
distant bodies. The foreground and midground are dotted with black
silhouettes. Like Promio, Passet turns his subjects into shadows.
Despite the unusually long exposure time of the autochrome pro-
cess, operators still tried to capture actions or events in the midst
of their unfolding. These images register as incomplete slices of a
temporal flow that continues, uninterrupted, elsewhere. The pho-
tographs blur where bodies and limbs move too fast for the camera,
a small point of refusal between the world and its representation. A
man washes vegetables in Morocco. A woman pounds grain in India.
And a street bustles and blurs with activity in Pakistan, so much so
that Stéphane Passet acknowledges the movement in his title: Une rue
animée (1914, inv. A 4414). Indeed, this last image comes much closer
to the cinematic street scenes in the Lumière archive than the photo-
graphs of a desolate Paris in the Archives de la Planète. Another auto-
chrome from Passet, Le Supplice d’une femme condamnée à mort pour
adultère (Mongolia, 1913, inv. A 3973), expresses time and the limita-
tions of visual reproduction in a radically different way. In this image,
one can see a green field, a blue sky, and a brown crate, centered in the
foreground of the frame. Part of a woman’s head and arm extend out
of a small hole on the side of the structure. Two small, empty bowls
lie discarded on the ground, alongside small bits of colored cloth. The
title of Passet’s image—­The Torture of a Woman Condemned to Death
for Adultery—­simultaneously casts us backward into a history (of
adultery and condemnation) that we cannot access and into a present
 Of Other Archives 95

of torture, an experience inscribed on the body of a subject, equally

unavailable to the photographic witness. Elsewhere among the im-
ages from Mongolia, a prisoner kneels with his neck and arms locked
in a wooden plank, another stands with a large chain draped about his
neck, and multiple eyes stare back from a dark prison cell.
All of these images from Mongolia resist visibility and visual
knowledge, not only because they are partial documents that can
only ever extract still slivers from a range of motion but also because
of what they try to document. The experiences of torture and impris-
onment correspond to that concept and category of “events” that
Derrida defines thusly: “[The event] remains . . . singular, of an always
essentially traumatic type . . . : its singularity interrupts an order and
rips apart, like every decision worthy of the name, the normal fabric
or temporality of history.”116 The event, as Derrida understands it, be-
longs to the living present and the human body. It cannot be commu-
nicated between bodies or beyond the body. Its essential singularity
opposes the machine, or machineness, “a certain technicity, program-
ming, repetition, or iterability.”117 The event thus escapes its repro-
duction and preservation in the archive. It rips a hole in history and
leaves a void. The images from Mongolia interrupt the Archives de la
Planète with visual, historical, and epistemological vacancies. To be
clear, these are not the empty signs of an archive under control. They
do not reiterate the disciplinary gaze that clears the streets in the do-
mestic collection. Rather, in the incessant, voyeuristic desire to see,
the archive reaches the limits of looking. Or, put another way, in the
actual prison, the panoptic order comes undone.
Before offering some concluding remarks on the Maison Lumière,
the Archives de la Planète, and the relationship between the two, I
would like to consider one final archival category from the Kahn
project: the excursive films. The border between the excursive films
and autochromes is porous. The moving image does not introduce a
set of stark visual or ontological differences, in part because the pho-
tographs themselves fail to function as a distinct visual or ontologi-
cal category. As we have seen, they mimic the moving image in both
chronophotographic series and blurred slivers of time. The films, in
turn, share something of the photographic, its fixity and vacancies.
In the archive’s excursions beyond the boundaries of France, a visual
 96 Of Other Archives

regime of repetition and redundancy redefines the relationship be-

tween photography and film, disturbing their domestic differences
with similarity and simultaneity.
There are no newsreels in the excursive collection, no major his-
torical events or celebrations, save perhaps the occasional state visit
from French leaders or colonial bureaucrats. The excursive foot-
age instead makes the promise of place, a promise made with titles
like Cambodge: Angkor-­Vat (Léon Busy, 1921), Turquie (Camille
Sauvageot, 1922), and Palestine: Bethléem, documentation sur ville
(Camille Sauvageot, 1925). This shift signals yet another change in
the archive’s organization of the moving image, not least of which en-
tails the subordination of time to space, history to the visible surface.
In the excursive film, movement happens elsewhere: offscreen, out
of frame, or in the camera. For example, Léon Busy’s footage from
Cambodia includes a three-­m inute-­long, 360-­degree panorama of
the Angkor Wat temple. But nothing really happens in Cambodge. The
film shows no celebrations, rituals, or ceremonies. Two subjects cross
our field of vision, but the camera slides right past them. Sauvageot
introduces the city of Constantinople with a similar visual technique.
His camera completes almost one full rotation on its axis, skimming
the rooftops of the city. In both films, this cinematographic figure
imposes movement upon an otherwise static terrain, its inhabitants
and their daily rhythms safely tucked out of view. In the footage of
Bethlehem, the panorama seems to contain the movements of the city
and keep the streets under control. The four-­m inute film is divided
into just a handful of shots. At first, the camera is high above the
city, panning left to right. Trees, homes, and minarets float past. No
human subjects can be seen. Next, the camera is fixed in the middle
of a busy pathway. We have, of course, stumbled upon this style of
ethnographic filmmaking in the Lumière catalog. Bodies push into
and against the lens, move into and out of frame. The proximity of the
camera to the activity of the street makes it nearly impossible to iden-
tify the contents of the image. Fragments of bodies obstruct our view.
In its preference for spaces and places (Cambodia, Turkey, Palestine,
etc.) over and above particular actions or events, this cinema invites
the indiscriminate and contingent movements, as well as the haptic
textures, that accumulate on the surface of the street. The film ends
with a return to visual stability. The camera retreats to a rooftop and
 Of Other Archives 97

pans the city. The only movements in this scene belong to the camera.
From this distance, no bodies bump into one another or against the
operator.
Kahn scholars have been quick to compare the panoramic and aer-
ial perspectives in these moving images to panoptic forms of power
or the imperial gaze of travel writing. For her part, Rony directs read-
ers to Mary Louise Pratt’s canonical analysis of the panoramic land-
scape in the writing of John Barrow and other eighteenth-­century
explorers.118 The panoramic views in the Archives de la Planète, as
Rony understands them, partake of the same fantasies that motivate
these written accounts of the world. They encourage “viewers to see
other lands precisely as places to be explored and inhabited by other
Europeans.”119 Pratt’s description of the imperial gaze indeed invites
this comparison between text and moving image. Barrow’s writing,
like the excursive films, elides the events of history and subjective
agents in its search for the dramas of spatial spectatorship. However,
Pratt’s reading locates an important tension in the imperial gaze and
its distribution of geographic fantasies. She writes:
Drama in Barrow’s travel account, then, is produced not by
history, nor by the agency of travelers themselves, but by the
changing face of the country as it presents itself to the invisible
European seers. Barrow’s own language suggests the fantasy
of dominance and appropriation that is built into this other-
wise passive, open stance. The eye “commands” what falls
within its gaze; mountains and valleys “show themselves,”
“present a picture”; the country “opens up” before the visitors.
The European presence is absolutely uncontested. At the same
time, the landscanning European eye seems powerless to act
upon or interact with this landscape that offers itself. Unheroic,
unparticularized, egoless, the eye seems able to do little but
gaze from a periphery of its own creation.120
In short, there are limits to what the eye can do. As Pratt makes clear,
the commanding vision of the imperial travel writer may conjure fan-
tasies of dominance and figures of control; however, it remains un-
able actually to dominate or control. The eye can only ever passively
survey the drama of difference on display. If we turn from the written
landscape to the Archives de la Planète, the powers of vision seem all
 98 Of Other Archives

the more troubled. In the shifts between the distance of the pano­
ramic perspective and the extreme close-­up of the camera-­in-­the-­
crowd, Palestine demonstrates precisely what happens when the eye
leaves its “landscanning” perch. The landscape pushes back against
this effort and obstructs the visual field.
But even the pattern of panoramic views, considered on its own,
poses significant challenges to the fantasies of dominance and the
ends of visual knowledge. The excursive films do not open onto “the
changing face” of the earth’s diverse landscapes. Rather, the distance
between the camera and the world, combined with the grayscale of
35mm film and the repetition of cinematographic movement, pro-
duces an archive of the same, a seemingly indistinguishable series of
panoramic views from Albania, Algeria, Greece, India, Morocco, and
Syria (to name just a few additions to those titles already mentioned).
The actual visual contents of the excursive films fail to establish the
kind of spatial specificity that their titles seem to promise and travel
writing manages to produce. The excursive camera rarely stops its
horizontal movements to isolate a landmark or monument. Pan after
pan, these films transform the diversity and activity of the visual
surface into a monotonous and monochromatic blur, a collection of
indecipherable views that resist visibility and frustrate the fantasy of
visual domination.
This tendency toward repetition reaches across the photo–­fi lm
divide, further deteriorating the differences between still and mov-
ing images. Passet’s Une rue animée, for example, haunts Sauvageot’s
Palestine (and many other films besides), while Gadmer’s photo-
graphic series of an Algerian mosque returns in the empty spaces of
Angkor Wat. The slippages and repetitions between photography and
film are perhaps nowhere more evident than in Léon Busy’s Scène
de déshabillage, Tonkin (1921). The film shows a young Vietnamese
woman as she takes her clothes off and then puts them back on. The
film is out of focus, blurred like so many photographic images. Amad
describes the film as “a striking anomaly in the Kahn Archive” and
compares the scene to Eadweard Muybridge’s movement studies
of the female body. She also attributes the lack of focus to “a self-­
consciousness regarding the potentialities of the scientific ethno-
graphic gaze.”121 What is striking here, however, is not the singular-
ity of the image but the visual dialogue between this film and the
 Of Other Archives 99

autochrome sequence Jeune femme revêtant le costume traditionnel

(1926–­28), which depicts nearly the very same series of actions, at
least four years later, with no trace of self-­consciousness; the woman’s
naked form is clearly visible and crisply focused. The echo with
Muybridge likewise extends beyond the scientific–­voyeuristic con-
tent of the moving image to include the actual chronophotographic
structure of Jeune femme. Considered together, Scène de déshabillage
and Jeune femme share in the same sparse composition, the same style
of clothing (removed and replaced), the same sequence of gestures,
and the same operator. The blur of the cinematic surface conceals the
identity of its nude subject, leaving open the possibility that the same
young woman could appear in both still and moving images. Scène de
déshabillage and Jeune femme represent the rituals and repetitions of
the everyday as they construct a system of visual rituals and repeti-
tions of their own. And yet, as Deleuze reminds us, “difference lies
between two repetitions.”122 Like the space between each frame in the
chronophotographic series, these images are separated by historical
time and the human subject. The photographs are at once repetitions
of the same and signs of an operator’s return journey. In the space be-
tween these cinematic and photographic revelations of an anonymous
female figure, other forms of repetition come into view: the ethno-
graphic compulsion to see and the insatiable drive of desire, for ex-
ample. These manifold images and expressions can only ever miss the
origin(s) that they are after. Indeed, the impulse to repeat, to return to
this body, is evidence of an origin having been missed.
In the excursive collection of the Archives de la Planète, photo-
graphs are made to move and films are brought to a standstill. These
formal patterns invert the domestic collection and confuse the onto-
logical distinctions between photography and cinema. They introduce
different ways of seeing and signifying the world. They also reflect ide-
ologies of difference. In the autochrome series of naked and tortured
women, we can read a history of colonial violence and voyeurism. In
the shift from newsreel footage to the panoramic view, we can read
the effort to exclude the bodies and spaces of others from historical
time. But whatever discursive systems or ideological impulses under-
pin the excursive images, these differences produce a set of complex
visual and epistemic remainders, which collectively oppose the pan-
optic order of making-­v isible and the preservative ends of the archive.
 100 Of Other Archives

The Archive and Its Critique

In this chapter, I have traced lines of subversive force from a small
collection of films and photographs to early film mythologies, histo-
ries, and concepts. I have insisted that the Maison Lumière and the
Archives de la Planète overturn several archival orders, including the
recuperative and preservative paradigms that dominate early film
studies and turn-­of-­the-­century anthropological discourse, as well as
the regimes of state power and panoptic control. I have also argued
that the fractures and fissures that define these archives cannot be
grounded in cinema’s ontology; that is, cinema itself does not make
all the difference. In the introduction to this chapter, I suggested that
the concept of the heterotopian archive hints at an alternative con-
stellation of archival instability, one that includes the departures of
global travel and ethnographic practice. This scant text, however,
does not go far enough in articulating the archival origins and effects
of alterity. In short, I have presented an argument that dismisses sev-
eral theories of the archive, without drafting a productive alternative.
By way of a concluding corrective, I would like to turn to Gilles
Deleuze, one of Foucault’s many interlocutors and philosophical al-
lies. In his reading of The Archaeology of Knowledge, Deleuze refers
to Foucault as the “new archivist,” a title that celebrates Foucault’s
contributions to archive theory and historiography but that also
(somewhat ambiguously) applies to Deleuze. His writing on Foucault
shatters discursive hierarchies into multiplicities and transforms
the vertical lines of power into mobile diagonals.123 Bracketing the
explicit dialogue between Foucault and Deleuze, however, I am in-
terested in a relatively obscure piece of writing by Deleuze, one that
opens onto his foundational argument about the subversive force of
the “minor.”124 In “One Less Manifesto: Theater and Its Critique,”
Deleuze elides any explicit discussion of archivists or archives, con-
temporary or otherwise. Still, Deleuze makes an important though
certainly inadvertent case for how one might read the divisions that
define the Maison Lumière and the Archives de la Planète.125 Deleuze
likewise returns us to that Foucauldian ship at sea, extending and
expanding upon the set of differences that subvert both the hierar-
chies of artistic practice and the order of the archive. Here Deleuze
describes Carmelo Bene’s reformulations of “major” theatrical works
as formative acts of criticism and what he terms minoration.126 Bene’s
 Of Other Archives 101

“minor” theater dismantles major works and institutions, distorting

and defamiliarizing their texts, images, and icons. The relationship
between the minor and the major exceeds simple oppositions or bi-
nary contradictions. The minor is positioned inside the major, an in-
timate perch from which to begin amputating the sites and signs of
power. Through processes of subtraction, a kind of nonsense and non-
being comes into view, exposing the rigidity and oppressive force of
major forms while creating a new and different work:
You begin by subtracting, deducting everything that would
constitute an element of power, in language and in gestures,
in the representation and in the represented. You cannot even
say that it is a negative operation because it already enlists and
releases positive processes. You will then deduct or amputate
history because History is the temporal marker of Power. You
will subtract structure because it is the synchronic marker,
the totality of relations among invariants. You will subtract con-
stants, the stable or stabilized elements, because they belong
to major usage. . . . But what remains? Everything remains, but
under a new light with new sounds and new gestures.127
Bene’s theater ignites a free play of variation. Major characters dis-
appear or recede into the background; minor characters step forward
and stutter incomprehensibly. In his version of Richard III, for ex-
ample, Bene excises the “royal and princely system,” leaving behind
a soldier who shuffles through drawers for prosthetic limbs to fill his
bodily gaps and women who cycle on-­and offstage as they care for
their screaming children. The minor work thrusts the lopsided and
deformed onstage, uncanny remnants of their major predecessors.
For Deleuze, these adjustments “release a new potentiality of theater,
an always unbalanced, non-­representative force.”128 Indeed, the minor
never stops producing and changing, out of balance and out of con-
trol; it cannot be recuperated by the major, which waits in the wings
to impose structure and stop all this incessant becoming.
The Lumière and Kahn archives produce a similar set of ampu-
tees, subtracting pieces and parts from their major visual practices.
The excursive Lumière films begin by excising the visual trappings
of state power and place, eliminating scenes of bourgeois life, urban
monuments, and familiar terrain. Next, they discard spatial distance,
 102 Of Other Archives

the coherent bodies and objects of optic visuality (for the surfaces of
haptic vision). Finally, history dissolves; we no longer know where or
when we are. The Kahn photographs and films encompass these sub-
tractions and contribute a few of their own. They remove the stasis
of the photographic image, the movements of cinema, and the dis-
tance between these two visual forms. Taken together, this purge of
organizing structures and visual standards opens the Lumière and
Kahn archives to the misshapen and senseless, the incomprehensible
and uncontained. They include what has been excluded elsewhere.
Digressive bodies wander into and out of frame. Resistant energies
mobilize and collapse. Images stutter with the same. Like the work of
minor theater, these images implicitly counter and critique that which
they have absented from the frame. Furthermore, the excursive col-
lections threaten the natural, ontological quality of the major (pho-
tographs, films, histories, mythologies). They suggest that the major
can be altered, or otherwise. Unfamiliar streets of proximate flesh and
violent scenes of force-­feeding linger just beneath the surface, percep-
tible after only a few (minor) adjustments.
The Lumière and Kahn archives also stand in a major–­m inor re-
lationship to each other. In this chapter, I have gone some way toward
demythologizing the Lumière archive and destabilizing the appear-
ance of archival singularity and continuity. Comparing the Lumière
archive to the Archives de la Planète goes further still. The concept
of the minor reframes this encounter as a site and space for critique.
In subtracting the burdens of commercial distribution and public
spectatorship, along with the limitations of single-­shot cinema, the
Archives de la Planète repeats the multioperator project of global
visual representation with a difference. It not only shatters the ciné-
matographic view into a multimedia tangle but also, and more impor-
tantly, extends the ethnographic desire to see until it reaches the lim-
its of visibility. Indeed, it counters the subtle violence of the Lumière
archive—­t he grabbed face and forced meal in Repas d’Indiens, for
example—­w ith explicit indices of physical and sexual violence. The
scenes of nudity and torture puncture the surface of the Archives
de la Planète and escape the search for visual knowledge. But these
images, I argue, equally belong to the Maison Lumière. They are the
most errant of copies among so many simulacrum. To put this read-
ing another way, the Archives de la Planète does not stand in synec-
 Of Other Archives 103

dochal relation to all of film practice; it is not the part that reveals an
ontological or historical whole. The Archives de la Planète subtracts
from cinema and decenters its canon. It serves a critical function, not
a symbolic one.
For Deleuze, the minor archive also subtracts Bene, the author, the
authority problematically positioned at the center of Deleuze’s text
(this is a problem shared by his writing on minor literature). In his
analysis of minor theater, Deleuze articulates the very real political
stakes of major force and minor resistance while awkwardly negotiat-
ing the power of a single “minor” playwright. For Deleuze, the bor-
der between the major and the minor separates “the people and the
ethnic. The ethnic is the minority, the vanishing line in the structure,
the antihistorical element in History.”129 Writing on behalf of those
excluded from history, Bene seemingly exchanges one major institu-
tion for another. He displaces the stability of state power with autho-
rial control, producing the uncritical function of “revolutionary art”
against which Lyotard warns.130 Deleuze does his best to excise (or
excuse) Bene from his reading, at turns describing him as “humble”
and “anti-­avant-­garde.” He argues that Bene’s work is not a theater
d’auteur (of the author) but rather “gives free rein to a different theatri-
cal matter and to a different theatrical form, which would not have
been possible without this subtraction.”131 Deleuze reassures us that
“it is of little consequence that the actor-­author-­d irector exerts influ-
ence and assumes an authoritarian manner, even a very authoritarian
one. This would be the authority of perpetual variation in contrast to
the power and despotism of the invariant.”132 At last, Deleuze emp-
ties the sign of Bene by inviting us all to take his place: “Minority no
longer denotes a state of rule, but a becoming in which one enlists. To
become-­minority. This is a goal, a goal that concerns the entire world
since the entire world is included in this goal and in this becoming
inasmuch as everyone creates his or her variation of the unity of des-
potic measure and escapes.”133
By contrast, both the Lumière and Kahn archives lack the author-
ity of authorship. This is true for all single-­shot cinema, where the
impulses of the individual operator meet the industrial demands of
global film factories like the Maison Lumière and the contingent pos-
sibilities of uninterrupted “real” time and space. It also holds for the
Archives de la Planète, where the utopian aspirations of an amateur
 104 Of Other Archives

archivist, the disciplinary ends of human geography, and a dozen

different operators place an imprecise photographic technique and
reels of unedited film footage in the service of representing the world.
The sum of any one image or archive simply cannot be grounded in a
single place or person, no matter what patterns (of aggression or de-
sire, for example) we might detect across the work of Promio, Veyre,
and Busy. Finally, in the minor archive, the heterotopian boat sets
sail. It is the stuff of dreams, “a floating piece of space,” as Foucault
describes.134 But this departure also invites those who have been ex-
cluded from history, those to whom Deleuze refers as the “antihistori-
cal ethnic,” to enter the frame. They share space and time with the
camera and the operators, “minorating” against their impulses to
capture, kill, or still. The minor subject participates in the collective
construction of the film, in the processes of subtraction, excision, and
amputation that define the minor image. More important perhaps
than the sheer uninterrupted duration of single-­shot cinema, the
lengthy exposure time of autochrome photography, or the open and
unfinished quality of the Kahn footage are the minor expressions that
these visual forms make possible. They give free rein to the minor in a
way that Bene never could and no entity called Lumière or Kahn (or
Brunhes or Promio or Busy) could bring under control.
 CHAPTER 2

HISTORICAL FIGURES
Dance and the Unlettered Line

PHAEDRUS: Do you mean, dear Socrates, that your reason

considers dance a stranger, whose language it scorns, whose
behavior seems to it inexplicable, if not shocking?
—Paul Valéry, “Dialogues: Dance and the Soul,” Dialogues (1921)

The door of the ghosts has opened. . . . The door of the ghosts
has opened.
—­Ashanti song for ceremonial dance, overheard by Robert Sutherland
Rattray, Ashanti (1923)

Drawing and dance, of course, grow from one and the same
source and are but two different embodiments of the same
impulse.
—­Sergei Eisenstein, “How I Learned to Draw: A Chapter about Dancing
Lessons,” 1946, in Immoral Memories: An Autobiography (1983)

A 16mm film titled Danses de Dogons, de Sanga, et de Bandiagara cycles

through a series of dances from the central plateau region of Mali,
Africa. The film lasts just four minutes and was likely made in the
late 1920s by the French Ministère des Colonies. Its images concen-
trate on the body, its physicality and force, the minutiae of its move-
ments, and the surface of its skin. Like the films from the Archives
de la Planète that I examined in the previous chapter, these images
read as raw, unedited footage. Here the haphazard assortment of shots
is united only in its representation of partially clothed, dark-­skinned
dancers in motion. The film is, by any measure, a frenetic series of
moving bodies and body parts, most keenly exemplified by the image

105
 106 Historical Figures

of a male dancer who cartwheels over and over again across the frame.
The film itself mimics these repetitions, generates its own copies, as
it inexplicably repeats the scene three times. The camera gets closer
with each repetition before it retreats to film from an obstructed point
of view.
A single, bilingual intertitle announces the final scene: “Boula, un
nègre mendiant exécute une danse grotesque qui rapelle vaguement
la danse sacrée des sorciers Africains / Boula, in his grotesque sorcer-
er’s dance.” The English portion of the intertitle excludes the descrip-
tion of the dancing subject as a kind of street-­performing “mendiant”
or “beggar” whose dance only “vaguely recalls” the origins of African
sorcerers. Indeed, it seems that this dancer and his routine cannot
be trusted. The intertitle also reminds us that dance (like cinema) is
a historical index. These dances—­and, in turn, their moving image
inscriptions—­are meant to summon specters, to faithfully repeat a
past of gesture, movement, and corporeality. A concluding title—­
“fin”—­follows the scene of the supposed beggar dancing. This textual
convention is an unexpected final turn, one that recalls (or predicts)
the temporal language play of Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1928).
Nothing has finished or really even begun. The film instead opens and
closes in the middle of movement.
Danses de Dogons, de Sanga, et de Bandiagara was donated by Anne
Morgan, J. P. Morgan’s youngest daughter, to the American Museum
of Natural History at some point in the late 1930s. A brief catalog
description notes, “It is unfortunate that the image is blurred.”1 One
must wonder, however, in the context of this particular film, What
would have been gained by clarifying the focus of the image? What
gets lost in the blur that was not already ambiguous from the start?
Like the French portion of the intertitle, which laments the vague re-
lationship between an ancient and authentic dance and its poor, beg-
ging copy, the catalog description gestures toward historical origins
and model images. It suggests that Danses de Dogons, de Sanga, et de
Bandiagara could be useful or valuable, if only we could see more or
better. The curatorial note encourages us to defer our judgment, to
keep searching for some other, more meaningful ethnographic evi-
dence. But, remarkably, the rhythmic, intermittent blurs of Danses
de Dogons, de Sanga, et de Bandiagara seem to belong here. They cor-
respond to the form and content of these moving images, to the re-
 Historical Figures 107

dundancies and Dionysian energies that stream so quickly past. One

might then reasonably press upon the ambiguity of the description:
To which blur does the catalog refer? To the material conditions of
the celluloid print? To its disjointed and unmotivated collection of
shots? To the swirl of dancing bodies photochemically indexed on its
surface? Or to the vague relationship that joins the image of (then)
contemporary dancers to the historical origins that they are meant to
perform?
Danses de Dogons, de Sanga, et de Bandiagara perhaps seems an
unlikely candidate for this kind of introductory rhetorical gesture,
whereby one film potentially comes to stand in for a whole (e.g., visual
pattern or a set of films). It is a strange, misshapen document: an
anonymous scrap of cinema that resists the ontology of the example
and the structures of synecdochal relation. Few, if any, films repeat
this one. What Danses de Dogons, de Sanga, et de Bandiagara never-
theless shares with nearly every ethnographic film that precedes and
follows it, both within and beyond the French colonial administra-
tion, is its privileging of dance in the epistemology of ethnographic
subjects and the unexpected, contingent, and often incoherent tem-
poral expressions that emanate from its representation. Put differ-
ently, dance is one of the few generic conventions of ethnographic
cinema (I explore another, the recurrent event of animal death, in the
chapter that follows), but one that paradoxically prevents these films
from ever cohering as a genre.
Dancers appear (and disappear) across the diverse spectrum of
ethnographic cinema. They are scattered throughout the excursive
collections of the Maison Lumière and the Archives de la Planète;
they are among the first ethnographic moving images produced dur-
ing Alfred Cort Haddon’s famed Torres Strait Expedition to Austra-
lia; and they emerge persistently in the broad expanse of commercial
ethnographic film that develops in the 1910s and 1920s.2 As I outline
in this chapter, the popularity of dance in these films derives, at least
in part, from the broader field of turn-­of-­the-­t wentieth-­century an-
thropology, which routinely describes dance as a cultural hieroglyph
and a historical document, in turn suggesting that these bodily for-
mations conceal secrets that need to be recovered and deciphered. In
the practice of ethnographic writing, “primitive” dance is a discrete
category and a clear sign of difference. Counterposed against the
 108 Historical Figures

disciplined and autonomous bodies of Western subjects and styles of

dance, this other category of movement is wild, dangerous, and com-
munal: individuals ecstatically forfeit themselves to the collective or
become possessed by ghosts. 3 This kind of dance is bound up with
magic, spirit, and sorcery. It belongs to the taxonomy of otherworldly
curiositas that, for Tom Gunning, compel our imaginations and our
scopic drives.4 The dancing body is also, of course, an energetic site
of racial and sexual difference, a symptom of the ethnocentric desires
that motivate discourses in the human sciences and popular culture,
as well as the work and writing of the European avant-­garde.
The recurrence of dance during the first decades of ethnographic
cinema betrays the disciplinary demands for the body, for an image of
the dancing body that steadies its mobilities and allows its rhythms
to be scrutinized. Ethnographic cinema offers up the hieroglyph of
dance for inspection and study. It seemingly confers stability and sta-
sis onto the practice by indexing its shapes in celluloid and regulating
the irregularity of unfamiliar dances with the rhythms of mechanical
reproduction. In other words, these films showcase the “wild” move-
ments of the body and cinema’s remarkable capacity to represent
those movements while simultaneously endeavoring to bring the con-
tingencies of dance under control.
And yet, no matter the motivations that might compel its appear-
ance, dance remains an intrinsically unstable form. Performance
theorist Randy Martin succinctly describes it as “a relation of forces
joined in tension,” divided as it is between expressions of corporeality
and ephemerality, structure and event, historical origins and the liv-
ing present. 5 Dance belongs to a category of gestures that, for Giorgio
Agamben, is privileged in its relationship to multiple and contra-
dictory expressions of time (rather than, say, movement). Indeed,
Agamben describes the temporality of dance as “a composition of
phantasms” and “a pause that is not immobile but simultaneously
charged with memory and dynamic energy.”6 To put this contradic-
tion in a slightly different way, dance is a nonlinguistic sign that sus-
pends signification—­referring viewers to nothing beyond its own
structure and shape—­and an imprecise citation (“charged with mem-
ory and dynamic energy”) of an absent historical source.
The reflexive and phantasmatic qualities of dance pose distinct
problems to the empiricist regimes that guide nearly all forms of eth-
 Historical Figures 109

nographic knowledge: what we can see or experience in dance either

does not signify beyond itself or signifies a source that we cannot see,
recuperate, evaluate, or understand. As Sergei Eisenstein suggests
in the epigraph that accompanies this chapter, the practice of dance
perhaps shares more with the plasmatic properties of drawing—­its
excesses and errors, its dynamic lines of flight, its interminable pro-
cesses of becoming—­than the indices of mechanical reproduction.
In this chapter, I examine what dance performs in the first decades
of ethnographic cinema, specifically, how it shapes the temporal and
indexical operations of these moving images. I draw on diverse ex-
amples, from ethnographic “dance films” made by amateur explorers,
including two further examples from the Morgan collection, to com-
mercial and academic expedition films, including the Basden mission
to Nigeria and the Citroën-­sponsored “croisière” across Africa, to a
more well-­k nown and recently restored example of commercial docu-
fiction, In the Land of the Head Hunters (Edward S. Curtis, 1914). The
diverse styles of dance that ethnographic cinema attempts to catalog
generate a similar constellation of effects. I do not, however, draw a
line of continuity, progress, or evolution across several decades of
diverse cinema, nor do the titles I examine here represent a compre-
hensive history of ethnographic dance. On the contrary, the represen-
tation of dance in ethnographic cinema presses against both tropes
of historical time: the steady, continuous line and the uninterrupted
whole. Indeed, these films are bound together by the irregular, dis­
orderly rhythms of dance and, in turn, the impossibility of generic uni-
formity. Each repetition produces diverse, irreconcilable differences.
That is, the films bear little resemblance to each other beyond their
compulsive returns to the temporal volatility and energy of the body-­
in-­motion. In ethnographic cinema, I argue, the steady rhythms and
sturdy shapes of dance collapse. Bodies layer upon bodies, and the
dance becomes a locus that loses track of time or refuses time. Across
expeditionary and docufiction ethnographies of the 1920s, images of
the dancing body give way to reformations of time that bend and twist
the structures of causal continuity through rapid montage, pauses and
flashbacks, slow and fast motion.
I transition from this reading of dance as an intracinematic
function—­a s an image and an ethnographic convention—­to con-
sider its extracinematic dimensions, specifically the ways in which
 110 Historical Figures

the figure of dance disrupts the discourses of the human sciences

and film history. One can begin to detect something of these disrup-
tions in the intertitular confusion of Danses de Dogons, de Sanga, et de
Bandiagara: language is either absented from the image altogether or
sputters in its efforts to transcribe it. Here I am influenced by Jean-­
François Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure, a book that famously “takes the
side of the eye.” 7 Lyotard argues that the visual arts (e.g., painting,
drawing, architecture) deform the structures of signification (i.e.,
discourse). Artistic practice gives rise to figures that language “can-
not incorporate without being shaken, an exteriority it cannot inte-
riorize as signification.”8 As Lyotard defines it, the “figure” positions
itself against “invariability and reason”; it exposes discourse to radical
heterogeneity, to a field of differences that cannot be rationalized or
recuperated through language, that cannot be translated into words
or made to mean.9 Though Lyotard does not meditate on the speci-
ficities of dance, this particular visual practice nevertheless surfaces
throughout the text as the figure for figural operations par excellence:
indeed, he describes the figure as “a gesticulation, a dance, a move-
ment” and compares the act of seeing (a painting by Paul Klee, for
example) to the act of dancing (or, in an echo of Eisenstein, the act of
drawing an erratic line).10 That the actual, physical practice of dance
collapses into metaphor and escapes Lyotard’s own discourse perhaps
demonstrates, somewhat contrarily, that dance stands in a unique re-
lationship to the very concept of the figure that Lyotard endeavors to
define.
Before outlining the counterdiscursive operations of the figures
that dance (flip, spin, jump, twirl) in ethnographic cinema, I begin
with a brief sketch of just how dance circulates among several fields in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including anthro-
pology, the interwar avant-­garde, and early twentieth-­century popu-
lar culture. I then explore the intersection between dance and cinema
in the early twentieth century, paying particular attention to the ways
in which these distinct expressions of fin-­de-­siècle modernism are
perceived as essentially, symbiotically, joined together. This overview
will go some distance toward explaining the centrality of dance to
ethnographic practices of all kinds; it also prepares the way for un-
derstanding just how dance in early ethnographic cinema responds to
the production of knowledge in anthropological writing as well as the
 Historical Figures 111

tropes of movement and continuity that circumscribe film-­theoretical

discussions of dance.

Rites of Passage
In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1911), French sociologist
Émile Durkheim makes a crucial distinction between thought and ac-
tion. He writes, “Religious phenomena fall into two basic categories:
beliefs and rites. The first are states of opinion and consist of represen-
tations; the second are particular modes of action. Between these two
categories of phenomena lies all that separates thinking from doing.”11
In the developing field of sociology—­a discipline then generally ori-
ented around the study of “Western” selves and structures—­thought
and action are separate but related systems of religious significa-
tion. In the neighboring field of anthropology—­a discipline oriented
around the study of “non-­Western” selves and structures—­the dis-
tinction between these categories collapses. In the absence of shared
systems of signification, ritualized actions replace writing and speech.
Ritual becomes a kind of discourse unto itself, visible evidence of the
things we cannot see: ideas, beliefs, intentions. The actions of the eth-
nographic subject stand in relation to something beyond the body
and the individual subject. They bridge a communicative divide.
For early anthropologists, dance was one of the most important
forms of ritual. Contemporary anthropologist Anya Peterson Royce
argues that “dancing by primitives . . . was seen as marking every im-
portant aspect of life. One has an image of primitive man weighed
down by the awful burden of ritual, unable to take, or dance, a step
without it.”12 And, to be sure, the intense, overburdened study of
dance spans both the North American and European strands of an-
thropological thought and surfaces in nearly every canonical work
during the discipline’s first decades. In his founding 1881 introduc-
tion to anthropology, for example, Edward B. Tylor assures his readers
that dance is not a “frivolous” activity and makes explicit the discur-
sive properties of the practice: “Savages and barbarians dance their
joy and sorrow, their love and rage, even their magic and religion.”13
Dance saturates the studies in comparative religion conducted by
Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer. He, too, equates danc-
ing with the serious matter of ritual and further notes that dance
 112 Historical Figures

functions as a form of naming: “When you wish to ascertain to what

tribe a man belongs, you ask him, ‘What do you dance?’”14 Alfred
Radcliffe-­Brown provides an inventory of ritual dances in his ethnog-
raphy of the Andaman Islanders, along with precise musical notations
should anyone want to re-­create the sonic experiences of mourning,
fighting, pig eating, or canoe building.15 And the fifty-­year career of
American anthropologist Franz Boas is bookended by reflections on
dance: from “On Certain Songs and Dances of the Kwakiutl of British
Columbia” (1888) to The Function of Dance in Human Society (1942),
just before his death later that same year.16 In the former, Boas de-
fines dance in the Kwakwaka’wakw community as a ritual descended
from ancestral and religious spirits. He writes, “The laws and regula-
tions of all the winter dances . . . were given to them by Xanikila,
the son of the deity. Several other traditions say that the ancestors of
various genres brought these ceremonies from heaven, when they de-
scended to the earth in the shape of birds. In these traditions the cus-
tom of the winter dance is embodied in the rings of red cedar bark.”17
For Boas, the movements of the Kwakwaka’wakw dances correspond
to ancient stories; he therefore pivots from a descriptive account of
the dances he observes—­“first he extends his arm to the left, then he
jumps to the right”—­to a narrative retelling of the folklore that these
dances are meant to signify.18
Here and elsewhere in foundational works of anthropology, dance
is a rite that compels its participants to forfeit themselves to a collec-
tive or to a god. E. E. Evans-­Pritchard insists on its communal quali-
ties, arguing that dance is “essentially a joint and not an individual
activity.”19 In their ethnography of dance in Bali, Claire Holt and
Gregory Bateson similarly note that the young girls who perform are
“puppets par excellence” without “a trace of individuality in them.”20
Others extend the collective function of dance to include encounters
with the dead, possession by spirits, or an ecstatic movement beyond
the self. Ruth Benedict, a student of Boas, explicitly describes the
Native American tribes of the Northwest Coast as “Dionysian” and
writes that “in their religious ceremonies the final thing they strove
for was ecstasy. The chief dancer . . . should lose control of himself
and be rapt into another state of existence.”21 And W. O. E. Oesterley’s
comparison of sacred dances likewise conjoins past time and lost
consciousness. Participants partake of a tradition “deeply seated in
 Historical Figures 113

human nature,” one that descends “from the early prophets of Israel”
and encourages the “abandonment of all self-­control.”22
The ethnographic description of what one can see of dance—­the
visible surface of the body and its gestures, the centrality of the prac-
tice to other cultures, the role of dance in a complex system of ritual
signs—­unites awkwardly with any accounting of what these diverse
dance-­signs might signify. As Franz Boas acknowledges in The Mind
of Primitive Man (1911), “it has been proven in many cases that rites
are more stable than their explanations. . . . The diversity of rites is so
great and their occurrence so universal, that here the greatest possible
associations is found.”23 In the specific case of dance, however, the
difficulty of pinning down just what and how any one practice might
mean owes not only to the sheer number of dances and the cultural
differences between those communities that perform them but also,
and more importantly, to the specific associations with which dance
comes into contact. Dance is a sign that conjures. It calls forth the
dead, the spectral presence of past time, fictions of ancient mythology
and folklore, religious spirits and the supernatural.
When dance does not obliterate the subject through Dionysian
ekstasis or possession, it undermines the seemingly uncomplicated,
physical “thereness” of the body by performing other kinds of bodies
and things, quite simply, by being a performance. For example, Tylor
argues that “dancing and play-­acting are one,” joined together by the
“same power of make-­believe or imagination.”24 Numerous others de-
scribe dance as a mimetic or pantomimic activity, a performance of
manifold animal and human characters.25 In this way, dance is not
only a ritual, or a repetition of historical practices and sources, but
also an activity that involves the dancer in processes of concealment
and disclosure. The dancer is never only themselves, nor merely a
body and the movements it makes, but a metamorphic circulation of
identities and bodily signs that come into and disappear from view.
In short, as Geoffrey Gorer explains, “no one knows who the wearer
of the mask is.” 26 Contrary to the suggestion by Tylor and others
that ethnographers take dance seriously as a subject of study, one
might more productively consider the intrinsically playful and per-
formative aspects of dance that disappear the ethnographic subject
into a dialectic of performer/character and, in turn, counter the very
 114 Historical Figures

conditions that make “serious” empiricism possible. What the dancer

is and means cannot be gleaned from the surface, through the skin, in
the instant of performance. This knowledge remains unavailable to
the senses, untransmitted through visual encounters with the body.
This counter-­episteme guides the late nineteenth-­and early
twentieth-­century European avant-­gardes in their fascination with
dance and diverse representations of it. Significant points of contact
join anthropology and the avant-­garde during this era, and I outline
several examples of this correspondence in what follows. It is never-
theless the “un-­avant-­garde” regimes of early ethnographic cinema
that, in my view, ultimately exemplify the epistemological chal-
lenges that the avant-­garde (and their anthropological iterations) ap-
proached in their theories of dance.
Perhaps most famously, the Symbolists saw in modern dance new
forms of energy and mobility. For them, the dancing body overcomes
the rigidity and stasis of the human form, fluidly changing from one
image or idea to another. In his 1896 essay on ballet, the Symbolist
poet Stéphane Mallarmé claims that the dancer is never a subject or
a specific someone. He writes, evacuating the subject and the sym-
bolic function of dance, “The ballerina is not a girl dancing [n’est pas
une femme qui danse] . . . ; she is not a girl [n’est pas une femme], but
rather [she is] a metaphor which symbolizes some elemental aspect
of earthly form: sword, cup, flower, etc.”27 In the essay’s concluding
paragraphs, Mallarmé frames the experience of watching dance as a
radically open one. The dancer accepts whatever state of reverie or
poetic impulse a spectator might project upon her:
At those times, when we ordinarily watch the Dance with no
special object in mind, the only way to lead our imagination on
is to stand patiently, calmly watching each of the dancer’s steps,
each strange pose—­toeing, tapping, lunge, or rebound—­and
then ask ourselves: “What can the meaning of it be?” Or, better
still, find inspiration suddenly and interpret it. Doubtless that
will mean living entirely in the world of reverie. World suffi-
cient, nonetheless; nebulous or clear, spacious or limited—­any
of these, so long as that illiterate ballerina [ballerine illettrée],
flutteringly engaged in her profession [se livrant aux jeux de
sa profession], encloses it with her circlings or bears it off in
 Historical Figures 115

flight. . . . If, at that sorceress’ feet (she! all unaware of sorcery),

you will humbly place the Flower of your poetic instinct. . . , she
will give you back your concepts in all their nakedness, and
silently inscribe your vision as would a Symbol—­which she is.28
In this passage, the term illettrée introduces a crucial ambivalence.
The image of the “illiterate” sorceress-­ballerina no doubt reflects
something of the Symbolist approach to sexual difference (and several
avant-­garde approaches-­to-­come). Mallarmé takes the female body as
an aesthetic and erotic talisman and echoes the taxonomies of racial
difference that subtend turn-­of-­the-­t wentieth-­century anthropologi-
cal discourse and practice. But in the phrase ballerine illettrée one also
detects a trace of a more literal unlettering, that is to say, of an image
that cannot be written. While the nonsentient (i.e., symbolic) dancing
body cannot see or read us, we are equally unable to read the dance.
However we read the symbol of the dance, whatever our imagination
might produce in response to the question, What can the meaning of
it be?, the dancer returns our concepts to us unconfirmed, unchanged,
in all their nakedness.
Some three decades later, Mallarmé’s protégé Paul Valéry restages
this spectatorial scene as an encounter between philosopher and
dancer. Here, too, the distance cannot be traversed, for these two
characters belong to two different (and, again, differently gendered)
regimes of knowledge. The philosopher “asks his usual questions”
and “brings in his hows and whys,” while the dancer “is in another
world” where “acts have no outward aim; there is no object to grasp,
to attain, to repulse or run away from.”29 Confronted with this incom-
mensurability between aims and worlds, Valéry suggests that the phi-
losopher “might do better to enjoy himself to the full and abandon
himself to what he sees.”30
Numerous artists and writers in the 1920s and 1930s, especially
those in the surrealist circles in Paris, seemed to follow or foreshadow
Valéry’s advice. They turned away from the ballet to consider the
specificities of non-­European bodies and dances. Some joined anthro-
pologists and government officials on expeditions to colonies; others
immersed themselves in the chaotic visual jumble of colonial exposi-
tions and natural history museums like the Musée d’Ethnographie du
Trocadéro. 31 They did not seek the “hows and whys” of dance; instead,
 116 Historical Figures

these encounters seemed to fold back upon the searcher, to engage the
European observer in a process of imaginative self-­construction and
world making.
Examples abound. Among them is Georges Bataille’s 1929 Docu-
ments journal, which was dedicated to the representation of “archae-
ology, ethnology, art, and miscellany.”32 Nearly every issue featured
descriptions and photographs of non-­Western dance and its acces-
sories (masks, costumes, totemic objects) juxtaposed alongside
paintings and sketches by Picasso, Seurat, and Miró; photographic
reproductions of archaeological treasures; and essays on jazz, medi-
eval engraving, big toes, and human faces. 33 Documents offered a free-­
associative experience of racial and cultural otherness in the service
of a new European self, a transgressive overcoming of the rigid archi-
tectures of the body, the museum, and the book. One might also turn
to L’Afrique fantôme (1934), Michel Leiris’s written account of the
1930 Dakar–­Djibouti mission (led by Marcel Griaule and conducted
by several other Documents contributors). Leiris recuperates an auto-­
ethnographic methodology—­a new approach to understanding his
own identity—­at the abyssal limit of unfamiliar bodies dancing. The
dancers of Dogon and their rituals of possession fill Leiris with anxi-
ety, prevent him from sleeping, and compel him to confess “the ardent
sensation of being on the brink of something I will never touch in its
depth, lacking . . . the ability to abandon myself as one must, because
of various motives [mobiles], which are hard to define.”34 Leiris ulti-
mately leaves the conventions of ethnographic writing behind (e.g.,
distance, objectivity, self-­annihilation) and gives his diary over to an
undisciplined exploration of himself. Finally, one might also consider
Antonin Artaud’s visit to the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internatio-
nale, which reoriented his approach to theatrical methods. 35 There
Artaud observed several examples of Balinese dance at the Dutch pa-
vilion, what he would later describe as a crisscrossing connection of
body and space, gestures and sounds, performer and spectator, that
“penetrates right through the mind!”36 Reiterating the modes of dis-
cursive resistance articulated so frequently by anthropologists and
the avant-­garde, Artaud found in Balinese dance “a new bodily lan-
guage no longer based on words but on signs which emerges through
the maze of gestures, postures, airborne cries.”37
These encounters are evidence of a voracious appetite for experi-
 Historical Figures 117

ences and images of non-­European dance and belong to an expansive

popular fascination with the art, music, and dance of “primitive” cul-
tures, including those of Africa, Oceania, Latin America, and Asia, as
well as African American and indigenous communities. In a remark-
able passage from Leiris’s experimental autobiography, Manhood
(L’Age d’homme), published several years after his return from Africa,
the lines of influence are made explicit. Leiris routes his interest in the
study of ethnography through popular culture and, in particular, the
sounds of jazz and the appearance of “Negro” dance. For Leiris,
the trip to Africa—­and, more interestingly, perhaps even ethnogra-
phy itself—­begins with an “orgy” of rhythms on a stage in Europe.
He writes:
In the period of great license that followed the hostilities, jazz
was a sign of allegiance, an orgiastic tribute to the colors of the
moment. It functioned magically, and its means of influence can
be compared to a kind of possession. It was the element that
gave these celebrations their true meaning: a religious mean-
ing, with communion by dance. . . . In jazz, too, came the first
public appearances of Negroes, the manifestation and the myth
of black Edens which were to lead me to Africa, and beyond
Africa, to ethnography. 38
Leiris describes the sounds of jazz and the images of dancing bodies
as a sensory experience that transports him to other times and geo-
graphic places (and plays a decisive role in shaping his career in an-
thropology). Moreover, as in so many entries from L’Afrique fantôme,
Leiris dissolves the boundaries between his body and the scene he
observes. Jazz itself becomes the sound of “allegiance” (To what? Or
between whom? He does not say), and everyone participates in the
“communion” of dance. Leiris recuperates the diverse signs of cul-
tural difference: he absorbs them, takes them in, digests them into
the writing of his life. The performances of jazz and dance inflect his
own celebrations of everyday (European) life with ritual and religious
meaning; they also send him “beyond” a phantasmatic Africa, di-
rectly back to Europe and its disciplines of human study. This ethnog-
raphy of difference extends, excursively, away from him but always
circles back to an understanding of the self.
 118 Historical Figures

Beyond anthropology and the avant-­garde, performances of “primi-

tive” dance facilitate a similarly recuperative operation for audiences
in the 1920s and 1930s. The negrophilic and orientalist displays of
the jazz age invite spectators to abandon the codes of European
civilization—­w ithin the safety of a European city—­and experience
something of the ecstasy and frenzy associated with the colonies.
Dance becomes a kind of shorthand for cultural difference, a con-
densed sign of the wildness and animality of otherness.
And yet, it is precisely the Dionysian inheritances of non-­Western
dance that allow spectators, much like Leiris (Bataille, Artaud, etc.),
to commune with this spectacle, to partake in the event, and to take
something of it for themselves. Indeed, Samir Dayal argues that the
success of dance performances by transatlantic stars like Josephine
Baker were symptomatic of the European desire “to shake off the
strictures of propriety” and inhabit other bodies and ways of being.39 In
André Levinson’s 1927 essay on “Negro Dance,” a category of move-
ment that contains “almost all folk dancing, from the Russian hopak
to the bourrée of Auvergne, from the Scotch reel to the tarantella or
the jota of Aragon and, most conspicuously of all, the Negro ‘steps,’”
he confirms this view of the spectatorial experience. He writes, “The
primitive, human instinct is violently affected by such rhythmic in-
sistence. The monotony of this measured tramping, the symmetry of
its pattern, has the effect of a narcotic, while its gradual acceleration
brings about a sense of exhilaration amounting to a positive ecstasy.”40
Levinson claims that the mad movements of dance “can give us an al-
most shocking insight into our own more somber depths.”41
As I have outlined here, non-­Western or “primitive” dance is fre-
quently circumscribed as ritual and myth, as spirit and performance—
in short, as events that cannot be wholly known by those who witness
them nor perhaps even by the dancers themselves. And yet, dance
compels the production of certain, quite rigorously delimited kinds
of knowledge over and again. In ethnographic practice, the play-
ful, phantasmatic qualities of dance are pinned down, made serious
through expansive written descriptions of the dancing body, exhaus-
tive taxonomies of the differences between dancing styles, and nar-
rative accounts of the rituals and myths that, we are told, the dances
are meant to signify. For artists and writers in the avant-­garde, as well
as audiences of turn-­of-­the-­twentieth-­century ethnographic dance
 Historical Figures 119

amusements, the difference of the dancing body and its resistance to

precise signification encourage a phenomenological encounter with
otherness—­a seemingly firsthand experience of alterity—­and, in
turn, the construction of new modes of European subjectivity.
The representation of dance in ethnographic cinema, by contrast,
does not lend itself to recuperative operations, to either the narrative
assimilation of difference or a reflexive constitution of the (spectato-
rial) self. These dances are suspended expressions, figures of radical
difference and epistemological refusal. These dances are illettrées: un-
lettered, spectral, and, as I will argue, historical signs that do not give
way to easy ethnographic assimilation. Crucially, these dances also
deviate from the images and attendant concepts of dance that domi-
nate early film practice and modernist thought. In the section that fol-
lows, I briefly trace these appearances and approaches to dance before
taking up the particularities of dance in ethnographic cinema and
naming more precisely its points of deviation.

Serpentine Symbols
The earliest era of moving images coincides with the development of
modern dance on American and European stages. The performance
of moving bodies and the technology of moving images meet over
and again during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
As I will outline here, theories of this site of intersection, of what cin-
ema and dance might share, have tended to emphasize certain kinds
and qualities of movement, namely, continuity, fluidity, and seamless-
ness. The conceptions of dance that inform these comparative read-
ings come quite close to those that circulate among anthropologists
and the avant-­garde: endlessly expansive, capable of dissolving all
boundaries and penetrating “right through the mind!” Ethnographic
cinema at once explicitly counters these concepts of dance and the
arguments that emanate from them.
The Lumière catalog contains dozens of films dedicated to the per-
formance of both domestic and excursive dances (and I analyze sev-
eral of the latter in the first chapter). In 1894, the first woman to ap-
pear in front of Thomas Edison’s camera was Carmen Dauset Moreno,
a Spanish dancer better known by her stage name “Carmencita.”42
Many others followed, each one betraying a desire for racial and/or
 120 Historical Figures

sexual difference: Native Americans perform the ghost dance and

the buffalo dance (1894); Japanese women cycle through the mikado
dance (1894); a Barnum and Bailey circus performer named “Princess
Ali” waves scarves in an “Egyptian dance”; the Leander sisters trot
around a public bath in San Francisco while dozens of bathers watch;
and Spanish dancers perform at the Pan-­A merican Exposition (1901).43
In the work of Georges Méliès, the dancers are skeletons, devils,
mermaids, and fairies plucked from the Théâtre du Châtelet.44 The
Gaumont and Pathé film studios competed with Méliès and pre-
dictably dedicated large portions of their early catalog to dance. As
Richard Abel notes, “nearly half of Gaumont’s production, between
1900 and 1902, was given over to dance films—­from serpentine,
Spanish, Bohemian, Basque, and Japanese dances to short ballets
such as Vénus et Adonis and Danse des saisons.”45
Both Gunning’s and Abel’s recitation of dance styles in early cin-
ema remind us that the “serpentine” takes precedence above them all
and exemplifies a foundational fin-­de-­siècle mixture of body and ma-
chine. Early film recordings of the serpentine dance adhere to nearly
the same formal presentation. One female dancer appears on a stage
against a black background.46 She performs for the camera, which
does not move. The contours of her body are concealed by layers of
cloth that undulate in waves, creating abstract and ethereal forma-
tions, as her arms rise and fall, as her body spins, flows, turns across
the frame. The costume of the serpentine dancer was often hand col-
ored so that the movements of the gown were joined by movements on
the gown, by the movements of one color transforming almost super-
naturally into another.47 Examples of the serpentine dance circulate
widely in the first decades of film production. Annabelle Whitford
performs the dance at least four times in the Edison catalog (August
1894, February 1895, April–­August 1895, May 1897).48 Two versions
appear in the Lumière collection (December 1897, June 1899), both
featuring a cross-­dressed performance by Leopoldo Fregoli.49 Max
and Emil Skladanowsky produced one example of their own. And
in Danse serpentine dans la cage aux fauves (Serpentine Dance in the
Lion’s Cage) (Ambroise-­François Parnaland, 1900), the serpentine
dance becomes a far more threatening creaturely encounter.
The phenomenon of the serpentine dance—­and the spectacular
layering of bodies-­in-­motion-­in-­color—­does not begin with the be-
 Historical Figures 121

ginning of early film (wherever and whenever we might locate that

origin). The dance most likely migrated from the Gaiety Theatre in
London, where the “Gaiety Girls” performed a billowing skirt dance
that teased spectators with rhythmic revelations of skin, to American
vaudeville, back across the Atlantic to the music halls of Paris, before
finding its way, serpentine-­l ike, onto celluloid. 50 Though hundreds of
dancers performed versions of an ecstatic skirt dance, Loïe Fuller, an
American who had performed as a burlesque dancer in London before
her debut in the United States, transformed the skirt into something
serpentine and made a significant contribution to the celebrity of the
dance on both stage and screen. Fuller’s version expanded the size
of the skirt and shifted attention away from the female body and the
technique of the dancer onto the excessive materiality of the costume
itself. Indeed, she transformed the dance through projective, proto-
cinematic technologies and made the skirt a dynamic screen. While
colored lights and projection were not new in the 1890s, early magic
lantern and motion picture performances were usually projected
onto static elements. As dance historian Sally Sommer notes, Fuller’s
serpentine dance “moved the huge screen, molding it into fantastic
shapes and forms”; through this movement, “light achieved motion,
shattering and fragmenting as it caught on the surface of the silk.”51
The interest of the Symbolists, especially Mallarmé, in the ab-
stract animations of Fuller’s dance has been well documented (not
least by Mallarmé himself). 52 Fuller’s metamorphosis—­f rom serpent
to butterfly to flower to an unnamed something else—­exemplified
the fluidity and continuity that compelled their conceptions of mod-
ern movement. 53 Frank Kermode convincingly argues that Fuller
“is much more properly the Symbolist dancer than any orthodox
ballerina . . . , for [she] is a kind of Ideogram: l’incorporation visuelle
de l’idée, a spectacle defying all definition, radiant, homogenous.”54
In this radiant homogeneity, Fuller also defied certain conceptions
of time, specifically, the heterogeneous stasis of the instant or the
pose that Henri Bergson endeavored to overturn with his theory of
durational or evolutionary time. Indeed, one can perceive the con-
temporaneity of Mallarmé and his serpentine in many passages from
Creative Evolution (1907). For example, Bergson describes the error
of perceiving psychic states as “independent entities” or “solid colors”
rather than “a flux of fleeting shades merging into each other,” and he
 122 Historical Figures

defines duration as the “continuous progress of the past which gnaws

into the future and which swells as it advances.”55
Several recent reflections on dance and cinema take Loïe Fuller
as evidence of a profound, symbiotic relationship between these two
modes of visual representation. This work draws a strong connection
between Fuller as an exemplar of Symbolist–­Bergsonian genres of
movement, on the one hand, and the image of movement that Gilles
Deleuze famously extracts from Bergson and grounds in the first de-
cades of moving images, on the other. Tom Gunning, for example,
argues not only that “Fuller provides the most complex example of
a technological art of motion, which certain film theorists will refine
later within the avant-­garde tradition, . . . and which Deleuze locates
more broadly in the pre-­War cinema,” but also, and more emphati-
cally, that “one would be hard put to conceive of a better image of
Bergson’s contrasting, new, dynamic understanding of duration than
the dances of Loïe Fuller.”56 In her rigorous account of the cross­
currents that bind dance and cinema together, Erin Brannigan like-
wise insists that modern dance, and perhaps even the specific shapes
of Fuller’s serpentine performance, underpins the conception of
movement that Deleuze develops in the first volume of his writing on
cinema. She writes:
The two models of movement [Deleuze draws] from Bergson—­
the “ancient,” which is aligned with traditional dance styles
such as classical ballet, and the “modern,” which is collocated
with new dance practices—­provide a binary framework for
thinking through changes in aesthetic practice related to dance
and photographic reproduction. In this instance, ballet can be
figured as a movement lexicon in which the pose dominates,
while modern dance, particularly in the form of La Loïe, repre-
sents an aesthetic commitment to the principle of flux. 57
While Gunning firmly locates the dance of Loïe Fuller in a modernist
dialectic, and frames her experimentation with the visual technolo-
gies of light and color as thoroughly a part of and predecessor to the
era of visual attractions, Brannigan argues (in a seeming mischarac-
terization of early cinema) against the association of modern dance
with “clunky editing, varying film speeds, and hysterical acting
styles.”58 For her, Fuller exemplifies the fluidity of Bergsonian dura-
 Historical Figures 123

tion and therefore occupies a “central position within the historical

and technological matrix” of cinema. 59 While they might disagree
about what in fact early cinema is and means, both ultimately come
to the same conclusion. What binds dance and cinema together is a
particular genre of movement, one that privileges the seamless con-
tinuity of bodies and objects as they obscure or overcome the stasis
of the pose—­or the photographic substrate—­to become, change, and
disappear in space.
The counterforce of modern dance—­its capacity to overturn the
poses that constitute classical forms of movement like ballet as well
as the protocinematic stutters of Muybridge and Marey—­makes it a
crucial metaphor in the film practice and writing of the moving image
avant-­garde in the 1910s and 1920s. Dance winds its way across the
Dadaist, Surrealist, and Futurist film movements, as well as the exper-
imental search for “pure cinema” and “photogénie”; it is represented
(on-­screen) and thematized (through titles, notations, etc.) in the di-
verse film practices of René Clair, Germaine Dulac, Viking Eggeling,
Fernand Léger, Marcel L’Herbier, Man Ray, Hans Richter, and Walter
Ruttman (the list necessarily goes on).60 Like the Symbolist writers
and anthropological avant-­gardists who distill dance into a broad and
undifferentiated whole, a homogenous sign (of sexual or racial oth-
erness), the cinematic avant-­garde takes dance as an inspiring sign
of a certain cinematic ontology: its liquescent qualities, its potential
for abstraction and nonlinguistic expression, and the new modes of
continuous, fluent mobility that moving images seemingly made pos-
sible. Élie Faure anticipates Deleuze (and recollects Bergson) when he
writes, “It is by volumes, arabesques, gestures, attitudes, relationships,
associations, contrasts, and passages of tones—­the whole animated
and insensibly modified from one fraction of a second to another—­
that [the art of the moving picture] will impress our sensibility and act
on our intelligence.”61 Germaine Dulac similarly privileges dance—­
and the spectral performance of Loïe Fuller—­as a figure of continu-
ous cinematic movement and the becoming of a harmonious whole:
“I evoke a dancer! A woman? No. A line bounding to harmonious
rhythms. I evoke, on the veils, a luminous projection! Precise mat-
ter? No. Fluid rhythms. The pleasures that movement procures in the
theater, why scorn them on the screen? Harmony of lines. Harmony
of light. Lines and surfaces evolving at length according to the logic of
 124 Historical Figures

their forms and stripped of all meanings that are too human to better
elevate itself toward the abstraction of sentiments leaving more space
for sensations and dreams: integral cinema.”62
Dance moves and means differently in early ethnographic cinema.
It does not serve metaphors of continuity, nor does it herald the fluid-
ity of film history, that is, the evolutionary overcoming of the chrono-
photographic pose or the stutters of nineteenth-­century visual cul-
ture. The representation of dance in ethnographic cinema further fails
to cohere as just one thing, one fantasy of otherness or one metaphor
of spatiotemporal expression. Rather, these events come much closer
to the diverse spectrum of discontinuities that Deleuze attributes to
a postwar crisis in the “sensory-­motor” schema, those “weak connec-
tions and floating events,” that array of fragmentary and ephemeral
images.63 The representation of dance in ethnographic cinema inter-
rupts the coherence of the body, as well as the continuous, chrono-
logical movements of a certain cinema and a certain conception of its
history (“this and then that”), with an errant, wandering spectrum of
temporal figures, to which I now turn.

Regional Dance, Local Time

Two films from the American Museum of Natural History’s (AMNH)
Morgan Collection are emblematic of the visual fragmentation of
dance in ethnographic film. Both were made by the French Ministère
des Colonies at some point between 1920 and the late 1930s (when
Morgan gifted the film to the AMNH). The first, Cameroun: Danses
dans les régions, begins with clear cinematographic and geographic
coordinates: the title of the film appears, followed by the name of the
cameraman (R. Bugniet) and a description, “Danses dans la region
d’Akonolinga” (dances from the Akonolinga region). The images that
proceed from these linguistic conventions, however, are images nei-
ther of dance nor of the geography of a Cameroonian province but
an extraordinarily proximate and fragmentary geography of the body.
The first image is an extreme close-­up of an arm (or a leg), stretched
across the diagonal of the frame and ornamented with a band of dried
grasses (Figure 4). The body does not move. Another shot follows the
first, nearly identical in both its composition and its stillness: an arm
or leg bisects the image along one diagonal, and an ornamental band
 Historical Figures 125

FIGURE 4
The abstraction of body parts in Cameroun: Danses dans les régions (R. Bugniet, Ministère
des Colonies, circa 1920–­39). American Museum of Natural History.

divides the image along the other. The film cuts to another extreme
close-­up of two shins, a pair of feet (which bring to mind Bataille’s
interest in the “most human part of the human body”), and, finally,
knees bobbing to a beat (Figure 5).64 From here, the dancing begins
in earnest, as a series of long shots reveals several groups of bodies
in motion. While one can perhaps retroactively piece the puzzle of
the dancers back together—­matching parts to bodies—­the film fre-
quently returns to the proximity and stasis of its introductory shots.
In other words, Cameroun departs from the coherence and clarity of
the dancing bodies to inspect a disembodied part or patch of skin,
to pan the length of a limb or the details of a decoration. Each new
geographic region, each new intertitular separation begins this visual
 126 Historical Figures

FIGURE 5
The scene cuts from a pair of feet to knees bobbing to a beat in Cameroun: Danses dans
les régions (R. Bugniet, Ministère des Colonies, circa 1920–­39). American Museum of
Natural History.

cycle of fragmentation anew: body parts, dancing bodies, body parts

interspersed among the dancing bodies. The film lasts twelve minutes.
A second film from the Morgan collection represents dance in a
strikingly similar way. Danses Cambodgiennes consists of a small col-
lection of scenes—­just six minutes in total—­featuring the Royal
Cambodian Ballet. Though the film lacks the kind of identifying
marks that structure Cameroun, the dances were likely recorded at
the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, where public performances were
common during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.65
Like Cameroun, the film begins with stillness: an empty dance floor
and a crowd of spectators look off­screen at movements that we can-
 Historical Figures 127

not see. A hand enters the frame and then retracts; a body comes into
frame, and then the shot dissolves (Figure 6). The film repeatedly
dissolves the dancing body into other bodies, body parts, and cos-
tume details. Nearly every transition between shots is a dissolve: the
body of the lead dancer dissolves into a medium close-­up of her torso
and face, which then dissolves into a close-­up of just her static counte-
nance, which next dissolves into the detail of her decorative headpiece
(Figure 7) and finally just the detail of her hand, holding two fingers
together in a frozen gesture (Figure 8). The film even incorporates an
elaborate split-­screen technique that blends an image of musicians on
one side of the image with the dissolving dancers on the other (Figure
9). The result is a spectral, ephemeral film whose images seem to have
no ground, no stability or security.
From the formal composition of the close-­ups in Cameroun to the
manifold dissolves in Danses Cambodgiennes, both films produce the
event of dance rather than simply “recording” or “documenting” its
appearance in the world. These interventions no doubt encourage
contemporary viewers to speculate on what might have motivated
them: perhaps a desire (not unlike those that underlie the excursive
images of the Maison Lumière) to approach the dancing body, to ex-
amine the surface of its skin, to return to (or continue) the chrono-
photographic practice of dissecting bodily movements and gestures,
or simply to extend the exertions of colonial control to the image and,
in turn, manage the threatening dynamism of an unfamiliar ritual.
Whatever might motivate the particular formation of these images,
however, their effects extend beyond visual hapticity or restraint.
These techniques introduce a principle of uncertainty and indiscern-
ibility. One cannot be sure of how (body) parts relate to wholes, or of
how one shot relates spatiotemporally to those that arrive before or
after it.
These films disorder the dances they endeavor to document:
they fragment, interrupt, and rearrange the movements of the body.
In the case of Cameroun, the static close-­ups delay the dance and
then haunt every image of coherent action that follows. In Danses
Cambodgiennes, the incessant dissolutions of the image defer the
movements of the body differently, by multiplying and suspending its
representation; the dance is haunted by its own image, at the very in-
stant in which it appears. In Cameroun, time expands, stretches out. In
FIGURE 6
Spectators and dancers dissolve into each other in Danses Cambodgiennes (Ministère
des Colonies, circa 1920–­39). American Museum of Natural History.

FIGURE 7
An image of a dancer’s face dissolves into that of her decorative headpiece in Danses
Cambodgiennes (Ministère des Colonies, circa 1920–­39). American Museum of
Natural History.
FIGURE 8
A frozen gesture interrupts the movements of dancing bodies and dissolving images in
Danses Cambodgiennes (Ministère des Colonies, circa 1920–­39). American Museum
of Natural History.

FIGURE 9
A split screen in Danses Cambodgiennes (Ministère des Colonies, circa 1920–­39).
American Museum of Natural History.
 130 Historical Figures

Danses Cambodgiennes, it condenses and collapses. Both films trouble

the enduring present tense of ethnographic discourse, the indexical
“thereness” of mechanical reproduction, and the causal connections
of “sensory-­motor” or narrative cinema. When the screen is filled with
flesh or the dancing body is doubled (or tripled), these images ges-
ture toward what is no longer or not yet there: the whole body and
the coherent, continuous dance. Put slightly differently, these films
announce their virtuality. In this way, one is reminded of the “double”
or “mutual” expressions that Deleuze locates in certain time-­images-­
to-­come, images with two “definite” but indiscernible sides: real and
imaginary, actual and virtual, “still present and already past, at once
and the same time.”66 If one recalls the divided qualities of dance—­
its “relation of forces joined in tension,” its simultaneous physicality
and ephemerality, its dispersion across live(d) performance and his-
torical origins—­one might identify yet another division or circuit of
indiscernibility in these films. Indeed, both Cameroun and Danses
Cambodgiennes seem to take on something of their subjects, thereby
confusing the distinction between dance and its representation as
moving image.
Although many works of ethnographic cinema, like Cameroun and
Danses Cambodgiennes, are quite simply “dance films,” single-­subject
affairs that begin and end with the body-­in-­motion, dance also ap-
pears as a feature of numerous expedition films from the early 1920s
onward. I examine the generic conventions of expedition filmmak-
ing at length in the next chapter. I would like to pause here, however,
to consider how the representation of dance interacts with visual ac-
counts of ethnographic travel and, in turn, generates distinct expres-
sions of temporal indiscernibility.
In the mid-­1920s, George Thomas Basden traveled by steamship
from Liverpool to Onitsha in southeastern Nigeria, where he had held
an Anglican missionary position since 1900.67 In 1921, Basden pub-
lished Among the Ibos, an amateur ethnographic account of the region
that was widely read by British colonial administrators.68 He fore-
warns readers, “Literature is not my profession. I have simply striven
to set forth in a plain way some of the things a plain man may see and
hear in Nigeria.”69 Such an exercise is necessary, he reasons, for “the
black man does not know his own mind. He does the most extraor-
dinary things, and cannot explain why he does them. . . . His policy
 Historical Figures 131

is very largely one of drift.” 70 The text includes twenty-­eight chapters

on the geography and culture of the region, including “Courtship and
Marriage,” “The Ibo at Work,” “Music,” “Some Aspects of Religion,”
and “Sacrifice.” A few paragraphs on dance—­“the body movements
are extremely difficult and would probably kill a European”—­appear
in a chapter dedicated to “Sports and Pastimes.” 71
During his expedition back to Nigeria a few years later (the precise
dates of his travel are not known), Basden shot ten reels of 16mm foot-
age. The untitled reels are now referred to as the Basden Collection.72
The footage contains numerous intertitles, suggesting that it was ed-
ited for a public audience of some kind, perhaps the British officials
who were already familiar with his published writing. The Basden
Collection begins with a departure from Liverpool, a beginning that
repeats the structure of the book. The passengers of the MV Apapa
“say farewell to England and grey skies.” The first scenes show large
nets of luggage loaded from the dock onto the deck of the awaiting
vessel and waving crowds gathered at the shore. From there, the film’s
intertitles carefully situate spectators in space and time as the ship
arrives in Madeira, the Canary Islands, Sierra Leone, Accra, and Port
Harcourt (Nigeria) before traveling “forty miles by car through the
Niger Delta,” “over the fine bridge crossing the Imo River” “by the
main highway Northwards,” and across the “Lordly Niger.” Shortly
after Basden’s arrival in Nigeria, however, the film shifts its attention
to the representation of dance and abandons all intertitular guidance
on just where (or when) we are. Of the film’s ten reels, Basden dedi-
cates six of them—­more than an hour of footage—­to dance, a rather
remarkable phenomenon given the scant attention that the practice
receives in Basden’s more than three hundred pages of writing on the
region.
An intertitle introduces the visual and epistemic shift: “Africa will
dance. In a concealed retreat we discover a children’s dancing class.”
The specificity of particular harbors, towns, rivers, and routes in
Nigeria no longer seems to matter. Basden instead refers us, with the
awkward insistence of the future tense, to the whole of Africa, that
mythological no-­place of dark corners and “concealed retreats” so
frequently called forth in the colonial imaginary. In the scenes that
follow, dancers pack the frame. Though many of them are children,
the crowd includes men and women as well. Occasionally, a cut
 132 Historical Figures

between shots seems to separate distinct dances and groups of danc-

ers; at other points, the same dance continues, repeats its cycle with
the same performers. Another intertitle appears, though it does not
clarify the spatiotemporal coordinates of what precedes and follows
it: “Dancing competitions between different villages are held, either
in parties or individual champions.” In the next scene, the dancing
continues, this time between men alone. Some face the camera, oth-
ers turn away to face a crowd of onlookers, still others dance across
the frame in multiple directions. It is not at all clear what the nature of
the competition is or whether it is one between groups or individuals.
Dozens of shots follow, each one no more than a few seconds long: a
costumed dancer wears a mask and dances into (extreme close-­up)
and away from the camera; a statue resembling a female figure appears
in close-­up, held aloft by the crowd; and dancers bend and lift their
bodies in such a way that the camera cannot keep them within view.
Nearly eight minutes pass before the intertitles return and briefly
interrupt the dance. In a moment that foreshadows the simulacral
performances of Jean Rouch’s Les maîtres fous (1956), we are told that
“the sense of mimicry is highly developed. Acting as Native Police in-
cluding a white Commissioner is a popular turn.” The dancers who
appear in the shots that follow do not aim at a precise performance of
European power.73 Several men indeed stand absolutely still, dressed
in something that resembles a police uniform. However, dancers sur-
round them, wearing masks, grass skirts, and shorts; their arms out-
stretched, they face the camera and eventually obscure the mimicry
of the “officers” with their bodies and their decidedly nonmimetic
movements (Figure 10). This first interlude of dance in the Basden
Collection continues for a further ten minutes. The intertitular expla-
nations recede, interrupting the image only to describe the dancers
as “fearsome creatures” and “weird and grotesque” caricatures. In a
cinematographic gesture that suggests something of the relationship
between cinema and dance—­and itself mimics the “policy of drift”
Basden once assigned to those he observed—­the camera occasion-
ally drifts away from the scene and swirls skyward, seemingly over-
whelmed by the scenes unfolding below.
Though the Basden Collection operates as a kind of limiting case,
insofar as the sensory-­motor apparatus of expeditionary travel comes
radically undone and dance stretches across almost the entire film,
 Historical Figures 133

FIGURE 10
Dancers obstruct the view of mimicry in the Basden Collection (George Thomas Basden,
circa 1920s–30s). Bristol Museums, Galleries, and Archives ref 2006/070.

nearly every ethnographic expedition film includes a scene of dance

that interrupts the representation of chronological travel. In La
Croisière noire (Léon Poirier, 1926), a more popular and widely cir-
culated expedition film, dance becomes a site of manifold tempo-
ral strategies.74 The film traces four teams of explorers as they drive
Citroën autochenilles (“caterpillar” or continuous-­tread vehicles) from
Colomb-­Béchar, Algeria, across the Sahara to multiple destinations
on the other side of the continent, including Le Cap (Cape Town),
South Africa, and Mahajanga on the island of Madagascar. The ex-
pedition began on October 24, 1924, and concluded eight months
later on July 26, 1925. Two commanders led the group: Georges-­
Marie Haardt, an engineer and general director at Citroën, and
Louis Audouin-­Dubreuil, who quit his position as an officer in the
Méhariste (camel cavalry) of the French army to join the expedi-
tion.75 La Croisière noire was designed to promote the Citroën brand,
especially its model of rugged expedition vehicles, and to project an
image of vehicular tourism in Africa to citizens of Western Europe.76
That is, the film was designed to make trans-­Saharan car travel look
 134 Historical Figures

efficient and feasible for potential visitors while, at the same time,
tempting spectators with scenes of the exotic bodies and cultural
practices that awaited the adventurous European traveler. The film
further exemplifies the frequent entanglements between the state (in-
cluding military and colonial administrations), industry and com-
merce, the natural and human sciences, and popular entertainment in
the practice of early ethnographic filmmaking.
In La Croisière noire, each stop along the journey—­each new geo-
graphic location—­is punctuated (or punctured) by dance. These fre-
quent iterations of the body-­in-­motion undermine the industrial and
instrumental aspects of the film’s design. Any implicit claims to the
efficiency and repeatability of the croisière (potentially undertaken
by tourists or imagined by spectators) dissolve in a series of strange,
composite scenes. The film integrates the kinds of techniques one
sees in Cameroun or Danses Cambodgiennes, including still shots and
extreme close-­ups of the dancers’ bodies and body parts, as well as
frequent and unmotivated cutting between modes and moments of
dance. And, like the Basden Collection, these images deflect intertit­
ular explanation and interrupt the spatiotemporal coherence of the
expedition. Poirier exacerbates the interruptive and temporal dimen-
sions of these scenes by slowing them down. The rhythms of dance
are therefore explicitly marked as different from all other expedition-
ary actions. In slow motion, dance oscillates between immaterial
and material expressions, at once fashioning otherworldly, dreamlike
tableaux and foregrounding the temporal formations of mechanical
reproduction.
Other, more complex examples are numerous. In Les fils de Cham
(circa 1930s), a film that documents the travels of Gaston Muraz,
a military doctor who treated sleeping sickness in West Africa, the
representation of dance combines the familiar techniques of bodily
fragmentation and extreme close-­ups with fast motion and montage.77
Bodies and body parts are whipped into a frenzied blur. These scenes
no doubt are designed to communicate something of the Dionysian
qualities of dance, but they also transform the film (however tempo-
rarily) into an abstract, illegible canvas. In the concluding moments
of Togo (1927), an expedition film directed by Pierre Marty, the film
cuts from an extreme close-­up of a dancing torso to a fast-­motion
 Historical Figures 135

flashback of the expedition viewers will have just seen. Remarkably,

the images that unfold in this flashback—­the review of the film’s
visual contents—­are disordered and recombined in the replay. The
coherence and linearity of the expedition film rupture in the con-
cluding moment of return. The film folds back upon itself and loses
itself, never returning to the dancing body out of which these images
initially emerged. The dance here retroactively reframes the expedi-
tion (as the convention of the flashback so often does) as memory or
dream, undermining at once the evidentiary epistemology of the film
and emphatically reminding viewers, as Mary Ann Doane argues,
that multishot cinema constructs time, produces time as an effect.78
Indeed, it could always be otherwise.
Despite the differences between them, these events in ethno-
graphic cinema adhere to the conception of dance we inherit from
Agamben: dance in these films introduces a pause or a form of pa-
ralysis that is itself not immobile but rather a “composite of phan-
tasms” “charged with memory and dynamic energy.” Agamben puts
this claim slightly differently in his writing on gesture. He argues that
dance—­and gesture more broadly—­is not a means to an end or to
some goal beyond the dance itself. Dance never arrives at the certi-
tude of being. Instead, it hangs in the process of becoming, a point
perhaps best emphasized in La Croisière noire by the suspension of
bodies in slow motion. In a passage worth excerpting at length, he
writes:
If dance is gesture, it is so . . . because it is nothing more than
the endurance and the exhibition of the media character of
corporal movements. The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality:
it is the process of making a means visible as such. . . . The gesture
is, in this sense, communication of a communicability. It has
precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-­in-­
language of human beings as pure mediality. However, because
being-­in-­language is not something that could be said in sen-
tences, the gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being
able to figure something out in language; it is always a gag in the
proper meaning of the term, indicating first of all something
that could be put in your mouth to hinder speech. . . . From
this point derives not only the proximity between gesture and
 136 Historical Figures

philosophy, but also the one between philosophy and cinema.

Cinema’s essential “silence” (which has nothing to do with the
presence or absence of a soundtrack) is, just like the silence of
philosophy, exposure of the being-­in-­language of human be-
ings: pure gesturality.79
Setting aside for the moment Agamben’s pivot from the specificity
of gesture to his larger claims about the essential (i.e., ontological)
silences that all of cinema and philosophy purportedly share, the
films I have examined contain precisely the kind of gestural “silences”
Agamben describes.
In early ethnographic cinema, dance is only ever commensurate
with itself. As Agamben speculates, it functions gesturelike and there-
fore fails to mediate between two points—­between the ethnographer
and an unfamiliar culture, between incomprehension and under-
standing. The deflecting interplay between intertitle and image only
further underscores this refusal to communicate anything more than
the possibility or process of communication. In these films, dance
is an expression of silence, a message deferred by indefinite means,
the “gag” of pure mediality. It also forcefully counters the temporal
expressions of the expedition itself, an ends-­oriented, sensory-­motor
practice bound etymologically to notions of both speed and martial
purpose. The movements of the mediating dancers, no matter their
own dizzying rhythms, inevitably slow, stop, or—­as Togo dramati-
cally illustrates—­undo the signification of expedition cinema. In
these scenes, the spatiotemporal transition from one point to another
meets a form of passage going nowhere, a transition without resolu-
tion, a communication of communicability.
In knotting the mediating “silence” of dance and cinema together,
Agamben suggests a further reflexivity, that is, if we can narrow and
refine the claim. These scenes of the body—­its pure mediality, its re-
sistant incommunicability—­perhaps stand in for the whole of early
ethnographic cinema (rather than, as he suggests, the whole of cin-
ema itself). Indeed, they offer a condensed perspective on the impos-
sible task of capturing and communicating the signs of human dif-
ference, the gestures of any/every body that “have nothing to say,”
suspended as they are in an expression of pure mediality.
While these examples model how dance intervenes in the produc-
 Historical Figures 137

tion of chronological or linear time, I would like to consider the ef-

fects of one final example of dance in ethnographic cinema, drawn
from the explicitly narrative expressions of docufiction and one of
the most well-­k nown examples of the genre: Edward S. Curtis’s In the
Land of the Head Hunters (1914). This film, as I will argue, invites a
different reading of dance, one that attends to the manifold ways in
which this visual event disrupts the temporal regimes of both the evi-
dentiary index and narrative expression.

Of Smoke and Mountain Goats

The genre of docufiction ethnography begins in the transitional
era and extends across the 1920s and 1930s. Ethnofiction includes
the work of Robert Flaherty, F. W. Murnau, Merian C. Cooper and
Ernest B. Schoedsack, and Martin and Osa Johnson, among other,
lesser-­k nown filmmakers like the anonymous Jesuit missionaries
who made Nionga (1925) and André Roosevelt, the hotel manager
and cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt who codirected Goona
Goona (1931), a romance set in Bali.80 As its name suggests, docu­
fiction makes a bifurcated promise: fabulation and fact, entertain-
ment and education. In theory, these films tell stories of romantic
coupling and exotic adventure with “real” native actors and settings.
In practice, the division between the actual or documentary aspects
of these films and their narrative imaginaries is far more fluid. 81
Contemporary anthropologists and film scholars have convincingly
argued that these films are not hyphenated operations but fantasies
of a world that never was, fashioned out of exotic details that very
often lack ethnographic evidence of any kind.82 In short, these films
are nearly all fiction and very little ethnography.
Edward S. Curtis was an American photographer and amateur eth-
nographer of Native American communities in the Pacific Northwest,
Alaska, and Canada. His first and only feature-­length motion picture,
In the Land of the Head Hunters, reflected and contributed to the early
twentieth-­century fascination with Native Americans and the “wild”
frontiers of North America.83 The film was shot on and around Tsaxis
(Fort Rupert) in British Columbia and features performances by the
Kwakiutl, ’Nak’waxda’xw, and other Kwak’wala-­speaking peoples
 138 Historical Figures

(Kwakwaka’wakw).84 Before making In the Land of the Head Hunters,

Curtis had published The North American Indian (1906), a massive,
twenty-­volume edition of photographs and ethnographic analysis
printed on fine handmade paper, bound in Moroccan leather, and sold
by subscription to museums, universities, and wealthy individuals. 85
Each volume was accompanied by dozens of copperplate photogra-
vures of Curtis’s work, with more than seven hundred images issued
for each edition of the project. Incidentally, the American banker and
financier John Pierpoint Morgan, Anne Morgan’s father, funded the
project.86 The tenth and longest volume in the collection—­at roughly
twice the length of any other volume, printed on thinner paper for
uniformity—­is dedicated to the study of the Kwakwaka’wakw cul-
ture.87 Research for this volume coincided with the production of
Curtis’s feature-­length film; both projects appeared in 1914, after
more than five years of ethnographic interaction and study in the
region.88 In the Land of the Head Hunters premiered at the Casino in
New York City and the Moore Theatre in Seattle in December before
receiving a limited nationwide distribution and, shortly thereafter,
disappearing from view.89
While Curtis is best known and most highly regarded as a por-
trait photographer, he was a multimedia dabbler who combined pho-
tography, writing, sound recording, cinema, and live performance
in his ethnographic practice.90 His work therefore bears a strong
resemblance to the utopic holism of Albert Kahn’s Archives de la
Planète (see chapter 1). During his research for The North American
Indian, Curtis made ten thousand wax cylinder recordings of Native
American language and music, produced more than forty thousand
photographic images, recorded several short films of Native American
dance, and transcribed what he gleaned of tribal history and tradi-
tions.91 While the bound volumes of his research were intended for
a small and exclusive readership, Curtis also distributed images and
narrative accounts of his ethnographic adventures through postcards,
newspapers and magazines, exhibitions at museums and department
stores, and, of course, commercial narrative cinema.92 In advance of
the release of In the Land of the Head Hunters, Curtis promoted his
project with a nationwide magic lantern tour or “musicale” in 1911,
which featured photographic slides, film footage, and live orches-
tral accompaniment, all of which was intended to appeal to a much
 Historical Figures 139

broader popular audience.93 Curtis’s mixture of ethnography and

entertainment influenced critical assessments of his academic aspira-
tions (not least by Franz Boas).94 His movements between media also
blurred the boundaries between them: the tenth volume of his collec-
tion features photographic images of the performers and props from
his film set, and his moving images were (and still often are) read as
fundamentally photographic. In 1915, poet and film theorist Vachel
Lindsay described In the Land of the Head Hunters as “abound in noble
bronzes,” recalling at once the stasis of Curtis’s photographic images
and the warm metallic tones of the copperplate photogravures.95
Curtis’s ethnographic work—­expressed in writing, photography,
and cinema—­is also bound by a shared conception of ethnographic
ends. Curtis understood ethnography as a form of cultural salvage,
as a way of preserving “vanishing races” against what he perceived
to be the annihilating threats of modernity.96 He summarizes the
view in the introduction to his photographic volume: “The passing
of every old man or old woman means the passing of some tradition,
some knowledge of sacred rites possessed by no other: consequently
the information that is to be gathered for future generations . . . must
be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost for all time. It is
this need that has inspired the present task.”97 In Curtis’s portraits of
Native Americans, the salvage operation, rather counterintuitively,
manifests itself as an absenting of (then) contemporary Native life
and photographic processes.98 The images confirm soft-­focus stereo-
types and construct picturesque scenes of “pure” Native subjects un-
touched by modern dress or technologies. Paul Chaat Smith rightly
reminds us of the anachronisms embedded in the work: “Most of
[Curtis’s] photographs were taken in the twentieth century, created to
make them appear as if they are from the nineteenth. . . . Those photo
shoots? He drove there! In his car!”99
The paradoxical practice of ethnographic salvage extends to Curtis’s
brief foray into commercial narrative filmmaking. Curtis promoted
In the Land of the Head Hunters as an authentic documentation of
Kwakwaka’wakw cultural practices and sought funding from ethno-
graphic institutions, including the Smithsonian, for what he described
as “carefully studied and worked out subjects, . . . an unquestioned
document.”100 The filmmaker nevertheless constructed or resurrected
(with a difference) much of what he claimed to document—­including
 140 Historical Figures

row houses, totem poles, canoes, masks, cedar-­bark costumes, and

other elaborate ornamentation—­and carefully removed the traces
of cross-­cultural interaction from the film’s mise-­en-­scène.101 At the
time of the film’s production, sailboats and motorized vessels were
frequently used, and traditional costumes were rarely worn.102 Curtis
paid his performers to shave their facial hair and wear wigs so as to
more closely approximate the stereotypes of Indian appearance. He
invented ceremonial practices, or remixed them with those of other,
neighboring communities. And for a scene of whale hunting, he bor-
rowed a specimen from a commercial whaling company (because the
Kwakwaka’wakw community did not actually hunt the animals).
For all of Curtis’s interventions, however, In the Land of the Head
Hunters is notoriously difficult to understand. The confusion is due,
in part, to the film’s complex restoration history and the multiple ver-
sions of the film in circulation, a point to which I will return. (The
version to which my own analysis refers, unless otherwise noted, is
the most recent, 2008 restoration by Aaron Glass, Brad Evans, and
the UCLA Film & Television Archive.) Curtis himself reedited the
film numerous times before depositing a badly damaged negative,
a stained master positive, and a thousand feet of additional footage
with the American Museum of Natural History.103 Attentive specta-
tors familiar with the geography of the region and the performers who
appear in the film may have also been puzzled by more than a few of
Curtis’s directorial decisions: the same interiors are used for two dif-
ferent locations; the same canoes are repainted to represent different
boats; and different actors play the same character, with the role of
female lead shared by at least three women.104 Curtis historians Bill
Holm and George Quimby put a fine point on it: “Curtis was com-
pletely consistent in his inconsistency.”105
Still, so much of what confuses in the film owes to a preponder-
ance of nonnarrative visual events that defer and detour sequential
narrative action. A generous reconstitution of the film’s winding
narrative goes something like this: a great chief ’s son, Motana, falls
in love with Naida; an evil, “head hunting” sorcerer named Yaklus
tries to prevent their union; Motana defeats the sorcerer, unites with
Naida, and becomes the chief of the tribe. Responding to the 1972
restoration, Fatimah Tobing Rony dismisses the plot as “labored”
and indeed secondary to Curtis’s visual impulse to “string together
 Historical Figures 141

footage purporting to offer a view of the Kwakwaka’wakw way of

life before the nineteenth century.”106 In both its intertitles and im-
ages, Rony reads a kind of cultural fabrication that nevertheless ex-
erts real epistemic control over the lives and cultures it represents.
Catherine Russell takes a different view (also in response to the
1972 version of the film), one that comes much closer to my own. For
her, the film’s collage of the real and imagined opens onto a field of
discursive play. Russell describes the plot as “absolutely impossible
to follow” and “an odd supplement to the images,” whose convolu-
tions were likely exacerbated in the process of its first restoration by
Holm and Quimby in 1972.107 For Russell, the “overdecorated and
prop-­laden” theatrical staging of Curtis’s film and the primacy of its
visual exhibitionism approximate the qualities of early cinema and,
in particular, Georges Méliès’s Voyage dans la Lune (1902).108 Curtis
is an operator in between disciplines, an anthropologist with com-
mercial aspirations, free to flitter across impulses and genres and to
upset the conventions of both travelogues and commercial narrative
cinema. He lands, seemingly by accident, in another era of cinematic
production: “In its present state, as a film that is neither a documen-
tary (because it is so inauthentic) nor a fiction (because the narrative
is so incomprehensible), Headhunters/War Canoes is a key instance of
the survival of a ‘cinema of attractions’ beyond the parameters of early
cinema.”109
More recently, film historian (and producer of the 2008 restora-
tion) Brad Evans has argued against understanding In the Land of the
Head Hunters as a cinematic “attraction,” or as ethnographic evidence
corrupted by an aimless and unwieldy narrative. Evans insists that
contemporary scholars and spectators abandon their “documentary
fixations” and see the film as a lavish early twentieth-­century cine-
matic narrative film (alongside Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria [1914] or
D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation [1915] and Intolerance [1916]) and an
elaborate “fictional melodrama of love and war.”110
Like Evans, I disagree with the categorization of the film as an
anachronistic “attraction,” as well as the emphasis that both Rony and
Russell place on the images as the “real” site of communication, where
meaning gets made. However, I also disagree with Evans’s diagnosis
of the film’s disorder as somehow born of a perceptual problem or
category error: if only we frame the film correctly, as a particularly
 142 Historical Figures

fantastic expression of narrative fiction, then the epistemic failures of

the film diminish. For Evans, we are simply holding the film to the
wrong (ethnographic, evidentiary) standard. This view overlooks the
intrinsic disorders of ethnographic evidence. It also elides the epis-
temic confusions—­and, contra Rony, the distinct lack of ideological
or discursive control—­that emanate from the sites of nonnarrative
(ethnographic, evidentiary) expression and, more specifically, the
film’s many scenes of supposedly ceremonial Kwakwaka’wakw dance.
Nearly half of the film’s most recently restored running time—­a
little over sixty minutes in total—­contains dance of some kind, from
the very first moments in which Motana dances next to a fire as part
of his “vision quest” (and the face of Naida appears superimposed
in its smoke), to elaborate performances in canoes led by dancers in
wooden animal masks, to another rhythmic vision quest, to what the
intertitles describe as ceremonial victory dances and dances of “mari-
tal acceptance.” It is worth noting that all of these scenes appear in
the 1972 restoration of the film, though they are framed differently
(or not at all) by the intertitles.111 In a remarkable collection of scenes,
dance intervenes and seemingly leaves the plot behind. The sequence
begins in a naturalistic style, out of doors, in the village of Yaklus, as
dancers celebrate the death of Motana’s father and the destruction
of his village, before the mise-­en-­scène shifts to a more theatrical
staging. An intertitle appears and ambiguously names the conceal-
ments in the images to come. It states, “In concealment are dancers
clothed as mythic animals and monsters.” In the scene that follows,
a row of musicians perform in front of a black curtain and an ornate
Méliès-­esque proscenium, before the curtain drops to reveal a cha-
otic crowd of dancers (previously concealed by the curtain, but still
concealed by animal masks and costumes) (Figure 11). The sequence
then shifts to another stage and a different theatrical composition. An
intertitle simply states “Thunderbird Dancer,” and the film cuts to a
single performer in a bird costume dancing on a wooden stage in front
of another black curtain (à la Edison’s Black Maria) (Figure 12).112
Next, an intertitle offers a more descriptive account of dance (that
nevertheless conflates reality and performance): “Fire Dance. The
Fire dancer hates fire and destroys the fire with his bare hands and
feet. Attendants try to restrain him.” In the scene that next arrives,
the film changes scenery yet again. A fire burns outdoors, in the cen-
 Historical Figures 143

FIGURE 11
The curtain drops to reveal a crowd of dancers in In the Land of the Headhunters (Edward S.
Curtis, 1914). UCLA Film and Television Archive restoration.

ter of the frame, as a group of (visibly) human dancers circle around

it. One of the dancers grabs at the fire and throws pieces of flaming
wood toward the foreground. Smoke fills the frame and obscures the
dance (it also draws attention to the clouds of decaying celluloid that
also obstruct the view, a common effect of ethnographic cinema that
I discuss in my fifth and final chapter) (Figure 13).113 The dance be-
comes a spectral play of hide-­and-­seek before the film cuts to another
deictic intertitle: “Bear, Wolf, Mountain Goat, Wasp and Dog.”114
A group of dancers—­perhaps the same ones who populate previous
scenes in the sequence—­appear in animal masks and costumes, danc-
ing in a circle (Figure 14). This time, they perform on an earthen floor
 144 Historical Figures

FIGURE 12
A dancer performs in a bird costume in In the Land of the Headhunters (Edward S. Curtis,
1914). UCLA Film and Television Archive restoration.

against an ornate backdrop of carved totem poles. Holm and Quimby

describe this dance of animals, in seeming exasperation, as “no more
easily explained than the other mass dance.”115 The sequence con-
cludes, at last, by resituating viewers in the village of Yaklus as Naida
dances for her captors.
While Rony is right to describe the film as a contingent “string
of footage,” each new scene does not reveal a “way of life” (however
inaccurately portrayed), nor does it perform the monstrative opera-
tions of the cinema of attractions, as Russell argues, putting “here,”
“now,” and “this” on clear display for spectators. In the Land of the
Head Hunters severs the deictic circuit with dance. Like so many cine-
 Historical Figures 145

FIGURE 13
Smoke fills the frame and obscures the dance in In the Land of the Headhunters (Edward S.
Curtis, 1914). UCLA Film and Television Archive restoration.

matic attractions, the film points, indicates, and gestures at each new
image, but one can rarely be sure of what “this” is or what exactly is
happening “now.” The obstruction of the monstrative or exhibitionist
image—­the image that shows itself—­is often quite literal: the bod-
ies of the dancers crowd into the frame or press against the camera
and block our view of the dance with cloth or skin, or, alternatively,
smoke from the film’s many fires transforms the image into a tex-
ture of billowing grays. When the dancers and their movements are
in fact visible—­present to the spectator—­they are meant to be the
“document” in the divided expression of docufiction, the index of a
“real” Kwakwaka’wakw ritual or ceremony that balances the film’s
 146 Historical Figures

FIGURE 14
A dance with animal masks and costumes in In the Land of the Headhunters (Edward S.
Curtis, 1914). UCLA Film and Television Archive restoration.

indulgence in fictional worlds or, by contrast, the site of a manifold

resistance. Indeed, numerous scholars have noted that the film’s pro-
duction coincided with the Canadian government’s amendments in
1884 to the Indian Act, otherwise known as the Potlatch Ban, which
outlawed potlatch ceremonies and traditional dances. Understood
in this way, then, In the Land of the Head Hunters preserved the very
Kwakwaka’wakw traditions that had been suppressed in the actual
lives of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples.116 And yet, at the same time
and in the very same scenes, the impulse to document collides with
Curtis’s commitment to fabricate: dances are performed in the wrong
kind of setting and in honor of the wrong kinds of occasions; they
 Historical Figures 147

are performed incorrectly or with inappropriate costumes; distinct

dances are combined into one amalgam; and some dances were sim-
ply invented by Curtis, without any relationship to Kwakwaka’wakw
dance rituals, past or present.117
What I want to insist upon here—­and, in so doing, escape a read-
ing of the film as an expression of any one or multiple positions of
agency (e.g., the heroic or failed ethnographer, the victimized or resis-
tant subjects)—­is that the representation of dance always introduces
contingency. The event exceeds the performers and the present of its
unfolding, as well as the interventions of the ethnographer-­d irector
(however corrupt or well meaning his intentions might be). What
surfaces in Curtis’s film is not simply a construction or misrepresen-
tation of a cultural practice, or a composite of actual and imagined
Kwakwaka’wakw movements, but a gesture that is always a repetition
with differences and deviations, an index of a historical origin that we
cannot see, or (as Agamben suggests) a sign severed from its signi-
fied, suspended in mediality. There is never a secure “there” or photo-
mechanical “this has been” in dance, an aspect of the practice that
Curtis only seems to insist on in the moments when dance is joined
with smoke, spectral superimpositions, or the sorcery of Yaklus. If
we accept the history of the film as somehow temporarily lifting the
Potlatch Ban that had been in place for decades, then we also might
understand that the moments in which glimpses of “actual” or “real”
Kwakwaka’wakw dances appear are themselves always embedded in
the resurrection of an ancestral practice that was no longer a part of
everyday life for those performing it. In other words, the dances in the
film are imprecise bodily indices of performances (and performers)
that had once been. Colin Browne glosses this structure of these im-
ages as “performers performing performers performing,” but a more
accurate accounting of the images and their uncanny surpluses might
be performers performing performers who once performed.118
For all of the narrative’s seeming excesses—­its sorcerers and skulls,
magic and head hunters—­what remains of it roughly corresponds to
the conventions of narrative cinema that were consolidating along-
side it, especially in its drive toward the heteronormative union of a
warrior and his endangered maiden; it also bears some trace of a tradi-
tional three-­act structure: setup, crisis, resolution. What nevertheless
 148 Historical Figures

introduces a form of radical excess to this otherwise banal romance is

the narrative’s interactions with dance. These scenes shatter the three
acts into many; stall the union of the couple with bodily stutters and
cyclical returns; and, perhaps most importantly, divert the narrative
action into nonnarrative mediality.
Another way of putting it is that the film’s fantastic plot comes
into contact with the virtual or “mutual” operations of dance. In
this situation, as Deleuze writes of certain cinematic representations
of dance, “we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or
mental . . . not because they are confused, but because we do not have
to know and there is no longer a place from which to ask.”119 Given
the free-­floating, counternarrative qualities of these visual events, it
is perhaps little wonder that it is precisely the film’s dance scenes—­
namely, the scenes of the masked dancers performing at the bow of
the canoe and the extended sequence of dances from the village of
Yaklus—­t hat have escaped the narrative structures of In the Land
of the Head Hunters and circulated in experimental cinema, includ-
ing Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) and Daniel Reeves’s Obsessive
Becoming (1995), where these images of dance stand in for the contin-
gency, strangeness, and epistemic imprecision of personal and film-­
historical past times.120
Like nearly every ethnographic film—­a nd surely all of those that
I have discussed in this chapter—­it is difficult to put In the Land of
the Head Hunters into words. And indeed, that is the point. This dif-
ficulty is due not only to the irregular images that the film assembles
but also to the fact that much of the film remains missing and what
survives has cycled through several processes of restoration or, as
some have argued, reconstructions of the film.121 In the Land of the
Head Hunters therefore compels an interminable deferral to an ab-
sent historical source. If only we had access to this other, lost docu-
ment, perhaps the film might communicate beyond communicabil-
ity. Perhaps its dances might be better framed by language or made to
mean more forcefully.
In the Land of the Head Hunters has been restored on two different
occasions. The first restoration was completed in 1972 by anthropolo-
gists Bill Holm and George Irving Quimby after badly damaged cop-
ies of several reels were found at the Field Museum in Chicago (hav-
ing been donated by film collector Hugo Zeiter in 1947). Holm and
 Historical Figures 149

Quimby reedited the film; condensed or changed many of the inter-

titles; changed the title of the film to In the Land of the War Canoes;
added a sound track of (untranslated) spoken language, songs, and
sound effects; and even reshot a missing scene.122 The second restora-
tion, completed in 2008, returns (or approximates) the film’s original
tinting, intertitles, and orchestral score; it also includes nearly two
further reels of footage that were discovered in a nitrate holding vault
at UCLA.123 Even with these additions, however, the film remains just
two-­thirds of its original release length.
Each version of the film, including Curtis’s original release, is ac-
companied (quite symptomatically) by a copious quantity of written
material and evidentiary supplements. Indeed, Curtis published a
written account of the film’s narrative, illustrated with photographs
from the set, just one year after its release. The publication tacitly ac-
knowledges the film’s unwieldy structure and perhaps reveals that
Curtis expected greater popular interest in the story of Naida and
Motana.124 Holm and Quimby, too, published an accompanying text,
which offers (among other elements) a history of Curtis’s production
of the film, an account of their approach to restoration, a narrative
scene-­by-­scene retelling of the film, photographic images from the
set, early scenarios for the film, and photocopies of George Hunt’s
accounting ledger. And, most recently, Aaron Glass and Brad Evans
published a collection of material to accompany their restoration, in-
cluding academic essays, photographic meditations, interviews, im-
ages of original promotional material, a list of cast and crew members,
a list of all known props from the film held by the Burke Museum of
Natural History and Culture, and a complete transcription of original
title cards. In collaboration with Rutgers University, the team has also
developed a website to accompany the 2008 restoration, which hosts
yet more supplementary documents.
That these restorations and accompanying materials feverishly
attempt to salvage a film that was itself engaged in salvage has not
been lost on film scholars (or in recent reporting on the newest res-
toration).125 However, this echo is not an accident or coincidence.
Rather, it is born of a shared response to a historical absence (of pure
cultures, on the one hand, and original documents, on the other).
The impulse to recuperate what is missing, to fill these absences with
writing or images, straddles early ethnographic and contemporary
 150 Historical Figures

film-­h istorical practices. The figure of dance nevertheless compels a

different view, one whereby the absence or silence of historical ori-
gins, and, in turn, the suspension of signification, does not appear as a
barrier to film history or a sign of methodological failure but instead
as a crucial, intrinsic part of film historiography.

The Line Illettrée

In his writing on the figure, Jean-­François Lyotard distinguishes be-
tween two categories: letters and lines. The difference between them,
he argues, is not a matter of degree but a deep “ontological rift.”126
In his view, the one is textual, the other figural. Moreover, these dis-
tinct categories stand in metonymic relationship to different kinds of
practices: the letter is writing, inscription, discourse, while the line is
drawing, painting, and (as I will suggest) dancing. And yet, of course,
the two remain tied together: lines make letters. For Lyotard, the
letter supports “a conventional, immaterial signification” and occa-
sions “instantaneous recognition.”127 In the letter, we do not see the
line so long as it adheres to the familiar code of alphabetic structure.
The line is disappeared by the letter. The eye cannot catch the indi-
vidual graphic elements. In fact, Lyotard suggests that we do not see
letters at all, that the process of reading (letters, words, sentences)
is not primarily a visual one. By contrast, lines belong to the side of
the eye. Lyotard suggests that “one can posit in principle that the less
‘recognizable’ a line, the more it becomes visible, and thus the better
it is at eschewing writing and the closer it sides with the figural.”128
Just as the letter is defined by automation and speed—­it effects an in­
voluntary, instantaneous kind of recognition—­the line slows down
the eye, forces it to stumble or stop, a description that certainly recalls
so many of the examples of dance from early ethnographic cinema.
There is no familiar or extrinsic code to which one can refer and make
sense of the line. It breaks away “like a scandal” from the alphabetic
code and, by extension of the metonymy, the discourse of significa-
tion. Again, Lyotard: “The line is an unrecognizable trace, so long as
it does not refer the eye to a system of connotation where this trace
would receive fixed, invariant meaning. It is unrecognizable when it
does not fit an order of relations that would inevitably determine its
value.”129
 Historical Figures 151

Well before Lyotard, Sergei Eisenstein speculates on the proper-

ties of the line in his fittingly unfinished, fragmentary writing on the
animation of Walt Disney. Here Eisenstein distinguishes this particu-
lar moving image practice from all other kinds of film and, in particu-
lar, from the photochemical index. The animated line does not adhere
to “what has been” in the world but rather bends to the “divine om-
nipotence” of (Disney’s) imagination. It does not repeat a code that
precedes it but makes one up as it goes along. It is a figure that con-
structs a world—­contingently, erratically—­in the very instant of its
own becoming: “You tell a mountain: move, and it moves. You tell
an octopus: be an elephant, and the octopus becomes an elephant.
You tell the sun: ‘Stop!’—­and it stops.”130 Eisenstein’s own imagina-
tion betrays a swirl of popular influences, including early twentieth-­
century primitivism. He routes the genealogy of animation through
totemism, the intoxicating cult of Dionysius, the animistic generation
of something out of nothing, of life out of the nonliving line. He also
compares animation to the threatening ephemerality of fire as well as
the so-­called “Snake Dancer” of “New York City negro night clubs,
where the same kind of creature writhes in abstract, silk robes.”131 In
defining what constitutes the essential “plasmaticness” of the ani-
mated image, Eisenstein nevertheless comes quite close to Lyotard’s
conception of the figural: “A rejection of once-­and-­forever allotted
form, freedom from ossification, the ability to dynamically assume
any form.”132
David Rodowick proposes another, somewhat narrower way of
under­standing the figural in cinema: not simply “as a transforma-
tion in the field of audiovisuality” that defies signification but also,
and more specifically, “as a historical image” that disturbs the sta-
sis of historical discourse, as well as the stasis that historical dis-
course attributes to history.133 Drawing on Deleuze’s taxonomy of
cinema, Rodowick takes modern, postwar French film (i.e., the
time-­image) as the model for this kind of historical figuration. The
time-­image, he argues, challenges the “empirical conception of time
as a linear and chronological force” and “projects a new concept of
historical time  .  .  .  , a new thinking of difference.”134 Whereas the
logic of the movement-­image corresponds to the Hegelian dialec-
tic of history—­to a teleological view of historical time wherein
every event serves an expansive whole and every origin is eminently
 152 Historical Figures

recuperable—­the time-­image deviates from the paradigm of an ex-

pansive, universal history that cycles eternally, chronologically for-
ward. As Rodowick rightly notes, Deleuze (like Foucault—­a nd
Eisenstein, for that matter) owes a debt to Nietszche’s philosophy
of history.135 Nietzsche counters Hegel and his “monumental” mode
of historical thought; he describes this approach as an expression of
force, always written by the “experienced and superior man.”136 Hegel
(in Nietzsche’s view) frames history as a regular (and regulated) tem-
poral system and reduces history to “an uninterrupted colourless
flood” in which “only individual embellished facts rise to the sur-
face.”137 For Nietzsche (as for the poststructuralists to come), history
is discontinuous and aleatory and fundamentally unguided by exter-
nal forces. The task of the historian, then, is not to return to or revivify
the past, for such efforts can only ever produce mythologies of his-
tory. Rather, like the animator or the artist, the historian engages in
a process of bringing history into being (in the present) and, in turn,
being effected or diverted by its discontinuities. In other words, his-
toriography is a practice of lines rather than letters, a figural opera-
tion more than a discursive one. Nietzsche writes, shifting the locus
of power away from the historian to the variations that emanate from
the creative work of history, “I hope that the significance of history
will not be thought to lie in its general propositions, as if these were
the flower and fruit of the whole endeavor, but that its value will be
seen to consist in its taking a familiar, perhaps commonplace theme,
an everyday melody, and composing inspired variations on it, enhanc-
ing it, . . . thus disclosing in the original theme a whole world of pro-
fundity, power and beauty.”138
However useful Rodowick’s reading of the historical dimensions
of the figure might be—­especially as it resonates with Nietzsche’s
conception of history—­t he time-­image does not quite fit the de-
mands of the historical figure, even as Rodowick himself defines
them. He is quick to remind readers that the categories of “move-
ment” and “time” do not stand in for a neat film-­h istorical dialectic:
before and after, classical and experimental, hegemony and resistance.
The time-­image, he argues, does not arrive after the movement-­image
but recurs intermittently—­d isruptively—­throughout the classical
era of cinema. The centrality of postwar, auteur-­centric European
cinema to this conception of the figure and the historical revisions
 Historical Figures 153

that this figure makes possible, as well as the emphasis that Rodowick
places on the figural force of new media elsewhere in his examination
of Lyotard, nevertheless implicitly privilege an evolutionary order of
history. What is more, the cinema of Alain Resnais, Chris Marker,
and Jean-­Luc Godard (to name just a few, the last of which Rodowick
lingers upon at length) is explicitly framed as a form of resistance and
a rejection of the cinema that precedes it, including the hegemony of
Hollywood, the derivative cinéma du papa, and the regimes of tem-
poral and historical continuity that underlie them both. And yet, this
mode and moment of cinema is positioned outside and after the first
decades of film history and thereby participates in the very historical
dialectic that the figure is ostensibly meant to overturn. Perhaps more
importantly, postwar European cinema fails to disturb the regimes
of power—­w ielded by singular, superior, experienced men—­t hat
Nietzsche attempts to dismantle. As I note in the previous chapter,
this is a blind spot and a failure of imagination that begins, not with
Rodowick, but with Deleuze. Perhaps less surprising, Eisenstein’s
view of animation—­especially his comparison of the line to black
bodies and snakes, commanded by the all-­powerful Disney—­equally
fails to disturb the ways in which we reconceive expressions of his-
torical force.
The image of dance in ethnographic cinema allows us to approach
the historical dimensions of the figure otherwise. This image is, of
course, embedded within ethnographic cinema—­it is a part of what
these films routinely represent—­and these films are, in turn, inextri-
cably bound to several discursive and disciplinary regimes, including
the natural and human sciences, narrative and nonnarrative moving
image practices, and film history. In an echo of the spatial relation-
ship that defines the minor of La Maison Lumière and the Archives
de la Planète (which I discuss in the previous chapter), the figural op-
erations of dance are internal to anthropological and film-­h istorical
discourse. These images do not respond from an autonomous point
of view. Rather, they reconfigure discourse because they are a part of it.
They operate from the interior of discourse. They therefore adhere to
Lyotard’s own understanding of the text–­figure encounter: “There is
simply no way to get to the other side of discourse. Only from within
language can one get to and enter the figure.”139 Moreover, the films I
discuss in this chapter—­again, not unlike the excursive iterations of
 154 Historical Figures

the very earliest ethnographic films—­do not emerge from the express
efforts of an individual artist or auteur. They are not, as Eisenstein
suggests, commanded (“You tell a mountain: move, and it moves”).
Even those examples that are attributed to George Thomas Basden,
Léon Poirier, or Edward S. Curtis are composite projects, divided into
multiple, multilanguage versions at the time of their releases and sub-
sequently fragmented by their circuitous routes through the archives
and accompanying processes of decay and restoration.
I take up the question of what ethnographic films are as physical
artifacts in chapter 5, but pertinent here is what exactly these films
represent and how that representation might tell us something about
historical discourse. Dance in ethnographic cinema exemplifies the
historico-­c ritical function of the figure. Like any (still or moving)
image, it intervenes in the broad field of signification, disrupting the
practice of writing with figures. But more specifically, the image of
dance counters the empiricist conceptions of historical time that
shape the natural and human sciences at the turn of the twentieth
century and that continue to inform philosophies of history and his-
torical methodology in film studies. Dance is the line that unletters
these codes. As we have seen, within the films themselves—­what we
might otherwise describe as a “diegetic” function if it were not for
their near-­complete lack of a diegesis—­dance weakens or ruptures
the relationships between intertitle and image, between one mo-
ment and the next, between itself and any other image. Dance per-
forms linelike in ethnographic cinema, departing from chronology,
cause and effect, or the cyclical return of the same, to activate other
temporal formations: the unmotivated interval, the static or ecstatic
event, imprecise repetitions and hauntings, the list goes on. The event
of dance nevertheless extends beyond its appearance in any one eth-
nographic film, figuring other film-­historical formations. It cannot be
contained by historical categories like early, transitional, or narrative,
or, as I have argued, historical concepts like attraction and narration,
classical and experimental, each of which remains bound to a chrono-
logical thinking of time (e.g., one always comes before the other). As
a historical figure, these images of dance do not belong to history, for
doing so would suggest that there is a code that precedes them or that
they combine to form. They do not bend to a monumental model of
history in which events obey a regulative mechanism, establish pat-
 Historical Figures 155

terns through recurrence, and encourage historians to go in search of

origins (including their own).
On the contrary, the figure of dance “constitutes itself only as a
network of discontinuities.”140 It appears and disappears, like so many
specters, without warning, reason, or any explanation. In this way,
dance effects or activates a history of variation in every instance of its
appearance. Inconstancy is the only constant that stretches across
these examples as each one creates its own erratic, unfamiliar line.
If these figures complete any kind of circuit at all, any cyclical shape
of return, it is only in resurrecting or reconnecting us to a radical re-
thinking of history that winds its way from Nietszche’s philosophy
of history to poststructuralism. Guided by this history of historical
thought, Michel Foucault comes quite close to sketching the kinds
of historical knowing that dance figures in ethnographic cinema:
“The purpose of history . . . is not to discover the roots of our iden-
tity, but to commit itself to its dissipation. It does not seek to define
our unique threshold of emergence, the homeland to which meta-
physicians promise a return; it seeks to make visible all of those
discontinu­ities that cross us.”141
By establishing an equivalence between images of dance in ethno-
graphic cinema and the counterdiscursive forces of the historical fig-
ure, as I have already noted, I am not making an explicit claim about
the dances or dancing subjects themselves. I am not reattributing a
kind of radical otherness or ontological purity to dance or position-
ing the dancers outside or beyond language. Such an approach would
reiterate the most insidious ideological structures of ethnographic
discourse (and echo the kind of arguments frequently made about
the ontological instability of “cinema”). Nor, however, am I mak-
ing the case for shifting the locus of power to the dancing subjects
as an effective counterforce to the “experienced and superior men” of
ethnography, history, and film practice. Rather, following Lyotard,
I argue that the images of dance—­the images of dance embedded in
this particular cinema—­perform a figural operation. These images
certainly include the dancers and their performances in an unstruc-
tured and contingent display that often allows individual subjects to
assert their agency through unexpected contact (with the camera)
and confrontation (with the filmmakers and audience). However, the
dancers are not the only agents in these images or the only sources of
 156 Historical Figures

figural events. This reading would reinstall a recuperative or salvage

paradigm, as well as a history of clear causes and effects. I am instead
proposing that we understand the origins of agency in these images as
multiple, discontinuous, dispersed—­and not at all limited to human
subjects. To draw on the figure of the figure with which I began this
conclusion: the line is constituted by many points.
 CHAPTER 3

FOLLOWING DERRIDA
Ethnocinematic Animals, Death Effects,
and the Supplement of Expedition Cinema

I almost always had some volume with me, either in my saddle

pocket or in the cartridge-­bag which one of my gun bearers carried
to hold odds and ends. Often, my reading would be done while
resting under a tree at noon, perhaps beside the carcass of
a beast I killed, or else waiting for camp to be pitched; and in
either case it might be impossible to get water for washings. In
consequence the books were stained with blood, sweat, gun oil,
dust, and ashes; ordinary bindings either vanished or became
loathsome, whereas pigskin merely grew to look as a well-­used
saddle looks.
—­Theodore Roosevelt, African Game Trails (1910)

When the instant of extreme passion passes, and I find peace

again, then I can speak calmly of the beasts of the Apocalypse,
visit them in a museum, see them in a painting . . . I can visit them
at the zoo, read about them in the Bible, or speak about them
as in a book.
—­Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),”
The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008)

After the close of his administration in 1909, Theodore Roosevelt left

the United States for a yearlong safari across east and central Africa
with his son Kermit.1 Over the course of the year, the elder Roosevelt
wrote a series of twelve articles for Scribner’s Magazine.2 This collec-
tion of travel writing was revised and republished upon his return as
African Game Trails, an expansive, autobiographical account of the
first presidential expedition. 3
157
 158 Following Derrida

Roosevelt begins his first essay by describing the travel experience

as fundamentally anachronistic. The train transports him through
prehistoric time while remaining itself a sign of industrial modernity:
“The railroad, the embodiment of the eager, masterful, materialis-
tic civilization today, was pushed through a region in which nature,
both as regards wild man and wild beast, did not and does not dif-
fer materially from what it was in Europe in the late Pleistocene.”4
In this passage, Roosevelt collapses the difference between animal
and (native) human, while distancing himself, remarkably, from both
contemporary Africa and historical Europe; he later adds that “the
teeming multitude of wild creatures . . . and the low culture of many
of the savage tribes substantially reproduces the conditions of life in
Europe as it was led by our ancestors ages before the dawn of any-
thing called civilization.”5
Each chapter of African Game Trails reiterates the rhetoric of geo-
graphic and temporal disjunction and sustains the pattern of ethno-
zoological confusion. These internal consistencies owe, in part, to the
publication history of the chapters. Each one appeared independently
in Scribner’s, and each new submission presented readers with just
one location in the “late Pleistocene,” one “savage tribe,” and one ad-
venturous hunt for a species of “wild creature.” This structure binds
place, animal, and human together in a formation of imaginary past
time and contributes to frequent slippages between descriptions of
human behavior and animal appearances. For example, in his ninth
chapter, “To Lake Naivasha,” Roosevelt insists on “the intensity and
the evanescence of [the] emotions” of carnivorous mammals while
describing, in the following paragraph, the diet of “blood and guts”
that characterizes the Masai tribes.6 This set of rhetorical patterns
also derives from the conventions of early twentieth-­century eth-
nographic writing, an aspect of anthropology that this chapter will
examine.
As a former American president, Roosevelt brings into sharp relief
the strands of state power and popular culture that intertwine in early
twentieth-­century ethnographic practice. While the American press
described the trip as a vacation from political life, Roosevelt’s prepa-
rations as well as his written account suggest a far more disciplined
endeavor.7 Three naturalists accompanied him on the expedition and
the animals killed and preserved on the trip—­more than eleven thou-
 Following Derrida 159

FIGURE 15
Theodore Roosevelt and his son Kermit, Father and Self with First Buffalo (Kermit
Roosevelt, 1909–­10). Roosevelt 560.61–­096a, Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton
Library, Harvard University.

sand in total—­were donated to either the Smithsonian Institute or

the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) (Figure 15).8
In her critical history of the AMNH, Donna Haraway situates
Roosevelt and his expedition to Africa at the center of a discursive
and historical nexus she terms the “Teddy Bear Patriarchy.” 9 This
particular constellation of masculinity, anxiety, and taxidermy, she
 160 Following Derrida

argues, circumscribes the formation of the natural and human sci-

ences, in general, and the AMNH, in particular: “In the upside down
world of Teddy Bear Patriarchy, it is in the craft of killing that life is
constructed, not in the accident of personal, material birth. Roosevelt
is the perfect locus genii and patron saint for the museum’s task of re-
generation of a miscellaneous, incoherent urban public threatened
with . . . the prolific bodies of new immigrants, threatened with the
failure of manhood.”10 From the taxidermic rhythms of sacrifice and
resurrection, Haraway extrapolates a conception of preservation
counterintuitively tied to the destruction of life. That is, in the era of
“Teddy Bear Patriarchy” and salvage ethnography, the lifelike rep-
resentation of animal and human subjects gets routed through their
death and dismemberment. This conception guides Roosevelt and
bleeds into a whole range of ancillary ideologies and institutions.
In African Game Trails, Roosevelt further situates himself within
the discipline of anthropology by addressing one of its most pressing
concerns: the role of the indexical arts in the study of other cultures.
He writes:
Mr. Kearton has made a series of moving pictures of various
big animals which were taken alive by Buffalo Jones and his
two cowboys, Loveless and Meany, on his recent trip to East
Africa. . . . The photographer plays an exceedingly valuable part
in nature study, but our appreciation of the great value of this
part must never lead us into forgetting that as a rule even the
best photograph renders its highest service when treated as
material for the best picture, instead of as a substitute for the
best picture; and that the picture itself, important though it
is, comes entirely secondary to the text in any book worthy of
consideration.11
Here Roosevelt constructs a taxonomy of ethnographic expression
(i.e., “photograph,” “picture,” “text”) that tries to control the tide of
visual technologies. He acknowledges the enterprising efforts of famed
wildlife filmmaker Cherry Kearton, who had anticipated the public
interest in Roosevelt’s yearlong big game safari and arrived months
before him to photograph and film images of the African terrain.12
When Kearton eventually crossed Roosevelt’s path, he received the
president’s permission to film what remained of the trip.13 Roosevelt
 Following Derrida 161

was familiar with Kearton and his wildlife images before their meet-
ing in Africa. He had invited Kearton’s brother, Richard, to the White
House in 1908 to present a selection of the bird photographs and
films that the brothers had made together.14 These intersections with
the visual notwithstanding, Roosevelt privileges the text above pho-
tography and film (or what he calls “the picture”). The photograph
serves the picture, and the picture serves the text, leaving Roosevelt
in the happy position of being served by both.
This preference for writing adheres to the standards of ethno-
graphic practice at the turn of the twentieth century as well as the
discursive regimes of colonialism and global travel, wherein the act
of writing is bound to the privilege of knowledge and concomitant
markers of the privileged race (white, European) and class (educated,
wealthy). Roosevelt’s evaluation of visual technologies (necessary,
but secondary to writing) reflects the gathering influence of mass cul-
ture within the natural and social sciences, along with the anxieties
born out of these border crossings and, in particular, the perceived
instabilities of the moving image. In a departure from the preferences
of these academic disciplines, however, Roosevelt explicitly favors
film over and above the photographic image (i.e., the photograph
“renders its highest service” to cinema). His inclination toward the
moving image perhaps betrays the rising popularity of the newsreel
in political life, including, most importantly, his own. Roosevelt was
the first president to leave behind a robust record of moving images.
He was a significant motion picture personality before, during, and
after his presidency not only because of the newsworthy events that
constituted his everyday life but also because he was deemed a pho-
togenic subject.15 In this way, Roosevelt himself exemplifies the inter-
stitial zone he endeavors to purify with the sturdy seriousness of the
ethnographic text; he is situated among academic anthropology, the
popular imaginary of American politics, and the changing terrain of
visual technologies.
In her history of anthropology and visual culture, Alison Griffiths
insists on the specificity of the cinematic threat. She traces the un-
easy alliance between the burgeoning scientific discipline and early
twentieth-­century amusements, including life groups, colonial exhi-
bitions, photography, and cinema. Among these forms of spectacle
and entertainment, she argues, the moving image encountered the
 162 Following Derrida

greatest resistance. Whereas the medium of photography “appeared

to achieve widespread professional legitimation and application within
anthropology soon after its invention,” cinema remained an ambigu-
ous disciplinary tool for decades.16 Anthropologists worried that its
proximity to mass popular culture would undermine the sobriety of
(any) serious discipline. But cinema also seemed to produce a differ-
ent form of knowledge, one that challenged the logocentric episte-
mologies of anthropology and the authority of the ethnographer. She
writes:
One of anthropologists’ most serious reservations about mo-
tion pictures . . . was that the spectacularized, moving ethno-
graphic image, with its surfeit of illusionistic detail and lack of
context, would paradoxically show too much and reveal too
little. . . . Ironically, cinema’s ability to represent reality with
such compelling verisimilitude may have contributed to an-
thropologists’ ambivalence about the medium, since the sense
of agency afforded native peoples for the duration of a perfor-
mance also threatened to undermine the specular authority of
an idealized scientific observer.17
Early anthropologists contained the threat of cinema by quarantin-
ing it to the function of “visual field notes, illustrations that were in-
teresting to look at but did little to advance ethnographic theory.”18
Ethnographic cinema thereby not only serves the written text but
also depends upon it for meaning. It is not a discrete anthropological
tool but always necessarily inscribed within a broader field of ethno-
graphic discourse and practice.
Ethnographic cinema maintains an ambivalent place within the
discipline of anthropology throughout the postwar era, notwith-
standing the experiments of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson
in the United States and Marcel Griaule and Jean Rouch in France.
For visual anthropologist David MacDougall, “film can never re-
place the written word in anthropology, but anthropologists are made
conscious by their field experience of the limitations which words
impose upon their discipline. We are beginning to discover how
film can fill some of the blind spots.”19 MacDougall suggests, not un-
like Roosevelt, that ethnographic cinema serves the text. The moving
image offers a corrective to written ethnography rather than an au-
 Following Derrida 163

tonomous form of representation, a new form of ethnographic under-

standing, or a critique of those ethnographic modes that precede it. In
his 1976 handbook for ethnographic filmmakers, Karl Heider makes
the hierarchy between writing and cinema more concrete. He writes,
“No ethnographic film can stand by itself. An ethnographic film must
be supplemented by written ethnographic materials. Or, put the other
way around, an ethnography is a written work which may be supple-
mented by film.”20 Heider argues that every ethnographic film needs
to be accompanied by written handbooks, detailing the choices that
were made, the context and conditions of filming, the conclusions
that one should draw from a film, and any differences between the
visual material as it was filmed and the final visual product. In short,
cinema can only ever return us to and reactivate written forms of eth-
nographic understanding.21
Roosevelt nevertheless implicitly complicates the primacy that he
(and the broader field of anthropology) assigns to the act of writing as
well as the distinctions that he makes between text, film, and photo-
graph. Throughout African Game Trails, Roosevelt refers to his “pig-
skin library,” a term that stands in metonymic relation to the discur-
sive and ideological divisions between animal and human, force and
reason. The pigskin library names the collection of forty canonical
works of American and European literature, poetry, mythology, and
philosophy that accompanied him on the trip, each volume bound
carefully in animal flesh.22 In the epigraph that accompanies this
chapter, Roosevelt describes his daily reading ritual. The images he
conjures oscillate between the pastoral and the macabre, and all three
sites (or times) of reading—­beneath a tree, beside a bloody carcass,
while camp is pitched—­betray the subtext of a class with the privilege
to wait and read. His trip was stocked with porters and servants who
skinned the animals and set up camp. More interestingly, however,
Roosevelt’s picturesque account of the books in his library—­stained
with blood, sweat, oil, dust, and ashes—­recasts the text as a taxider-
mic object and an index of time, joined with the spectral skin of an
animal that once was and shaped by the physical impressions of past
events. Put another way, the indexical arts may stand in a kind of sec-
ondary relationship to writing, beneath or outside of the text, but the
traces of past time and experiences are literally bound to Roosevelt’s
library and essential to his conception of it. One would be forgiven
 164 Following Derrida

for confusing Roosevelt’s mummified editions with one of the “magic

identity substitutes for the living animal” that André Bazin includes
in his preservative genealogy of the moving image. 23
This passage also foretells a different play with citations and an-
other “second skin”: the rebound Bible gifted from Jakob to Sigmund
Freud (father to son) on the occasion of the latter’s thirty-­fi fth birth-
day. Jacques Derrida reads this book and its handwritten dedication,
which includes a reference to the ceremonial seventh day of Freud’s
life, as a “figurative reminder of a circumcision.”24 The Bible com-
memorates the impression left upon Freud’s body with a second writ-
ing and a new skin; the father memorializes the occasion of this origi-
nal incision and reminds Freud of the “dissymmetrical covenant” into
which he was forced.25
The historian Yosef Yerushalmi takes these documents as evi-
dence of both Freud’s religious commitments and the influence of
Judaism on the development of psychoanalysis. In making a religious
claim upon Freud—­in claiming Freud for a particular religion—­
Yerushalmi’s history redoubles the violence of the (first and second)
impressions; he repeats the gesture of the father from the position of
a stranger, an outsider, external to the original event of circumcision
and the second event of its commemoration.
In Derrida’s view, this series of inscriptions, returns, and reread-
ings transforms the Bible into both “a writing and a substrate,” both
the Bible itself, “the book of books,” and an archive (of impressions,
sediments, and historical layers). The additional “skin” and signatures
bind themselves to the original writing. They confer meaning on the
text and function as a repository of historical events and encounters.
That is, this archive and the archive “put into reserve (‘store’), accu-
mulate, capitalize, stock a quasi-­infinity of layers, of archival strata
that are at once superimposed, overprinted, and enveloped in each
other.”26
This capacity to collect and commemorate is tempered by an equal
and opposite impulse to undo, annihilate, and forget. The archive is
always divided or, as Derrida describes it, “disjointed between two
forces.”27 Insofar as the archive is, by definition, separate from the
origins of objects and events, consigned “to an external place, which
assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition,” it can only
ever append and approximate those origins with other histories and
 Following Derrida 165

different kinds of writing.28 To put this claim differently, the archive

binds preservation and destruction together. It can neither overcome
its physical and temporal separation from history nor withdraw from
the preservative processes that guarantee history’s erasure.
For Derrida, the preservative–destructive impulses that circum-
scribe the archive exemplify one of the foundational concepts of
Freudian psychoanalytic theory: “a diabolical death drive, an aggres-
sion or a destruction drive: a drive, thus, of loss.”29 Compelled by this
archival drive, historians feverishly sift through the infinite traces
of the past, searching for unrecovered objects and historical wholes.
This drive marks a mal—­a sickness, illness, fever—­for the archive, a
nostalgic obsession for origins and original artifacts, a desire to pre-
serve an entirety that is always and forever out of reach. The historian
actively annihilates the very origins that she was driven to preserve,
repeat, and reproduce. In the case of Freud’s Bible, the father and his
proxy, Yerushalmi, displace the son and psychoanalyst—­whom they
had hoped to secure in a religious covenant—­through layers of tex-
tual and bodily inscription.
The taxidermic operations at the center of early twentieth-­century
anthropology share in the divided logic of the archive. They transfig-
ure the violence of forgetting into actual, physical slaughter. To re-
turn to Roosevelt’s pigskin library, then, these animal-­bound volumes
double the divided energies of the archive. They accumulate past time
and index dead bodies.
I begin with this reflection on Roosevelt and his library of animal
indices in order to reframe the encounter between ethnographic writ-
ing and cinema. This reframing sets aside the methodological hierar-
chy that developed in the discipline of anthropology and contributed
not only to its privileging of writing over cinema but also to a set of
ontological claims about the artifactual and evidentiary value of these
respective media. In this chapter, I do not revise or replace this his-
tory, nor do I recuperate ethnographic cinema from the archives and
repair the gaps in our history of the practice. 30 As I have argued in
the previous chapters, these ends are neither possible nor desirable.
Instead, this chapter sifts through the substrate of the ethnographic
expedition, interrogating the relationship between the cinematic ser-
vant and the standard of ethnographic writing. What kind of second
skin or supplement does cinema offer to the ethnographic text? What
 166 Following Derrida

does the moving image do to and for written practice? And how might
this encounter between language and the moving image reshape
the writing of film history? I cast these questions against the ethno-
graphic expedition film, a form of cinema that adjoins ethnographic
writing throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. This
vast category includes hundreds (maybe thousands) of films made
as visual records, notes, and sketches of ethnographic travel and
fieldwork. Expedition films record the movements of amateur and
academic ethnographers as they travel down rivers, through forests,
and across deserts. And yet, in this process of repetition and repre-
sentation, these films deviate from the ideological and disciplinary
demands for spatial, temporal, and narrative coherence.
As my title (and first paragraphs) suggest, this chapter tries to fol-
low (track, pursue, hunt, etc.) three distinct lines of thought through
the work of Derrida, perhaps with the same epistemic imprecision
that he attributes to every act of following, every instance of “after.”
The first of these strands includes his foundational critique of anthro-
pological discourse, which stretches from “Structure, Sign, and Play”
to Of Grammatology, destabilizing the authority of the discipline—­
and of disciplinarity itself—­a long the way. This argument guides my
own comparative movements between the practices of ethnographic
writing and filmmaking. It offers a crucial set of tools for theorizing
the interaction between these different modes of representation and
for thinking about the effects of cinematic supplementarity.
The second strand of thought pertains to Derrida’s understanding
of the archive. I take his theory of the destructive archival drive as a
starting point for understanding the annihilating patterns that define
the ethnographic expedition. Beyond the taxidermic model of “Teddy
Bear Patriarchy,” we have also encountered ethnographic analogs of
this drive in chapters 1 and 2, where a manic search for un­familiar
bodies and geographies replaces the historian’s search for past time.
The archive of expedition cinema nevertheless exceeds the annihila-
tion of origins and artifacts. Indeed, this archive destroys both the
ethnographic subject and the logocentric model of ethnographic
practice. These films disrupt ethnography’s tidy rhetoric of spatial
distance and temporal difference with a visual rhythm of emptiness
and extreme violence. The expedition film stakes a space outside of
language, in the absence of language; and yet, it remains bound to
 Following Derrida 167

the ethnographic text and, in so doing, reconfigures our understand-

ing of it.
Third and finally, I follow Derrida as he follows—­and meditates on
the spatial and temporal entanglements of following—­that “wholly
other they call animal.”31 The expedition film itself engages in a kind
of twofold following. It follows the ethnographer in the process of
ethnographic following, in the pursuit of both human and animal
others. More to the point, animals of all kinds crowd the frames of
expedition cinema. They visually compete with the objects of ethno-
graphic study (i.e., humans) and, in so doing, confuse the boundaries
between ethnographic and zoographic categories of otherness. These
ethnocinematic animals—­and, in this phrase, one might hear the echo
of Derrida’s autobiographical animal—­unsettle our understanding of
the human and, in turn, draw attention to the logocentric limits of
human understanding, including our disciplinary approaches to un-
derstanding the human. These visual encounters equally implicate
the practices of anthropology, history, and film history (among oth-
ers), insofar as they all share in an anthropocentric exclusion of the
animal and a commitment to the epistemological ends of language,
writing, and narrativity. The ethnocinematic animals of expedition
cinema encourage “another concept of history.”32
The animals that inhabit expedition cinema unsettle other bound-
aries of being, namely, the border between the living and dead, being
and not-­being. Like the animals in Roosevelt’s pigskin library, they
concretely manifest the “diabolical death drive” of the ethnographic
archive. 33 Indeed, one of the few conventions of expedition cinema
includes scenes of animal death or, more specifically, the hunt and
slaughter of at least one but, more commonly, multiple animals. Sarah
O’Brien rightly argues that the category of “animal death” (just like
the category of “animals” itself) is so large and imprecise as to be vir-
tually meaningless. She writes, “Significant differences exist, for ex-
ample, between industrialized slaughter, .  .  .  and practices such as
hunting, ritual sacrifice, and artisanal butchery, the economic logics
and experiential qualities of which vary considerably.”34 Ethnographic
cinema contains nearly every possible category of animal death. In
this chapter, however, I am concentrating our view on the specific
deaths that define expedition filmmaking and subtend the taxidermic
practices of the natural history museum. These films detail a gruesome
 168 Following Derrida

transition from animal life to death as well as the extensive efforts re-
quired to produce a taxidermic rebirth. They undo the lifelike appear-
ances that populate the corridors and glass enclosures of the natural
history museum and overturn the theories of taxidermy and salvage,
including Haraway’s, which have dominated studies of ethnographic
cinema for several decades. These taxidermies do not maintain the fa-
cade of naturalism or open up the possibility of a redemptive commu-
nion with an animal ideal. Nor do these animals simply stand in for
the otherness of certain human subjects, for the fragile, almost always
dead bodies that turn-­of-­the-­century anthropology tasked itself with
saving. Instead, and in pursuit of Derrida, I argue that these scenes
of hunt and slaughter exemplify the ambiguities of hunting, follow-
ing, pursuing. They capture us, fold back upon us, in the very instant
and image of animal annihilation, in the moment of anthropologi-
cal and spectatorial control. Here “I no longer know who, therefore,
I am (following) or who it is I am chasing, who is following me or
hunting me. Who comes before and who is after whom? I no longer
know which end my head is. Madness.”35 These animal events disturb
disciplinary structures, including the narrative coordinates of ethno-
graphic expression and the subject at the center of the ethnographic
project. But they also undermine the indexical ontologies that tend
to circumscribe cinema, especially as it is brought to bear on ethno-
graphic practice. Whereas Derrida’s archive destroys the historical
origins from which it is excluded—­because it is excluded from these
origins—­the archive of ethnocinematic animals destroys itself along
the way toward preservation.
To understand the annihilating function of expedition cinema—­
exactly what and how this archive annihilates—­I begin by sketching
two key moments in the history and theory of ethnographic writing,
namely, the development of structural anthropology and Derrida’s
critique of this discursive formation. 36 One can distill this dis-
agreement into a handful of key texts, including Lévi-­Strauss’s Tristes
Tropiques and Derrida’s polemic response (delivered in lectures, jour-
nal articles, and, finally, a chapter in Of Grammatology). In Tristes
Tropiques, Lévi-­Strauss abandons the search for radical difference
and proposes a comparative study of similarity. In this way, he chal-
lenges the basic premises of anthropology (e.g., geographic and cul-
 Following Derrida 169

tural differences are meaning bearing), redefines the anthropologist

as a tinkerer who makes do with imprecise tools and techniques, and
reconceives the world as a text whose cultures can never be mastered.
Derrida’s response criticizes the ethnocentrism that continues to
linger in Lévi-­Strauss’s thought. He notes that structuralism “stands
on a borderline: sometimes within an uncriticized conceptuality,
sometimes putting a strain on the boundaries.”37
In what follows, I briefly rehearse the contours of this canonical
critical turn. The impact of Derrida’s argument reverberated across
the humanities and social sciences; it demanded a broad reconsid-
eration of the epistemological aims of reading, writing, and inter-
pretation; it reframed anthropology’s disciplinary methods as hap-
hazard bricolage; and it invigorated a postwar era of experimental
ethnography. It did not, however, send anthropologists or their crit-
ics to the archive of ethnographic cinema to consider the structures
of the moving image that preceded the poststructural turn. (Had
they done so, they likely would have been surprised to find films as
shapeless and contingent as those that arrive decades later.) I begin
this work here.
A final preambular note: this chapter follows Derrida in the sense
that it arrives after him, long after his lectures had been written, de-
livered, and published. It follows in the sense of adhering or conform-
ing to his arguments, tracing them (as much as it is possible) as they
intervene in our understanding of ethnocentric writing and thought.
But this chapter also follows Derrida in the sense that it pursues him,
chases after him, and tries to draw connections between distinct
strands of his work, between his early arguments about the anthro-
pological categories of otherness and his later writings on the “other
they call animal,” between the paradoxical beginning he calls the “ar-
chive” and the end or “abyssal limit” of the animal that opens onto
new modes of historical thinking. In so doing, this chapter follows the
ambiguities of following. It inherits those spatial and temporal slip-
pages that, Derrida argues, the very act of following almost always
guarantees. That is, in following historically “after” and spatially “be-
hind,” I inevitably lose the track through Derrida, depart from it as I
take off in the direction of cinema, and, thereafter, wander into a posi-
tion in which I might be pursued.
 170 Following Derrida

The Same Differences

Claude Lévi-­Strauss famously claimed to loathe (on the very first page
of Tristes Tropiques) the generation of amateur adventurers to which
Roosevelt belonged and the undisciplined genre of ethnographic
travel writing that spread across the first decades of the twentieth cen-
tury. At a first pass, the two ethnographers had significantly different
understandings of travel, text, and time. Roosevelt’s ethnography—­
written in the field and republished just after his return—­bears a
decidedly proximate (and confident) relationship to the events it
narrates, whereas Lévi-­Strauss’s autobiographical account of his expe-
dition to Brazil begins by marking a set of hesitations and a significant
historical delay. Lévi-­Strauss challenges both the privileges heaped
upon the written text and the omissions that plague the practice.
Against the romance and bloody eventfulness one finds in a work like
African Game Trails, he proposes an autoethnography of emptiness
and the everyday:
Fifteen years have passed since I left Brazil for the last time
and often, during those years, I’ve planned to write this book,
but I’ve always been held back by a sort of shame and disgust.
So much would have to be said that has no possible interest:
insipid details, incidents of no significance. Anthropology is a
profession in which adventure plays no part; merely one of its
bondages, it represents no more than a dead weight of weeks
or months wasted en route, hours spent in idleness when one’s
informant has given one the slip; hunger, exhaustion, illness as
like as not; and those thousand and one routine duties which
eat up most of our days to no purpose and reduce our perilous
existence in the virgin forest to a simulacrum of service. 38
This hostility toward the mythologies of anthropological travel stems
from Lévi-­Strauss’s own disappointing search for the signs of radi-
cal difference that his predecessors had promised. Lévi-­Strauss goes
looking for pure Brazilian Indians and finds “nothing but ashes,” a
phrase that resonates in crucial ways with those embers left upon the
pages of Roosevelt’s leisure reading. 39 In Tristes Tropiques, the “age of
real travel” has long since concluded. All that remains are indices torn
from their objects and scattered impressions of past time. Too many
 Following Derrida 171

trains have made their way through the Pleistocene, leaving Lévi-­
Strauss with the task of bricolage, piecing together “the idea of the ex-
otic with the help of a particle here and a fragment of debris there.”40
In her 1964 paean to Lévi-­Strauss, Susan Sontag claims that, “for him,
the demon is history, not the body or the appetites. The past, with its
mysteriously harmonious structures, is broken and crumbling before
our eyes. Hence, the tropics are tristes.”41 Despite the distance be-
tween Roosevelt and Lévi-­Strauss (e.g., their distinct models of eth-
nographic labor), both share in the same mythologies of history. For
Roosevelt, the purity of premodernity exists in Africa’s geographical
present; for Lévi-­Strauss, it is long since gone, but it existed all the
same, in another time and place.
Lévi-­Strauss adds the instability of individual memory to the cor-
ruptive forces of contemporary time. At the center of Tristes Tropiques
is the ethnographer himself, a site of imperfections and fragmenta-
tions, much like the landscape of (then) modern Brazil. Lévi-­Strauss
ties the text to his own biography and chronology (i.e., “fifteen years
have passed”) and the imprecise processes of recollection. The acts
of writing (about other cultures) and remembering (one’s own per-
sonal experiences) unfold at a spatial and temporal remove from the
already disjunctive experience of the present. In Tristes Tropiques,
Lévi-­Strauss describes the act of memory as a form of observation
conducted at a distance, between two cliffs:
Forgetfulness has done its work among my recollections, but
it has not merely worn them thin, not merely buried them. It
has made of these fragments a construction in depth that offers
firmer ground beneath the feet and a clearer outline for the eye.
One order has been substituted for another. Two cliffs mark the
distance between my eye and its object; in the middle ground
Time, which eats away at those cliffs, has begun to heap up the
debris. The high ridges begin to fall away, piece by considerable
piece; Time and Place come into opposition, blend oddly with
one another, or become reversed, like sediment shaken clear
by the trembling of a withered skin. Sometimes an ancient and
infinitesimal detail will come away like a whole headland; and
sometimes a complete layer of my past will vanish.42
 172 Following Derrida

Lévi-­Strauss’s terrestrial figure entangles memory and ethnography,

emphasizing the great chasms that equally define them. It also re-
turns us to the functions of the archive (as it precedes Derrida’s de-
scription of them), to the failures and forgetting born out of the exter-
nal relationship that Lévi-­Strauss necessarily bears to both his own
past and the subjects of ethnographic study.
Lévi-­Strauss’s revisions of anthropological methods mark a re-
thinking of difference, the very concept that had sustained the dis-
cipline for decades and defined the relative positions of the ethnog-
rapher and his human subjects. In Tristes Tropiques, the difference
between ethnography and memory recedes, taking with it the demar-
cations between the subject and the self. Both the ethnographer and
his subject share in the corruptions of modernity (and the modern,
present moment). Lévi-­Strauss writes, “[Anthropology] rejoins at one
extreme the history of the world, and at the other the history of my-
self, and it unveils the shared motivation of one and the other at the
same moment. . . . The differences and changes which we ethnogra-
phers deal in are those which matter to all mankind.”43 In drawing
these two ends together, Lévi-­Strauss hints at the disciplinary alli-
ances between anthropology and history as well as the internal alli-
ances that restructure ethnographic practice.44
The “differences and changes” that matter to Lévi-­Strauss and, more
broadly, structural anthropology are those that can be extricated from
their specific contexts and enlarged “to the dimensions of a more gen-
eral [experience], which thereby becomes accessible as experience to
men of another country or another epoch.”45 The task of the ethnog-
rapher, then, becomes a search for cultural and historical similarity,
for systems amid the shared disorder of the twentieth century.
In his reading of Tristes Tropiques, Jacques Derrida binds Lévi-­
Strauss to Jean-­Jacques Rousseau. Lévi-­Strauss did not disagree with
the comparison in principle.46 On the contrary, he counted Rousseau
among his predecessors and referred to him, much to the dismay of
mid-­t wentieth-­century anthropologists, as the father of anthropologi-
cal thought.47 For Derrida, however, Lévi-­Strauss had not developed
a new genealogy of anthropology with Rousseau as his guide. Rather,
Derrida’s comparison of Lévi-­Strauss to Rousseau suggests that a
shared project extends from Émile to Tristes Tropiques, gathering up
all forms of anthropological practice that emerge in between.
 Following Derrida 173

Derrida argues that a crude and ideologically motivated division

between the self and various categories of otherness sustains cen-
turies of diverse anthropological methods. This division (between
self and others), as Derrida understands it, rests on phonocentrism,
or the privileging of the voice and the act of listening above all other
expressions of the logos (i.e., word, language, thought, reason).48 In
the phonocentric view, the voice bears a proximate and privileged re-
lationship to the mind and the origins of thought. It is a pure form
of expression, at once the signifier of mental experiences and “the
producer of the first symbols.”49 Writing, by contrast, interrupts the
voice, severs its circuit with a corrupt or derivative representation of
thought. Whereas the voice diminishes the distance between signifier
and signified, writing necessarily sustains it, depends on it. According
to the phonocentric framework of language, writing always signifies
something (other, elsewhere); it only refers to things and therefore
“has no constitutive meaning.”50 In the historical practice of anthro-
pology (including Lévi-­Strauss’s structuralism), Derrida claims, the
phonocentric division between writing and speech plots the disciplin-
ary coordinates of modern self and ahistorical other, ethnographer
and subject.
These coordinates, and the phonocentrism that underpins them,
reflect antecedent and ideological commitments to a certain under-
standing of the world and its inhabitants (e.g., the West writes, the
non-­West speaks) rather than knowledge gleaned from the study of
actual ethnographic subjects. Many will recall that Derrida demon-
strates the organizing operation of phonocentrism, as well as the in-
coherence of this view, in his reading of the “Writing Lesson.” In this
chapter of Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-­Strauss encounters the Nambikwara
tribe, a people who can speak, he claims, but do not write. Lévi-­
Strauss reads this absence as a sign of innocence and nonviolence, an
“unconditional affirmation of [their] radical goodness.”51 For him, the
Nambikwara precede the corruptions and exploitations of the mod-
ern, writing world. As Derrida points out, however, “if the ‘Lesson’ is
to be believed, the Nambikwara did not know violence before writ-
ing; nor hierarchization.  .  .  . Round about the ‘Lesson,’ it suffices
to open Tristes Tropiques and the thesis at any page to find striking
evidence to the contrary.”52 What is at stake in Tristes Tropiques and
structural anthropology, then, is not a set of generalities or universals
 174 Following Derrida

that draw self and world together but a commitment to keeping cer-
tain kinds of bodies separated that reiterates the most common forms
of ethnocentrism.
An imaginary of physical, geographic differences adjoins the pho-
nocentric division between writing and speaking subjects. In other
words, the distinction between writing and speech implies a differ-
ence in kind (between those who write and those who do not) as well
as a distance between self and other, signifiers and their referents,
Europe and elsewhere. At turns, Derrida accuses the anthropologi-
cal tradition of positioning writing “under” or “beyond” speech. This
rhetorical pattern hints at the spatial figures that inhabit the phono-
centric distinction. Speech ensures physical presence and proximity,
while writing encompasses an absence and communicates, imper-
fectly, across space (and time). But speech and writing also belong to
different places. Indeed, in Derrida’s view, anthropology constructs
an ethnocentric fantasy of purity, prehistory, and radical alterity by
mapping the respective spaces of writing and speech, by imagining
them as spaces that can be clearly demarcated and defined. Put simply,
those who write and those who speak not only adhere to different sys-
tems of signification; those systems (and the subjects who use them)
also belong to different parts of the world.
Derrida counters this cartography with a third term: archi-­écriture
or arche-­w riting. This concept does not invert the speech–­w riting
hierarchy, nor does it collapse one category of expression into the
other. He instead proposes an enlarged and inclusive field, one that
redefines the relationship between speech and writing against the fal-
lacious phonocentric metaphysics of presence. The prefix that Derrida
attaches to writing in the process of renaming it—­archi, arche,
arkhē—­joins the term, both etymologically and conceptually, to the
phenomenon that he will read some two decades later: the archive.
Like the archive to come, this “arche” names a process of commenc-
ing and commanding, beginning and forgetting. It also names a place,
forever consigned to the outside and after of experience and self-­
presence. Reconceived as a function of arche-­w riting, speech shares
in the qualities once reserved for written language. For Derrida, both
speech and writing are signs of signs. They equally participate in a
play of differences and contribute to a string of infinite referrals.
The concept of arche-­w riting—­especially in its anticipation of
 Following Derrida 175

Derrida’s reading of the archive—­extends the spatializing rhetoric

of phonocentric anthropology. Derrida nevertheless redraws the di-
viding line between writing and speech. He argues that all forms of
linguistic expression are outside, beyond, or below whatever they
endeavor to represent. Derrida further suggests that the “arche” of
writing—­its places and processes, imprecisions and failures—­can be
seen. In his introduction to Lévi-­Strauss, for example, Derrida invites
us to “meditate upon all of the following together: writing as the pos-
sibility of the road and of difference, the history of writing and the
history of the road, of the rupture, of the via rupta, of the path that is
broken, beaten, fracta, of the space of reversibility and of repetition
traced by the opening, the divergence from, the violent spacing, of
nature, of the natural, savage, salvage, forest.”53 What emerges from
our meditation on this string of spatial figures? And why must we
meditate (méditer) here, rather than, say, read?
In the first instance, this passage offers a set of images or scenes
to look at, or imagine. It also prepares the way for arche-­w riting, for
an expanded category that includes not only phonetic expression but
also the systems of writing that characterize the Nambikwara tribe:
the roads and paths that lead through, between, and beyond their vil-
lages as well as the graphic marks inscribed upon the ground or the
surfaces of calabashes. Arche-­w riting corresponds to a set of geo-
graphic formations and physical impressions: the rough and ragged
roads that scar the soil, the lines of passage that simultaneously con-
nect and fracture physical locations, the “violent spacing” already em-
bedded within the natural world. In this way, Derrida transcribes the
deviations and differences between linguistic signifiers, the gaps and
absences that circulate across all expressions of arche-­w riting, onto
the surfaces of the earth. He also reconceives the physical and geo-
graphic divisions that structure phonocentrism. The dividing lines
no longer separate the modern and natural worlds, Europe and else-
where. The lines (roads, ruptures) are instead inscribed upon every
surface of the earth.
What unfolds here—­and throughout Derrida’s response to Lévi-­
Strauss—­is a process of making arche-­w riting legible within Tristes
Tropiques and an argument for understanding this reconfiguration of
speech and writing as visual. Put another way, Derrida produces an al-
ternative concept of writing bound to a particular way of seeing both
 176 Following Derrida

language and the world (as an infinite string of differences, spatial

separations, fractures, gaps, absences). Over and again, he invites us
to imagine, envision, and meditate upon an image of arche-­w riting. As
I will argue, this process of making the arche-­image visible—­the in-
complete paths, the ruptured roads, and the forest of violent spaces—­
begins with the practice of ethnographic filmmaking and can be found
along the many roads and paths that traverse the expedition film.
Crucially, Derrida challenges not only the concept of writing that
circulates in anthropological thought but also the way that this
concept interacts with the practice of writing as an anthropological
method. He argues that phonocentrism performs a methodological
sleight of hand. It passes its privileges on to the ethnographer and the
practice of ethnographic fieldwork while at the same time distracting
from the mediations of ethnographic writing. In other words, the
phonocentric privileging of speech and presence conceals the prac-
tice of writing, along with the actual exertions of force that manifest
themselves in the ethnographic text. Derrida expresses this point yet
another way in his description of the profound and silent operations
of ethnographic writing: “The difference between peoples with and
peoples without writing is accepted, but writing as the criterion of
historicity or cultural value is not taken into account; ethnocentrism
will apparently be avoided at the very moment when it will have al-
ready profoundly operated, silently imposing its standard concepts
of speech and writing.”54 The discipline of anthropology—­indeed,
the history of anthropological thought—­m isses (or refuses to see)
the practice of writing as the condition that makes its phonocentrism
possible. As for Lévi-­Strauss, in writing the Nambikwara as a “people
without writing,” he not only misreads their “scribbled lines” and
misses the evidence of their writing but also annihilates (writes, rep-
resents) the Brazilian tribe with his own graphic impressions. 55
A decade or so after Derrida, Johannes Fabian joins him in trac-
ing the history of anthropology’s disciplinary formation to Rousseau.
He notes that while anthropological writing may be scientific (a point
with which Derrida would disagree), “it is also inherently autobio-
graphic.”56 And yet, ethnographic writing defines the ethnographer
as a neutral cultural observer, distant and detached from the field
before them. Written ethnographic practice eliminates the traces of
intersubjectivity through a set of rhetorical adjustments, including
 Following Derrida 177

third-­person pronominal expressions and the present tense. Instead

of “I saw” or “I learned,” the ethnographer claims, “they are.” The
third person consolidates spatial and temporal differences expressed
elsewhere in the text. The present tense generalizes, immobilizes
the ethnographic subject. Taken together, these devices refuse both
temporal simultaneity and existential similarity. They contribute to
a pattern of what Fabian describes as schizogenic time, “a persistent
and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in
a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological
discourse.”57 The schizogenic subject moves between ancient history
and the ethnographic present, never resting at a precise moment in
the ethnographer’s past.
In turn, Fabian advocates for a practice of ethnographic reflexion,
or the representation of past encounters and moments of shared
communication, rather than bodies-­as-­objects suspended in temporal
ether. Reflexive ethnography collapses the distinction between field-
work and writing; experiments with new modes of address; abandons
the rhetorical and grammatical patterns that structured ethnographic
discourse for decades; and joins ethnographer and subject together in
shared spaces and times.
More importantly for our purposes here, Fabian grounds the pos-
sibility of ethnographic reflexion in the practice of filmmaking rather
than in some alternative model of ethnographic writing: “My feeling is
that, paradoxically, we may have a movement [in visual anthropology]
which is directed against the limited effects of visualism on a theory
of knowledge. At least some visual anthropologists affirm the impor-
tance of intersubjective experience of time and explore hermeneutic
approaches to visual data.”58 Remarkably, in guiding readers toward
the work of Jay Ruby, a then-­contemporary anthropologist and film-
maker, Fabian overlooks the first decades of ethnographic filmmak-
ing. For him, it seems, the ethnographic past was written. Whatever
shifts cinema might contribute to the discipline belong to its experi-
mental visual futures, embodied by visual anthropologists like Ruby.
The long tradition of phonocentrism in anthropology—­of pho-
nocentrism communicated through writing—­unravels in the wake
of poststructural critique. As Fabian predicts, the second half of the
twentieth century opens onto all manner of ethnographic reflexivity,
especially in the field of visual anthropology.
 178 Following Derrida

In turning to the first decades of expedition filmmaking, I respond

to this understanding of ethnographic writing and anthropological
thought with two different but conjoined claims. The first is histori-
cal: the era of ethnographic reflexion begins long before the post-
structural shift in visual anthropology. The second is metahistorical:
this mode and moment of ethnographic cinema dissolves the rigid
taxonomies of difference, the antecedent ideological commitments,
and the schizogenic spatiotemporal expressions that subtend phono-
centric writing. Like the expanded field of inscription that Derrida
proposes in the concept of arche-­w riting, the expedition film reveals
the processes of forgetting and failure that accompany every effort to
preserve. This cinema incessantly gestures toward a remainder that
all forms of ethnographic writing necessarily exclude and from which
the films themselves are excluded. These sites of exclusion include,
among others, the “irreducible living multiplicity” of animals herded
and hunted in the moving image. 59 They introduce yet another order
of otherness and make visible the limits not only of ethnocentric cate-
gories and comparative claims (e.g., writing and speech, us and them)
but also, and more fundamentally, of all forms of anthro­pocentric
knowledge, from anthropology to (film) history.

Forgetting the Human, Remembering the Animal

The expedition film lacks the kind of spatial and temporal separations
that define centuries of ethnographic writing, which is not to say that
it lacks divisions altogether. The schizogenic fault line can be found
elsewhere, running between nomadic streams of any-­d ifference-­
whatever (to borrow a term from Deleuze) and the event of death
on-­screen. These formations furnish different orders of representa-
tion, different expressions of space and time, which fail to distinguish
ethnographer from ethnographic subject with the same clarity and
control of the ethnographic text (or, as I will argue, commercial eth-
nographic cinema). These films seem to have no visual or narrative
structures, no generic conventions to which they must adhere, save
those that paradoxically guarantee the annihilation of structure itself.
They instead drift indiscriminately across the earth’s surface and col-
lapse in the depths of a gunshot wound. Expedition cinema is neither
 Following Derrida 179

the inheritor of ethnography’s discursive violence nor the offspring of

ethnographic cinema’s popular genres.
In 1931, the Clark–­O’Donnell expedition departed from New
York for southern Sudan under the auspices of the AMNH. The
team included Charles Oliver O’Donnell, a fellow at the AMNH;
James Lippitt Clark, vice-­d irector of exhibition at the museum; and
a small group of anthropologists, artists, and specimen specialists.
Jack Robertson filmed the expedition, dividing his attention between
humans, plants, and animals, between observing the culture of the
Sudanese people and recording the flora and fauna of the region.
Robertson also documented the team’s efforts to “secure” several
eland (a kind of antelope) for the Akeley Hall of African Mammals,
an event that I will argue brings human and animal, ethnography and
zoography, together in crucial ways. Upon their return, the film was
screened at the AMNH as Adventures on the Upper Nile, a title that
sidesteps the film’s institutional affiliations—­excluding any mention
of the Clark–­O’Donnell expedition—­in an effort to attract members
of the general public. Given the unstructured set of images and arti-
facts that Robertson’s film gathers together, audiences who went in
search of adventure would have been disappointed.
Adventures on the Upper Nile lacks the trappings of coherent nar-
rative structure. There are no crises or resolutions in this adventure,
no indications (via intertitles, editing, or maps) of how much time has
passed or where we are in space. The expedition film opposes the nar-
rative stability one often finds among early commercial ethnography,
a category that includes Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922),
Grass (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1925), and
Simba: King of the Beasts (Martin and Osa Johnson, 1928). In marked
contrast to these more discernible narrative expressions, one finds a
disordered jumble of visual experiments and technical imperfections
in expedition cinema, a collection of accidents and contingencies that
refuse “good” narrative order. These are films of continuous passage,
transience, and mobility that rarely come to rest or come together in
familiar narrative shapes.
In turn, this mode of ethnographic cinema challenges the ways
in which historians commonly periodize film’s first decades (e.g.,
early, transitional, narrative). It questions the organizing structure
 180 Following Derrida

of periodicity itself. Expedition cinema fails to follow the histori-

cal schema of “this and then that” of “early and then narrative.” It of-
fers an anachronistic mix of “before” and “after,” early and late. Put
otherwise, in resisting the narrative structures of film history, ex-
pedition cinema equally resists the linear narrative shapes of film
historiography.
Adventures on the Upper Nile is divided into three parts, each of
which represents time and space in slightly different ways. The first
part of the film depicts the crew’s constant movements along the river.
Robertson shot most of the Nile footage—­its banks and its waters, its
animal and human inhabitants—­from aboard the moving steamship,
a technique that produces a series of languorous traveling shots. With
each cut, the camera approaches an animal, a village, or another patch
of land. As the boat passes by these focal points, the camera slowly
turns, keeping the subject within view. The combined movements of
both steamer and camera construct a generous and fluid 180-­degree
visual field. The connections between these shots, however, are im-
precise and unmotivated. Along the way, Robertson pivots from shots
of other boats to flocks of wild ducks and cattle to dozens of people
fishing in the distance to a great (and spectacularly beautiful) wildfire
to a crocodile chasing its prey to the bodies of villagers gathered at
the shoreline. Robertson also moves his camera erratically between
starboard and port, creating a kind of back-­and-­forth motion that
counters the spatial continuity and linear time of the actual expedi-
tion and further confuses the relationship between distinct shots.
How much time has passed (days, weeks)? Where are we on the river
(whose length exceeds four thousand miles)? The film offers an end-
less succession of appearances (i.e., this and this and this) rather than
a series of events structured by narrative time (this and then this, here
and then there).
This first portion of Adventures on the Upper Nile exchanges the
spatial and temporal structures of the expedition for a shapeless and
interminable search for signs of difference. The ambulant, itinerant
pathways of the expedition film resemble Deleuze and Guattari’s
nomad, a figure of continuous “becoming and heterogeneity, as op-
posed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant.”60 The
nomad moves, passes, drifts across “a field without conduits or chan-
nels,” in a spiral of endless variation, “wedded to a very particular
 Following Derrida 181

type of multiplicity: nonmetric, accentric, rhizomatic multiplicities

that occupy space without counting it and can be explored only by
legwork.”61 The concept of the nomad opposes fixed routes and global
systems with the kinds of local and sensory knowledge that come
with physical proximity (i.e., “legwork”). The nomad is a minor fig-
ure, posed against and outside the rigid, sedentary structures of the
state as well as what Deleuze and Guattari call the “Royal Sciences.”62
As they understand it, the nomad is a force for political and episte-
mological revolutions: “insubordination, rioting, guerilla warfare.”63
Some may object to my use of this concept. After all, expedition
cinema is designed to serve the state and its scientific systems. It is
produced by an outsider’s gaze upon the local surface and, in this way,
bears the trace of a disciplinary, disciplining order. Like the nomad,
however, expedition cinema deviates from the systems at its source.
It substitutes the hierarchical planes of anthropological thought and
ethnographic writing for an infinite field of differences. And it makes
visible those “insipid details, incidents of no significance,” that Lévi-­
Strauss sought to protect his readers against.
When the steamer reaches “the land of the great eland,” the sec-
ond part of the Adventures on the Upper Nile begins, and this nomadic
rhythm temporarily subsides, giving way to some kind of coherent
narrative order and action. An intertitle marks both past and future
time: “After many weeks of hard hunting the great bull eland was se-
cured.” From here, Adventures on the Upper Nile follows the anthro-
pologists and their native guides from the steamship into the field.
We watch as the Clark–­O’Donnell expedition sets up camp, eats
their meals, and interacts with local villagers. Time stretches out, ex-
tends. “Daily for weeks,” we are told, “the hunting party searches the
district for Eland.” Thereafter, the anthropologists and their guides
appear in a field of tall grass. A guide fires his rifle. The film cuts to
a close-­up of the dead eland’s gaze. Human hands touch and tug at
its head and body, bringing the animal temporarily back to life and
movement. Another cut and the eland is already divided into two
parts. In the foreground, O’Donnell holds the animal’s head by the
horns for the camera, while the guides remove the skin from the
carcass behind him (Figure 16). Taxidermic preparations unfold
in the scenes that follow (Figures 17 and 18). Clark and O’Donnell
tan the hide. The local guides clean the skeleton. The AMNH artists
 182 Following Derrida

FIGURE 16
Charles Oliver O’Donnell holds the horns of the “great eland” in Adventures on the Upper
Nile (Jack Robertson, 1931). American Museum of Natural History.

and specialists gather leaves, make plaster casts, and paint pictures
of the surrounding foliage (unmoved, it would seem, by the machine
in their midst and the documentary record already under way). The
guides consume the meat in one shot; in another, the anthropologists
labor to preserve what they have seen and touched and smelled for
reproduction in the museum’s glass enclosures. One could easily read
this visual division between self and other, the West and elsewhere, as
an example of cinematic schizogenic time.
This window of taxidermic efficiency and narrative time neverthe-
less disappears during the third and last portion of the film. Once the
eland has been “secured,” the film returns to its spatial and tempo-
ral indifference. Indeed, the final fifteen minutes of Adventures on the
Upper Nile offer no adventures at all. The film concludes with thirty-­
one inexplicable shots (roughly nine minutes in total) of elephants
(alone and in groups, walking and still, close to the shore and off in
the distance). Robertson is back on the boat, filming from side to side
as the banks of the Nile pass him by at no particular time or place,
elephants all around him.
FIGURE 17
Taxidermic preparations in Adventures on the Upper Nile (Jack Robertson, 1931).
American Museum of Natural History.

FIGURE 18
Taxidermic preparations in Adventures on the Upper Nile (Jack Robertson, 1931).
American Museum of Natural History.
 184 Following Derrida

It is tempting to treat Adventures on the Upper Nile as an excep-

tional film, to separate its strange forms from the heap of ethno-
graphic images and begin unpacking the puzzles posed by its graz-
ing camera. I would like to resist this impulse to recuperate the film
and discipline its contingencies. Adventures on the Upper Nile is not a
special case. It belongs to a broad collection of misshapen and mal-
formed moving images whose only organizing structures include the
nomadic search for visible difference and the radical alterity of death
on-­screen.
Many titles gather at its sides, including The Captain Marshall Field
Brazilian Expedition (George Cherrie, 1926), a film funded by the
Field Museum and archived in the AMNH moving image collection.
Like Adventures on the Upper Nile, the camera slides from side to side,
from image to disconnected image, shooting from the windows of a
passenger train and from the bough of a steamship. As viewers, we
skim the surface of the Brazilian terrain, encountering a sunrise over
Rio’s harbor (in rose-­tinted stock), extreme long shots of birds along
the shoreline, an abstract tangle of matted trees and grass, and the
unidentified bodies of Brazilian peoples (filmed at multiple distances,
movements, and angles). This film substitutes the single hunt of the
eland bull with a series of hunts (for crocodiles, jaguars, deer, mon-
keys, and birds). Twenty of the film’s thirty minutes cycle through
images of shots firing, animals dying, and anthropologists and their
guides displaying animal bodies and, importantly, faces for the
camera. The repetition of animal death introduces a different kind of
rhythm. Rather than interrupting the nomadism of the ethnographic
camera with the eruptive temporality of death-­on-­screen, these spa-
tial and temporal forms overlap, coincide. We wander from death to
death, from gaze to gaze, encountering the limits of visibility over and
again, all along the way.
Another brief example from the AMNH models the tension be-
tween written and visual ethnography, on the one hand, and the
archive and ethnographic cinema, on the other. During the first
AMNH expedition to eastern and southwestern China, Yvette Borup
Andrews, the wife of anthropologist Roy Andrews, filmed Frontiers
of a Forbidden Land (1916). According to the AMNH archive cata-
log, the purpose of the expedition was “to collect zoological speci-
mens and visual ethnographic records.”64 This impulse to collect also
 Following Derrida 185

underpins the haphazard and unstructured accumulation of dead

bodies and ethnographic images that surface in the film. The traveling
shot dominates the film’s visual grammar, but like the ethnographic
expeditions to come, this cinematographic form fails to clearly com-
municate the coordinates of travel (e.g., direction, progress, measur-
able movements over time). The AMNH library catalog nevertheless
includes a brief description that narrativizes this decidedly nonnarra-
tive accumulation of events:
The film opens as the expedition’s mule caravan moves through
Yunnan (K’un-­M ing); the expedition mules are seen being
packed. A goral that had been collected is shown. The expedi-
tion reaches the Yangtze River where the mules are unpacked
and with great difficulty are boarded onto flat boats that ferry
the caravan across the river. The spectacular gorge in the Snow
Mountain Range is filmed, and near the Tibetan border a
camel caravan is seen. The expedition caravan moves through
the Mekong Valley and along the Mekong River until it makes
camp. At Wa-­tien, a sambar deer is collected and brought to
camp. A Shan tribesman contortionist performs for the expedi-
tion staff. In Tali, portraits of Chinese are filmed, as well as the
city gate; and a fur trader’s market in Li-­Chiang. The expedition
is next seen camping in the Snow Mountains. Moso people
are seen tending sheep and various tribespeople are filmed in
Meng-­ting. Along the Burmese border the Nam-­k Shan are
shown building a pole and thatch house; and the local costume
of wide pants or skirts, short jackets, and turbans is seen. A
serow is collected, and Lisu men demonstrate the use of their
crossbows. The final sequence is of two Tibetan bear cubs, that
the Andrews bought in Tengyueh. . . . This is the remnant of a
longer film, and according to Roy C. Andrews’s notes [this ver-
sion] is out-­of-­order.
Buoyed by the anonymity and authority of the library catalog, this
description imposes a kind of narrative order, installing geographic
and temporal markers that are missing from the actual film (e.g., “the
expedition reaches the Yangtze River,” “moves through the Mekong
Valley,” “along the Burmese border”). Indeed, this brief text creates
a coherence that the film itself simply lacks. The catalog description
 186 Following Derrida

likewise condenses multishot scenes of animal hunting and death

into a single, euphemistic verb: to collect. The zoologists on the expe-
dition collect a goral, a sambar deer, and a serow. The term occludes
the complexity of this encounter, displacing the spatial and temporal
imprecision of death as a visual event and site of spectatorial exchange
with an expression that names the productive, desired ends of ethno-
graphic practice (e.g., to collect, to categorize, to curate). And yet the
text concludes with a curious editorial remark that betrays the aims
of an archive and the hierarchical regimes of ethnographic practice.
It refers us to another (longer, lost) version of the film and Andrews’s
field notes. The archive assures us that the disorder of this film can be
reordered with the privileged mode of ethnographic expression. The
“real” version and the “right” meaning exists elsewhere, beyond the
inherent disorder and futility of the moving image, in the archive of
written ethnography.
The examples discussed thus far all concern expedition films from
the AMNH collection. However, this mode of ethnographic cin-
ema is not limited to this national context or this particular archive.
Rather, expedition cinema expands beyond American anthropology
and the institutional orders of the AMNH. Hundreds of expedi-
tion films inhabit national and colonial film archives across Europe.
In this category, one can include the Basden (circa 1920s–­1930s)
and Dalyell expedition collections (1926–­37); Angus Buchanan’s
Crossing the Great Sahara (T. A. Glover, 1924); André Gide’s Voyage
au Congo (Marc Allégret, 1926); the Renault and Citroën expedition
films, including La Croisière noire (León Poirier, 1926); and dozens of
titles from the Dutch national film archives: Suriname, Nederlandsch
Guiana (Anon., 1921), Met geweer en lasso door Afrika (With gun and
lasso in Africa, Anon., 1920s), and Langs den Nijl naar het van Afrika
(Along the Nile to Africa, Anon., 1925), to name just a few. The list
necessarily goes on; it is as broad and imprecise as the task of record-
ing the ethnographic expedition. Many of these films duplicate the
steamship cinematography of Adventures on the Upper Nile as they
wind their way by boat, train, or automobile over vast tracts of water
and land. All of them pivot between ethnography and zoography, be-
tween human and animal subjects, between the allegorical hunt for
signs of difference (regional markets, traditional crafts, hairstyles,
 Following Derrida 187

ceremonial dances) and the actual hunt for crocodiles, birds, fish,
lions, hippos, buffalos, and elephants.
Expedition cinema crowds the margins of moving image archives,
often disconnected from disciplining institutions (like the AMNH)
and the kind of identifying information that promises to order the
disorder of its wandering cameras [e.g., the name(s) of the expedition
or its participants, the production company or film studio, the year
of the film’s release]. These missing details further frame the expedi-
tion film as an incomplete or partial document, an unstructured and
potentially endless accumulation of images set adrift by the absence
of language and the search for difference.
As my description of them indicates, however, these films do share
in at least one visual convention: a scene or multiple scenes of animal
death. How might one begin to understand the animals at the center
of the expedition, including the event—­or, following Derrida’s insis-
tence that we recognize animals in their multiplicity, events—­of their
deaths? What do these animal encounters do to the humans with
whom they share the frame? And what are their effects upon the prac-
tice of ethnographic writing?
For Tom Gunning, scenes of death and dying, of mangled bod-
ies and rotting flesh, exemplify the grotesque curiositas of the “cin-
ema of attractions.”65 They sit alongside the images of dance I discuss
in the previous chapter. Gunning inherits the term curiositas from
Augustine’s fifth-­century catalog of visual and voyeuristic sins. In the
medieval period, these repulsive spectacles led the individual away
from the seriousness and contemplation of the Christian life; in early
cinema, these corporeal sights lead spectators away from narrative
absorption toward the dangers of distraction and the shocks of the
socially taboo. Gunning nevertheless does not linger on the differ-
ences between death and the other categories of curiositas (e.g., what
separates our encounters with death from those of dance?), nor does
he address the distinction between animals and humans, between the
actual deaths and the performances of death that crowd the early era.
Jonathan Auerbach also approaches the representation of death
from the historical perspective of early cinema. Unlike Gunning,
however, Auerbach insists on the specificity of this visual event. Draw-
ing on photographic theories of spectrality (e.g., Barthes and Bazin),
 188 Following Derrida

Auerbach reads the cinematic image of the dead or dying body as an

“extreme form of stasis” and the “ultimate repudiation of theatrical-
ity.”66 Death is an expression of stillness. It suspends cinematic time
and exposes the photogrammatic structures that underlie the moving
image and are intrinsic to its materiality.
Garrett Stewart comes to similar conclusions. He argues that the
“structural force of the death scene” cracks open “the entire cine-
matic system” and produces “critical moments of self-­d isclosure.”67
As Stewart describes them, these disclosures operate in both cin-
ematographic and diegetic directions. The representation of death
implicates the photographic and projective technologies of cinema
and interrupts the spectatorial sutures of narrative film: “Death takes
visual definition from the self-­apocalypse of the medium’s own rep-
resentational limits. . . . Death is defined in situ, that is, as the mo-
ment when the fiction of a camera angle assimilated entirely to the
organic agencies of the diegesis can no longer be sustained, when see-
ing (recording) is made to persist in the evacuation of the gaze.”68 In
Stewart’s view, death denaturalizes the experience of cinema. It fore-
closes our points of identification within the frame and alienates us
from the image, revealing the photographic foundations of film and
the “unconscious photo synthesis of film viewing.”69
Catherine Russell is one of the few film scholars to directly address
the phenomenon of animal death in ethnographic cinema. However,
her work reiterates many of the claims one finds in more general
studies of death on-­screen. Her analysis of Martin and Osa Johnson’s
commercial expedition film Simba, King of the Beasts (1928), for ex-
ample, cycles back to the interruptive effects of the photographic
image, in part because the film itself replaces the continuous move-
ment of cinema with a photographic portrait at the precise moment
of capture and death. As an intertitle explains, the filmmakers used
a zebra as bait and “set a trap camera with flash lamps to register the
lions which prowled around the camp at night.” 70 A black frame and
white flash are followed by three still images of a lion, standing near
the body of the dead zebra, staring directly into the camera. Both the
film and Russell’s reading of it conflate the death of the zebra, the
photographic image, and the returned look of the lion. Russell argues
that each of these elements belongs to a regime of visual stasis, and in
this way, it is not clear how the stasis of death might differ from, say,
 Following Derrida 189

the stasis of the photographic image, nor can we analyze the interac-
tion between death and its representation.
Moreover, for Russell, the animal operates metaphorically. It means
in relation to the human subject, stands in for it, and, in so doing, signi-
fies a broad category of ethnographic otherness and unknowability.
She writes, “Martin Johnson’s photos of the lion and the zebra are in
fact stunning images, capturing the shock of the moment in which the
zoo has traveled to the wilderness. The zebra’s body is fixed, dead, as
image while the lion’s impenetrable gaze registers the unknowability
of the Other, her wildness intact, but barely.” 71 What shocks in this
image, according to Russell, is the control that cinema manages to
exert over the wild animal body, installing the captive conditions of
the zoo where the savannah once was. Gone, it seems, is the shock
of the dead or dying body that both Gunning and Auerbach attach
to the early image. Here, as elsewhere, the photograph (diegetically
figured by the stillness of a lifeless gaze) intervenes in the “cinematic
system.” It tempers the shock of cinema, the claims it makes upon the
body of the animal. And here, too, the fixed, “dead” image challenges
our scopic drive with a gaze that meets our own. For Russell, the film
thus splits “between two competing historiographies: the narrative
of human evolution, and the temporal fragmentation of discrete mo-
ments in time.” 72
Gunning, Auerbach, Stewart, and Russell each read the represen-
tation of death in cinema as an epistemologically productive event.
That is to say, there is something in these deaths for us to discover: a
new way of thinking or theorizing cinema (e.g., in relation to its pho-
tographic substrate) or knowledge about our own relationship to the
cinematic image. Still, none of these approaches really captures the
crisis that this visual event creates in the expedition image.
Mary Ann Doane’s analysis of death and cinematic time, by con-
trast, closely approximates its effects, although, as I will explain, there
remains some distance between her reading and my own. Doane
argues that on-­screen death refuses understanding. It registers “as a
cinematic Ur-­event . . . , the zero-­degree of meaning, its evacuation.”73
Death does not return us to the technologies of cinema or the pho-
tographic origins of the moving image. It is an irrecuperable and in-
articulate sign. As an experience or event in the world, death marks
the limits of existence. As a cinematic image, however, death marks
 190 Following Derrida

the limits of representation. It escapes visual capture, like the physical

bullet buried in the flesh. It is a nonvisual event that happens else-
where: in the body, beneath the surface. As viewers, we are left only
with the visible trace, the index, and the inadequacies of wounded
flesh.
As I note in my first chapter, Doane’s is a theory of the ecstatic,
eruptive image, born not only out of the generalized spectacularity of
early film but also from the contingencies and spontaneities of single-­
shot cinema. Whereas Auerbach’s theory of death-­as-­cinematic-­stasis
turns to A Daring Daylight Burglary, a 1903 chase film that includes a
fictional tableau of the body torn apart, and Stewart refers us to what
he (somewhat confoundingly) calls the “actual” and “literal” deaths
that accumulate in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) and The Shining
(Stanley Kubrick, 1980), Doane takes up the sliver of cinematic history
in which real time and real—­often animal—­deaths repeat, potentially
endlessly, on-­screen. In the rise of narrative forms, like those mastered
by the Johnsons, Doane perceives a movement away from the threat-
ening contingency of death toward condensed, controlled time. Doane
describes this distinction with reference to the foundational early
image of animal death, Edison’s Electrocuting an Elephant (1903):
In the cinema, the tendency to depict death in this form, in a
direct and unmediated way for the gaze of the spectator, lasted
only a brief period of film history, a period that is also bound
up with speculations about the new technology itself (what it
is for, what it can do). Just as electricity could be activated as
a technological control over life and death, the cinema must
have seemed to offer the same promise in the field of repre-
sentation. . . . But to the extent that the spontaneous and the
unpredictable seemed to invade the image of the actuality,
to the extent that the image cannot speak its own relation to
temporality, narrative proved to be a more effective and surer
means of assimilating the unassimilable by conferring on death
a meaning. The direct presentation of death to the spectator as
pure event, as shock, was displaced in mainstream cinema by
its narrativization. Technology and narrative form an alliance
in modernity to ameliorate the corrosiveness of the relation
between time and subjectivity.74
 Following Derrida 191

As Doane explains, narrative structure and precise editing schemes

eliminate the corporeal and epistemological risks of single-­shot cin-
ema and its particular reiteration of death. Narrative cedes control
back to the spectator, finally fulfilling the Bazinian promise of a visual
“defense against the passage of time” and a “continued existence of
the corporeal body.” 75 It restores meaning to the empty, eruptive
image, making sense of the senseless or the purely sensational.
Importantly, however, expedition cinema falls outside the “brief
period of film history” when single-­shot cinema delivered unmedi-
ated encounters with real time and its contingencies. Adventures on
the Upper Nile, for example, creates “time as an effect” rather than
time as pure event. Cuts divide shots and sculpt the rhythms of the
expedition out of distinct visual slices. The expedition film neverthe-
less bears the trace of early, single-­shot cinema. This trace emerges
in the nomadic collection of disconnected instants, wherein the risk
of accidents and the unexpected—­as well as the attendant threat of
meaninglessness—­issues not only from each individual shot but also
from the immense and unmotivated space between shots, which are
joined only by the concept of difference. Expedition cinema fails to
mediate our encounter with the expansive boredom and eruptive
shocks of real time. Its temporal effects deviate from both the photo-
graphic stasis of a fictionalized tableau and the progressive linearity
of narrative structure.
The trace of early cinema can also be found in the abundance of
animals that these films gather together and the compulsive represen-
tation of their deaths. In Adventures on the Upper Nile, the death of the
eland interrupts the narrative time of the hunting party and its taxi-
dermic recuperations with an irrecuperable visual event. This effort to
think early and expedition together further suggests that Doane’s ma-
terialist account of film history fails to exhaust the sites of cinematic
contingency. Editing does not always bring the temporal expressions
of cinema under control, and the line between “early” cinema and
whatever arrives “after” cannot be drawn so sharply.
Before addressing the specificity of these animal events in expedi-
tion cinema, I would like to examine two related phenomena: one is
visual, the other critical. The first is the representation of animal death
and taxidermy in early popular cinema. The second is the concept of
“taxidermy,” which develops in studies of commercial ethnographic
 192 Following Derrida

cinema. Both reveal something of the expedition film (its lines of de-
scent in popular film, for example). But these films and the animal
deaths that they gather, I will argue, nevertheless escape the efficien-
cies of early taxidermic images and the preservative claims of taxider-
mic theories.
Several early film genres adjoin expedition cinema, including the
“hunting film,” a popular format that first appeared around 1903 and
included the early work of French, British, and American filmmaker-­
naturalists like Alfred Machin, Carl Akeley, Cherry Kearton, and
Paul Rainey, as well as dozens of films made by production studios
throughout Europe and the United States.76 Scott Curtis identifies the
hunting film—­together with scientific or educational films and nar-
rative adventure films—­as an important example of the early “animal
picture” and the burgeoning predilection for “gruesome and violent
stagings of animal deaths.” 77 The hunting film condenses months of
travel and time into a brief but spectacular event: the killing, skin-
ning, and dividing of an animal into parts. These films very frequently
frame the event of animal death and taxidermy as industrial and/
or scientific processes. That is, they move through the hunt—­from
search party to death—­and conclude in the natural history museum
or artisanal studio, where they reveal the animal’s material or taxider-
mic afterlife as a productive, consumable object.
The hunting film exerts precisely the kinds of temporal and nar-
rative controls that, for Doane, multishot cinema guarantees. For ex-
ample, in Chasseurs d’ivoire (Machin, 1912), the film pivots from the
shocking non-­sense of an elephant’s death to the coherence of com-
mercial ivory production. The film leaves the elephant carcass—­
its stomach slashed and billowing with smoke—­and continues in a
workshop, somewhere far away. People in lab coats examine tusks.
They sand and cut and carve. The final image of the film retroactively
explains the voyage. One of the craftsmen exhibits a trunk filled with
the latest devices of home beauty: an array of ivory-­handled mir-
rors, nail files, brushes, and bottles, each tucked into its own velvety
compartment.
Chasseurs d’ivoire recuperates the death of the animal from the
edge of meaninglessness by reinstalling this event within an economy
of industrial and visual production. The hunting film distills broad
expanses of time and space into a few thrilling minutes of blood and
 Following Derrida 193

gore, packaged as educational notes from the field. While the en-
counter with death on-­screen may resist understanding—­addressing
the body rather than the mind—­the hunting film meets the desire
for death on demand with a compact, consumable, and enormously
popular spectacle. It adheres to Gunning’s model of early film specta-
torship, which I discuss in the first chapter: spectators desire shocks,
and early cinema provides them. In this view, the early filmgoer and
the early film image operate like interlocking pieces, symbiotically
joined together.
The expedition film fails to fashion its dead bodies with the same
industrial and economic efficiency. Nor does it move through the
same repetitive circuit of spectatorial desire and satisfaction. These
films produce images in excess of spectatorial desire, in excess of
what one could possibly anticipate in advance. The expedition film
produces what Gunning’s model—­and, more specifically, the hunt-
ing film genre—­necessarily excludes: the errant, the unexpected, the
undesired, and the irrecuperable.
The twin figures of animal death and taxidermic preservation con-
tribute to the conceptual and temporal framework that has guided
studies of early ethnographic cinema for more than two decades. In
her reading of Nanook of the North, Fatimah Tobing Rony describes
the work of Robert Flaherty as “taxidermy.” 78 Rony argues that the
taxidermic image, like the taxidermied body, “seeks to make that
which is dead look as if it were still living.”79 A stranger irony still: the
taxidermist must kill their subject so that it can be brought back to
life, a stilled representation of its former self. The twofold taxidermic
operation maps onto a cinematic imperative: “In order to make a visual
representation of indigenous peoples, one must believe that they are
dying, as well as use artifice to make a picture which appears more
true, more pure.”80 It follows, then, that Nanook of the North does not
present life as it is or was but life as Western explorers, travel writers,
and ethnographic filmmakers imagined it to be. Like the taxidermied
bodies that populate the natural history museum, Nanook of the North
offers only the scantest shells of lives that once were in a real place and
time. Beneath their cinematic skins, one finds a batting of grasses and
leaves, bodies and limbs arranged just so in a lifelike fantasy of strug-
gle and survival. The taxidermic cinema, like the ethnographic text,
passes over the actual to signify a fictional constellation of images
 194 Following Derrida

and ideas. Rony’s intervention also rehearses an argument from Jean

Baudrillard, who writes of ethnology some fifteen years earlier: “In
order for ethnology to live, its object must die. . . . Of course, these
savages are posthumous: frozen, cryogenized, sterilized, protected
to death, they have become referential simulacra, and science itself
has become pure simulation.”81
This rich conceptual paradigm—­moving image as taxidermic
preservation—­not only suggests that the image of the Inuit family
in Nanook of the North oscillates between movement and stillness,
life and death, but also foregrounds the violent lineage of visual rep-
resentation. Taxidermy and the camera intertwined with startling
frequency throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Finis Dunaway traces the roots of nature photography to the rifle. In
the nineteenth century, gun and camera circulated freely among the
elite members of the hunting party. Networks of “artist-­hunters” or
“camera-­hunters” began to form, joined by a shared interest in con-
servation, aesthetics, and the transformative power of the American
landscape. We can, of course, trace this ideology across Roosevelt’s
work and writing. These men “longed to regain primal instincts
through gun hunting; they desired to fix the primeval landscape
through camera hunting.”82 The overlap between camera and gun, ob-
servation and penetration, fascinates Susan Sontag and shapes much
of her writing on the photographic image. 83 Both Donna Haraway
and Mark Alvey explore the intersections between taxidermy, cin-
ema, and the AMNH in their respective studies of Carl Akeley, a
figure who played a central role in the development of taxidermic
practice in the United States and Europe (and, coincidentally, accom-
panied Roosevelt during part of his expedition to Africa).84 Akeley
was also the inventor of a motion picture camera whose “freewheel-
ing damped-­action gyroscopic tripod head,” Alvey notes, “allowed the
operator to pan and tilt with a steady, fluid motion, using a handle
mounted on top of the camera.”85 In other words, the very person who
perfected the taxidermic stillness of the life exhibit brought an un-
precedented fluidity of motion to ethnographic cinema.
Rony’s argument owes a further debt to Haraway and her foun-
dational critique of taxidermic display. As I note in my introduction
to this chapter, Haraway situates the practice of taxidermy within
the “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” a historical moment and metaphysi-
 Following Derrida 195

cal view in which a certain idealized conception of life—­natural, or-

ganic, pure—­gets routed through death, dismemberment, and re-­
presentation. Haraway further explains that taxidermy produces a
spiritual surplus in the natural history museum and, in particular, the
Akeley Hall of African Mammals:
Each diorama has at least one animal that catches the viewer’s
gaze and holds it in communion. The animal is vigilant, ready to
sound an alarm at the intrusion of man, but ready also to hold
forever the gaze of meeting, the moment of truth, the original
encounter. The moment seems fragile, the animals about to dis-
appear, the communion about to break: the Hall threatens to
dissolve into the chaos of the Age of Man. But it does not. The
gaze holds, the wary animal heals those who will look.86
While taxidermy may be fundamentally violent, its destructive pro-
cesses ensure the resurrection of the animal and the redemption (or
healing) of the human. More importantly, as Haraway describes it,
this sacrificial theater betrays nothing of the violence—­the chaos of
the Age of Man—­that sustains it. The literal blood and guts of taxi-
dermy are removed from the scene and safely hidden from view,
encouraging the spectator to remain in uninterrupted contact and
communion.
In Haraway’s view, Akeley brings this spiritual sleight of hand from
the natural history museum to the moving image. Indeed, she sug-
gests that cinema inherited the stillness of taxidermic communion
from Akeley over and above the freewheeling gyrations of his cam-
era: “Akeley was a leader technically and spiritually in the perfection
of the camera’s eye. Taxidermy was not armed against the filmic fu-
ture, but froze one frame of a far more intense visual communion to
be consummated in virtual images.”87
Rony’s reading of Nanook of the North draws on Haraway’s con-
ception of taxidermy as a fragile communion, a spiritual encounter
that depends on slaughter. However, Rony’s technical and spiri-
tual guide through the stillness of cinema is not Carl Akeley—­a
rather minor figure in the history of ethnographic cinema, all things
considered—­but the patron saint of cinematic realism, André Bazin.
She writes, “Taxidermy is also deeply religious: when Bazin writes
that the mummy complex is the impulse behind the evolution of
 196 Following Derrida

technologies of realism—­‘To preserve, artificially, his bodily appear-

ance is to snatch it from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to
speak, in the hold of life’—­one is reminded of the image of the sleep-
ing Nanook.”88 That Allakariallak, the actor who played the sleeping
Nanook, died only two years after the film was released, in Rony’s
view, ensures the sacred quality of this particular moving image
mummy. His likeness extends limitlessly, mechanically, into the fu-
ture, and the film becomes a final resting place for a body whose an-
nihilation was all but guaranteed.
In joining the preservative impulses of ethnographic cinema to
Bazin’s theory of cinematic mummification, Rony nevertheless de-
parts from Haraway’s understanding of taxidermy as a practice whose
most “intense visual communion” unfolds in the museum and is only
ever smuggled into the cinema by the likes of an actual taxidermist.
Rather, Rony argues that there is something essentially or ontologi-
cally taxidermic about cinema, a claim that does not address the dif-
ference between the preservative impulses that spur technologies of
realism and the destructive ones that motivate taxidermic practice.
Both Haraway and Rony slide too easily from actual to virtual
taxidermies. The imprecision of Rony’s view is compounded by an-
other slippage from Bazinian mummies to ethnographic taxidermy.
Rony ultimately overlooks the strong claims that Bazin’s essay makes
for the indexicality of both photography and cinema. Their preserva-
tive ontologies present objects, bodies, and events as they once were
(contra Flaherty’s ethnographic impulse to construct out of thin air).
Rony also does not distinguish between written and visual ethnogra-
phies. She understands Nanook of the North as a visual extension of
written practice and schizogenic time. After sketching Fabian’s view,
she writes, “The cinema of Flaherty worked in the same way: Nanook
and his family were represented in a cinematic ‘ethnographic present’
in which intertitles establish the camera, and thus the filmmaker, as
observer.”89 Rony thereby assigns the temporal expressions of cinema
to the forms of writing that emerge between its images (i.e., the in-
tertitles). She sets the image aside and never considers the encounter
between image and language. What, for example, do the taxidermic
images do to the schizogenic expressions of the intertitles?
While one might struggle to bring together “the ethnographic pres-
ent,” the Bazinian mummy, and taxidermic preservation, the central
 Following Derrida 197

thrust of Rony’s critique marks an important rethinking of ethno-

graphic cinema. As she argues, ethnographers were not engaged in a
process of saving their subjects (in writing, photographs, and films)
from the brink of existential annihilation; rather, they actively partici-
pated in the twin drives of destruction and preservation. Cinematic
taxidermy thus quickly displaced the framework of “salvage eth-
nography” through which Flaherty, and early ethnographic cinema
more generally, had been understood theretofore.90 And rightly so.
Flaherty’s infamous claim—­“Sometimes you have to lie. One often
has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit”—­suggests an ethno-
graphic methodology, and Rony takes it seriously (and takes seri-
ously the task of critiquing it). But Nanook of the North is just one
film among the small field of commercial ethnographic cinema, and
the concept of taxidermy proves difficult to generalize beyond its
boundaries.
The expedition film refuses the preservative effects and spiritual
excesses of taxidermic practice. Rather than making “that which is
dead look as if it were living,” these films nearly always detail the
processes by which the living are made dead as well as the taxidermic
efforts to bring the dead back to life. The expedition image moves
behind the corridors of the natural history museum and, in so doing,
disrupts the theater of communion. It destabilizes the lifelike ap-
pearances of its exhibits and reveals a bloody mess of skin, bone, and
flesh.
While the expedition film shares in the taxidermic and archival
impulses toward destruction—­their “diabolical death drives”—­it de-
parts from these analogues in making the destructive effects of this
drive visible. Indeed, one finds evidence of the death drive in the ex-
pedition’s shapeless search for difference, an aspect of these images
that mimics the archival search for past time. Both are infinite and
impossible tasks that destroy what they aim to preserve (retrieve or
prove) in the very process of collecting evidence. Even more obvi-
ously, however, the death drive of expedition filmmaking produces
actual images of animal death and dying scattered across the vast ar-
chive of ethnographic cinema. When these films exclude hunts led
by anthropologists and their guides, death still appears in the repre-
sentation of religious sacrifice, in scenes of local agriculture, or as the
natural outcome in a fight between species. These events interrupt the
 198 Following Derrida

repetition of the same with radical, inexplicable difference. The chaos

of the Age of Man intrudes.
The death drives of taxidermy and archiving further fail to explain
the specificity of animal death in the expedition film. Of course the
taxidermic framework depends on the animal, uses it—­its violent
death, dismemberment, and reconstitution—­as a metaphor for the
representation of ethnographic subjects. But what exactly is an animal
death in cinema? What does the animal do to the undifferentiated
deaths, to our understanding of the event of death, which we have im-
ported from film theory? And why is the specificity of the animal, its
death, so invisible to theory, even when it seems to be precisely what
is at stake (in the work of Russell and Doane, for example)? Several
film scholars, as I outline below, respond to these questions by putting
pressure on the explanatory power of cinema (i.e., cinema does things
to the animal; moving image ontology is responsible for the interrup-
tive effects of animal death).91 Following Derrida, I present a different
view, one that considers what the expedition offers to our understand-
ing of the animal in excess of mechanical reproduction.
In expedition cinema, the animal often stands in allegorical or
metaphorical relation to the ethnographic subject. These animals are
vestiges of Fabian’s schizogenic time; they establish a kind of equiva-
lence between themselves and (human) others, drawing the ethno-
graphic subject into an expression of evolutionary order. The animal
figure also implies a racist joke (told between filmmaker and specta-
tor): the “primitive” humans look like monkeys, dogs, cows, or some
other nonhuman animal. These “comic” comparisons are especially
popular in commercial expedition filmmaking, including the work
of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, Martin and Osa
Johnson, and Léon Poirier.92
One might argue that the expedition’s recurrent scenes of animal
death similarly operate by proxy, figuring human death in their eter-
nal return to the last instant of the animal. However, this approach
fails to exhaust the animal operations at work in these films; it also
does not address the animal as an animal, what it communicates be-
yond the “fragility” or “primitivity” of certain humans.93
Akira Mizuta Lippit similarly rejects this reinstallation of the
salvage paradigm, whereby the animal stands in for a human sub-
ject always teetering on the brink of extinction or already dead. He
 Following Derrida 199

suggests, “The animal metaphor in film turns out to be most often

an animetaphor, a trope that collapses under the surge of an electric
semiotic.”94 The cinematic animal slips out of its figural affiliations.
It refuses to stay in place or take the place of the human. This is par-
ticularly true, Lippit argues, in representations of animal death. Using
Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike (1924) as an example in which the killing of
animals stands in for the brutality of capitalism, he writes, “The ac-
tuality of the animal slaughter supersedes the metaphor and imposes
from outside the diegesis a taste of death, of the real. Eisenstein’s ani-
mals are parergonal, never fully inside nor outside the diegesis but
against, beside, and in addition to it.”95
The representation of death always stands in parergonal relation-
ship to the actual experience of it. It is this secondary or supplemen-
tary relationship to actual death that makes it such an unsettling cine-
matic encounter. The mechanized, endlessly repeatable death that
cinema makes possible counters both the metaphysics of death, as a
singular and final instant, and the ontology of cinema as an inscrip-
tion, index, or archive of past time. In his short essay “Death Every
Afternoon,” André Bazin explains the peculiar effects that erupt when-
ever death appears on-­screen:
For every creature, death is the unique moment par excellence.
The qualitative time of life is retroactively defined in relation to
it. It marks the frontier between the duration of consciousness
and the objective time of things. Death is nothing but one mo-
ment after another, but it is the last. . . . Despite the ontological
contradiction [cinema] represents, we quite readily accept it as
an objective counterpart to memory. However, two moments
in life radically rebel against this concession made by con-
sciousness: the sexual act and death. Each is in its own way the
absolute negation of objective time, the qualitative instant in its
purest form. Like death, love must be experienced and cannot
be represented . . . without violating its nature. This violation
is called obscenity. The representation of a real death is also an
obscenity, no longer a moral one, as in love, but metaphysical.
We do not die twice.96
Cinema cannot reproduce or repeat the experience of death, though it
can endlessly reiterate the shock of its simulacrum. As Doane argues,
 200 Following Derrida

these scenes present us with the limits of our own understanding,

with the unique instant that resists cinema precisely because it cannot
be seen. In Bazin’s description, the mechanically reproducible death,
though unable to transmit knowledge of the event itself, nevertheless
forces a different understanding of cinema. These annihilating im-
ages insist on the disparity between reality and its representation, the
event and its simulacrum. The two sides come apart. Death displays
their inherent disconnection, their irreconcilable differences, and re-
minds us that the cinematic archive and its index of the ethnographic
subject are “consigned to an external place,” at a distant remove from
the origins that they are meant to preserve.
This separation between the spectacle of death and the actual ex-
perience of it also marks a separation between species. The dead we
see in expedition cinema are not human. This simple fact radically
shifts the place of the ethnos (nation, people, tribe, caste) in ethno-
graphic cinema. These films represent a death that will never be ours;
but they also represent an experience that many argue can never be-
long to the animal. For Bazin, every creature experiences death in the
same way, as the unique, unrepeatable, final instant. He thereby takes
exception to a certain view in Western metaphysics that states that
humans and animals experience death differently or, to put it another
way, the experience of death belongs to humans. In this anthropocen-
tric understanding of death, the animal dies without any knowledge
of death, without the ability to really know an absence of conscious-
ness. The animal also lacks the singularity we ascribe to humans. As
a term, “the animal” always implies a living multitude of distinct spe-
cies. Conceived in this way, the animal cannot experience the unique
and final instant of death; an individual animal might perish, but “the
animal” always survives; it is a forever present and enduring category.
Lippit therefore argues that the cinematic representation of animal
death “marks a caesura in the flow of that philosophy of being.”97 Film
provides a privileged space for the animal wherein its death takes
place “despite its impossibility” or “as a spectacle of impossibility
unique to cinema.”98 These deaths give to the animal precisely the
kind of singularity normally reserved for humans.
While I agree that the cinematic representation of animal death
produces a crucial rupture in anthropocentric practice and thought,
I would like to resist the impulse to ground the interruptive effects of
 Following Derrida 201

this event in a broad and undifferentiated practice called “cinema.”

In other words, my own argument is not an ontological one. The ex-
pedition film challenges the undifferentiated ontology of “cinema” as
much as it undoes the homogenous multiplicity of “the animal.”
We are now in a position to return to Derrida and follow his
thoughts on the animal. For Derrida, the animal always ruptures
or challenges our views on the nature of human existence. Whether
living or dead, the animal interrupts us, presents us with the “abyssal
limit” of the human. Derrida overturns the tendency to define the ani-
mal in opposition to the human, that is, to define it through a string
of deprivations that includes (among others) speech, reason, and the
experience of death. The animal is what we cannot know rather than
what cannot know like us. Derrida further argues that the limits of
human understanding can be felt most acutely in the lived confronta-
tion with the gaze of an animal other. He returns throughout the text
to an example from his own experience (one that recalls Lacan’s story
of the tin can that “sees” him at sea): the moment in which he stands
naked before the gaze of his house cat. The animal looks at him, and
he sees himself seen “from a wholly other origin.”99
As Derrida suggests in the epigraph that accompanies this chap-
ter, the interruptive dynamic changes in the representation of the ani-
mal, in its reconstitution at the museum or zoo, in paintings or books.
These animals do not engage or interpellate us in quite the same way.
They invert the flow of this exchange. We “speak calmly” of the ani-
mal, speak for the animal, and control whatever the animal might
mean in relation to the human. The human no longer comes “after”
the animal, chases behind it, and risks getting caught in its gaze or,
more threateningly, its grasp. In these disciplinary regimes, the
human imposes a narrative and historical order, one that insists on a
strong separation between the categories of human and animal. This
order also ensures both the physical and metaphysical integrity of the
human: the human comes first; the animal follows. One might draw
some connections here between Derrida’s conception of the lived and
represented animal encounter, on the one hand, and Doane’s argu-
ment about single and multishot cinema, on the other. The one opens
onto the contingencies of real time; the other brings the threat of con-
tingencies under narrative control.
Expedition cinema takes exception to this ordering of both the
 202 Following Derrida

animal and moving images. This exception owes, in part, to precisely

the kinds of animal events that gather here. The expedition demands,
over and again, that we participate in the precarious process of hunt-
ing them (this demand, ironically, does not issue from the early genre
of hunting films). In the ethnographic expedition film, we chase the
animals, follow behind them, and, inevitably, get caught by their gaze
in the profoundly ambiguous moment of their deaths. Is the animal
dead or alive? What does it know (of us or itself)? Does it suffer? Can
it see? This cinema does not allow us to “speak calmly” of the animal,
for it does not take place in the instant after passions have passed. It
coincides with the extreme instant and makes visible those “moments
of nakedness” when one realizes that animals have a point of view.100
Expedition cinema therefore complicates, thickens, and delinearizes
(to borrow a few terms from Derrida) the simplicity of the spatial and
temporal border—­“outside” and “after”—­that distinguishes human
from animal at the zoo or museum, in painting, writing, or even com-
mercial ethnographic film. In his description of following the animal,
Derrida approximates the experience of this cinematic encounter:
“The animal is there before me, there next to me, there in front of
me—­I who am (following) after it. And also, therefore, since it is be-
fore me, it is behind me. It surrounds me. And from the vantage of this
being-­there-­before-­me it can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but
also . . . it can look at me.”101 Animals are all around us in expedition
cinema. However, this experience of being-­with or near does not imply
a kind of utopian dissolution of the boundaries between species.
These films instead produce a reiterative encounter with the limits of
anthropocentric forms of knowledge, including both anthropology
and history.
This is, of course, a curious effect in the context of ethnographic
cinema. The expedition film displaces the image of the human and the
ends of ethnographic practice. In its representation of animal death
and dying, this cinema takes on a recollective function for the animal
rather than the human. It “remembers in place of the animal that can
no longer remember, remembers for the animal, remembers the ani-
mal.”102 In other words, these films annihilate both the ethnographic
impulse (to record, preserve, study) and the ethnographic index (of
the human body) as they construct a fantastic and impossible archive
 Following Derrida 203

of animal memories. The expedition film circumvents the schizogenic

temporality of ethnographic writing by giving time or, perhaps more
accurately, losing time to the animal. This offering of time, of final in-
stants, cannot be recuperated by ethnographers, filmmakers, or spec-
tators. It does not lend itself to easy reinscription within economies
of disciplinary or narrative meaning. Nor do these moments invite us
into that sacrament of animal encounter, which (for some) heals the
metaphysical and epistemological fissures of being human and (for
others) reveals the foundational stasis of moving images. This cinema
excludes us. Any knowledge of us or for us issues from these sites of
exclusion.
The animals in expedition cinema are not ethnographic subjects
otherwise imagined (as dead or dying creatures). They do not stand
in for the bodies that anthropological writing relentlessly endeavored
to quarantine. The deaths that accumulate in this cinema overwhelm
the kind of metaphorical associations that circulate elsewhere in eth-
nographic cinema, visually suggesting that certain humans are like
animals: subordinate, illiterate, primitive. But the expedition animals
also fail to communicate as radically autonomous signs, whose fragile
binds are broken by the “electric semiotic” of cinema.
On the contrary, these animals are figures that fold back upon the
construction of the human. That is to say, they do not stand in for the
human but rather open onto a critique of its representation. One can-
not separate these animal others from the history of anthropological
thought, from a certain way of thinking and theorizing otherness.
Indeed, the deep irony in Derrida’s refrain—­“the wholly other they
call animal”—­is precisely that this formation can never be wholly
other. As he suggests from his first lecture on the discipline of anthro-
pology to his final lectures on the animal, this conception of other-
ness subtends a broad range of anthropocentric practices. As Derrida
himself argues, this way of understanding the other has a history and
is the very condition that makes the writing of both ethnography and
history possible:
The multiple and heterogeneous border of this abyssal rupture
[between human and animal] has a history. . . . Indeed, one
can speak here of history, of a historical moment or phase, only
from one of the supposed edges of the said rupture, the edge of
 204 Following Derrida

an anthropo-­centric subjectivity that is recounted or allows a

history to be recounted about it, autobiographically, the history
of its life, and that it therefore calls History.103
This history of the border between animals and humans can be traced
through anthropocentric practices of all kinds. These epistemological
and disciplinary formations depend on “abyssal ruptures” (between
ethnographers and their subjects, past and present times). As Derrida
describes, only one side of the border generates history or writes eth-
nography. The abyssal distance is the condition on which these prac-
tices depend, but it also guarantees their exclusion from the very sub-
jects they endeavor to represent.
The animals in expedition cinema expose the other edge of the
rupture between human and animal. We know that we are seen (by
animals), but we do not know this experience of seeing or dying (as
an animal). The diverse, manifold animals that populate the scenes of
expedition cinema mark the limits of anthropocentric understanding,
the boundary of what humans can know, in this case, about animals.
But the “wholly other they call animal” is also a figure for the oth-
ers constructed by anthropology and history. In this way, it equally
marks the limits of every encounter between ethnographer and sub-
ject, historian and event.
The decentering operation that Derrida attributes to the animal
goes by another name elsewhere in his work: supplementarity. In the
concluding pages of this chapter, I shift away from this consideration
of how the animals in expedition cinema respond to the practice of
ethnographic writing and theories of ethnographic taxidermy to con-
sider, more broadly, the processes of supplementarity that issue from
ethnographic cinema.

The Cinematic Supplement

Although expedition films bring ethnographer and subject together
in moments of shared frame and time, they do not offer the antidote
to phonocentrism and schizogenesis, to the spatial and temporal
separations that define ethnographic writing. They do not “free” their
subjects with reassuring visions of copresence and cotemporality. But
nor do they simply repeat or reiterate written ethnographic practice.
 Following Derrida 205

These films instead, I argue, decenter the structures of the natural sci-
ences. In these concluding pages, I linger on Derrida’s seminal 1966
lecture “Structure, Sign, and Play.” Here Derrida makes the case for
how one ought to understand the “event” of anthropology and inad-
vertently suggests how one might begin to understand the relation-
ship between its written and visual tools. This framework further
allows me sketch the stakes of the encounter between expedition cin-
ema and another disciplinary practice: the writing of film history.
Remarkably, Derrida grounds the first structural rupture—­the
very first poststructural event—­in the discipline of anthropology.
He writes that anthropology “could have been born as a science only
at the moment when a decentering had come about: at the moment
when European culture—­and, in consequence, the history of meta-
physics and its concepts—­had been dislocated, driven from its locus,
and forced to stop considering itself as the culture of reference.”104 For
Derrida, anthropology contains the seed of its own undoing. It takes
clear structural differences (us and them, Europe and elsewhere) as
first and essential conditions for scientific investigation and then pro-
ceeds to trouble those differences, travel between them, and blur the
space that separates them. Anthropology recognizes an autonomous
self and then moves outside of it, beyond the center and the boundaries
of the self-­structure. These fundamental, disciplinary dislocations
disrupt the stability of anthropology’s organizing structures from
the very start. They mark a movement away from structure toward a
decentered and disorganized play of differences. Derrida applies the
term event to this particular category of movement. He writes:
The event I called a rupture, the disruption I alluded to at the
beginning of this paper, presumably would have come about
when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought,
that is to say, repeated, and this is why I said that this disruption
was repetition in every sense of the word. Henceforth, it be-
came necessary to think both the law which somehow governed
the desire for a center in the constitution of structure, and the
process of signification which orders the displacements and
substitutions for this law of the central presence—­but a central
presence which has never been itself, has always already been
exiled from itself into its own substitute.105
 206 Following Derrida

Events allow one to think the structure as such, precisely because

the rupture of movement forces one to recognize the structure as
just one among other possibilities. The structure can be abandoned
(and returned to). It can be seen (at a distance, from outside). Perhaps
most importantly, the event forces an encounter with the disciplin-
ary and discursive regimes—­“the law which somehow governed the
desire for the center”—­that regulate the appearance of any given
structure. The event thereby contests the appearance of centrality and
the assumption of neutrality. This is the operation at work in Derrida’s
reading of Lévi-­Strauss and the function he assigns to the animal.
In this early lecture, however, Derrida defines the process of dis-
rupting or decentering in broad terms. He does not limit the event
of decentered thought, of thinking the structure as such, to the most
radical revisions in the structures of knowledge (e.g., Marxism, Freud-
ian psychoanalysis). A structure can be a sign, a taxonomic category,
a discipline, or, as we have seen, a geographic location. In turn, the
event of structural disruption can signal a shift in signification, modes
of knowledge production, and/or spatial position.
Anthropology owes its place in Derrida’s thought to its rupture of
multiple structural categories (discourse, discipline, and geography).
In every iteration, the event marks a movement away from structures
toward an unpredictable and destabilizing play of differences. The
departure from structure opens onto the possibilities of bricolage, a
term that Derrida reads against the grain of Lévi-­Strauss’s distinc-
tions (i.e., bricoleur vs. engineer). One leaves the firm ground of dis-
course and disciplines, abandoning “all reference to a center, to a sub-
ject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute archia.”106
In its place, one takes what is at hand, what one encounters, what one
sees. One simply makes do.
All forms of ethnographic practice—­be they written or visual—­
emerge out of a necessary and initial movement away from the struc-
ture, its center, what Derrida describes as an “invariable presence . . .
aletheia [truth], transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God,
man, and so forth.”107 Ethnographic forms of representation cannot
deliver truth, true forms, or an enduring presence. Text upon text,
image upon image, ethnography tries to represent that which is al-
ways absent from its center and present somewhere else: the actual
ethnographic subject, in propria persona. In the impossibility of total-
 Following Derrida 207

izing representation and this potentially endless cycle of representa-

tion, Derrida perceives a process of supplementarity and an invigo-
rating field of free play:
There is too much, more than one can say. But nontotaliza-
tion can also be determined in another way: no longer from
the standpoint of a concept of finitude as relegation to the
empirical, but from the standpoint of the concept of free play.
If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the
infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a
finite discourse, but because the nature of the field—­t hat is,
language and a finite language—­excludes totalization. This
field is in fact that of free play, that is to say a field of infinite
substitutions only because it is finite. . . . One could say—­
rigorously using that word whose scandalous signification is
always obliterated in French—­t hat this movement of free play,
permitted by the lack or absence of a center or origin, is the
movement of supplementarity.108
In ethnography, one leaves the center to chase (hunt, follow) the pe-
riphery; one supplements the living, breathing, speaking self with
writing, photographs, and cinema. In ethnography, one also loses
precise disciplinary tools for bricolage, for a system of inadequate and
imprecise substitutions. One writes what one hears. One films what
cannot be seen. One takes what one can get and puts it all on-­screen.
The concept of supplementarity invites us to rethink the instabili-
ties of expedition filmmaking. We have encountered the term supple-
ment before. Karl Heider uses it to demote ethnographic cinema to a
kind of second-­order ethnographic practice: “No ethnographic film
can stand by itself. An ethnography is a written work which may be
supplemented by film.” Bringing Derrida and Heider together: ethno-
graphic cinema is inscribed within a twofold, or two-­fielded, process
of supplementarity and free play. Like any ethnographic practice, it
supplements the subjects it tries to represent (i.e., bodies, landscapes,
cultures). But it also supplements the first order of ethnographic
practice: ethnographic writing. In its status as a supplement, or as
a practice of secondary and often vaguely defined utility, early eth-
nographic cinema welcomes the unexpected and the contingent in a
way that written ethnography actively tries to sew over. These films
 208 Following Derrida

contribute an order of displacement and decentering to a set of prac-

tices that are always and already operating on unstable ground. Put
another way, these films do not have any obligations to coherence.
As the visual supplement to the written supplement, they are the un-
necessary extra, the imprecise something else. But in their shapeless
imprecision, they show us the imprecision that has been there all
along, lingering beneath the authority of the written word. A seminal
and unstructured adventure. Absolute chance. The “other” interpre-
tation, which is not turned toward the origin, but toward the affirma-
tion of contingency and play.
The event of the ethnographic image decenters the most proxi-
mate structures: anthropology, writing, history. However, the ef-
fects of this particular moving image also extend genealogically to
film historiography. As I argue in the introduction to this book, film
studies inherits its historical methods and preservative obsessions
from nineteenth-­century historiography and turn-­of-­the-­t wentieth-­
century anthropology. This is particularly true in the field of early and
silent film studies, where the imperative to save films teetering on the
brink of archival annihilation rehearses the urgent rhetoric of ethno-
graphic salvage. Decaying celluloid stands in for those fragile bodies
that compelled the ethnographic imagination of the twentieth cen-
tury, and the mythologies of archival encounter displace those that
circumscribe anthropological fieldwork.
Well into the twenty-­fi rst century, film history continues to align
itself with objectivist and recuperative models of historical thought.
In the objectivist view, historical facts exist independently of human
culture or mind. The historian simply discovers, mediates, or tran-
scribes (as objectively as possible) those facts that have been formed
elsewhere, in another time and place. The recuperative view simi-
larly defines the historian’s task as a process—­however infinite—­of
recovering, restoring, making whole. The film artifact, like the eth-
nographic image, never stands on its own. It always belongs to some
other, more complex and complete historical origin. In this way, its
meaning is forever deferred to a historical elsewhere, to a totality
from which it has been separated and with which it must be reunited.
Taken together, these historiographic frameworks foreclose any con-
ception of film as essentially fragmentary or incomplete. They also
 Following Derrida 209

suggest that the distance between the film artifact and its historical
origin can be filled (recovered, restored) with language.
In scavenging from ancillary historiographic traditions, film histo-
rians necessarily operate by analogy, metaphor, and substitution. That
is, the moving image artifact functions like other forms of historical
evidence, and film-­h istorical practice approximates other historical
models. The metaphors that bind these disciplinary structures to-
gether nevertheless ensure their shared disruption.
Ethnographic cinema is precisely the kind of incomplete or partial
document that neither ethnography nor film historiography can ac-
commodate. These films retreat from the recuperative and preserva-
tive demands that define the practice of film-­h istorical writing, and
they present a foundational challenge to the objectivist and recupera-
tive conceptions of historical evidence. They are fragments from the
very start, counterposed against the demand for origins and wholes.
In other words, ethnographic cinema functions as a radically impor-
tant supplement to film history rather than its stable or explanatory
visual evidence. It belongs to that expansive field of nonphonetic or
graphic practices that “menace at once the breath, the spirit, and his-
tory as the spirit’s relationship with itself.”109
Indeed, it is worth recalling here the many figures of death that
surface as Derrida defines his terms. The supplement “betrays life,”
it cuts “breath short,” “it is the principle of death and of difference in
the becoming of being.”110 While many forms of cinema—­and per-
haps even the medium itself—­d isturb the mythologies of presence
and resurrection that subtend film history, ethnographic cinema’s
compulsive return to the death and dying of “the wholly other they
call animal” issues this challenge more directly, more visibly, than the
broad category we call cinema. It is the visual intervention that marks
the end of film history, the paralysis of what has been written.
This page intentionally left blank
 CHAPTER 4

LANGUAGE GAMES, OR
THE WORLD INTERTITLED
You cannot flash a word into a phrase without altering the phrase;
you cannot freeze a word without losing it.
—­Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (1971)

In the final chapter of The World Viewed, a portion of pages enigmati-

cally titled “The Acknowledgment of Silence,” Stanley Cavell joins
together his interests in the philosophy of ordinary language and
the ontology of cinema. At the time of his writing, the one was a se-
rious and well-­respected subfield of analytic philosophy, buoyed by
the mid-­century contributions of Ludwig Wittgenstein and a handful
of Oxford philosophers, including J. L. Austin and Gilbert Ryle; the
other, by contrast, was neither serious nor particularly academic, for
film studies in the Anglo-­A merican academy had only just begun to
develop as a discipline.1 Cavell himself came to write about cinema
by way of yet another avenue through analytic philosophy: aesthetics.
He had hoped that his work on the subject would go some way toward
rectifying the collective oversight and demonstrating that “movies
may be written about, and that some are worth thinking and writ-
ing about, with the same seriousness that any work of art deserves.”2
As Cavell notes on the very first pages of his book, he was also, quite
simply, a film lover. That he framed his writing on cinema as a “meta-
physical memoir” of his own moviegoing experiences between 1935
and 1960, and of his own flawed recollections of the films he saw each
week (“I noticed that almost every summary statement of a movie . . .
contains one or more descriptive inaccuracies”), may well have risked
211
 212 LANGUAGE GAMES

marginalizing the project as the autobiographical scribblings of a

cinephile rather than a serious appraisal of what and how the moving
image means. 3 But it is precisely the personal, or what we might call,
following Wittgenstein, the “private,” experience of cinema that not
only informs Cavell’s conception of the medium but also binds his
philosophies of cinema and language together.4
In Cavell’s writing on cinema, the moving image serves a crucial
heuristic and metalinguistic function; that is, it has something to
teach us about the social dimensions of language and, more funda-
mentally, about the relationship between language and meaning. For
Cavell, the meaning of a particular word or phrase depends upon the
context and community in which it is used. 5 Unlike so many film
theorists who have considered what cinema might have to do with
language, Cavell does not make the case for a “language of cinema”
where cinema stands in some kind of metaphoric relationship to se-
miotic structures. Cavell instead argues that cinema models what
cannot be written or communicated in language, or what cannot be
known but rather only “acknowledged.”6 This lesson comes in the
form of what Cavell calls “silence,” a property that he ascribes to mov-
ing images from both the silent and sound eras of cinema. For Cavell,
the term “silence” refers to the spectatorial experience of cinema, the
experience of simply watching cinema (in a theater). He describes his
own “isolation in fantasy” and offers a lyrical account of film spec-
tatorship as a nonlinguistic process of absorbing or assimilating the
image into ourselves: “We involve the movies in us. They become
further fragments of what happens to me, further cards in the shuffle
of my memory, with no telling what place in the future.” 7 Whatever
we take or integrate from a film, in Cavell’s view, contributes to a
private understanding of the moving image. It belongs to a particular
subject and therefore will likely not be shared by other viewers. In
this case, the “silence” of cinema describes the “pulsing air of incom-
municability” that hangs between diverse, private points of recep-
tion. Moreover, our experience of a film—­and the language we use
to communicate that experience—­makes no claim on the intrinsic
meaning of the film itself, nor does any expression of this experience
in language adequately communicate the experience itself. To put this
somewhat differently, there is no intrinsic meaning of a film but, in-
stead, multiple and shifting contexts within which private meanings
 LANGUAGE GAMES 213

are made. Movies may be written about, and indeed some are even
worth the effort of doing so, but the practice of writing or speaking
about cinema is always informed by false memories, misunderstand-
ings, self-­projections, and traces of some singular encounter.
There is another, more important, and perhaps better known form
of “silence” that Cavell insists we acknowledge, a silence that marks
the exclusion of viewers from the image. At several points in The
World Viewed, Cavell describes the relationship between viewer and
image as one of spatial distance. The viewer is “absented” or “outside”
of the world the film projects; or, as he most compellingly puts it,
“[the film screen] screens me from the world it holds—­that is, makes
me invisible. And it screens that world from me—­that is, screens its
existence from me.”8 In the final chapter, the coordinates of this re-
lationship of difference and distance become at once linguistic and
temporal: Cavell suggests that film and viewer are interlocutors try-
ing to communicate across a historical divide and thus are always
necessarily out of sync. He describes the silence of the moving image
as “spools of history that have unwound only to me now, occasions
which will not reach words for me now and, if not now, never.”9 The
message of the film always arrives too soon—­and the viewer, in turn,
responds too late. By way of further explanation, Cavell compares the
spectatorial experiences of theater and cinema. In cinema, he writes,
“the actors are there, all right, in your world, but to get to them you
have to go to where they are, and in fact, as things stand, you can-
not go there now. Their space is not metaphysically different; it is the
same human space mine is. And you are not, as in a theater, forbidden
to cross the line between actor and incarnation, between action and
passion, between profane and sacred realms. In a movie house, the
barrier . . . is time.”10
There are several clear objections to Cavell’s view, not least of
which is that his ontology is not sufficiently delimited. What would
prevent one, for example, from arguing that our encounters with paint-
ing, photography, or any other form of representation are private ex-
periences that we cannot wholly share with others? Or that the kind
of “silence” that separates cinema’s “historical spools” from its con-
temporary viewers equally separates literature from its readers, and
that this conception of historical incommunicability draws on the
very common, phonocentric division between (living) speech and
 214 LANGUAGE GAMES

(dead) writing?11 One might also object that Cavell’s appeal to meta-
phors of silence, as well as his metaphoric handling of the linguistic
dimensions of cinema, overlooks the actual and indeed quite diverse
expressions of silence and language that accumulate during the era of
moving image production that preceded the publication of The World
Viewed and coincided with Cavell’s decades of cinemagoing.
These potential objections and blind spots notwithstanding, Cavell
offers a crucial starting point for thinking about the encounter be-
tween language and image in early ethnographic film. Unlike his
fellow philosophers of ordinary language—­nearly all of whom were
deeply skeptical of the semantic determination of meaning and, in
turn, made the much messier case for considering the role(s) that ex-
tralinguistic parameters like context might play in the meaningful-
ness of language—­Cavell took cinema seriously as just one among
many possible and contingent contexts for the expression of language
and the determination of meaning. Cavell equally unsettles film-­
theoretical approaches to language, from the formalists of the 1920s
to the semioticians of the 1960s and 1970s.12 In his skeptical view
of syntactical and semantic determination, language is not a stable
category to which cinema can be compared; the meaning of language
always depends on the context in which it is used.
The work of Christian Metz is a foundational counterpoint to
Cavell’s view of ordinary language.13 As many will recall, Metz argues
that film is a language (langage) without a langue—­which is to say
that it does not adhere to Saussure’s conception of langue as a strict
code, or system of signs, for intercommunication. Film fails to sat-
isfy Saussure’s criteria on several counts, including its unidirectional
mode of communication (spectators do not speak back to the image
or interact with it through language) and the nonarbitrary, indexical
nature of its signs. Metz instead argues that film produces a multi-
plicity of codes and comes much closer to the creative and contingent
events of everyday speech, or parole (a phonocentric metaphor that
does not address the instances of actual speech and writing in film).
In Metz’s cinesemiotics, film is the unstable term posed against the
stasis and rigidity of langue. Put slightly differently, Metz’s work im-
plies that the ordinary uses of language can operate independently
of its broader structures (langage), whereas for Cavell and other phi-
losophers of ordinary language, the two remain necessarily bound
 LANGUAGE GAMES 215

together (i.e., langue is langage). Metz’s approach not only obscures

the relationship between film and language with linguistic analogies
but also interestingly mimics the kind of unidirectionality he ascribes
to film.14 Metz (and the broader field of cinesemiotics) considers what
language might reveal to us about the codes of cinema but never asks
what cinema might offer to our understanding of language.
If, following Cavell, we understand cinema as a determinative
context for language, the project of drawing equivalences or, indeed,
contrasts between the shots of cinema and the grammar of language,
to name just one film-­theoretical approach, is a fundamentally mean-
ingless one. Grammar is not sufficient for determining the meaning
of language, and therefore locating the analog of these structures—
or the lack thereof—­in cinema does not give us any insight into how
cinema communicates linguistically (or how language works, for that
matter). The lines of influence between image and language—­or,
more precisely, the determinations of meaning—­move in both direc-
tions. The question, then, is not whether or how film acts like a lan-
guage but how cinema acts upon language and how language, in turn,
might act upon the image.
In the previous two chapters, I considered how two distinct visual
phenomena in ethnographic cinema—­the events of dance and animal
death—­communicate with the discursive practices of history and
ethnography.15 Both chapters take ethnographic cinema as a predomi-
nantly visual practice, one that stands in a supplementary relationship
to the many forms of writing that gather beyond it to name, describe,
explain, and narrativize the subjects of ethnographic study. Put sim-
ply, these chapters largely consider the language “outside” of cinema
and the ways in which the moving image disturbs the hierarchy of
ethnographic epistemology as well as the methodologies of ethno-
graphic and historical practice. The dividing line between image and
language therefore appears to divide media, to mark a separation be-
tween cinema and writing.
In this chapter, I relocate the line of encounter between cinema
and language. I examine this relationship as it operates within early
ethnographic cinema and thereby attend to the blind spot in the
previous chapters (and also, one might note, in Cavell’s writing on
cinema). More specifically, I explore several patterns of interaction
between intertitle and moving image, including (1) deixis, in which
 216 LANGUAGE GAMES

the intertitle simply endeavors to name what we see; (2) translation,

in which a multilanguage message explicitly manifests the otherness
of the ethnographic image; and (3) utterance, in which a written text
cites spoken language (or sounds) and endeavors to “speak” for the
ethnographic subject and/or the sonic aspects of the ethnographic
scene. This final section explicitly counters Metz’s conception of the
film image as an expression of ordinary “speech.” Put plainly, the aim
of this chapter is to examine some of the ways in which intertitles
work, that is, how intertitles work as, with, and upon ethnographic im-
ages, and how these images work with and upon them in turn. Where
are the boundaries or blurs between word and image? What does lan-
guage do to the ethnographic image? And what does the image do
to language, especially the privilege that ethnographic and historical
practices attribute to language?
The specific contexts I pursue in this chapter do not exhaust the
possibilities of interaction between language and image. They do
not constitute a complete taxonomy of ethnographic–­cinematic ex-
pression, nor are they mutually exclusive. In other words, there is no
direct route from this handful of image–­language patterns to an on-
tological claim about all moving images and language, nor do these
examples serve just one claim about how language or intertitles work
in early ethnographic film. Rather, following Cavell, I understand
these particular contexts for language as heuristic devices. They have
lessons to teach us about the manifold and mutual relationships that
sustain the encounter between language and moving images in eth-
nographic practice, both within and beyond ethnographic films. And,
in a further echo of Cavell, I argue that the spatial and temporal play
between intertitle and image frequently models the kind of “silence”
that he reads as an effect of the disjunction between contemporary
viewers and the implicit past time of moving images (“you cannot
go there now”). Like the spectator Cavell imagines, the temporality
of the intertitle never wholly coincides with the ethnographic image;
these messages never arrive at exactly the same time. To restate what
the prefix inter-­perhaps already makes sufficiently clear, the intertitle
is positioned spatially and temporally in between moving images. It
follows, then, that there are always temporal and, somewhat more
subtly, historical dimensions to any intertitle’s claim on the image,
as well the image’s reciprocal claim on the intertitle. Unlike the en-
 LANGUAGE GAMES 217

counter between spectator and image that Cavell describes, however,

there is no term that stands in analogical relationship to the living
subject and the present tense, no one term that receives or “involves”
the other. Both intertitle and image are forms of mediation that im-
perfectly, asynchronously, mediate each other.
In pressing upon the symbiotic and intermedial qualities of this
encounter between language and image in ethnographic cinema, this
chapter shares in a foundational strand of poststructural thought,
one that is deeply skeptical of logocentric approaches to language,
from semiotics to structuralism, from turn-­of-­the-­t wentieth-­century
human sciences to contemporary film-­h istorical studies. The logo-
centric view sharply divides language from image; it conceptualizes
the former as transparent, autonomous, and epistemologically cer-
tain, while the latter (if it is considered at all) is perceived as opaque,
irrational, and epistemologically dependent on language. The skepti-
cal critique of logocentrism emerges in Michel Foucault’s dissolution
of the boundary between “words” and “things” in The Archaeology of
Knowledge; in Jacques Derrida’s articulation of the graphic aspects
of language, perhaps most keenly illustrated by his critical interest
in ideographic, nonphonetic language systems like Egyptian hiero-
glyphics; and in Michel de Certeau’s The Writing of History and the
traces left behind in his unfinished Heterologies (to name just a few
examples).16
More narrowly, this chapter extends the work of several key theo-
rists of media mixture, including Raymond Bellour and W.  J.  T.
Mitchell, both of whom take up the task (more explicitly than their
poststructural antecedents) of analyzing the entanglements between
language and image, and both of whom frame their work as an alter-
native to Christian Metz’s cinesemiotics and its descendants. Like
Metz, Bellour understands cinema as a mixture of distinct categories
of communication, including written titles; moving photographic im-
ages; and, after the arrival of sound, phonetic dialogue, music, and
noise. Bellour nevertheless argues, contra Metz, that the combination
of these elements generates a decidedly nonlinguistic, “peculiarly un-
quotable” text.17 This incompatibility between writing and cinema
compels Bellour to consider what he describes as a set of “social, po-
litical, and profoundly historical” questions: Should cinema even be
“approached in writing at all”?18 Should analyses of cinema continue
 218 LANGUAGE GAMES

to privilege the textual practice of writing and the mythology of lin-

guistic transparency? Or should cinema free itself from writing and
the “formidable collusion of writing and Western history”?19 For
Mitchell, the mixture of cinema and writing contaminates both sides
of the divide. The task, then, in his view, is not to identify whether or
how cinema fails to behave like writing but rather to consider how
cinema transforms writing or, even more provocatively, how moving
images might simply reveal that writing is not (and perhaps never has
been) the system or structure we think it is:
Christian Metz demonstrated long ago that cinema cannot
be reduced to models of linguistics, that film is parole but
not langue. But suppose that language itself were not langue,
that its deployment as a medium of expression and discourse
inevitably resulted in its contamination by the visible? That is
what it means, in my view, to approach language as a medium
rather than a system, a heterogeneous field of discursive modes
of pragmatic, dialectical description rather than a univocally
coded scheme open to scientific explanation.20
By concentrating on early ethnographic cinema, this chapter exam-
ines just one site of visual–­linguistic contamination, one discursive
expression among the vast and heterogeneous field of moving image
media. I propose not only that language cannot be reduced to the
coded structure of a langue but also that the specificity of the encoun-
ter between language and moving image might be more meaningfully
approached beyond the broad and undifferentiated category of “cin-
ema.” This is especially important when one considers that medium-­
specific claims about language and cinema are typically not about the
medium at all but narrative expressions of the medium and the narra-
tological structures these expressions share with language. The inter-
titular expressions of ethnographic cinema have something different,
and more transparently narrow, to show us about language.
This chapter also intervenes in the film scholarship on intertitling,
a body of research largely focused on the industrial and exhibition
histories of the practice, and a few preliminary notes are worth mak-
ing here.21 These histories often locate the origin of the intertitle in
the textual slides of the magic lantern show and chart its rise in the
1910s, which signaled both the decline of the lecturer and the loss of
 LANGUAGE GAMES 219

autonomy for film exhibitors; once on-­site supplements (like verbal

explanations) were no longer required, creative and economic con-
trol returned to the hands of film manufacturers.22 Scholarship on
intertitling has also emphasized the mixed reception of the practice,
with most early film critics and theorists lamenting the intertitles as
an intrusion of language and the literary arts in an otherwise purely
visual field.23 Remarkably, however, for most modes of film practice,
the transition to intertitles marked a shift, not from an absence of lan-
guage to its presence, but from the speech of a lecturer to the written
text of a lantern slide or intertitle. In Claire Dupré la Tour’s account
of the practice, she notes that the first intertitles usually contained
just one word in bold capital letters.24 By 1905, whole sentences were
more common, and as films themselves became longer, intertitles in-
creased in number, complexity, and category (e.g., dialogue, exposi-
tion, chapter titles, credits).25 The proliferation of intertitling in the
1910s coincided with the transition from early attractions to narra-
tion, and concomitant efforts to transform the demographic of film
audiences—­especially in the United States and Europe—­by court-
ing the middle classes. The collapse of the lecturer-­translator and the
popularity of intertitles ensured the exclusion of those members of
the public who could not read, namely, new immigrants and members
of the working and lower classes.26
The practice of intertitling in nonfiction and/or noncommercial
filmmaking is far more unfamiliar and irregular territory, in large
part because these modes of film practice were not disciplined by the
demands of the narrative film industry. Beyond the reach of commer-
cial production, exhibition, and spectatorship, ethnographic cinema—­
along with its nonfiction neighbor, the travelogue—­made use of live
vocal accompaniment for decades. Indeed, lecturer–­showmen like
Lyman Howe, Burton Holmes, and Cherry Kearton thrived in non-
commercial and educational circuits of film exhibition (like the natu-
ral history museum), where the lecturer was never just an explanatory
supplement but a prop in a pedagogical and frequently colonial mise-­
en-­scène.27 More pertinent to the ends of this chapter, ethnographic
cinema defies the seemingly evolutionary progress from single words
in the 1900s to multi­sentence intertitles in the late 1910s and 1920s.
Here, too, the genealogy of the intertitle deviates from its mainstream
commercial counterparts; it is not (or not only) descended from the
 220 LANGUAGE GAMES

magic lantern show and the music hall but from the disciplinary prac-
tices (or what we might call “contexts”) of ethnographic writing (e.g.,
identification, classification, exposition). What little has been writ-
ten about intertitles in nonfiction and ethnographic cinema tends
to assign authority to one side or the other of the image–­language
divide: the intertitle is either an inconsequential addition to the
image, made subordinate by the phenomenal indexical “thereness” of
cinema, or an extension of ethnographic and/or colonial power that
forcefully determines what we can ever know of the image.28 While
the former view marks an interesting overturning of the standard
image–­language hierarchy in ethnographic practice, as I will argue,
both approaches miss the interaction between language and image in
these films and the effects of their mutual encounter.

This Is Not the Blikslager

I begin with one of the most common intertitular patterns in ethno-
graphic cinema: the deictic noun. This form of intertitle endeavors
simply to name or identify one thing (e.g., object, place, person) in
the image(s) that follow it or, in very rare cases, precede it. In this
category, I include the expression of both common nouns (e.g., “a
market”) and proper nouns (e.g., “Cairo”). The intertitular structure
of the deictic noun bears some resemblance to an exhibition label or
photographic caption, the latter of which was described by Roland
Barthes as a means of controlling or “anchoring” the image. 29 This
resonance between caption and intertitle (or label and intertitle) owes
not only to a shared function—­a ll of these expressions of language
identify the content of an image or display—­but also to a shared spa-
tial arrangement. This language is always, in some sense, “outside” of
the thing it names, excluded from the image or exhibition it identifies
and therefore privileged in the logocentric or image-­skeptic contexts
of, for example, the natural and human sciences. Indeed, it is the dis-
tance and disconnection of the caption from the image that gives it,
as Barthes suggests, an authoritative perspective onto the image and
some semblance of control over it. Of course, the intertitle fundamen-
tally alters this relationship. It is not only spatially separated from the
image but temporally disconnected as well. Intertitle and image never
 LANGUAGE GAMES 221

appear at the same time. And yet, this twofold, spatiotemporal dis-
junction does not confirm the difference of their encounter but rather,
as I will argue here, ensures their entanglement. Intertitle and image
never wholly come apart.
In linguistics, the category of “deixis” generally includes pronouns
like I, she, he, it, this, and that, as well as adverbs like here, now, today,
and tomorrow. The term itself comes from the Greek δείκνυναι (deik-
nunai), which means “to show” or “to demonstrate.” Deictic expres-
sions are sometimes called “indexicals,” a term that captures their
tendency to point or gesture not only to subjects and objects but to
particular spatiotemporal coordinates. 30 Comparing these examples
of linguistic deixis to the ethnographic intertitle, one might pre-
liminarily observe that deictic words are not normally common or
proper nouns at all but context-­dependent linguistic expressions. The
reference of a deictic word depends on the identity of the speaker or
writer; where and when they happen to be speaking or writing; and/
or their supplementary gestures, demonstrations, or intentions. Put
another way, the relationship between language and meaning in deic-
tic expressions is not a fixed code or semiotic sign. The “signified” of
any deictic term is underdetermined by the “signifier.” It hangs, sus-
pended, until further notice. There are complex distinctions between
deictic terms—­the pronoun I, for example, always refers to a speaker,
while pronouns like this and that can refer to virtually anything—­but,
for the purposes of understanding the deictic expression of ethno-
graphic intertitles, a more general understanding of the concept will
suffice: the referent of deictic expressions cannot be understood with-
out a context or additional information.
Like its linguistic counterparts, the deictic intertitle points or dem-
onstrates beyond itself, to some aspect of what the image contains.
The deixis of the intertitle, however, is not explicitly communicated.
Rather, every noun expressed elliptically implies a deictic phrase:
[This is] a market. [That is] Cairo. [Here is] a native. And, like any
other deictic expression, the intertitular deixis demands further in-
formation. The intertitle, after all, is not an image of Cairo (or a mar-
ket, or a native, etc.). So, while the deictic intertitle disambiguates the
referent of the pronoun it implies (i.e., What is this? A market. Who
is that? A native.), viewers nevertheless attend the image (save those
rare instances in which the image precedes the intertitle). They wait
 222 LANGUAGE GAMES

FIGURE 19
A deictic intertitle from In Egypte (1920). EYE Filmmuseum.

for visual confirmation of the visual referent that the intertitle seems
to promise as it deictically gestures elsewhere, beyond itself.
The intertitle and image from the Pathé travelogue In Egypte
(1920) (Figures 19 and 20) exemplifies this deictic gesture. 31 The
surviving print of the film, which is held by the EYE Filmmuseum
in Amsterdam, was distributed in the Netherlands by J. P. Smith and
contains Dutch-­language intertitles. As a whole, the film adheres to
what Jennifer Peterson calls the “collection system of editing”: the
film is structured, as she describes, “like a series of visual anecdotes”
or “a string of pearls, each view functioning as a little imagistic gem.”32
What separates one anecdote or image from another in the Pathé film,
however, is not only a visual rupture or break in the image track—­
 LANGUAGE GAMES 223

FIGURE 20
The corresponding deictic image from In Egypte (1920). EYE Filmmuseum.

the physical cut and suture of the editing process—­but also the inter-
titles that accompany these images. The film adheres to a kind of
regular rhythm, undulating between intertitle and image, intertitle
and image. At just under nine minutes in length, the film begins with
the intertitle/image of the Sultan Hassan Mosque in Cairo, its mina-
rets and sacred spaces; it then presents several scenes of prayer, be-
fore shifting to intertitles/images of everyday life on the streets, in the
market, and in the kitchen as someone prepares food. For Peterson,
who also writes about this particular film, the language of the trav-
elogue is often “simple, mostly place names and sparse descriptions
to underscore the images, which carry most of the informational sig-
nificance.” Setting aside the ambiguity of the phrase “informational
 224 LANGUAGE GAMES

significance” (What counts as information here? And how do we

measure its significance?), Peterson is right to note the strange su-
perfluity of the intertitles. While we might disagree about what rela-
tion image and language ultimately bear to one another, the term she
uses—­“underscore”—­suggests a shared recognition of the repetition
and redundancy at work in their interactions, which my analysis of
deixis demonstrates in the pages that follow.
The intertitle-­i mage of “De Blikslager” (or “The Tinsmith”) ad-
heres to the deictic conventions of ethnographic cinema. The intertitle
points to a tinsmith, and the image that subsequently arrives shows
us a man in a market stall, packed with glistening metal objects, dan-
gling above him and hanging at his sides. The claim that this is “the”
tinsmith rather than “a” tinsmith suggests yet another ethnographic
convention: the absorption of particularities, especially as they per-
tain to the identities of ethnographic subjects, into broad taxonomic
categories. There is nothing all that remarkable in the pair—­indeed,
that is, in many ways, the point of the example—­and the tinsmith
is not alone: after him, we encounter the intertitle/image of “De
Klompenmaker” or “The Shoemaker” and “De Limonade-­koopman”
or “The Lemonade Merchant.” Still, for Dutch readers, the interac-
tion between the intertitle and image of “De Blikslager” produces
a strange, manifold play of meanings. In Dutch, the word blikslager
refers to a tinsmith, a tinker, or a tinkerer (these terms are etymo-
logically related in English as well). The term blikslager also contains
other fractures: blik can mean “tin plate” as well as “look,” “glance,”
and “gaze,” while slager or slachter means “butcher” or “slaughterer.”
The noun slager is further tied to the verb slaan, which describes the
act of hitting, slapping, beating, or striking. Brought into contact with
the moving image, and the act of spectating, the visual resonances of
the term come to the fore, as does a range of violent metaphors (e.g.,
“gaze slaughter,” “look butchery”), which might ambiguously de-
scribe the contact between image and language (i.e., Is the language
or the look doing the butchery? Which side of the divide is hitting or
being hit?). This constellation of metaphorical associations perhaps
also contingently and reflexively reminds us of the violence of colo-
nial practice and ethnographic representation that is under way in the
very moment(s) of making and consuming these images. So, this par-
ticular intertitle and image refer us to the tinsmith or the tinkerer, but
 LANGUAGE GAMES 225

together they also model the ways in which this encounter is always
itself a kind of tinkering.
Here one might recall that it is the figure of the bricoleur or
tinkerer who most compels Derrida in his reading of Lévi-­Strauss. 33
For Derrida, there is no engineer of language or anthropological
method, no stable counterpoint to the amateur or armchair explorer,
no route to meaning that is more serious or precise. There is only the
scrap heap of tools (or tin) and the wayward, multiple paths of mean-
ing that any one word (or, here, any one combination of word and
image) might produce. And there is no way to prevent language from
saying more than we mean, or undermining our intentions with an
implicit counterclaim or contradiction. Elsewhere, Derrida names
this epistemology of language with the homophonous coinage diffé-
rance, that notoriously difficult to define word and concept that, he
nevertheless insists, is “neither a word nor a concept” but a demonstra-
tion of the relationship between them.34 Différance refers to the move-
ments of language, the ineliminable and systematic play of differences
that produce meaning; it marks at once the spatial separations (be-
tween letters, between words, between speech and writing, signifiers
and their signifieds) as well as, crucially, endless chains of deferral
and delay, the disjunctive temporality that inheres between a word
spoken and read, between writing and reading, between a concept
signified and the concept itself: the constitutive elements of language
are never identical, co-­present, simultaneous. Derrida describes his
substitution of e for a in the term différance as a “discreet graphic in-
tervention” that demands we consider the differences and deferrals of
every seeming repetition. The deictic intertitle does a similar kind of
graphic, interventionist work.
Indeed, beyond the specificities of “De Blikslager,” the interac-
tion between the deictic intertitle and its images is equally, and more
obviously, defined by precisely the kind of nonidentical repetitions
that concern Derrida. That is to say, both intertitle and image share
in nearly the same deictic expression and the same kind of indexi-
cal claim. Just as the single noun “De Blikslager” implies the deic-
tic phrase “This is the tinsmith,” the image of the tinsmith repeats
the claim at a different instant and in a different way: “This is the
tinsmith.” The image of the tinsmith is meant to stand in for the ac-
tual tinsmith.
 226 LANGUAGE GAMES

Christian Metz articulates a deep skepticism of any deictic view of

cinema, a skepticism, I would argue, born out of his focus on so-­called
classical Hollywood cinema, which he claimed lacked the kind of di-
rect address, visible source of enunciation, and existential presence
required for deixis; he preferred the category of histoire (story). His
well-­k nown revolver example nevertheless describes the film image
as a fundamentally deictic structure:
The image is “sentence” less by its quantity of meaning . . . than
by its assertive status. The image is always actualized. Moreover,
even the image—­fairly rare, incidentally—­that might, because
of its content, correspond to a “word” is still a sentence: This is
a particular case, and a particularly revealing one. A close-­up
of a revolver does not mean “revolver” (a purely virtual lexical
unit) but at the very least, and without speaking of the connota-
tions, it signifies “Here is a revolver!” It carries with it a kind
of here. . . . Even when the shot is a “word,” it remains a kind
of “sentence-­word,” such as one finds in certain languages. 35
Metz’s “particular case” muddies the claim a bit: is the assertive or
emphatic quality of the image intrinsic to cinema itself, or to the
close-­up, or to the particular kind of object that the image contains
(i.e., the gun)? Still, the passage is remarkable for the way in which
it describes not only the implicit sentence-­l ike expressions of ethno-
graphic images but the deictic expressions of its one-­word intertitles
as well. While single-­word images may be “fairly rare” in the context
of the Hollywood histoire, the single-­word image and intertitle circu-
late widely and with great frequency in ethnographic cinema.
But where exactly is the here of the deixis in the ethnographic
image? What does the image actually actualize? Does the image ac-
tualize the intertitle or whatever the intertitle expresses (i.e., do they
share a content)?
While we might read the intertitle as a metalinguistic claim about
the intertitle itself—­something like “Here is the word ‘tinsmith’”—­
this intertitle participates in a linguistic and spectatorial convention.
As I have noted, it points or gestures beyond itself, to the image. In
this way, it is both spatially and temporally divided from the thing
it tries to name. But the image, of course, also points beyond itself.
It, too, is spatially and temporally divided from the subject it tries to
 LANGUAGE GAMES 227

represent. That is the nature of its deixis, or indeed its indexical claim:
the tinsmith is not present to us “here” and “now” in the moment of
our spectatorship; the film can only guarantee that this tradesman
once existed in another, imprecise time and place.
Though I discuss the peculiarities of the index in ethnographic
cinema at greater length in the next chapter, in particular, the coinci-
dence of iconic and indexical signs, it is worth simply recalling here
Roland Barthes’s familiar argument about what makes referentiality
in photochemical reproduction so tricky. He writes:
Show your photographs to someone—­he will immediately
show you his. . . . “Look,” “See,” “Here it is”; [the photograph]
points a finger at certain vis-­à-­vis, and cannot escape this pure
deictic language. This is why, insofar as it is licit to speak of a
photograph, it seemed to me just as improbable to speak of the
photograph. A specific photograph . . . is never distinguished
from its referent (from what it represents), or at least it is not
immediately or generally distinguished from its referent (as is the
case for every other image, encumbered—­from the start, and be-
cause of its status—­by the way in which the object is simulated):
it is not impossible to perceive the photographic signifier . . . , but
it requires a secondary action of knowledge or of reflection. By
nature, the Photograph . . . has something tautological about it:
a pipe, here, is always and intractably, a pipe. 36
Barthes makes a deceptively simple point: photochemical reproduc-
tion conceals the very processes that make its specific deixis or indexi-
cal claim possible, or what we might call, leaning on Derrida, the dif-
férance of its repetition. The “here” or “there” or “this” of photographic
and cinematic images never refers us to the physical image itself—­the
glass plate, chemically treated paper, celluloid or acetate film, and so
on—­but to the referent of the image, to the thing the image tries to
represent. Like any other photograph or film, then, the deixis of the
ethnographic image points us away from its photochemical substrate,
away from itself as an object and technology of reproduction. The
implicit claim that “this is a tinsmith” compels us to take the image
of the tinsmith (or the native, or the village) as a sufficient substitute
for the tinsmith himself. As Barthes argues, the photographed (or
filmed) pipe is always just a pipe, not a photograph or a photographed
 228 LANGUAGE GAMES

pipe. In other words, the photograph does not make a reflexive or

metalinguistic claim.
The invocation of Magritte is worth lingering on. Barthes draws
a distinction here between the tautological deixis of photography—­
ceci est toujours une pipe—­and the iconic play of painting: ceci n’est pas
une pipe, ceci n’est jamais une pipe. But the epistemological stakes that
Magritte’s work explores are not confined to medium-­specific con-
cerns about the distinction between the photochemical index and the
autographic icon. In his reading of Magritte’s La Trahison des images
(1929) and Les Deux mystères (1966), Michel Foucault argues that
while Magritte’s painting (and drawing, in the latter case) emphasize,
through explicit negation, that these images “could neither equal nor
substitute for” the pipes they represent, the artist’s work more funda-
mentally disturbs the border between words and images. 37 Magritte
inscribes language within the boundaries of the image and brings
both regimes into comparative, symbiotic, nonhierarchical relation;
Magritte thereby insists on the graphic qualities of language and the
discursive properties of the image. The mischief we associate with
Magritte is provoked not only by his insistent claim that paintings,
drawings, and statements about pipes are inequivalent to actual pipes
but also by the accompanying acknowledgment that word and image
are equivalent in their inequivalence: ceux-­ci ne sont pas de pipes. For
Foucault, Magritte upends the conventions of image–­language re-
lations, specifically our tendency to defer to the deixis of a title and
overlook the “common frontier [of] incessant transactions” that al-
ways necessarily unfolds between image and language. 38 He argues
that, in Magritte’s images, “the linguistic signs which seemed to be
excluded, which prowled at a distance around the image, and which
the arbitrary quality of the title seemed to have averted for good,
have surreptitiously reappeared.”39 The result of this appearance of
language in the image, as a part of the image, creates what Foucault
describes as a “broken and drifting space,” unmoored by external lan-
guage, where “strange relations are formed, intrusions occur, sudden
destructive invasions, the fall of images among words, verbal explo-
sions which crack the drawings and smash them to pieces.”40 When
Magritte paints words—­when he paints “ceci n’est pas une pipe”—­
language ceases to retain its claim on the image and its explanatory
privilege. Word and image become deeply entangled and, together,
 LANGUAGE GAMES 229

disclose their equivalent play of referentiality, their shared differences

and deferrals.
And so it is, in my view, with ethnographic cinema, where the
pipe is not always and intractably a pipe. These moving images, like
Magritte’s paintings (or Derrida’s différance), disclose the hollow of
their deixis, that there is no “there” there. As Barthes himself sug-
gests, it is not impossible to detect the conditions of photographic or
cinematic indexicality, but it requires “a secondary action of knowl-
edge or reflection disrupting the referential.” The deictic intertitle is
one such secondary action, and it comes quite close to the disruptive
mechanism(s) manifested in the work of Magritte: painting words,
drawing language, entangling the processes of reading and seeing,
dissolving the differences between words and things.
There are indeed important differences between the work of a
surrealist painter and the moving images of an (anonymous) ethno-
graphic travelogue. In early ethnographic cinema, as we have seen, in-
tertitle and image never arrive simultaneously, as they do in Magritte’s
play with pipes, nor does a film like In Egypte negate the deixis of its
images as forcefully as Magritte (e.g., this is not a tinsmith). (One
might nevertheless argue that the undulations of the deictic intertitle
and image more plainly manifest the temporal dimensions or defer-
rals of différance, the “playing movement” of appearance and disap-
pearance, presence and absence, “there” but not really there at all.41)
Still, word and image are inextricably bound together in ethno-
graphic cinema, as they are in Magritte’s work. There is no language
wholly “outside” of the image, no words uncorrupted by graphic rep-
resentation. Moreover, the intertitle anticipates the image, preempts
its deixis with a deixis of its own. Returning to the terms Barthes
outlines, the intertitle is not a secondary action but a primary one; it
transforms the image into a secondary reflection, into a site of repeti-
tion and reiteration. As Barthes suggests it would, this structure of
intertitle and image, this doubling of the deixis, draws attention
to the absences internal to them both. In the intertitle, the “tin-
smith” is both there and not there, named but not visible. Echoing
Magritte, “this” both is and is not the tinsmith. The missed encoun-
ter that the intertitle performs—­the deixis that never coincides with
the thing that it indexes, points to, or names—­models the deictic
operation always at work in the moving image but concealed by the
 230 LANGUAGE GAMES

peculiar processes of photochemical reproduction. As an image itself,

the intertitle reveals to us—­shows us, even—­that there is never any
“here” or “there” or “this” in the images that follow. In this assem-
blage of intertitle and image, in its relay of repetition and difference,
language no longer has the authority afforded by the distance or de-
tachment of a caption, and in turn the moving image can no longer
conceal the difference between itself and the subjects it tries to show.
This is not a tinsmith.

Translating the Patria

Thus far, I have argued that the deictic encounter between intertitle
and image participates in the spatial and temporal play of différance. I
have also suggested that this play of deixes, these repetitions-­w ith-­a-­
difference of writing and words, makes the conditions of the photo-
chemical index plain. In this section, I consider another pattern of
ethnocinematic language: the bilingual intertitle. As I will argue, this
pattern multiplies the expressions of difference and repetition, creates
strange circuits of relation between image and words. In a return to
Cavell, the ethnographic image generates a very particular context
for the bilingual intertitle; the bilingual writing acts upon the image,
but the image acts upon this divided language in turn, manifesting
over and again the very thing that the intertitle tries to resolve with
an overabundance of language, explanation, and translation: the sign
of otherness, the unassimilable site of difference that cannot be made
to mean.
Between December 1926 and December 1927, the steamship and
shipping company Rotterdam Lloyd offered “fortnightly mail service”
and passenger travel between Holland and the Dutch East Indies,
with ports of call in Southampton, Tangier, Marseilles, Port Said,
Suez, Colombo, Belawan, Singapore, and Batavia. The company was
founded in 1883 by Willem Ruys and, together with the Stoomvaart
Maatschappij Nederland (Netherlands Steamship Company), con-
trolled turn-­of-­the-­t wentieth-­century Dutch colonial trade and travel
routes in the “Gordel van smaragd” region or the “emerald belt” of
Indonesia. As one celebratory account of Dutch maritime power de-
scribed the company, Rotterdam Lloyd was “as industrious as the
buffaloes in the rice fields of Java.”42
 LANGUAGE GAMES 231

The film industry in the Netherlands coincides with the shipping

routes of Rotterdam Lloyd, as well as the broader industrial operations
of colonial trade and travel, at numerous points during the first de-
cades of the twentieth century. The Dutch filmmaker and producer
Henk Alsem founded the Hispano Film Fabriek production company
in 1924, having previously worked with the Fox Film Company in
the United States and Willy Mullens and his Haghe Film produc-
tion company in the Netherlands; the latter was a well-­k nown pro-
ducer of Dutch colonial and educational films in the 1920s.43 Alsem
eventually settled in Batavia (then capital of the Dutch East Indies,
present-­day Jakarta), where he established a local branch of Hispano
Film. The company would come to specialize in nonfiction colonial
and ethnographic cinema in the 1920s, with a particular emphasis
on the Dutch East Indies and North Africa. In 1926, Alsem made
Met het SS “Patria” der Rotterdamsche Lloyd naar Nederlandsch Oost-­
Indië (On the SS Patria of Rotterdam Lloyd to the Dutch East Indies)
during one (or perhaps several) of the Rotterdam Lloyd services to
the region. That the film follows the excursive, maritime voyage of a
ship named Patria (in Dutch, “homeland,” “country,” “native land,”
“fatherland,” and/or “soil”) coincidentally suggests something of the
visual–­l inguistic incompatibilities that structure the film.44
Like so many ethnographic films, one might easily mistake Met
het SS “Patria” for an assemblage of raw, unedited, and/or amateur
footage were it not for the occasional sign of Alsem’s cinematographic
skill (e.g., a spectacular play of black and white as the sun sets at sea;
an attention to the texture of the water and waves; a well-­composed
scene of passengers dancing on the first-­class deck; and iris shots of
the ship’s crew members). The beginning, middle, and end of the
film, like the expedition films I discuss in chapter 3, also loosely cor-
respond to the chronology of the journey and thereby suggest a nar-
rative structure; the first scenes depict the departure in Rotterdam,
and the final moments show the steamship returning to port in the
Netherlands.
Still, Met het SS “Patria” lacks the kind of intertitular structure
that defines the travelogue (e.g., the regular rhythms of the “collec-
tion system of editing”). The film does not have an introductory or
concluding title, and for the first seven minutes or so, there are no
linguistic interruptions at all. These first scenes instead present a
 232 LANGUAGE GAMES

composite of departure images: crowds gathered at the dock, passen-

gers boarding the ship by the gangplank, jubilant scenes on the first-­
class deck as groups of well-­dressed, mostly white men and women
dance and drink to the sounds of a live string quartet. However, once
the travelers and the travel film arrive in a foreign destination, lan-
guage briefly arrives as well. In this case, the intertitle is bilingual and
divided horizontally into Dutch (on the top) and English (on the bot-
tom). The practice of bilingual intertitling in ethnographic cinema
is not uncommon and very often reflects a difference between the
national affiliation of a production company, on the one hand, and
the official language of a colonial territory, on the other.45 In the case
of Met het SS “Patria,” the intertitle marks the passengers’ arrival in
Singapore (notably, one of the non-­Dutch colonies on the steamship’s
route). It also marks the linguistic division between the Hispano
film company and the British colonial government. One might also
read the simultaneity of language as evidence of historical geopoliti-
cal tensions in Southeast Asia. The Dutch and British governments
had fought for colonial influence in the region, and Singapore, in par-
ticular, was a disputed territory until the signing of the Anglo-­Dutch
Treaty of 1824.46
What is nevertheless unusual about the bilingual intertitles in the
surviving print of Met het SS “Patria” is that there is only one (Figures 21
and 22). It states, “Ook Singapore heeft zijn moderne verkeersagenten /
Singapore also has its modern traffic cops.” Moreover, the lone inter-
title only corresponds to the images that adjoin it in the very loosest
sense: the images that precede it include bustling street scenes with
cars and rickshaw drivers crisscrossing their paths; and those that fol-
low return us to the SS Patria as official-­looking crew members reload
packages and luggage onto the boat in preparation for departure and
the next exotic destination. There are no “traffic cops” anywhere in
sight and, perhaps considered more figuratively, no “modern” regu-
lation or policing of the moving images themselves as they circulate
between ports of call.
The position of the intertitle notwithstanding—­it appears almost
at the precise midpoint of the film—­this language seems to commu-
nicate with the image in the most haphazard and contingent of ways.
The singularity and incongruence of the intertitle surely invites us
to speculate about other, nonextant versions of the film, versions in
 LANGUAGE GAMES 233

FIGURE 21
A bilingual intertitle from Met het SS “Patria” der Rotterdamsche Lloyd naar Nederlandsch
Oost-­Indië (Henk Alsem, 1926). EYE Filmmuseum.

which the intertitles multiply and coincide more clearly with what
we see—­in short, a version that makes good sense. In any silent film,
intertitles usually were printed after a negative had been edited but
before positive prints had been struck. The physical detachment of
the intertitles from the negative ensures that intertitles frequently go
missing, and when they do survive, they have often been subjected
to changes and/or manipulations. As Dupré la Tour notes, interti-
tles are often the most phantasmatic part of any restoration project:
“Preserved negatives include mostly ‘flash titles’ or cues [indicating
the proper placement of intertitles]. . . . Yet positive prints are often
devoid of intertitles. Either their material has undergone alterations
or the boxes containing intertitles, which were supposed to come
with the reels, have been lost. They also may have been removed from
the prints. . . . Finally, surviving prints of the same film can feature
intertitles that differ greatly in number and kind.”47
There is no easy explanation for the survival of just one intertitle in
Met het SS “Patria” and no negative prints or other surviving versions
with which to compare it. Perhaps other intertitles are out there, in
 234 LANGUAGE GAMES

FIGURE 22
The corresponding street scene, with no sign of modern traffic officers, in Met het SS
“Patria” der Rotterdamsche Lloyd naar Nederlandsch Oost-­Indië (Henk Alsem, 1926).
EYE Filmmuseum.

an archive, waiting to be found and reintegrated into what we know

of this particular film. However, the strangeness of this single, in-
compatible description, in my view, is very much in keeping with the
imprecise “tinkering” of ethnographic cinema, where any image-­or-­
method-­whatever often comes into view.
While one might be tempted to take the intertitle as an expression
of radical irregularity, without a broader pattern or point of compari-
son from which to begin understanding or interpreting it, what never-
theless interests me here, more than the singularity of the intertitle
or the idiosyncratic differences that separate any one ethnographic
 LANGUAGE GAMES 235

film from all the others, is the bilingual pattern its (one) intertitle
shares with so much ethnographic cinema. Divided as it is between
distinct colonial languages, the intertitle itself also contains a site of
comparison and an act of interpretation. Indeed, it puts the compara-
tive process of translation on display and inadvertently approximates
the critical function of postwar translation practices.
A brief overview of these practices—­and the theoretical commit-
ments underlying them—­w ill help clarify the contingent criticality
of the bilingual intertitle. In one of the founding texts of compara-
tive literature and translation studies, Linguistics and Literary History
(1948), the polyglottic Leo Spitzer famously refused to translate his
citations of poetry by non-­A nglophone writers in a passage marked
out for emphasis with an asterisk. Equally famous was the way in
which the text’s editors undid Spitzer’s refusal in the very same in-
stant of his issuing it:
*The frequent occurrence, in my text, of quotations in the
original foreign language (or languages) may prove a difficulty
for the English reader. But since it is my purpose to take the
word (and the wording) of the poets seriously, and since the
convincingness and rigor of my stylistic conventions depends
entirely upon the minute linguistic detail of the original texts, it
was impossible to offer translations. [Since the linguistic range
of readers of literary criticism is not always as great as Spitzer’s,
the editors of this volume decided to provide translations.]48
The interventions of his editors notwithstanding, many scholars under-
stood Spitzer’s refusal to translate not only as an epistemological
claim about the limits of language and translation (i.e., it cannot be
done) but also, and more importantly in the postwar era, as an ethical
imperative (i.e., it should not be done).49 Even with the accompanying
translations, Spitzer’s approach ensures that some trace of the foreign,
of the unfamiliar, remains inscribed upon the page and unassimilated
by the language of Anglophone literary criticism.
This ethics of (non)translation—­and, specifically, the command
that readers of translated texts should encounter signs of otherness
and difference, as well as the limits of their own access—­influences
a broad range of translation practices and scholarship in transla-
tion studies, linguistics, cultural studies, and film theory. In his essay
 236 LANGUAGE GAMES

“Words from Abroad,” for example, Theodor Adorno contends that

untranslated foreign words (Fremdwörter) usefully intrude upon the
seeming naturalness of language and the seamless union of word
and meaning; he claims that “foreign words stick out, unassimilated,
and are available to the writer who chooses them with care.”50 In the
translation treatise After Babel, George Steiner argues that “a trans-
lation must, in regard to its own language, retain a vital strangeness
and ‘otherness.’ . . . The translator enriches his tongue by allowing the
source language to penetrate and modify it. But he does far more: he
extends his native idiom towards the hidden absolute of meaning.”51
In an effort to work toward an “ethics of difference” in translation,
Lawrence Venuti similarly claims, “Good translation is demystifying:
it manifests in its own language the foreignness of the foreign text.”52
Venuti specifies just how this manifestation might happen: “[It] can
occur through the selection of a text whose form and theme deviate
from domestic literary canons. But its most decisive occurrence de-
pends on introducing variations that alienate the domestic language
and . . . reveal the translation to be in fact a translation.”53
More recently, the obligation to disturb our encounter with trans-
lated texts guides Abé Mark Nornes in Cinema Babel, one of the most
sustained studies of language and translation in cinema published to
date. Nornes reads the contemporary practice of subtitling as one of
the worst, most misguided forms of translation. Subtitling, he argues,
“conspires to hide its work—­along with its ideological assumptions—­
from its own reader-­spectators,” “violently appropriates the source
text,” and “domesticates all otherness while it pretends to bring the
audience to an experience of the foreign.”54 Nornes advocates for what
he calls “abusive subtitling,” a translation practice that draws atten-
tion to itself, embraces experimentation, and purposefully deforms
the target language. 55
Across this body of work, from Spitzer’s ethics of nontranslation
to Steiner’s suggestion that a hidden “absolute” or “pure” meaning
dwells somewhere beyond both the original and its translation to
Venuti’s description of translation as “demystification,” one can de-
tect the influence of Walter Benjamin. Adorno makes explicit refer-
ence to the scene of writing that Benjamin describes in “One-­Way
Street,” where the author “unpacks his instruments: fountain pens,
 LANGUAGE GAMES 237

pencils, and pipe,” and, upon the page, “inserts a foreign word like
a silver rib.”56 Elsewhere, in “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin
argues that translation should retain some “echo of the original” in
the target language and produce what he describes as a “transparent”
document: one must be able to see through the translation, to see it
as a secondary rendering of its source.”57 Or, put another way: the lan-
guage of the translator should be “profoundly affected by the foreign
tongue.”58
Benjamin’s understanding of translation opens onto a set of epis-
temological and historiographic concerns, which are equally at stake
in any understanding of the bilingual intertitle. For Benjamin, unlike
so many other theorists of translation, the translator has no obliga-
tion to either the comprehension or the instruction of potential future
readers. His is not a theory of reading, or of what one ought to do to
readers and their experience of a translated text. Instead, his view is
oriented toward the interaction between translator and text, between
the translation and the original (not the aftermath of their encoun-
ter when these documents are circulated, read, and received). In
short, Benjamin makes a claim about what happens—­or what should
happen—­in the meeting between two languages. While the insertion
of a foreign word may function like a nonorganic interruption of the
body, Benjamin describes translation as a meeting between organic
bodies: one dead or past, the other living and present. Good transla-
tion has a potentially “vital” relationship to its source material; it has
the capacity to bring the original back from the dead, to resuscitate
the original writing and reveal what he describes as the immanent
“seed of pure language,” that is, a “kinship” or internal connection be-
tween languages. 59 Moreover, for Benjamin, translation contributes
to a historical operation. He writes:
We may call this connection a natural one, or, more specifically,
a vital one. Just as the manifestations of life are intimately con-
nected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance
to it, a translation issues from the original—­not so much from
its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than
the original, and since the important works of world literature
never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin,
their translation marks their stage of continued life. The idea
 238 LANGUAGE GAMES

of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an

entirely unmetaphorical objectivity. Even in times of narrowly
prejudiced thought, there was an inkling that life was not limited
to organic corporeality. . . . The concept of life is given its due only
if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the
setting for history, is credited with life. The philosopher’s task
consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more
encompassing life of history. And indeed, isn’t the afterlife of
works of art far easier to recognize than that of living creatures?60
In Benjamin’s description, original and translation are bound to-
gether in a temporal relationship (i.e., one comes before, the other
after). The translation is a crucial addendum or supplement to the
original: it reactivates the source text—­our knowledge of its life—­by
producing or contributing to its afterlife. The translation generates
historical knowledge of the original text. It generates knowledge
of the original as a historical object or artifact in the very instant of
its own living. In this way, the process of translation approximates
Benjamin’s concept of history (Geschichte), whereby historical knowl-
edge is born out of the relation between moments, between the past
that, as he famously describes it, “flashes up” as an “image” and the
present moment of knowing in which that image is unexpectedly rec-
ognized or received.61
In the last of his well-­k nown Messenger Lectures (on the subject
of Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator”), Paul de Man underscores the
“curious” way in which translation at once stabilizes the original (as
a historical artifact, as a canonical text, etc.) and, in the reiterative
processes of translation, destabilizes the very same text: “[Translation]
undoes the stability of the original by giving it a definitive, canoni-
cal form in the translation or in the theorization. In a curious way,
translation canonizes its own version more than the original was ca-
nonical. That the original was not purely canonical is clear from the
fact that it demands translation; it cannot be definitive since it can be
translated. But you cannot, says Benjamin, translate the translation;
once you have a translation you cannot translate it anymore. You can
translate only an original. The translation canonizes, freezes an origi-
nal and shows in the original a mobility, an instability, which at first
one did not notice.”62
 LANGUAGE GAMES 239

To be sure, neither Benjamin nor de Man would have had film inter-
titles in mind when considering the epistemology or historicity of
translation. Had he reflected upon them at all, Benjamin may have
dismissed the language of intertitles as mere “information,” a cate-
gory that, for him, includes expressions of “lower quality and distinc-
tion” and constitutes a “less fertile” field for translation.63
There is no real question about the quality or potential canonic-
ity of an ethnographic intertitle or its translation: this language was
intended to be useful, not meaningful (in the Benjaminian sense).
Moreover, in the case of Met het SS “Patria,” the intertitle that inter-
rupts and divides the film is a mere fragment of language, an erratic
part of a larger, more contingent visual whole. There are further, per-
haps more obvious differences between the acts of literary translation
that concern Benjamin and the intertitular translation of Met het SS
“Patria.” Most importantly, one cannot distinguish between original
and translation, “before” and “after.” The bilingual intertitle instead
presents “both” simultaneously. The intertitle lacks the temporality of
literary translation—­historical source and secondary transmission—­
and, in this way, fails to execute the historical operation that both
Benjamin and de Man describe.
The bilingual intertitle offers a different set of critical and histori-
cal operations. This linguistic phenomenon adheres to an inadvertent
ethics of translation, or what we might call, following Nornes, “abu-
sive” intertitling (if, that is, an ethics without intention is possible).
It shows the process of translation—­t he comparative, differential,
and imprecise relationship between two distinct languages—­a nd
leaves some remnant of the unassimilable or “foreign” always on
display (even for viewers with the facility to read both languages).
Like any intertitle, the bilingual one communicates beyond itself. It
is designed to address the image, to supplement what we see: to ex-
plain it, “speak” for it, or indeed translate it into writing. Unlike the
mono­l ingual intertitle, however, the bilingual intertitle disrupts the
authority of language, weakens its claim on the image. By fracturing
the written supplement into two distinct parts and revealing, mak-
ing perfectly visible, the difference between languages—­the very fact
that there are different languages and multiple ways of expressing the
image in language—­the bilingual intertitle challenges the logic of
 240 LANGUAGE GAMES

similarity and substitution that structures the monolingual intertitle,

that easy and seemingly elucidating slide between image and word.
The bilingual intertitle counters the implicit suggestion that language
can stand in for the visual, that the intertitle is somehow equivalent
to the visions that shuttle into and out of view. The two divided lan-
guages are not wholly equal or identical to each other—­if they were,
after all, we would need only one—­much less to the images that they
endeavor to describe. In the visual gap between its languages, the bi-
lingual intertitle subtly acknowledges what ethnographic discourse
rarely does: there are other languages, other divisions, and even other
differences that the intertitle cannot contain or explain in words. The
bilingual structure triangulates among languages and the moving
image, inviting viewers to notice the differences between these con-
stitutive parts, the meaning that slips out of reach of one language to
surface in the one that adjoins it (or not at all), and, most importantly,
the moving images that escape any and every expression in language
that tries to make them mean. It is, then, peculiarly fitting that the
bilingual intertitle that divides Met het SS “Patria” describes a visual
phenomenon that is nowhere to be found. One might also read the
absence of a “modern traffic cop” somewhat more playfully: as a ser-
endipitous sign of the film’s unregulated circulation. Language does
not discipline the flow of ethnographic images.
The historical operation at work in Met het SS “Patria” is akin to
what Benjamin and de Man ascribe to the processes of textual trans-
lation. Here, however, this operation does not unfold between the si-
multaneous texts of the intertitle, in the instant that most readily ap-
pears as an act of translation. Both of these written expressions arrive
after the image in the process of its production. They are translations
of each other but, more fundamentally, translations of a visual before,
of events that always necessarily precede their writing. Like the lit-
erary translation, then, the divided intertitle generates an afterlife to
the cinematic record of the Patria’s maritime excursions. This site of
writing frames the image as a historical artifact in the very instant of
its re-­presenting the image, through language, to the viewer. Like any
intertitle, it disrupts the cinematic fantasy of lived, real time and re-
minds us of the temporal conditions of mechanical reproduction: the
intertitle re-­presents the image, just as the image re-­presents bodies
and events that once were.
 LANGUAGE GAMES 241

Still, the manifold acts of translation that unspool in ethnographic

cinema, and Met het SS “Patria” in particular, betray a different kind
of historical life than the divisions between originals and translations,
lives and afterlives, might allow us to imagine. In Met het SS “Patria,”
the bilingual intertitle does not stabilize the image as it simultane-
ously reveals hidden instabilities (as de Man argues of textual transla-
tion) but rather misses the visual content it attempts to name. In other
words, the intertitle reasserts, repeats, adds yet another reminder of
the visual mobility and irregularity that is, quite simply, plain to see
in the first instance of any encounter with early ethnographic cin-
ema. What is more, the temporality of image and intertitle gets just as
tangled as it does in the bilingual intertitle, where one can no longer
distinguish between the categories of “original” and “translation.”
While all intertitles arrive after the process of photochemical record-
ing, they are nevertheless, as I have argued, positioned spatially and
temporally in between the moving image in our experience of watch-
ing (and reading) them. This is nowhere more apparent than in Met
het SS “Patria,” where the film’s single, bilingual intertitle divides the
film in two. Both intertitle and image are “before” and “after,” “origi-
nal” and “translation,” as they appear and disappear. Image and word
do not meet and make mutual sense; nor does one, in a Benjaminian
flash, interrupt the continuity or progress of the other. Together, they
generate a series of chance encounters and discontinuous, unassimi-
lable fragments. The untranslated bit of text, the unexplained image,
the missed connections between them both: these contingent signs
gather in the ethnographic image, so many reminders of what remains
unavailable to any historical view.

The Images That Keep Silence

In this final reflection on the linguistic conventions of ethnographic
cinema, I consider the phenomenon of the intertitular “utterance,”
that is, moments in which the intertitle represents the voices and
noises of the ethnographic scene. How do intertitles “speak” in early
ethnographic film? And whose speech or sounds do they ventrilo-
quize? While there are distinct theories of utterance in linguistics and
the philosophy of language, and disagreement about how utterance
works and why it matters, the term utterance generally refers to the
 242 LANGUAGE GAMES

smallest possible unit of speech.64 An utterance is a continuous vocal

expression bounded by silence on each side. An utterance is not nec-
essarily a sentence, nor does it even have to be a word: it is simply a
vocal sound that the human (or animal) body makes. Perhaps most
crucially for our purposes here, utterances are live(d) events. They
technically do not exist in writing. An intertitular utterance therefore,
like any written utterance, is always a representation of the voice and
an imperfect exchange (of sound for writing). Moreover, this linguis-
tic structure fails to call out or appropriately name what appears in
the image, for the voice simply cannot be seen.
On the way to responding to these questions and understanding
the nature of this substitution of writing for voice, I draw on an exam-
ple of this intertitular practice from Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B.
Schoedsack’s Grass (1925), one of the few explicitly commercial eth-
nographic films to make an appearance in this book. Grass was pro-
duced and distributed by the Famous Players-­L asky Corporation,
which would become Paramount Pictures in the decade that followed,
and “stars” journalist Marguerite Harrison in frequent on-­screen ap-
pearances for, as an early intertitle reflexively explains, “The men were
busy behind the camera.”65 The film depicts the biannual migration
of the Persian (present-­day Iranian) Bakhtiari tribe as they cross the
Zardeh Kuh mountain range in search of grass for their herds. Grass
belongs to the category of docufiction that I discuss at some length in
chapter 2 and finds its closest analog in the work of Martin and Osa
Johnson’s ethnographic adventure films. Like the Johnsons, Cooper
and Schoedsack position themselves (and Harrison) as courageous
explorers battling extreme physical conditions and risking their lives
in a “primitive” part of the world. In another point of contact with the
Johnsons’ visual practices and the broader field of commercial eth-
nography, the film just cannot seem to shut up. Grass quite remark-
ably credits its titlers, Terry Ramsaye and Richard P. Carver, in the
very same frame as its directors. The excesses of writing in the film
nevertheless suggest that credit was perhaps given where it was due
and in appropriate proportion.
I include the film not only as a counterpoint to the extraordinary
contingencies of amateur ethnography that I have explored elsewhere
but also as a way of engaging one of the most logocentric modes of
ethnographic cinema and intervening in the most common debates
 LANGUAGE GAMES 243

about its intertitular expressions. Commercial ethnographic films

contain an abundance of language, in part because the era of inter-
titling in which these films appear (i.e., the late 1910s and 1920s)
nurtured the profession of intertitling and celebrated the skill of the
very best title writers.66 As I have noted, scholars of ethnographic
cinema have read the abundance of language in commercial ethno-
graphic filmmaking, and the particular ways in which this language
describes and narrates the bodies and lives of ethnographic subjects,
as an exertion of control over the image and evidence of the racist
ideological regimes at work in the first decades of ethnographic film. 67
Indeed, the “voice” of ethnographic cinema has often been criticized
for its tendency to reduce, simplify, and “speak for” the ethnographic
subject.
There are ample reasons to criticize the language and ideological
expressions of Grass. In addition to the film’s explicit sexism, Grass
depicts its ethnographic subjects, by turn, as children, animals, and
uncivilized artifacts of a bygone historical era. Still, there is no one
intertitular voice, no one answer to the questions of precisely who
and how the intertitles speak. Nearly every example of ethnographic
film, especially those made by commercial film studios for popular
audiences, contains multiple “voices” or modes of intertitular ad-
dress: typically, one that points, names, identifies; one that narrates
and describes in detail; one that resurrects the tradition of the lec-
turer and entertains with jokes, puns, and ironic observations; and
one that cites the sounds and speech of the ethnographic subject,
sometimes with the dubious assurance of quotation marks. In short,
ethnographic intertitles are dialogic; they evoke multiple personas
and ethnocinematic practices.
One might argue, then, that this multiplicity alone counters the
stability and singularity so often attributed to these acts of writ-
ing. Here, however, I take a different route to thinking the relation
between intertitle and image, one that shifts away from the mani-
fold metaphorical “voices” always in circulation to consider the in-
stances in which the ethnographic intertitle explicitly endeavors to
write the voice (or voices) of its subjects. Like the bilingual intertitle
in Met het SS “Patria,” this linguistic structure misses the very thing
it tries to name, not because the image contingently fails to appear,
but rather because it simply cannot be seen. This intertitle writes what
 244 LANGUAGE GAMES

must be heard and promises an image of the decidedly and necessarily

invisible.
Grass begins with several paragraphs of written language, conspicu-
ously marked with pilcrows (or paragraph marks). The Bakhtiari, we
are told, are a “long Forgotten People” who exist “behind us” “back in
the East” in the “cradle of the [Aryan] race.” These first titles exem-
plify the schizogenic temporality that Johannes Fabian identifies in
ethnographic writing, whereby the contemporary subjects of ethno-
graphic study are situated in past time (see my discussion of this phe-
nomenon in chapter 3). They frame the film as a written document,
perhaps intended to mimic the typed record of the resident journalist,
Marguerite Harrison, but they also reiterate the bombastic rhetoric of
colonial travel writing. In a variation on the method of ethnographic
salvage, the film positions itself not as an attempt to save a culture
on the brink of annihilation but rather as an effort to recuperate or
remember a tribe that has already been wholly “forgotten.”
The film concludes in a similar way, with an abundance of writing
and a curious re-­presentation of written documents. At the end of the
migration (and the film), an intertitle states, “Now all that is left of
this epic struggle are memories—­and the last document witnessed
by Major Robert Imbrie, the American Consul, who shortly after
met his death in the streets of Tehran.” What follows is the image of
a certificate, written in Arabic, that dissolves into an English trans-
lation of the first document (another iteration of the bilingual inter-
title): “M. C. Cooper, E. B. Schoedsack, and M. E. Harrison are the
first foreigners to have crossed the Zardeh Kuh pass and the first to
have made the forty-­eight day migration with the tribes.” The trans-
lated version of the certificate is “signed” by the chief of the Bakhtiari
tribe and the U.S. vice-­consul, Robert Imbrie, whose reported death
the following month confers a surplus of historical value onto the
document(s) and seemingly confirms the treacherous circumstances
that the filmmakers just survived. 68 What is so curious about this
conclusion, of course, is that it diminishes the evidentiary value of
the moving image record that spectators will have just seen: “all that is
left,” apparently, are “memories” (an ambiguous term that could refer
to the film itself, the filmmaker’s recollections of their experiences,
or indeed our own memories of the images) and the (filmed) written
record of the adventure having happened.
 LANGUAGE GAMES 245

The layers of writing that bookend Grass—­intertitular paragraphs,

original texts, translations—­suggest a hierarchy of ethnographic rep-
resentation, a certain way of evaluating the relationship between lan-
guage and image that we have encountered before: the film frames
language as a more stable and secure kind of communication, and it
privileges writing, in particular, over the moving image. Tellingly,
Grass begins and ends with an excess of writing, with intertitles
that encourage us to see the film as a book, and with repeated writ-
ten assurances about the authenticity of what we see. Taken together,
these textual expressions endeavor to “contain” the images and con-
tinuously reassert the authority of language. This hierarchy, however,
along with the division between writing and speech, is overturned by
the film’s ecstatic intertitular utterances.
In the precise middle of the film, as the Bakhtiari cling to rafts
of inflated goatskins and attempt to make a dangerous crossing of
the Karum River with their herds, language loses its cool. The vi-
sual intervals between intertitles decrease in this scene, quickening
the image–­language rhythms of the film, a technique no doubt in-
tended to impress the frenetic energy of the event upon the viewer
and convey something of the water’s threatening rapids. In a kind of
self-­defeating reflexivity, however, the intertitles arrive with such fre-
quency, interrupting the narrative action—­the visual flow of water
and bodies and animals—­that viewers might easily be reminded of a
camera’s shutter or the photographic substrate of cinema. Moreover,
the intertitles that appear and retreat during the river crossing ap-
peal, almost exclusively, to the sonic aspects of the event: the sounds
of the water, the calls of the terrified animals, and the voices of the
Bakhtiari. As goats are strapped to rafts, an intertitle animates the ca-
cophony of sound with overlapping layers of “B-­A-­A-­A! B-­A-­A-­A-­A-­A!
B-­A-­A-­A!” Once the rafts depart, another intertitle cites the sounds
of the Bakhtiari: “‘YO ALI!’—­Their Ancient Battle Cry.” The shot
that follows this intertitle shows three men on a raft, their backs to
the camera, paddling into the distance and out of frame (Figures 23
and 24). The phrase “YO ALI!” reappears two more times before an
intertitle summarizes the audio aspects of the scene: “Roaring waters!
Screaming Tribesmen! Bellowing Herds! Cries of the drowning!
Swirling down to death.” The only images that correspond to what we
read include shots of lambs and goats struggling in the tremendous
 246 LANGUAGE GAMES

FIGURE 23
The intertitle speaks for the Bakhtiari in Grass (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack,
1925).

currents of the river and then disappearing beneath the water and out
of view. (As I note in the previous chapter, early ethnographic cinema
contains an extraordinary range of animal death events.)
The claim that silent film contains an acoustic dimension, even in
excess and in advance of the many performances by musicians and
lecturers that accompanied its projection, is an uncontroversial one.69
From Béla Balázs’s theory of “sound-­explaining pictures” to, more re-
cently, Michel Chion’s exploration of the audiovisual scene, numer-
ous film scholars and theorists have convincingly argued that even
images without a sound track can contribute to the production of a
sonic or sounded universe.70 In her analysis of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise
 LANGUAGE GAMES 247

FIGURE 24
The corresponding image, three men on a raft, their backs to the camera, paddling into the
distance and out of frame in Grass (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1925).

(1927), for example, Melinda Szaloky explores the “synaesthetic”

properties of the silent film image or the many ways in which sound
can be seen and made visible. Through Murnau’s use of close-­ups,
cinematographic movements, and editing, she claims, “every signifi-
cant moment in the narrative is expressed acoustically.” 71 Moreover,
Szaloky argues that the acoustic images in silent films like Sunrise
guide viewers toward a sonic experience that is not explicitly coor-
dinated or captured by the film and toward a surplus of meaning, of
sense meaning, that is not explicitly narrative. Or, as Chion puts it
in his study of the voice, “silent film allows us to dream” about the
sounds and speech we cannot literally hear in the images.72
 248 LANGUAGE GAMES

Grass, however, is not a film like Sunrise, nor does it come close to
any of the acoustic images that energize sound theory in the silent era.
On the contrary, Grass only ever allows us to read about sound. Its
images are not acoustic; they do not encourage us to dream about
voices or imagine the sonic environment its intertitles describe.
Whether by choice or necessity—­indeed, one doubts that the film-
makers joined the Bakhtiari on their sheepskin inflatables as they
“swirled down to death”—­the camera does not get close to the bel-
lowing herds nor to the human subjects it claims are shouting “YO
ALI!” We do not see any sources or signs of vocal events: no mouths
opened to shout or scream, no visual responses to the utterances all
around (facial expressions, bodily gestures, voiced replies, etc.). The
river crossing is filmed almost entirely in extreme long shot. Animals
and humans are often indistinguishable from one another, specks in
the distance of a swiftly moving current. In the instant after the first
intertitle announces the exclamation of “YO ALI!” and explains that
this utterance is a native war cry, the bodies of the Bakhtiari on the
raft appear like silhouettes against the water, their backs (and faces
and mouths) turned away from the filmmakers and their cameras as
they move even farther into the distance, and then out of frame.
The voice always seems to escape: ephemeral, invisible, and un-
available to hands that want to touch. In poststructural revisions of
the phonocentric order, the voice becomes a figure of resistance (to
writing, images, bodies, patriarchy) and a sign of what cannot be en-
tirely known, even by the subject who speaks.73 While I do not want
to review this expansive discursive field here, the specific intersec-
tion between theories of the voice and ethnographic writing—­and, in
particular, the contribution of Michel de Certeau—­offers a useful set
of tools for understanding the intertitular utterance in ethnographic
cinema. In The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau claims that “eth-
nological orality” (or the vocal sounds of ethnographic subjects) dis-
turbs a range of writing practices in the human sciences, including
anthropology and history. Like Derrida, de Certeau argues that the
human sciences exile orality from Western culture and transform
speech into an exotic object. The separation of speech and writing
structures ethnography’s binaristic taxonomies (primitive and civi-
lized, us and them) and determines its subjects of study; it also shapes
our understanding of the artifactuality of writing as more stable, se-
 LANGUAGE GAMES 249

cure, and faithful to historical origins than the bodily and ephemeral
expressions of the voice. In short, this division makes writing and
thinking possible in the human sciences, while privileging the very
position that manufactures the distinction. De Certeau describes the
implicit expression of force at work in writing:
On the one hand, [writing] accumulates, it keeps an inventory
of secrets from the West, it loses nothing. . . . Writing is an ar-
chive. On the other hand, [writing] declares, it goes to the end
of the world, toward those destined to receive it—­a nd without
budging an inch, without having the center of its actions being
moved, without any change in it through its progress. . . . The
power that writing’s expansionism leaves intact is colonial in
principle. It is extended without being changed. It is tautologi-
cal, immunized against both any alterity that might transform
it and whatever dares to resist it.74
So, writing accumulates the past and declares in advance. Those who
write can accumulate and control archives. And those who write can
also determine what gets written about those who speak. The division
between writing and speech—­a long with its attendant associations
with civility and primitivity, culture and nature—­precedes any ethno-
graphic encounter. Put another way, ethnographic writing produces
the history of the expedition before any explorers set sail or any expe-
dition even begins.
This critique of writing in the human sciences—­of the ideology
and epistemology of writing—­returns us to Derrida’s renovations of
“A Writing Lesson,” which I discuss in chapter 3. While Derrida and
de Certeau are in broad agreement about how this division structures
the human sciences, they offer very different ways of understanding
where and how this structure might come apart. Derrida routes his
response through the visual and what he calls archi-­écriture, an ex-
panded category that includes phonetic writing as well as all manner
of marks made upon the surface of the earth. Derrida dissolves the
division: all cultures, he argues, write, and no mode of expression can
claim the privilege of a pure, unmediated transcription of historical
or anthropological events, nor is there any form of writing undivided
by différance.
De Certeau argues for a different reading of how the voice acts
 250 LANGUAGE GAMES

and interacts with ethnographic writing.75 His deconstruction of

ethnographic discourse depends on an understanding of the aural/
oral (rather than the visual) as indeed a special category of expres-
sion (though not one that reinstalls the voice as a sign of pure pres-
ence and natural communication, à la phonocentrism). In response
to the “writing lesson” of Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage faict en
la terre du Brésil (1578), which predates Lévi-­Strauss’s own Brazilian
expedition by some four centuries, de Certeau argues that the sounds
and speech of unfamiliar voices frequently trouble the spatiotemporal
coherence of ethnographic narrative. Encounters with native speech
“take on the figure of a missing precious stone.” 76 They are marked
as “stolen instants,” when “totally ravished, fascinated by the other’s
voice, the observer forgot himself.” 77 In ethnographic writing, the
sounds of song, chanting, and speech are condensed signs of other-
ness, exoticism, bodily pleasure, and wild primitivity. But they are
also impediments to writing otherness: “These are vocations loos-
ened from the orbits of meaning. . . . Like a cry, the act of enunciation
inverts the statement and the whole organization of form, object, or
referent. It is senseless. It partakes of orgasm.” 78
For de Certeau, the ethnographic writing of enunciation or utter-
ance incessantly gestures toward a remainder, an excess, a vocal “over
there”: the sounds and speech that the ethnographer cannot under-
stand, the voice at the center of a subject that we, as readers, cannot
hear. Perhaps most importantly, the voice tips the balance of power
against the imperialism of writing. Again, de Certeau: “Whereas the
object beheld can be written—­made homogenous with linearities
of stated meaning and constructed space—­the voice can create an
aparté, opening a breach in the text and restoring a contact of body to
body. ‘Voice off.’ What comes from the mouth or goes into the ear can
produce a ravishment. Noises win over messages, and singing over
speech.” 79 Whereas the object beheld by the eye can be written, the
voice heard by the ear draws our attention to what escapes. In short,
the voice cannot be put into (written) words.
Crucially, the term that de Certeau invokes—­aparté—­carries
with it not just a sense of breaking open or breaching but of whisper-
ing. The term comes from the language of theater; the aparté is an
aside, a secret shared covertly by performers with their audiences. It is
 LANGUAGE GAMES 251

a departure or excursion from the narrative line that reveals the line,
comments upon it, supplements and therefore destructures it.
In the case of Grass, it is not the writing of the voice that produces
the aparté—­the moments in which the ethnographer must confess his
ravishment or the limits of his own understanding—­but the image
that refuses to speak. Another way of thinking about the difference:
unlike colonial or ethnographic writing, intertitular writing always
refers us to another form of representation (rather than the “real”
of an author’s experience); the intertitular utterance holds out the
promise of the voice, and we await the image for the fulfillment of
that promise of acoustic signs. It is, then, the image that ensures—­
that admits—­that the promise will go unfulfilled. Here de Certeau’s
concept of supplementarity perhaps collides with Derrida’s. The im-
possibility of transcribing the voice, of putting sound into writing,
manifests in a decidedly visual way. The image shares secrets with the
viewer precisely because it does not utter a word, does not keep the
promise of the intertitular utterance. In the most obvious disclosure,
it contradicts the filmmakers and titlers who insist that this film is no
film at all but a written document with paragraphs and official seals
and signatures.
More deeply, the image deflects the intertitular utterances, the
citations of sounds that the intertitles implicitly guarantee can be
seen. Recalling Cavell’s notion of silence with which I began this
chapter, a “pulsing air of incommunicability” here hangs between the
intertitle and the image. Indeed, if there is a synesthetic operation at
work in Grass, it does not involve the production of noises or voices.
Nor, as Metz would have it, do these images stand in metaphorical
relationship to ordinary language or speech, to the contingencies
of everyday énoncés. Rather, the images that interact with the film’s
intertitular utterances keep quiet. They show us silence. The images
motion “over there”: beyond the image and its intertitles, toward the
bodies (not images) that actually speak.

The Image of Writing

In this chapter, I have considered the interaction between several pat-
terns of intertitular writing and indexical moving images in early eth-
nographic cinema. I have used the terms intertitle and image as well
 252 LANGUAGE GAMES

as writing and the visual as a way of describing and distinguishing

between these categories of ethnographic expression. I have argued
that intertitle and image co-­m ingle, communicate, and, as they do in
intertitular utterances, come apart. While I have insisted that we see
intertitular writing and moving images as sites of mutual influence
and encounter, I have also kept these sites separate. Indeed, I under-
stand them, largely, as different kinds of things: divided by distinct
production processes and, more fundamentally, by the spatiotempo-
ral rupture of the cut. Although the intertitle arrives in between the
image in the moment of spectatorship, it arrives after the image in the
procedures of making a film. From either vantage point, they never
coincide at the same time, as the same thing.
Rather than annihilating the differences between word and image,
my aim here has been to examine several variations on what W. J. T.
Mitchell understands as a constant dialectic and protracted struggle
for dominance between language and pictorial signs. He writes, “At
some moments, this struggle [between language and image] seems
to settle into a relationship of free exchange along open borders; at
other times . . . the borders are closed and a separate peace is declared.
Among the most interesting and complex versions of this struggle
is what might be called the relationship of subversion, in which lan-
guage or imagery looks into its own heart and finds lurking there its
opposite.”80 What Mitchell’s view—­and my own—­stresses (in a slight
revision of Cavell’s view of ordinary language) are particular contexts
or communities in which language discloses what it shares with visual
or graphic elements, and vice versa. Others, of course, like Derrida,
have made much stronger arguments about the intrinsic proximity
between word and image.
What I have not explored in this chapter, however, are the specific
material conditions that join intertitle and image in an expression of
the same. Considered from the perspective of film artifactuality, inter-
titles are images. In other words, and setting aside the visual elements
that many intertitles represent (colors, decorative frames, studio in-
signias, etc.), intertitles are a part of the totality of any film that in-
cludes them. We do not, for example, exclude the intertitles from our
understanding of Sunrise as a visual artifact. The one does not exist
without the other. Like the indexical images that they try to name or
describe, intertitles are divided into a series of still frames: rectangu-
 LANGUAGE GAMES 253

lar in shape, a certain number of millimeters in width. Even if noth-

ing is visibly animated by the intertitle, the intertitle itself is always
animated: it endures, extends, and takes time. Indeed, a single word
represented on an intertitle is always multiple (frames and instants).
Furthermore, and even more materially, intertitles are printed
onto the surface of film. They share the same physical substrate and
the same archival afterlife as the indexical image. Both accumulate
the graphic signs of celluloid decay and deterioration in equal mea-
sure. Scratches, water stains, and mold spores do not distinguish be-
tween intertitle and image but bind them together. This is true for all
intertitles and images on film but is especially pronounced among
the neglected artifacts of early ethnographic practice. These indices
at once make visible the coterminous relationship between intertitle
and image as well as the fragility of film’s physical matter. They also, as
I argue in the next chapter, suggest the limits of iconic indices in any
understanding of celluloid historicity.
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 CHAPTER 5

ETHNOGRAPHY WON’T WAIT

New Media and Material Histories

From wastes, papers, vegetables, indeed from glaciers and

eternal snows, historians make something different: they make
history. They fashion an artifice of nature. They participate in the
work that changes nature into environment, and thus modify the
nature of man.
—­Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (1975)

When I began researching this book nearly ten years ago, I spent
many months in natural history museums, university libraries, na-
tional film collections, and peculiar institutions like the Musée
Albert-­K ahn. I dutifully tried to adhere to the methodological obli-
gations of the film historian (obligations, as I have noted elsewhere,
that descend from nineteenth-­century historical methods and turn-­
of-­the-­t wentieth-­century anthropological practice): I traveled to the
archives and spent long stretches of uninterrupted time in contact
with film artifacts. This work produced a range of physical experi-
ences (e.g., displacement, excitement, boredom). It also involved a
physical encounter with film. I learned to handle film and read the
many identifying marks that gather on the surface of these objects
and embed each work in complex histories of moving image technolo-
gies: the signs of distinct color processes, the shapes of nonstandard
perforations, the company stencils that often run along the edges of
film stock, to name just a few examples.
I also learned to ignore or see through the many contingent signs
of decay, intervention, and inattention that impress themselves upon

255
 256 Ethnography Won’t Wait

the ethnographic film image and seemingly obstruct my historical view.

These signs include (among others) scratches, burns, mold spores,
and the flickering shadows of sustained decomposition. Ethnographic
cinema is an aging visual demographic that inhabits the vast margins
of the archives: untitled, unauthored, and seemingly infinite in num-
ber. The great majority of these films never reached an audience and
never managed to intervene in popular culture.1 The circulation of
ethnographic cinema beyond and before narrative film production,
in and for unusual and interstitial spaces (the museum, the university,
the government office, the personal collection), has all but ensured its
obscurity in the archival afterlife. While several institutions are com-
mitted to preserving the ethnographic portions of their collections—­
and I will focus on one of them in the pages that follow—­very few
ethnographic films have ever been restored. Their surfaces are like so
many mystic writing pads, the wax paper never having been lifted.2
When I began cycling back to these archives in the early 2010s,
many large-­scale digitization projects were under way. In 2007,
the EYE Filmmuseum, formerly known as the Netherlands Film-
museum, joined a consortium of Dutch audiovisual archives in the
Images for the Future project, a government-­funded initiative that
was dedicated to digitizing more than 100,000 hours of film and
video by the end of 2014. 3 Images for the Future also aimed to dis-
tribute its digital content as widely as possible and develop a contem-
porary community of archival “users.” To this end, the Dutch con-
sortium partnered with social media and software design firms to
create several digital applications that experiment with new modes of
archival encounter. The experience of conducting archival research at
EYE and other archives engaged in these kinds of fundamental infra-
structural shifts has changed in tandem with the digitization of film
artifacts. In many cases, researchers no longer need to touch film—­
they are, in fact, discouraged from doing so—­or travel to the archive.
They can instead consult a digital database and stream archival con-
tent from nearly anywhere in the world.
There are surprising consequences to this transition. In the case
of EYE’s ethnographic cinema, the processes of digitization and com-
pression contribute yet another layer of visual noise to a collection
of already badly damaged films. The digital images pixellate, stut-
ter, and blur as they stretch to fill in the gaps of the original analog
 Ethnography Won’t Wait 257

documents or compress the details of film for online circulation. The

virtual controls of a digital player intermittently appear and dissolve,
facilitating our interaction with the image as they simultaneously
interrupt it, distract from it. All of EYE’s digital films also contain a
proprietary watermark: the silhouette of an eye, conspicuously at the
center of every image. The eye demands to be seen but also, and per-
haps more generously, encourages us to consider eyes and vision and
the physical–­v irtual surfaces upon which they appear. The images
that accompany this chapter are the watermarked digitizations rather
than the higher-­resolution reproductions from the physical print, for
reasons that I hope will become clear (see Figures 25–­29).
Critics of digitization have been quick to mourn these kinds of ar-
chival developments as a loss for film history and celluloid culture,
frequently reminding us that cinema’s digital future is an unstable
one.4 In this view, the digital threatens to displace analog film in both
its production and preservation, and film historians inevitably forfeit
their encounter with film artifacts in exchange for wider access to
digitized copies. While I do not intend to intervene in these debates
about the obsolescence of film and the future of digitization, a couple
of points are worth making on the way to outlining the scope and
claims of this final chapter.
First, in EYE’s effort to digitize its collection and limit the circula-
tion of physical film artifacts, one might reasonably argue that the im-
ages it preserves “for the future” are indeed the analog ones. As Paolo
Cherchi Usai has pointed out, the preservation of film—­and the fan-
tasy of the unblemished Model Image—­depends on preventing its
circulation. 5 He thus presents a deep irony to any cinéphile-­historian:
we should not watch the images we would like to keep.
Second, and more pertinent to my own argument, it is not clear
that digitization displaces the analog film artifact or diminishes its es-
sential historical properties (in part, as I will explain, because the his-
torical properties of film artifacts have never been rigorously defined).
Rather, as Thomas Elsaesser has suggested, the digital produces a
“zero-­degree” from which one might begin to consider precisely the
kinds of metahistorical concerns that our access and proximity to
physical film artifacts have hidden from view: “I take digital media as
the chance to rethink the idea of historical change itself, and what we
mean by inclusion and exclusion, horizons and boundaries, but also
 258 Ethnography Won’t Wait

by emergence, transformation, appropriation, i.e. the opposite of rup-

ture. It permits me to once more query what I think I know already.”6
In my return to ethnographic cinema as a digital formation, I was
drawn into a comparative form of spectatorship. Alongside the visual
noise of the digital transfer, the manifold signs of imprecision, and
the clumsy interface that mediated my encounter, I could not help
but consider the aggregate of analog inscriptions. In short, following
Elsaesser, I began to query what I thought I knew already or at least
what I thought had been settled in film-­historical debate, namely, that
the contingent marks that gather on the surface of any one film, in-
cluding the signs of celluloid decay and deterioration, were either im-
pediments to film history—­the very obstacles that film historians and
archivists would need to remove in order to grasp at this thing called
“history”—­or extraneous to any understanding of it.7
Throughout the film preservation movement in the twentieth cen-
tury and its waves of archival activism, including the exclamatory
“Nitrate Won’t Wait!” campaign, the annihilation of celluloid has
presented itself as a future (already present) to be overcome rather
than an intrinsic property of film material to be understood.8 Framed
in this way, the arrival of the digital can only ever be another anni-
hilating force to be prevented or warded against. As I understand it,
however, the digitization of celluloid opens up new fields of historical
thought, new approaches to familiar historical questions. It demands
that we begin rethinking the physicality of film and more carefully
theorizing the encounter between film historians, archives, and ob-
jects. In other words, the digital archive makes celluloid artifacts
more, not less, visible. Its annihilating function is aimed at our ap-
proach to film history, not the artifacts that constitute it.
This chapter is also a kind of coda, at once an effort to conclude
and a supplement or something more, a writing that does not quite
fit with all the others. Here I am interested in reorienting our under-
standing of the material surface and reading the archival impressions
that historians have been trained to ignore, see through, or absent
from their imaginations. One will recall that, in my first chapter, I
expand the category of film-­h istorical artifacts beyond model (im-
ages) and good copies, beyond the fantasy of historical origins and
the privileged objects that compel historians to recuperate or ap-
 Ethnography Won’t Wait 259

proximate those origins. Any study of ethnographic cinema needs to

take this maneuver as its starting point. In this chapter, however, I
expand the category of filmic historicity, or the properties of film that
contribute to its being historically meaning bearing. I argue that the
historicity of film exceeds the indexical signs left behind in the pro-
cesses of its original production—­the image, the sprocket hole, the
company stencil—­to include those that accumulate in the archives,
whether by accident, intention, or deterioration. In so doing, I further
argue that the historical meaning of film and filmic historicity itself
are not things that we discover (in the archive or on the image) but
rather properties that we confer upon film artifacts.
Once one begins attending to the surface of celluloid in this way,
other indexical formations come into view. Like any other photo-
graphic or cinematic index, these signs are references to a past pres-
ence, to what once was. They are evidence of historical encounters
and interventions. Unlike the iconic indices that tend to shape our
understanding of cinematic historicity, however, they are irreparably
divided from the image of their historical source and therefore em-
bedded in far more ambiguous systems of historical causation. In
this last reflection on ethnographic cinema, I take seriously Usai’s
provocative—­and underexamined—­claim that the very possibility of
film history depends on these kinds of indices. Or, as he aphoristically
puts it, there is “no such thing as film history” without the decay or
degradation of film.9 These material signs, I argue, foreground the
immaterialities of film-­h istorical practice and the creative, playful
processes that film historiography requires.
In these final pages, I pursue the concept of historicity by bring-
ing what we might term the “internal” features of ethnographic
cinema—­its images, cinematography, and compositional patterns,
for example—­into conversation with its “external” qualities, with the
rips, gaps, tears, and textures that at once mark ethnographic film as
marginalized archival detritus and mediate our encounter with these
moving images. Ethnographic cinema offers a privileged view of the
actual and conceptual surfaces of cinema. It studies the surface, takes
a deep interest in it, and demands that we do the same.
This conception of ethnographic cinema is not uncontroversial.
Laura Marks’s foundational reading of intercultural cinema—­a broad
 260 Ethnography Won’t Wait

term that encompasses the diverse practices of experimental postwar

ethnography, postcolonial “third” cinemas, and transnational produc-
tion (among other cinematic modes)—­comes, albeit indirectly, to a
very different set of conclusions. In her view, intercultural cinema re-
sponds to the penetrative and objectifying gaze of its ethnographic
antecedents. Its play at the visual surface and its haptic appeal to non-
visual forms of knowledge, she argues, stand in direct opposition to
the ocularcentrism of ethnographic film:
Many [intercultural] films and videos critique the will to visu-
ally master another culture. Some put up real or metaphoric
smokescreens that obscure the view of a culture. Others sug-
gest that the most important aspects of the culture or the story
are invisible. In all cases, these works trouble the relationship
between vision and knowledge.10
As Marks explains, intercultural cinema further refuses the ocular
impulses of ethnographic cinema in its attention to the surfaces of the
body. One can no longer penetrate the body, seek visual knowledge
of its interiorities, so long as the gaze of intercultural cinema flattens
the body into skin and only ever skims this surface.
However, Marks does not address the question of whether and
how the impulses that intercultural cinema endeavors to overturn
actually manifest themselves in the ethnographic image. Her inter-
ests, of course, lie elsewhere, in the response to visual mastery rather
than the images that motivate this response. Her reading of intercul-
tural cinema as a response to the ocularcentrism of early ethnography
nevertheless rests on a misunderstanding of the first decades of eth-
nographic cinema.
Whatever its ideological underpinnings, ethnographic cinema never
manages to master its human subjects, or even make them visible with
any reliability. Despite its etymological claim on the ethnos (nation,
people, caste, tribe), it surveys the surfaces of the earth more than it
plumbs the depths of the body. Its cinematography travels, grazes,
searches, and skims, relentlessly shifting our attention away from the
skin of difference toward another kind of visual surface: landscape.
In the first section, I focus on a handful of films from EYE’s eth-
nographic collection. I consider the ways in which the landscapes of
ethnographic cinema reorganize this visual tradition and, in so doing,
 Ethnography Won’t Wait 261

reflect the force of things, objects, and environments. I argue that this
representation of nonhuman energies finds its analog in the surface of
celluloid itself, in the materiality that adjoins these images of the non-
human. The dialogue between the surfaces of ethnographic cinema—­
internal and external—­is at once mimetic and metahistorical. That is,
the surfaces communicate with each other in a similar way, and they
say the same thing. And together, both sides communicate beyond
each other to tell us something about the absences in our understand-
ing of film artifacts and historical telling. These arguments draw upon
art-­h istorical scholarship on the landscape—­in particular, W.  J.  T.
Mitchell’s efforts to “change ‘landscape’ from a noun to a verb”—­as
well as more recent debates on the new ecologies and materialities
that accompany twenty-­fi rst-­century technology.11
In the concluding pages, I shift away from the dialogue between
these cinematic surfaces to consider another order of archival im-
pressions. As I discovered in the process of researching ethnographic
cinema, contemporary archives frequently create compilations of
these (and other) uncategorizable films. Since the late 1980s, the
EYE Filmmuseum has collected and preserved portions of its un-
identified films into a series it calls Bits & Pieces. To date, the col-
lection consists of more than six hundred fragments, many of them
from ethnographic cinema, spread across dozens of individual reels.
Over the last decade, the reels have been transferred to VHS tapes
and digitized for online circulation. The Bits & Pieces are not alone
in the EYE archive. The project finds contemporary company in the
Scene Machine, a new media application funded by Images for the
Future. Here, too, the ethnographic image recirculates as raw mate-
rial for archival experimentation.
All of these interventions raise crucial questions about the his-
toricity of film artifacts and the historical agency of film archives,
among them, What do these archival operations do to (and for) our
understanding of film? Where do the images produced out of the
archive belong among the “original” objects of film history? Less
broadly—­and, one might argue, ontologically—­these archival forma-
tions require that we address the specificity of ethnographic cinema
as it escapes from the margins of the archives and enters into a kind
of new mainstream: digitized, virtual, and interactive. In remixing its
artifactual scraps, EYE constructs another history of ethnographic
 262 Ethnography Won’t Wait

cinema. But it also positions ethnography at the center of its reflec-

tions (however implicit or indirect) on film history, historiography,
and the future of the archive. The ethnographic image contingently
returns and reencounters other modes and moments of cinema. In so
doing, it reveals the contingencies and constructions always embed-
ded in the materiality of film and our film-­historical methodologies. It
asks film historians, in echoes of Hayden White’s historical critique,
“to entertain the notion that history, as currently constructed, is a
kind of historical accident.”12
These concluding reflections do not offer a comprehensive theory
of film historicity. Rather, I sketch the contours of a few blind spots in
our approach to film artifacts as well as the implications of those blind
spots for the practice of film history. I no doubt will have missed im-
portant properties of film material that gather elsewhere, beyond the
boundaries of ethnographic cinema. And those that I examine do not
combine to form a total reimagining of historical practice. Indeed,
that is the point. In this final chapter and those that precede it, I take
ethnographic cinema as a starting point for challenging the stability
of film-­historical methodology and the ontological assumptions that
underpin it. In asking after the specific materiality of ethnographic
cinema, I am suggesting that there are perhaps multiple materialities,
many distinct formations of film artifacts, each of which produces its
own set of metahistorical concerns and its own challenges to the sta-
sis of film history.

Historiographic Landscapes
To understand how landscape informs both the internal and external
aspects of ethnographic film—­that is, its images and the material sub-
strate upon which those images appear—­I would like to briefly sketch
the concept and practice of landscape as it develops in art history,
moves into cultural studies, and, more recently, influences theories
of narrative, temporality, and spectatorship in film studies. I begin
with Kenneth Clark, one of the most important contributors to the
first wave of landscape scholarship, before examining the challenges
that were issued in the decades that followed. The genealogy I out-
line here—­in particular the early dialectic between Kenneth Clark
and Ernst Gombrich, followed by the Marxist approaches developed
 Ethnography Won’t Wait 263

by Raymond Williams and John Berger—­is well-­worn territory, re-

hearsed (with small variations) in numerous accounts of twentieth-­
century landscape scholarship, including Mitchell’s.13 This prelimi-
nary overview therefore also offers some insight into what motivates
Mitchell’s view of landscape, and it prepares the way for understand-
ing just how my own view departs from these predecessors.
Landscape emerges as a critical category in the mid-­t wentieth
century, when art historians begin speculating on the origins of the
practice and the historical forces that shaped its development. Most
art historians trace landscape painting to the Netherlands in the sev-
enteenth century.14 Ann Adams glosses the claim: “Something dra-
matic happened around 1620 in Haarlem, so the narrative goes, as if
scales had suddenly and collectively fallen from seventeenth-­century
Dutch artists’ eyes, and they could see, and faithfully transcribe, the
land in which they found themselves.”15 This narrative of visual en-
lightenment owes to Kenneth Clark and the distinction he draws in
his 1949 Slade Lecture series between what he terms the “landscape
of symbols” and the “landscape of fact.”16 The former belongs to the
“medieval mind” and bears little resemblance to the appearance of
the natural world; the latter reflects the rigorous reshaping of art and
human perception by science. Clark posits a natural relationship be-
tween the intellectual development of man and his representation of
the world he inhabits. He writes, “This was the great age of botany,
when the details of nature were examined and classified. It was the
age in which the range of man’s sight was enormously extended. . . .
And as so often happens, art anticipated intuitively what science was
beginning to formulate.”17
Embedded in the distinction that Clark makes between land-
scapes are ontological and historical claims (about what landscape
is and how the practice developed) as well as an evaluative claim
(about the superiority of facts over symbols). As he describes it, the
landscape stands in a kind of natural relationship to culture, passively
absorbing the progress of the human species. Facts are better than
symbols because the one arrives after the other; the landscape of fact
is an intrinsically more developed or advanced model of the practice
of representing the world’s geography.
In his canonical Norm and Form, Ernst Gombrich (one of Clark’s
 264 Ethnography Won’t Wait

contemporaries and numerous opponents) demythologizes the land-

scape and dismisses the division that Clark draws between sym-
bols and facts. There is no such thing as a scientific landscape, an
empiricist painting, or an image without symbols. Gombrich cites
Nietzsche’s refutation of realist painting—­“‘All Nature faithfully’—­
But by what feint / Can Nature be subdued to art’s constraint? / Her
smallest fragment is still infinite! / And so he paints what he likes in
it”—­and, in so doing, insists on the construction of landscape, its
composition by artists, and the symbols that continue to circulate
well after the medieval period.18
Much sharper critiques of the implicit ideological commitments of
landscape follow these initial counterclaims. In the early 1970s, both
John Berger and Raymond Williams argue that landscape painting
often expresses the power of landownership and the social hierarchies
that stratify Europe, “not a kind of nature, but a kind of man.”19 For
Berger, who addresses Clark directly in Ways of Seeing, the expres-
sions of power are explicit: the land that appears in these images—­
from the seventeenth century onward—­belongs to someone, and that
landowner is usually depicted in the frame. The landscape painting is
therefore not a window onto the world “but a safe in which the vis-
ible has been deposited.”20 For Williams, the proprietary messages
are subtler, often communicated through absence—­what is with-
held from view—­rather than the visibility of the proud possessors.
In eighteenth-­century Britain, landscape writing and painting allows
owners to exert control over the land, to project order where none ex-
ists. It succeeds in creating an image, “emptied of rural labour and of
labourers; . . . the roads and approaches artfully concealed by trees,
so that the very fact of communication could be visually suppressed;
inconvenient barns and mills cleared away out of sight; . . . the expres-
sion of control and of command.”21
Numerous scholars pivot from this reading of landscape as an ex-
pression of domestic landownership to consider the proprietary land-
scapes that adjoin the imperialist, colonial, and ethnographic proj-
ects.22 Here, as elsewhere, the image is deeply implicated in regimes of
actual and ideological force. The landscape makes a claim on the land,
mimes its mastery. Echoing Williams’s reading of the image emptied
of human labor, Mary Louise Pratt describes the strict composition of
the colonial landscape as one emptied of human life: “Uninhabited,
 Ethnography Won’t Wait 265

unpossessed, unhistoricized, unoccupied, even by the traveler them-

selves. . . . Human presence . . . is absolutely marginal, though it was,
of course, a constant and essential aspect of the traveling itself.”23 The
colonial landscape painting thus reiterates the schizogenic fantasy of
ahistorical otherness as it constructs a fantastic image of the future,
one in which the native inhabitants have been cleared from it, obliter-
ated, conquered.
W.  J.  T. Mitchell comes closest to articulating the conceptual
stakes of landscape in ethnographic cinema. He argues that landscape
painting is a historiographic phenomenon, or what we might call a
“metahistorical image.” Its semiotic structures generate certain kinds
of history and particular narrative patterns, most often a tale of “prog-
ress from ancient to modern, from Christian to secular, from the
mixed, subordinate, and ‘impure’ landscape to the ‘pure’ landscape
‘seen for itself.’”24 In erasing the signs of human subjectivity and of-
fering a seemingly unimpeded view of the environment—­“a natural
representation of a natural scene”—­landscape painting erases the
conditions of its own production.25 In turn, these images compel a
historical imaginary (like Clark’s, for example) of natural representa-
tion and natural scenes, of neutral observer-­historians and crystalline
image-­facts.26 In other words, the imperialism of landscape extends
to the discursive regimes that historicize it. These images stand in
analogical relationship to a set of historical practices that endeavor
to eliminate any trace of the constructive processes of historiography
and the interventions of the historian.
Though sympathetic to what he calls the “darker, skeptical” read-
ings of landscape, Mitchell is critical of the stability that this more
recent body of work attributes to the ideological expressions of the
image. In his view, “landscape . . . does not usually declare its relation
to imperialism in any direct way; it is not to be understood . . . as a
mere tool of nefarious imperial designs, nor as uniquely caused by im-
perialism.”27 Mitchell proposes an alternative to both readings of the
image. The landscape offers neither an unmediated encounter with
the natural world nor a direct expression of imperialist ideology. He
argues that one must instead read this visual practice as a supplement
to a subject that is always constructed. Mitchell thus denaturalizes
landscape painting and landscape itself:
 266 Ethnography Won’t Wait

Landscape painting is best understood not as the uniquely

central medium that gives us access to ways of seeing land-
scape, but as a representation of something that is already a
representation in its own right. . . . Landscape is itself a physical
and multisensory medium (earth, stone, vegetation, water, sky,
sound and silence, light and darkness, etc.) in which cultural
meanings and values are encoded, whether they are put there by
the physical transformation of a place in landscape gardening or
architecture, or found in a place formed, as we say, “by nature.”28
One can detect something of Jean Brunhes and nineteenth-­century
theories of human geography in this conception of landscape. 29
Like Brunhes, Mitchell reads landscape as a network of cultural
codes, a medium that accrues the impressions of human activity:
both the synchronic signs of everyday life and broader diachronic
transformations.
However, Mitchell departs from the anthropocentric ground of
human geography to consider the nonhuman causal relata—­including
that peculiar list of multisensory formations (earth, stone, sky)—­that
equally contribute to the activity inscribed on the land, or emanat-
ing from it. Mitchell also implicitly disagrees with Brunhes’s view of
the photographic image, a naive reiteration of art-­historical realism. 30
In redefining the landscape as a medium represented through other
media (painting, writing, photography, cinema), Mitchell posits an
interactive, communicative encounter between two unstable things
(i.e., landscape and its medium). One does not offer unfettered access
to the other, nor is one the more natural formation. Rather, they are
joined by a fundamental likeness or similarity, and each reflects some-
thing of its counterpart.
What is most striking in Mitchell’s work—­and what motivates my
lingering on his approach at such length—­is a strange note at the out-
set of his collection in which he identifies what informs his reframing
landscape as an active medium and a site of visual and epistemologi-
cal exchange. He writes:
Although this collection does not contain any essays on cine-
matic landscape, it should be clear why moving pictures of
landscape are, in a very real sense, the subtext of these revi-
sionist accounts of traditional motionless landscape images
 Ethnography Won’t Wait 267

in photography, painting, and other media. The basic argument

of these essays is that landscape is a dynamic medium, in which
we “live and move and have our being,” but also a medium that
is itself in motion from one place or time to another. 31
Mitchell’s intuitions seem reasonable. If previous analyses of land-
scape insist on the stability and clarity of the image (as a natural or
ideological sign), the durational qualities and inherent mobilities of
cinema would seem to offer an essential counterpoint to these kinds
of claims. However, without any cinema-­specific arguments—­or
any examples of moving image landscapes—­it is not clear how film
intervenes “in a very real sense.” More importantly, in omitting cin-
ema from the communicative encounter with landscape—­f rom the
mutually transformative dialogue between media—­M itchell installs
cinema as a stable entity in this conceptual transaction. For him, cin-
ema operates subtextually, invisibly, externally, transforming our
understanding of landscape and its expression across diverse media,
without itself being transformed and without any adjustments to our
understanding of cinema.
Setting aside this internal tension for the moment, I would like
to emphasize that Mitchell is not alone in seeing cinema as a desta-
bilizing force, enacted upon the history and practice of landscape.
Tom Gunning claims that cinema counters the “traditional picture”
of landscape by producing an image “without a frame.”32 Lauren
Rabinovitz argues that early ride films (à la Hale’s Tours) “transform
the landscape into pure spectacle” and “foreground the body itself as
a site for sensory experience.”33 And, in his study of avant-­garde cin-
emas, Scott MacDonald traces several lines of resistance that emanate
from the moving image and intersect with the (largely masculine) tra-
dition of landscape painting. 34
Those film scholars who ask the other question—­what does land-
scape do to cinema?—­u sually produce answers that address the
spatiotemporality of diegetic structure. For example, in one of the
few collections dedicated to film and landscape, Martin Lefebvre
argues that certain kinds of “autonomous” landscapes introduce a
space “freed from the eventhood” of narrative action; these images
signal “the need to grasp the emergence of landscape outside of nar-
rative, outside of what Barthes considered to be the ‘informative’ or
 268 Ethnography Won’t Wait

communicational level of the film.”35 The landscape obstructs narra-

tive meaning with what Lefebvre describes as “landscape feelings.”
Spectators experience landscape images rather than understand them.
Indeed, if cinematic images of landscape communicate any messages
beyond the diegesis, those messages extend to viewers who have “feel-
ings” about the images, or who cannot feel, overwhelmed as they are
by the sublime or spectacular view. 36 Only Jennifer Peterson specu-
lates elsewhere. She sets aside these diegetic interactions to consider
how the marginal status of landscape in the history of art might infect
the travelogue genre with unintended political effects. 37
My own thinking about what landscape does to cinema overlaps,
in different ways, with that of Mitchell and Peterson. Like Mitchell,
I understand the representation of landscape as an interactive en-
counter between two media, between landscape itself and, in this
case, cinema. I am interested in pursuing precisely the question that
Mitchell’s work generates and ignores: What does landscape do to
the moving image? And what does it do to ethnographic images in
particular? Like Peterson, my reading of landscape in ethnographic
cinema sets aside the communicative relay between landscape, nar-
rative structure, and spectatorship. However, unlike Peterson, I am
not interested in exploring the ideological or counterideological ef-
fects of landscape. Mitchell’s framework asks us to consider what
landscape might offer to the medium of cinema, to our understand-
ing of its “physical and multisensory” qualities. By way of reply, I
argue that landscape does indeed do something to cinema and, more
precisely, to the ethnographic image. Just as the moving image de-
stabilizes the landscape and its purchase on the natural world, the
landscape makes visible the matter of ethnographic cinema, that is,
its portion of “earth, stone, vegetation, water, sky, sound and silence,
light and darkness.”
Before making this argument, I would like to consider how land-
scape actually materializes in ethnographic cinema by way of a few
examples from EYE’s ethnographic collection. These examples are
joined by hundreds of other ethnographic films—­hundreds of other
possible examples—­in which the visual construction of landscape
brings the surface of unrestored celluloid into view. They invite us
to attend to the specific historicity of ethnographic cinema and the
possibility that multiple historicities inhabit moving image archives.
 Ethnography Won’t Wait 269

They also compel us to consider nonhuman forms of historical causa-

tion and nonphotographic indices of past time. Finally, and perhaps
most crucially, these examples demonstrate the difficulty of discern-
ing between different indexical categories (e.g., iconic and un-­iconic,
human and nonhuman, intended and accidental). Indeed, the diverse
indices that gather in the ethnographic image are inextricably joined
together and often qualitatively indistinguishable from one another.
Any effort to separate them or arrange them into a hierarchy of his-
torical value will be an arbitrary one. The landscapes of ethnographic
cinema therefore encourage us to think otherwise about the task of
the film historian and the constitution of cinematic historicity.
The first example, Dayak Village (Anon., 1914), does not lend it-
self to easy description. Archival visitors who manage to stumble
upon this five-­m inute film would be forgiven for missing it, or for-
getting it. The version that has been scanned and uploaded to EYE’s
digital database seemingly begins in medias res with an intertitle:
“Landingsplaats aan de rivier” (Landing on the river). But where
are we? On what river? A decorative frame indicates that the film be-
longs to the Koloniaal Instituut and Pathé Frères, but the title card
is missing, along with other identifying marks. Who made this film?
It could have been J. C. Lamster or Willy Mullens, the most well-­
known cameramen at the Koloniaal Instituut, but one cannot be
sure. 38 The archival metadata discloses the title. The film takes place
in Borneo, in one of several hundred possible riverine villages. None
of the major trade publications (in France, the Netherlands, or North
America) mentions the film, though some version made its way to
New Zealand, where the local press celebrated its “exclusive coloured
scenes.”39 The copy available at EYE, however, does not include any
color, suggesting that color portions of the original film are missing,
that some prints of the original film underwent a color process, or that
the film was remixed with colored images (perhaps from another vil-
lage or another film altogether) before making a limited debut abroad.
What remains of this film—­as much as what is missing—­invites
us to reflect on its status as artifact. Following a brief traveling shot
along the banks of the river, another intertitle appears: “Riviergezicht
met fraai wolkeneffect” (River view with beautiful cloud effect). The
next shot is indeed beautifully composed, with sky, land, and water
equally distributed into even horizontal layers (Figure 25). The image
 270 Ethnography Won’t Wait

FIGURE 25
Even horizontal layers of water, land, and sky in Dayak Village (Anon., 1914). EYE
Filmmuseum.

easily drifts away from the specificity of the Borneo village—­the in-
dexical “thereness” of a certain time and place—­toward the abstrac-
tion of its visual thirds: light gray, black, dark gray. The image is an
illusion produced by an illusion, an image of thirds produced by the
reflective surface of the river. The water in fact stretches halfway
across the frame, its edge obscured by underexposure. The mirror
image doubles both earth and sky, creating a thick layer of land in
the middle of clouds—­or, looking again, an image ripped in half. The
intertitular suggestion that we attend to the “cloud effect” is unex-
pectedly imprecise. There are multiple cloud effects in this image—­
effects of the clouds on the water and effects of their reflections as
 Ethnography Won’t Wait 271

the water ripples and distorts their shapes—­but there are also cloud
effects that play on the image, that emerge and dissipate across the
remainder of this short film. By some archival coincidence, almost all
of the images that follow this intertitle are clouded by celluloid decay.
The images (and intertitles) all but disappear behind a haze of grays
and whites. The liquidity of the river—­and the cloud effects that play
upon the water—­reemerge in bubbles and waves that dance upon the
surface of the film. Put another way: the ambiguity in the image (the
confusion between clouds and their reflections, between water, sky,
and land) is doubled, echoed by the ambiguities of the image, born
out of the very materiality of celluloid.
A second example from EYE, By Aeroplane to Pygmyland (1926)
resembles raw footage. The film includes very few identifying marks:
no title card, no names, no intertitles. Like Dayak Village, the film be-
gins in the midst of action. Villagers assemble on the banks of a body
of water, getting into and out of their boats. Just one minute later, the
film inexplicably cuts to an image of the eponymous plane, embla-
zoned with the words “Stirling New Guinea Expedition.” Between
April and December 1926, Matthew W. Stirling led a joint Dutch–­
American expedition to what was then known as Netherlands New
Guinea (the contemporary Indonesian provinces of Papua and West
Papua).40 The expedition included more than four hundred partici-
pants, with support from the Smithsonian Institute and the Dutch
Indies Committee for Scientific Research.41 The group returned with
a motley array of records: dozens of journals and maps, hundreds
of photographs, twenty thousand meters of silent film footage, and
hours of sound recordings. Multiple films were constructed out of the
footage, some with intertitles, others without.42 Stirling gave lectures
with the intertitle-­less footage. An intertitled English-­language ver-
sion screened on its own in New York and Chicago. The version of
the film held at EYE lasts just over an hour, suggesting that it was
edited or excerpted from the original footage in some way. Stirling
had hoped to construct a comprehensive account of the expedition
and a definitive sound track for his film. However, as Smithsonian
historian Paul Michael Taylor notes, his efforts were only ever “in-
complete and ephemeral.”43
The aircraft in Stirling’s film is a seaplane, and we watch as it skims
 272 Ethnography Won’t Wait

across the water and takes off. In the shots that follow, we encoun-
ter the earth from an aerial perspective. The lens of the camera peers
down directly from the plane, flattening the topography below into
abstract shapes and lines. The ragged texture of the land meets the
smoothness of the water (Figure 26). The images divide unevenly as
the plane follows the seam where these two formations meet. In one
shot, a dark mass of earth covers almost the entire frame; in the next,
water flinted with the creases of white waves dominates the image.
By Aeroplane to Pygmyland plays tricks on the viewer. There are
no signs of “pygmies” here, no landmarks, no shapes that give away
our distance from the terrain below or that indicate the distances
we might have covered by plane. We lose all sense of proportion, all
ability to measure (either human bodies or the topography of the
earth). These shots offer a macro perspective on the landscape of New
Guinea, but they could also be confused for microphotographic im-
ages, for a patch of skin, a cell, a speck of dust, or a bloom of algae.
In their openness and imprecision, the aerial images encourage our
eye to slip away from the specificity of land and water, to see other
surfaces and textures, other movements, and perhaps even other signs
of life.44 The materiality of film and the surface of a particular strip
of celluloid intervene between the “aeroplane” and “pygmyland.” The
water shimmers, at turns, with sunlight and decay. Scratches and
holes rhythmically appear and dissolve among the patches of trees
and grass. The image traces the movements of the camera (or the
plane), but it also seems to move independently, internally, vibrated
by the entropic energy of its physical substrate.
A third and final encounter: in the early 1930s, Dr. Paul Julien led
an expedition from Egypt to Tanzania. Julien had a PhD in chemis-
try; he was an amateur anthropologist and photographer, without any
institutional affiliations.45 He returned from his journey with notes
on equatorial tribes, photographs, and film footage. He edited the
footage, added Dutch intertitles, and called the film Tusschen Nijl en
Congo (Between the Nile and the Congo). During his lifetime, Julien
made thirty expeditions to Africa and more than 140 16mm films,
almost all of which were financed with personal funds.46 His films
never screened beyond a small lecture circuit in the Netherlands and,
to date, have never been restored.
Tusschen Nijl en Congo contains dozens of uncanny encounters
 Ethnography Won’t Wait 273

FIGURE 26
An aerial view from By Aeroplane to Pygmyland (Matthew W. Stirling, 1926). EYE
Filmmuseum.

between its virtual and material surfaces, between the surfaces that
it represents and the surface that it is. But one set of images, in par-
ticular, is worth describing at length. In the middle of the film, some-
where along the Nile, an intertitle explains that “Onheilspellend ver-
toonen zich aan den horizon roodbruine wolken: de sprinkhanen zijn
in aantocht” (Ominous reddish-­brown clouds appear on the horizon:
the locusts are coming). An extraordinary sequence of shots follows
this linguistic cue (Figures 27–­29). A thin sliver of land divides water
from sky. A cloud of gray undulates in the distance as other clouds
swirl more proximately on the surface of the film. The camera drifts
skyward to reveal hundreds, maybe thousands, of flickering shad-
ows. The locusts are too many, too small, and too fast to see in any
 274 Ethnography Won’t Wait

FIGURE 27
A cloud of locusts on the horizon in Tusschen Nijl en Congo (Paul Julien, circa 1930). EYE
Filmmuseum.

detail. They instead fill the frame with an enigmatic texture, a layer
that merges with the landscape and makes it move. But the locusts
also imitate the shimmering pockmarks of celluloid deterioration. We
cannot tell the difference between these marks, between the clouds of
condensation, insects, and decay, between the natural world and the
archival object on which this world appears.
One might be tempted to read these sequences, following Mitchell,
as the necessary effects of cinematic representation. After all, Mitchell’s
argument for reconceiving landscape as a verb takes the causal role of
cinema as its starting point: cinema makes landscape move and makes
us reconsider the concept of landscape. However, this reading simply
reinstalls the ontological category of cinema where the landowner or
the practice of landscape painting once was. Cinema acts unilaterally
and hegemonically on the land, forcing it into formation.
While cinema no doubt acts on these images—­the camera frames
the landscape, establishes relationships between objects, changes its
position, and reframes the landscape in turn—­the landscape meets
FIGURE 28
A texture of locusts in Tusschen Nijl en Congo (Paul Julien, circa 1930). EYE Filmmuseum.

FIGURE 29
Locusts fill the frame in Tusschen Nijl en Congo (Paul Julien, circa 1930). EYE Filmmuseum.
 276 Ethnography Won’t Wait

it with its own causal and representative powers. It moves in advance

of cinema, with cinema, and in surplus of cinematic motion. In their
cloud effects, mobile textures, and flickering swarms, these land-
scapes exemplify the broad spectrum of nonhuman causes and ener-
gies that Jane Bennett calls “vibrant matter.”
Bennett explores how “things”—­from plastics to minerals, stem
cells to spores—­act autonomously in this new order of material-
ism as well as how they combine to form “assemblages” with other
things and human subjects. Following Deleuze and Guattari, Bennett
understands these assemblages of things as “living, throbbing con-
federations” of contingently formed, ad hoc elements.47 For example,
Bennett finds assemblages in the tableau of a storm drain (where she
stumbles upon a plastic glove, oak pollen, a dead rat, a bottle cap, and
a stick of wood) and the complex circuitry of the electric power grid.
The latter example is particularly useful in rethinking the combina-
tory effects of landscape in ethnographic cinema. Like the power grid,
both landscape and cinema are clusters of human and nonhuman
forces: the social, legal, and linguistic power of human subjectivity
and some “very active and powerful nonhumans,” like wind, water,
and trees.48
To be clear, I am not suggesting that these assemblages of land-
scape somehow resist the imposition of cinema with the pure energies
of the natural world. Rather, I am arguing that these assemblages em-
phasize the antecedent impurity of landscape, their uneven topogra-
phies and dispersive powers. As Mitchell argues, landscape is always a
medium, a combination of human and nonhuman processes, cultural
and natural “things.” However, in these cinematic assemblages of
landscape—­in the ethnographic images I describe here—­the mate-
riality of film joins the shifting clusters of dirt, stone, water, sun, sky,
and insects that endlessly combine, disperse, and come back together
in ethnographic film. That is, there is no disentangling the landscape
from the specific strip of celluloid on which it has been printed.
Indeed, as I have described, one often cannot tell the difference be-
tween the profilmic events of landscape and the diverse signs of cel-
luloid “life” that appear and dissipate alongside them.
To return to the questions with which I began, What, then, do
these landscapes offer to cinema? What do they offer to our under-
standing of the medium? Just as the moving image radically recon-
 Ethnography Won’t Wait 277

figures the concept of landscape, landscape shatters the causal and

representative efficacy of cinema, refracting it into an assemblage of
material parts. Film itself appears in its most radical particularity: a
single strip of celluloid and the cumulative impressions that distin-
guish one copy from any other.
One cannot ground these images in the ontology of film. Here the
purported cause lacks the kind of stability, coherence, and coordina-
tion attributed (by Mitchell and so many others) to the category of
“cinema.” These ethnographic landscapes bear the contingent traces
of manifold things. They reveal a spectrum of encounters with film,
but they also make visible the interactive, causal materiality of film
itself, the ways in which each piece of celluloid decays, degrades, and
changes as it comes into contact with light, air, water, and dust (to
name just a few possibilities). To put this material and conceptual reci-
procity between landscape and film slightly differently, on the one
hand, these landscapes compel us to imagine film as a part of the envi-
ronment, to see the ways in which it is literally embedded in the repre-
sentation of landscape; on the other hand, they compel us to imagine
the environment that surrounds each individual film and to speculate
on the assemblage of human and nonhuman “agents” that interacts
(or has interacted) contingently, accidentally with every fragment of
celluloid.
There is an important historiographic corollary to these claims,
one that will return us to thinking about what the digital might
owe or offer to our understanding of film history. Just as landscape
painting generates a certain kind of history (linear, evolutionary,
imperialist), these cinematic landscapes generate their own histori-
cal formations. One might have noticed that the operation I describe
is one of imagination and speculation rather than empirical evidence.
We cannot see the historical sources that gather in these images, the
causal relations responsible for the surfaces we see. They are multi-
ple, simultaneous, and, in many cases, invisible from the start. These
films therefore refuse any historiographic regimes that draw on visual
knowledge; their historicity depends on what we cannot see and what
the image does not secure.
Arguments about the historicity of film have long been grounded
in claims about the materiality and indexicality of film. Like pho-
tography, film straddles at least two of the sign categories in Charles
 278 Ethnography Won’t Wait

Sanders Peirce’s tripartite semiotic system: the icon and the index.49
An icon resembles the object it represents; it shares “community in
some quality” with what it stands in for. 50 Icons include paintings,
drawings, diagrams, and mimetic gestures. An index, however, exhib-
its some kind of sensory feature that joins it to the object it references.
An index can include a knock at the door, footprints upon the earth,
and the movements of a weather vane. The index and its object are
joined by a physical connection; the object imposes itself upon the
index, makes itself felt; and the index, in turn, “presents” something
of the object to its addressees. Both photography and film are iconic
in that their images resemble the very things they represent. And both
are indices of their objects, formed by the interaction between light
waves and a photochemically treated material base (i.e., film).
The coincidence of iconic and indexical signs in photographic rep-
resentation ensures that its indices never merely guarantee the exis-
tence of something. Rather, as Dai Vaughan argues, “the visual idiom
of the photograph reassures us not only that it is a nonarbitrary trans-
formation of the thing represented but, more fundamentally, that an
object of which this is a representation must have existed in the first
place.”51 In other words, the simultaneity of these signs generates a
particular formation of historical knowledge, a guarantee not only
that something (i.e., anything) once was but rather that the very thing
it represents once existed. The iconic indexicality of the photochemi-
cal arts is essential to the ontological claims of both Roland Barthes
and André Bazin. The “ça” in Barthes’s canonical formulation—­“ça
a été” (this has been)—­importantly refers to what one can see, or,
perhaps more accurately, what Barthes can see in the photographic
image of his dead mother that he withholds from readers/viewers. 52
For his part, Bazin insists that the development of the plastic arts
(from painting to photography to film) “will be seen to be essentially
the story of resemblance, or, if you will, realism.”53 Like a fossil (or a
mummy), the photo-­fi lm image makes a physical and visual histori-
cal claim. It survives in the present as a material link to its object of
representation, but it also bears a visual resemblance to that historical
object. In other words, it shows us the historical source that its index
physically guarantees.
This conception of photo-­fi lm materiality secures its position
among a privileged cluster of historical artifacts that, in Philip Rosen’s
 Ethnography Won’t Wait 279

assessment, “achieved a kind of epistemological prestige in an era

of intensifying time consciousness.”54 It also erects a firm boundary
between the historicity of physical and digital images. The digital,
so the argument goes, ruptures the essential photochemical union
between index and icon. The digital annihilates the index, severing
the rigorous physical relationship with past objects and time that de-
fines photochemical representation. This fundamental reorganization
of moving image material (from celluloid to code, actual to virtual)
necessarily threatens the privileged historicity of the film artifact. It
leaves us with the iconic sign and the attendant risks of manipulation,
trickery, and deceit. Of course, new media theorists did little to quell
the anxieties of film scholars. Lev Manovich, for example, forecast
a new media future in which the all-­encompassing reach of iconic-
ity and animation would undermine whatever indexical vestiges re-
mained from the visual practices of the twentieth century. 55
The ethnographic landscapes that I circulate in this chapter muddle
the historico-­ontological boundary between physical and digital im-
ages. They sever icon from index well before the supposed lawless-
ness of digitality and, in turn, generate an altogether different model
of moving image materiality and historicity. In these images, iconic
and indexical signs operate contingently, autonomously, and errati-
cally. They occasionally coincide, producing glimpses of the “real-
ness” and “thereness” of a historical landscape. And they come apart,
as in the images when sky, land, and water abstract into visual layers
in Dayak Village or when the aerial view in By Aeroplane to Pygmyland
becomes a microscopic exploration of any-­surface-­whatever. In these
instances, what is “there” in the image no longer corresponds to what
was there at the moment of recording. Like the digital-­to-­come (or
any iteration of the avant-­garde, for that matter), these iconic images
meander into and away from their indexical moorings.
These films introduce another, more important order of contin-
gency. The scratches, tears, bubbles, decay, and decomposition that
settle on their surfaces mimic the appearance of the landscapes, their
movements and textures. There is, then, a kind of symbiotic encoun-
ter between indices and icons, between the landscape of the film it-
self and the landscape it represents. However, the marks made upon
the surface of the film are not the necessary indices of the landscapes
we see, nor do they resemble the historical objects or events of which
 280 Ethnography Won’t Wait

they are evidence. That is to say, these indices belong to a different

category of photochemical index, one that nevertheless remains in-
extricably bound to the materiality of film and materially bound to
a historical source that we cannot see. In this case, what “matters”
is the inherent instability and impressionability of the celluloid
rather than its encounter with camera and light. Mary Ann Doane
(following Peirce) describes indices without iconic counterparts as
“hollowed-­out” signs:56
They are limited to the assurance of an existence; they provide
no insight into the nature of their objects; they have no cogni-
tive value, but simply indicate that something is “there.” Hence
the “real” referenced by the index is not the “real” of realism,
which purports to give the spectator knowledge of the world.
The index is reduced to its own singularity; it appears as brute
and opaque fact, wedded to contingency—­pure indication,
pure assurance of existence. 57
In the absence of the icon, Doane argues, the index reasserts the cen-
trality of its tactile operations. The index is the trace of touch, of hav-
ing been touched. As Doane describes, it is a fingerprint, a record of
physical contact, and an impression left behind by a historical source.
The un-­iconic index may fail to show its source, but it is a guarantee of
that source having existed and, reframed in this way, of its ability to
touch with fingers, to feel and be felt, and to leave fingerprints behind.
It is, in other words, a human thing.
Doane’s implicit anthropocentrism is made more explicit in her
reflections on what we lose in losing film. The shift from film to new
media, she argues, is a transition from the “digits” of human hands
to the digitality of code, from the reassuring materiality of the “real”
world to the dematerialized environment of mathematics: “what is
elided here is the finger’s preeminent status as the organ of touch, of
contact, of sensation, of connection with the concrete.”58 Of course,
Doane is not alone in conflating digital practices with a loss of “real”
human things, especially fingers that point and touch. But if, as Doane
suggests, the un-­iconic index does not show us its source, how can we
possibly know what we are missing (or eliding)? Why should we as-
sume, for example, that historical sources always have fingers, or that
the un-­iconic index assures us of just one existence rather than many?
 Ethnography Won’t Wait 281

In my view, there is no more rigorous thinker of cinematic indexi-

cality, temporality, or historicity than Doane. However, a curious
rift emerges between the index she describes (hollow, contingent,
opaque) and the historical sources she attaches to them. Indeed,
Doane subtly restricts the spectrum of film-­h istorical agency to hu-
mans. Put another way, she claims to know precisely what the un-­
iconic index ensures that we cannot know: the sources of these signs
inscribed upon the materiality of film.
We might read the scratches and tears that skim the surface of
the ethnographic landscapes as signs of a human encounter. Perhaps
someone touched the film, projected it, or intervened in the archive.
Conceived as the signs of human touch, we might also read these in-
dices as a kind of ethnographic unconscious, as figurative iterations
of the impulse to encounter the human body, get close, and make
contact: the un-­iconic counterpart to what we see, for example, in
Promio’s cinématographes.59 After all, human subjects are absent from
so many of these films. Perhaps they haunt the materiality of celluloid.
Or perhaps they remain missing. The indices that accumulate in
these images—­cloud effects, chemical stains, entomological blurs—­
exceed the explanatory power of human touch and the stability of
human agency. They are indeed disconnected from the historical
causes of which they are signs: erratic, singular, opaque.
These indices refuse the epistemologies (i.e., objectivism, positiv-
ism, empiricism) that join both ethnographic and film-­historiographic
practices together. We have no way of knowing where, when, how, by
whom, or by what they were formed. In this way, however, these in-
dices allow us—­or, depending on your point of view, require us—­to
imagine a spectrum of film-­historical sources as irregular and disor-
dered as they are themselves. It is, then, not the human figure absented
from the image that hints at what we might be missing but the land-
scapes we actually see. They reiterate over and again the composite as-
semblage of diverse energies and agencies that we have excluded from
our historiographies, the contingent forces of light and air, nitrate and
cellulose, human and nonhuman processes, the manifold “things” that
potentially, but never with any certainty, come into contact with film.
In their hyperbole and multiplicity, the indices that gather within
and upon the landscapes of ethnographic cinema also press an essen-
tial metahistorical question: What is the task of the film historian?
 282 Ethnography Won’t Wait

Should we separate the iconic from the un-­iconic signs? The intended
from the accidental? The “real” or “original” document from the ef-
fects that gather upon one or many archival copies? Is one category
more meaning bearing than another? No matter our historiographic
intuitions or methodological commitments, the task of distinguish-
ing between these signs is ultimately an impossible one. We cannot
organize them into a hierarchy of historical meaning. This is not only
because of the sheer volume of signs scattered across these images
but also and more importantly because the un-­iconic indices prevent
us from doing so. As I have outlined, they are shape shifters: wander-
ing, spectral, simulacral. They interact with the other historically
meaning-­bearing signs, imitate them, and confuse the boundary
between them. Indeed, we often have no way of knowing with any
certainty which of these indices are photographic and which are im-
pressed upon the surface of the celluloid, which belong to the pro-
filmic landscape and which emanate from the archival one.
These un-­iconic indices bind the materiality of celluloid to its
historicity. As Usai claims, there is “no such thing as film history”
without these inscriptions upon the physical substrate of cinema. 60
However, the indexical play that we encounter in the material sur-
faces of cinema ensure that any historical claims we make, any signs
we read as historically meaning bearing, will always be contingently
determined. In short, history is not discovered in the object but con-
ferred, constructed, made out of the interactive encounter between
historian and manifold signs. Indeed, the materiality of cinema dis-
closes that this “thing” called history is an imaginative, speculative,
and virtual process, long before the supposed losses of digitality begin
to accumulate.

Bits & Pieces of History

Thus far, I have been examining the historicity of ethnographic film
and, in particular, how its representation of landscape reorganizes our
understanding of cinematic indices, the spectrum of film-­h istorical
causation, and the historiographic processes that celluloid requires.
I would like to conclude by considering a few ways in which the EYE
Filmmuseum contributes to the historicity of its ethnographic docu-
ments, how it shapes (and reshapes) these images, and how it posi-
 Ethnography Won’t Wait 283

tions the ethnographic image at the center of a generative, creative,

and interactive approach to film artifacts and historical knowledge.
Before turning to these archival projects, it is worth pausing to
note the peculiarities of the EYE archive.61 When EYE (née Nether-
lands Filmmuseum) was founded in 1946, Dutch film production
(along with many of its European counterparts) had just emerged
from the traumas and film-­industrial stasis of World War II. Even be-
fore the war, however, the Netherlands’ contributions to global film
circulation were relatively modest, with just a few native companies,
including Amsterdam Film Cie, Filmfabriek F. A. Nöggerath, Film-
fabriek Hollandia, and the moving image arm of the Dutch Koloniaal
Instituut.62 The archive therefore expanded its scope and flexibly re-
defined the boundaries of Dutch national cinema to include not just
films that were made in the Netherlands but any film that was circu-
lated or screened in the country. This is a critical opening gesture.
From its inception, EYE playfully remaps the relations of global cine-
matic power, shelving major works of the twentieth century alongside
the minor titles of its domestic film industry.
This kind of artifactual play and experimentation continues to
inflect the archive throughout the twentieth century. Head Curator
Giovanna Fossati divides the history of the archive into roughly three
phases: its first thirty years, under the direction of Jan de Vaal, dur-
ing which time the archive developed its collection and received sev-
eral important donations; the 1980s–­90s, under the direction of Eric
de Kuyper and Peter Delpeut, when the archive began experiment-
ing with diverse exhibition practices and investing in the preserva-
tion of marginalized artifacts (e.g., orphan films, nonfiction film from
the 1910s, and color silent film, to name just a few); and finally, the
last two decades, as EYE has embraced ambitious digitization proj-
ects like Images for the Future.63 For her part, Fossati draws on Jean
Baudry’s concept of the dispositif to describe the archive’s approach to
its artifacts. Recast in the archival context, a dispositif is any situation
in which film meets its viewer or user. Fossati argues that EYE turns
away from the “film as original” model of historicity to conceptualize
the film artifact as a dynamic and ongoing accumulation of dispositifs.
In this way, “a silent film viewed on an iPod should not be seen as an
historical falsification, but rather as one of the many dispositifs that
can take shape.”64 Fossati offers a radical intervention in historical
 284 Ethnography Won’t Wait

thinking, especially when one considers her role in one of the most
important archival institutions in the world.
The concept of the dispositif, however, reconceives the film artifact
through an additive approach to exhibition and spectatorship. Film
is always more (experiences, exhibitions, encounters) than its original
object and conditions of exhibition; it exceeds our expectations and
is itself excessive. In other words, Fossati adds to the artifact without
threatening what we know (or might hope to know) of the original.
She envisions a kind of surplus of historical knowledge, grounded in
the ongoing encounters with the image that institutions like EYE
make possible.
I understand EYE’s archival operations in a different way, especially
as they are brought to bear in the reassemblage and re-­presentation of
ethnographic cinema. While the archive may “add” to its objects—­by
way of new exhibitions, platforms, or digital dispositifs—­these addi-
tions do not simply contribute to an infinite and seamless expansion
of film history, each event isolated from the others and intrinsically
meaning bearing. Instead, EYE produces a series of interactive en-
counters, where “interactive” describes not only the relationship be-
tween users or viewers and a single cinematic artifact but also, and
more interestingly, an exchange between artifacts, between the past
of film history, the present of its production, and a speculative future
of archival objects. Like the interactive encounter between landscape
and celluloid, this exchange generates a metahistorical surplus. It
does not add to film history but rather contributes to how we under-
stand the historicity of moving image artifacts and, in turn, the forma-
tion of film history.
Under the direction of Eric de Kuyper, Peter Delpeut, and Mark-­
Paul Meyer, EYE began gathering fragments from their vast col-
lection of unidentified film and compiling them into reels of Bits &
Pieces during the late 1980s. Each compilation reel consists of ten to
fifteen fragments, or roughly three hundred meters of film. The cura-
tors of the collection assign each fragment a number and a few key-
words in the database. The number appears in the form of a title card
before each fragment begins to play. Some of the reels seem a haphaz-
ard collection of unrelated images, while others have a subtle struc-
ture or thematic coherence. Bits & Pieces, no. 198–­205, for example,
consists entirely of “animals,” “dancing,” and “animals dancing.” Indi-
 Ethnography Won’t Wait 285

vidual fragments can be found in the archive by searching its database

for a specific number or relevant keyword. The fragments have no
other identifying marks (save the occasional intertitle), and viewers
have no way of tracing the fragment to its original artifact. In most
cases, the artifacts no longer exist, at least not in the EYE archive. The
fragment reels are all that remain, and even these circulate to contem-
porary viewers as digital data. Indeed, the Bits & Pieces were among
the very first collections that EYE digitized in its entirety.
To date, the Bits & Pieces collection comprises more than sixty
reels. Of those sixty-­odd reels (and counting), dozens of them con-
tain one or more fragments of ethnographic cinema, like Bits &
Pieces, no. 244–­6 4, which includes a scene of handbag artisans at
work in an atelier; a steamship pounding its way through rough wa-
ters; blue-­toned footage of a whale hunt; a stenciled fragment of his-
torical fiction; the rushing waters of Niagara Falls; an Asian family’s
meal on the deck of a boat; scenes of a street market somewhere in
the world and young boys eating fistfuls of food; panning shots along
an unidentified coastline; spectacular microcinematographic views
of a bee rubbing its forelegs together and collecting nectar from a
flower; a street in Cairo (identified by an intertitle), a veiled woman
drinking, and a bustling Egyptian market; the detailed engravings
on the surface of the Kom Ombo temple and panning shots of other
Egyptian ruins; and, at last, a sea urchin as it glides along the bottom
of an aquarium. The keywords attached to this film and its fragments
in the database include “ruins,” “Cairo,” “hunt,” “Ombo,” “style,”
“Niagara,” “Cornwall,” “Great Britain,” “archaeology,” “temples,” “fish-
ing,” “Egypt,” “industry,” “crafts,” “women’s work,” “nature,” “funerals,”
and “storms.” Viewers might turn to the terms to resolve some of the
puzzles that the images introduce. Perhaps those beaches belong to
the coasts of Cornwall. But the keywords do not resolve all of the
visual mysteries, nor do they unify the images into a coherent the-
matic entity.
This approach to archival artifacts similarly structures EYE’s Scene
Machine, an interactive installation (available in both Dutch and
English) developed by Dima Stefanova and David Lammers, and pro-
grammed by Jim de Beer and Marcus Besjes, as part of the Images for
the Future digitization project.65 The Scene Machine invites users to ex-
plore film fragments by choosing from a set of predetermined themes.
 286 Ethnography Won’t Wait

The fragments come from the archive’s collection of early Dutch

cinema, and as a result, ethnographic images from the Koloniaal
Instituut’s catalog form a large portion of the available scenes.
Once viewers make their thematic selection, a black screen stretches
across the page. Film fragments appear, transparently, stacked one
upon the other before they spread out side by side. Each one appears
from the right and slides across to the left, stretching to its complete
width at some point along the way, before collapsing into a nar-
row sliver and slipping out of view. As the fragments move within
the screening space, appearing and disappearing, the edges of their
frames create rigid vertical lines, visible points of contact and colli-
sion (Figure 30). But these edges also occasionally give way as the
moving images pass by, over, underneath one another. No more than
four fragments ever appear at once. Some will linger and begin again.
Others will never reach their “conclusion” before they slip out of view.
Once a fragment disappears, another moves in to take its place.
Viewers can intervene in the display of fragments by using a small
keyword menu at the bottom of each frame. The menu allows users
to remove a fragment from the stream or replace it by selecting an-
other keyword from more than three hundred terms like “authority,”
“dance,” “agriculture,” “imam,” and “goodbye.” The combinations eas-
ily drift toward the absurd and subversive. In the Scene Machine, the
concrete (“horses,” “snow,” “airplane”) mixes with the abstract (“sal-
vation,” “unmasking,” “emotion”), significant historical events (“colo-
nization”) meet their minor counterparts (“violence,” “despair”), and
the seeming-­same collide with wild visual non sequiturs.
Like Bits & Pieces, the Scene Machine stages an encounter between
language and image. As film fragments spill across the screen, they
inevitably overwhelm the demonstrative function that they are meant
to serve. Whatever category they carry fails to capture the other
nouns and verbs that circulate in these images as well as the aspects of
the film fragments that exceed language: the rips, gaps, tears, colors,
and textures of celluloid, to name just a few.
There are, of course, important differences between Bits & Pieces
and the Scene Machine. The former relies on traditional modes of
cinematic spectatorship (i.e., one thing after another), while the lat-
ter experiments with user-­oriented paradigms of interactivity and
digital simultaneity (i.e., several things all at once). In their different
 Ethnography Won’t Wait 287

FIGURE 30
A sample of scenes from the EYE Film Institute’s Scene Machine. EYE Filmmuseum.

approaches to re-­presenting physical film fragments, however, both

encourage viewers to engage in a comparative mode of visual encoun-
ter. That is, both mimic a form of archival spectatorship, one that
invites viewers to notice the differences between early film shapes,
stocks, tones, and tints; the many un-­iconic indices that accumulate
in the archives; and the infrastructure of the archive itself, including
the numbers and words that archivists use to try to order it all. These
projects carry with them abundant signs of celluloid as they digitally
re-­present the fragments of early film.
As we have seen, however, these impressions do not return us to a
historical origin, nor do they ensure that “real” film somehow resists
its digital reinscription. Rather, these projects keep the interaction
between media and material traces in constant, simultaneous play.
In the many reels of Bits & Pieces, for example, the extraordinary
snatches of unrestored celluloid collide with the pixellation and blurs
of digital expression, the clumsy interface of the archive’s new media
player, and the transparent watermark that interminably reminds us
of EYE’s proprietary claim and the immateriality of the digital file.
In its representation of early film fragments, side by side, the Scene
Machine recalls the photographic substrate of film. As the fragments
slide past one another, crossing and combining their images, here,
too, the digital emphasizes the transparency and fragility of celluloid.
 288 Ethnography Won’t Wait

Nearly everywhere on the Scene Machine, the digital reminds us of the

physical “thingness” of film. It is, precisely, the supposed flaws and
failures of digitality—­the distracting noise, the immaterial nothing-
ness, the cumulative “losses” of code—­that make visible the equiva-
lent failures and artifactual features of film. As with the symbiotic op-
erations of ethnographic landscape, we cannot extricate the one from
the other.66
Both of these projects use ethnographic cinema as a kind of raw
visual material. As a result, they produce—­accidentally, contingently—­
the kind of critical minorism that I stage in my first chapter between
the Lumières and their excursive views, between the Archives de la
Planète and the whole of early cinema. In Bits & Pieces and the Scene
Machine, fragments of forgotten (or never-­k nown) films float forward,
entering new routes of circulation, coming into contact with dis-
similar scenes: scraps of melodrama, animation, advertising, nonfic-
tion newsreels. The list goes on. In the context of the EYE archive,
it is compelling to read these mixtures as forms of historical disclo-
sure. They reveal the roots of colonial violence and exploitation that
underpin nearly every scene of early twentieth-­century Dutch domes-
tic life and labor. However, what is remarkable for anyone who has
sifted through the archives of ethnographic cinema, or the films that
wind their way through this book, are the uncanny resemblances that
emerge between these ethnographic remixes and their “originals.”
In the random assemblage of a family eating, bodies dancing, and
animals dying, one reencounters the contingent mixtures of ethno-
graphic practice that have defined it all along.
In these projects, ethnographic cinema serves another critical func-
tion. Like any other film artifacts, these ones “won’t wait.” But no one
is really advocating for their rescue or restoration (including me). As
the misshapen remnants of colonial and anthropological practice,
ethnographic cinema has been left to decay and degrade in the ar-
chives. These images resurface precisely because of their marginality,
because they are what remains: fragmented, anonymous, and incom-
plete. Few will mind if these scraps are “lost” to the supposed im­
materialities of archival experimentation and digitization.
As I argue, however, both Bits & Pieces and the Scene Machine
make the material conditions of ethnographic film plain, perhaps
even more so than when the degrading celluloid of ethnographic cin-
 Ethnography Won’t Wait 289

ema communes with the empty landscapes it represents. Moreover,

all of the formations I have discussed here—­landscape, reel of scraps,
digital “machine”—­emphasize the historicity of film material and, in
turn, the virtual, imaginative operations of film historiography. But
EYE’s archival projects seem to make the point more directly. This
clarity owes to the many ways in which the archive is itself implicated
in this process of making visible (through title cards, a database of
keywords, and a form of comparative, artifactual spectatorship).
The archive materializes alongside the materialities of ethnographic
film. It confesses itself, the contingent role it plays in disintegrating
the image and resurrecting it, in obscuring ethnographic fragments
from view and refashioning them into a strange and decentered his-
tory of Dutch cinema, where crumbling scenes of colonial life over-
whelm any and all forms of narrative fiction. The risk of these proj-
ects, if there is one to be named, is not that they annihilate physical
objects and obscure the contours of our “real” film histories but
rather that they reveal the accidents and imperfections intrinsic to the
very matter of film artifacts as they model the speculative, generative,
and creative processes required of any film historiography. Each re­
assemblage counters the conception of “real” film histories or “right”
ones with manifold and imaginative alternatives. It is true that early
ethnographic cinema won’t wait—­and no one is waiting for it. But it
nevertheless arrives to reorganize film-­h istorical thought.
This page intentionally left blank
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book benefited from numerous acts of support and encourage-

ment. At the University of Aberdeen, I found a group of colleagues,
readers, and friends who challenged my thinking on this project and
supported me in the process of writing it. I am especially grateful to
Timothy Baker, Silvia Casini, Chris Heppell, Áine Larkin, Nikolaj
Lübecker, Janet Stewart, Pete Stollery, Simon Ward, and Ross Whyte,
all of whom made life in the northeast of Scotland much warmer.
Paul Flaig generously read the manuscript in its final stages. His com-
ments encouraged me to reach the finish line. My deep thanks also
to Cairns Craig, who advocated for the humanities and protected my
sabbatical leave.
I owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to the film studies and
comparative literature communities at Cornell University, where this
project began. I was encouraged to experiment, to think both widely
and deeply, to linger on details, and to take my time. The rare kind of
education I received crystallized for me only at a distance. I will never
be able to repay the many gifts of knowledge, time, insight, care, and
mentorship given by the faculty members who shaped this project in
its first stages and who continue to offer their support. Amy Villarejo
read multiple iterations of my early drafts with a precision and clarity
that never failed to sharpen the dull edges of my thinking and writ-
ing. Sabine Haenni introduced me to film studies and the field of
early cinema, influencing this project in more ways than I can name.
I thank her for reading everything I sent her way, for her brilliant and
rigorous questions, and for her boundless patience. She is a model of
the kind of teacher and scholar I strive to be. I also owe my sincere
291
 292 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

thanks to Timothy Murray, who taught me to move across disciplines

and media and who encouraged me to pursue new paths through the
moving image. I am so very grateful for his support and guidance.
Generous grants from the British Academy, the Carnegie Trust,
the Cornell Institute for European Studies, and the Cornell Society
for the Humanities allowed me to conduct archival research at vari-
ous stages of the book’s development. I am grateful to the archivists
and administrators of the American Museum of Natural History, the
Human Studies Film Archive, the Centre national du cinéma et de
l’image animée, the Archives françaises du film, the Cinémathèque
française, the British Film Institute, the Musée Albert-Kahn, and
the EYE Filmmuseum. I owe special thanks to Hermine Cognie,
Serge Fouchard, Mark Katzman, and Nico de Klerk for their help in
locating images and films. Leenke Ripmeester provided invaluable
help during the final stages of research and image reproduction. I re-
ceived generous responses to this research at the Society for Cinema
and Media Studies conference, the Screen Studies conference, the
European Network for Cinema and Media Studies conference, and
the Domitor conference, as well as at the University of Glasgow, the
University of Sussex, and the University of St. Andrews.
John David Rhodes has been a tremendous friend, mentor, and
advocate since my early days in Aberdeen. I thank him for engaging
with my work and treating me as his peer, well before I had earned it.
Laura McMahon’s comments were crucial in the revision process, as
were our many conversations at the Machar. I am profoundly thank-
ful for her friendship. Lisa Patti has been supportive and generous at
so many critical junctures, including my very first week in upstate
New York. I hope our (almost) annual evening of good food and con-
versation continues for many years to come. Mark Lynn Anderson
and Alice Maurice read the manuscript with great care and offered
incisive comments, suggestions, and advice. The arguments I make
here are stronger for it. I also thank Danielle Kasprzak, my editor at
the University of Minnesota Press, for her enthusiasm, persistence,
and guidance.
I finished this book after beginning a new life in a new place. I
thank the community of Lafayette College for welcoming me so
warmly and supporting my research. I owe special thanks to Lafayette
Film and Media Studies and, in particular, to my colleagues William
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 293

Bissell, Beth Corzo-Duchardt, Alessandro Giovannelli, Adam MacHose,

Cindy Notaroberto, Alix Ohlin, Nandini Sikand, and Andy Smith.
I could not have hoped for a more collaborative place to teach and
work. I also thank Lindsay Ceballos, Mary Jo Lodge, Owen McLeod,
Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, Julia Nicodemus, Stephen Rodrick, Suzanne
Westfall, and Lijuan Xu for making my transition easier—­and abso-
lutely worthwhile.
I am thankful to my students, from the University of Aberdeen
to Lafayette College, who helped clarify my thinking on minor film
histories as we wound our way through them together. What I began
writing in the isolation of graduate school was strengthened by our
collective work in the classroom.
My parents, Kathy Finkbeiner and Stuart Groo, encouraged me to
wander and supported me at every turn. I appreciate their patience,
acceptance, and all the differences that still bind us together. I know
my mother would have gotten here first had she only had the kind of
mother I had. I am deeply grateful to Sandra Jezzi, Arrigo Jezzi, Aaron
Jezzi, Amber Hares, and Matthew Jezzi for the myriad acts of love
and kindness they have performed all along the way. I thank Lauren
Chianese and Tara Schweizer for their many years of friendship, con-
versation, and solidarity.
None of this would have been possible without Nathaniel, Alma,
and Nicola. You are the great loves of my life and sources of im­
measurable joy. I thank Nathaniel for reading every word more than
once and insisting on the strengths of the work whenever I was in
doubt. Alma made my writing slower but my life more full of wild and
wonder. Thank you for taking my hand on so many adventures. And
my little Nicolino, you arrived at the end and right on time. I can’t
wait to see how you see things.
I know myself extraordinarily lucky to have had the opportunity
to learn, research, and write as I have. In this book, I have done my
best to fulfill whatever promise others saw in me or in this work;
whatever failures remain are entirely my own.
This page intentionally left blank
NOTES

Introduction
1. Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic
Spectacle (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996); Catherine Russell, Ex-
perimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1999), 142.
2. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-
Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
3. Rony, Third Eye, 8.
4. Jean-­François Lyotard, “Acinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed.
Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 349, 351.
5. Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press,
2004), 19.
6. I take this phrase from Gilles Deleuze. See Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-­
Image, trans. Robert Galeta (1985; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1989), 126–­55.
7. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David
Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 3:143.
8. Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-­of-­
the-­Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), xi.
9. Griffiths, xxix.
10. For key texts in nineteenth-­century realist and objectivist historiogra-
phy, see Wilhelm von Humboldt, “On the Historians Task” (1821), History and
Theory 6, no. 1 (1967): 57–­71; Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in
England (1857; repr., New York: Kessinger, 2006); Jules Michelet, History of
France, trans. G. H. Smith (New York: D. Appleton, 1847); Leopold von Ranke,
Theory and Practice of History, ed. George Iggers (1973; repr., New York: Rout-
ledge, 2010).
11. See Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 86–­125.
12. The 1978 conference was co-­organized by David Francis and Eileen
Bowser. The conference proceedings were published in 1982; see Roger Holman,

295
 296 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

ed., Cinema 1900–­1906: An Analytical Study by the National Film Archive (Lon-
don) and the International Federation of Film Archives (Brussels: FIAF, 1982).
13. Richard Abel, The Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (New York: Routledge,
2005), xxx.
14. For examples of this introductory maneuver, see Thomas Elsaesser, Early
Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990); Richard
Abel, Silent Film (London: Athlone Press, 1996); Paolo Cherchi Usai, Silent Cin-
ema: An Introduction (2000; repr., London: British Film Institute, 2010); Simon
Popple and Joe Kember, Early Cinema: From Factory Gate to Dream Factory (Lon-
don: Wallflower Press, 2004); André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago
Hidalgo, eds., A Companion to Early Cinema (Oxford: John Wiley, 2012).
15. For compelling contemporary approaches to film preservation that resist
the recuperative model, see Caroline Frick, Saving Cinema: The Politics of Pres-
ervation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Giovanna Fossati, From
Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam: University of
Amsterdam Press, 2014).
16. See Annette Kuhn and Jackie Stacey, eds., Screen Histories (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1998), 3–­4.
17. J. Douglas Gomery, “Writing the History of the American Film Industry:
Warner Bros and Sound,” Screen 17, no. 1 (1976): 40–­53.
18. See Edward Buscombe, “Notes on Columbia Pictures Corporation,” Screen
16, no. 3 (1975): 65–­82.
19. Edward Buscombe et al., “Why We Have Resigned from the Board of
Screen,” Screen 17, no. 2 (1976): 106–­9.
20. Philip Rosen, “Screen and 1970s Film Theory,” in Inventing Film Studies,
ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
2008), 264. Kuhn and Stacey offer a slightly different view of the journal’s his-
torical turn, noting that the effects of new historicism were ultimately slow to
arrive. See Kuhn and Stacey, Screen Histories, 3.
21. Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice
(1985; repr., New York: McGraw-­H ill, 1993); Barry Salt, Film Style and Technol-
ogy: History and Analysis (London: Starword Press, 1983).
22. In the term new film history, Nicholas Baer also detects the influence of
James Harvey Robinson’s The New History (1912) as well as the French and
American new histories/nouvelles histoires of the 1960s and 1970s. See Baer,
“Historical Turns: On Caligari, Kracauer, and New Film History,” in Film and
History: Producing and Experiencing History in Moving Images and Sound, 153–­54
(Berlin: Bertz and Fischer, 2015).
23. Thomas Elsaesser, “The New Film History,” Sight and Sound 55, no. 4
(1986): 246–­51. See also Steven Neale’s Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound,
and Colour (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), and Elisabeth Weis
and John Belton’s anthology Film Sound: Theory and Practice (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1985).
24. Elsaesser, “New Film History,” 251.
 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 297

25. Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London:
British Film Institute, 1990).
26. In the debate between David Bordwell and Charlie Keil (on one side)
and Tom Gunning and Ben Singer (on the other) about what would come to
be called the “modernity thesis” (by Keil), the intrinsic value of archival re-
search and empirical evidence is where both parties find shared ground. See
Tom Gunning, “Modernity and Cinema: A Culture of Shocks and Flows,” in
Cinema and Modernity, ed. Murray Pomerance (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 2006), esp. 303, 307.
27. See Thomas Elsaesser, “The New Film History as Media Archaeology,”
Cinémas 14, no. 2–­3 (2004): 75–­117; Elsaesser, “Early Film History and Multi-­
media: An Archaeology of Possible Futures?,” in New Media, Old Media: A His-
tory and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, 13–­2 6
(New York: Routledge, 2006); and Elsaesser, “Is Nothing New? Turn-­of-­t he-­
Century Epistemes in Film History,” in Gaudreault et al., A Companion to Early
Cinema, 587–­6 09.
28. Elsaesser, “New Film History,” 246.
29. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 7.
30. For key writing on Ranke, see Peter Gay, “Ranke: The Respectful Critic,”
in Style in History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 57–­94; Georg Iggers, “The
Image of Ranke in American and German Historical Thought,” History and Theory
2, no. 1 (1962): 17–­4 0; Leonard Krieger, “Element of Early Historicism: Experi-
ence, Theory, and History in Ranke,” History and Theory 14, no. 4 (1975): 1–­14;
and Hayden White, “Ranke: Historical Realism as Comedy,” in Metahistory,
163–­90. For further discussion of the influence of nineteenth-­century German
historiography in new film history, see Baer, “Historical Turns,” 153–­56.
31. Iggers, History and Theory, 3.
32. White, Metahistory, 171, emphasis original.
33. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,”
in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 91. For an overview of Droysen’s
critique of Ranke, see Michael J. Maclean, “Johann Gustav Droysen and the
Development of Historical Hermeneutics,” History and Theory 21, no. 3 (1982):
347–­65; see also Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, trans. Sylvia
Sprigge (1938; repr., London: George Allen and Unwin, 1941).
34. David Bordwell, “Historical Poetics of Cinema,” in The Cinematic Text:
Methods and Approaches, ed. Barton Palmer (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 371.
35. Bordwell, 371.
36. Bordwell, 379, 381.
37. Bordwell returns to the task of defending the field against “Grand Theory”
in Post-­Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).
38. Bordwell, “Historical Poetics,” 370.
 298 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

39. Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema
as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 63. See also
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Routledge, 1985).
40. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett,
1987); see, e.g., I.11:1450b–­51a.
41. Cited in Charlie Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 3. In this passage, I have selected the most
likely referent for Wölfflin’s ambiguous pronoun. In the translation Keil cites,
“them” could refer to the historical periods established by the distinctions fruit-
fully made or to the fruitful distinctions themselves. The latter point seems one
not likely to have been made by Wölfflin. See Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art
History, trans. M. D. Hottinger (1932; repr., Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1950), 14.
42. Barbara Klinger, “Film History Terminable and Interminable: Recover-
ing the Past in Reception Studies,” Screen 38, no. 2 (1997): 107–­28.
43. Klinger, 128.
44. Paula Amad explores these connections in Counter-­A rchive: Film, the
Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 2010), 67–­70.
45. For writing on empiricism, see Bruce Aune, Rationalism, Empiricism,
and Pragmatism: An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1970); Robert
Matthews, “Where Do Our Ideas Come From? Descartes vs Locke,” in Innate
Ideas, ed. Stephen Stich, 71–­88 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975);
W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View,
20–­4 6 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951).
46. For writing on rationalism, see Deborah Boyle, Descartes on Innate Ideas
(London: Continuum, 2011); Albert Casullo, Essays on A Priori Knowledge and
Justification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); John Cottingham, Ratio-
nalism (London: Paladin Books, 1984); Stephen Stich, Innate Ideas (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1975).
47. Allen and Gomery, Film History, 21.
48. Robert C. Allen, “Relocating American Film History: The ‘Problem’ of
the Empirical,” Cultural Studies 20, no. 1 (2006): 49.
49. David Bordwell, “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of
Grand Theory,” in Bordwell and Carroll, Post-­Theory, 34n63, emphasis original.
50. Noël Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment,” in
Bordwell and Carroll, Post-­Theory, 67, emphasis original.
51. Stacey and Kuhn, Screen Histories, 4.
52. See Jean-­François Lyotard, “Can Thought Go on Without a Body?,” in The
Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby,
8–­23 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988).
53. For examples of this objection, see Paul M. Churchland and Clifford A.
Hooker, Images of Science: Essays on Realism and Empiricism (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1985); Paul Teller, “Whither Constructive Empiricism?,”
Philosophical Studies 106 (2001): 123–­50.
 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 299

54. See, e.g., Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Ian Bogost, Alien Phenome-
nology; or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2012); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009).
55. See Noël Burch, “Porter, or Ambivalence,” Screen 19, no. 4 (1978): 91–­106;
Jane Gaines, “Of Cabbages and Authors,” in A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema,
ed. Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra, 88–­118 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2002); Jean-­L ouis Baudry, L’Effect cinéma (Paris: Albatros, 1978); Baudry,
“Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Williams,
Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 286–­98; Fossati, From Grain to Pixel.
56. Geoffrey Nowell-­Smith, “On History and the Cinema,” Screen 31, no. 2
(1990): 160–­71.
57. Nowell-­Smith, 170.
58. Nowell-­Smith.
59. Tom Gunning, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space,” in Film before
Griffith, ed. John Fell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 355.
60. For a recent discussion of twenty-­fi rst-­century attractions, see Wanda
Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: University of
Amsterdam Press, 2006). Paul Flaig and I take the “pseudomorphic” quality of
attractions as a starting point for understanding the encounters between con-
temporary media and silent-­era cinema. See Flaig and Groo, eds., introduction
to New Silent Cinema (New York: AFI/Routledge, 2015), 6–­7.
61. Miriam Hansen, “Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?,” New Ger-
man Critique 29 (Spring/Summer 1983): 147–­8 4. See also Miriam Hansen, Babel
and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1994), and Hansen’s posthumously published excavation of
the experience of cinema in the post-­Weimar criticism of Siegfried Kracauer,
Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, Cinema and Experience (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012).
62. Robert Sklar, “Oh! Althusser! Historiography and the Rise of Cinema
Studies,” Radical History Review 41 (1988): 31–­32.
63. Gayatri Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading Archives,” His-
tory and Theory 24, no. 3 (1985): 247–­72.
64. Catherine Russell, “Parallax Historiography: The Flâneuse as Cyberfemi-
nist,” in Bean and Negra, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, 552–­70.
65. To this list of coordinates in feminist film historiography, one might also
add Bean and Negra’s seminal collection A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema,
Vicki Callahan’s more recent Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History
(Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2010), and the biennial Women
of the Silent Screen conference, first held in 1999.
66. Patrice Petro, Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 31–­32.
67. Petro, 67.
 300 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

68. Alison Butler, “New Film Histories and the Politics of Location,” Screen
33, no. 4 (1992): 426.
69. Butler. Roger Odin makes a more recent (and less radical) case for un-
derstanding film history and theory as distinct but productively interactive
categories. See Odin, “Early Cinema and Film Theory,” in Gaudreault et al.,
A Companion to Early Cinema, 224–­42.
70. Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” 67.
71. Jane Gaines, “Whatever Happened to the Philosophy of Film History?,”
Film History 25, no. 1–­2 (2013): 70–­80.
72. Vivian Sobchack, ed., The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the
Modern Event (New York: Routledge, 1996), 4.
73. Gaines, “Whatever Happened to the Philosophy of Film History?,” 77.
74. Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and
the Digital Dark Age (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 21.
75. Usai, Silent Cinema, 12. Of the artifacts in the Tyler, Texas, Black Film
Collection, Jacqueline Stewart similarly argues that “films’ meanings are not
intrinsic but constructed, not singular but multiple, and not fixed but evolving,
as archivists, scholars, and a host of viewers and commentators leave our own
interpretive traces on them.” See Stewart, “Discovering Black Film History:
Tracing the Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection,” Film History 23, no. 2 (2011):
148.
76. Usai, Silent Cinema, 166.
77. Usai, 167.
78. See, e.g., essays by Charles Musser, Janet Staiger, Steven Joseph Ross, and
Donald Crafton in the “In Focus” portion of Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (2004):
94–­142.
79. Jane Gaines, “Film History and the Two Presents of Feminist Film Theory,”
Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (2004): 116–­17.
80. Robert Sklar, “Does Film History Need a Crisis?,” Cinema Journal 44,
no. 1 (2004): 134.
81. Sklar.
82. Sklar, 136–­37.
83. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, and Theory (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
84. Rosen, 143.
85. Rosen, 142.
86. Russell, Experimental Ethnography, 10, xvii.
87. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings,
vol. 4, 1938–­1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund
Jephcott and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2003), 392.
88. Benjamin, 390–­91; Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept
of History,’” in Selected Writings, 4:408.
89. Rony, Third Eye; Amad, Counter-­Archive.
90. In addition to previously cited examples of media archaeology from
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 301

Thomas Elsaesser, Wolfgang Ernst, and Jussi Parikka, I am referring to works

such as Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of
Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008);
Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications,
and Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Lev Manovich,
Software Takes Command (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).
91. David Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2007).
92. Rodowick, 12.
93. Elsaesser, “Early Film History and Multi-­media,” 18.
94. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (1967; repr., Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1978), 282, emphasis original.
95. Malcolm Crick, “‘Tracing’ the Anthropological Self: Quizzical Reflec-
tions on Field Work, Tourism, and the Ludic,” Social Analysis 15 (1985): 73.
96. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnogra-
phy, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 13.
97. Clifford, 14.
98. See Jean Rouch, “Film ethnographique,” in Ethnologie générale, ed. Jean
Poirier, 429–­71 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968); Jean Rouch, “Avant propos,” in Premier
catalogue sélectif international de films ethnographiques sur la région du Pacifique,
13–­20 (Paris: UNESCO, 1970); David MacDougall, The Corporeal Image: Film,
Ethnography, and the Senses (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).
99. MacDougall, Corporeal Image, 230.
100. MacDougall.

1. Of Other Archives
1. See Michel Foucault, “The Historical A Priori and the Archive,” in The
Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, 142–­4 8 (1972; repr.,
New York: Routledge, 2002); Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay
Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–­27.
2. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 52–­53.
3. Foucault, 145, emphasis original.
4. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Pre-
nowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Several substantive dis-
agreements separate these two theorists of archive. See Jacques Derrida, “Cogito
and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 31–63
(1967; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Michel Foucault,
“My Body, This Paper, This Fire” (1972), trans. Geoff Bennington, Oxford Lit-
erary Review 4, no. 1 (2012): 9–­28; Jacques Derrida, “To Do Justice to Freud,”
trans. Pascale-­A nne Brault and Michael Naas, Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2 (1994):
227–­6 6.
5. Derrida, Archive Fever, 7.
6. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 84.
7. Foucault, “Other Spaces,” 26.
 302 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

8. Foucault, 24.
9. See Jacques Lacan, “The Symbolic Order,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, ed. Jacques-­A lain Miller, trans. John Forrester
(1975; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 1:220–­36; see also Jacques Lacan,
“Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan XI: The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-­A lain Miller, trans. Alan
Sheridan (1973; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 11:65–­120.
10. Foucault, “Other Spaces,” 24.
11. Foucault, 22.
12. For histories of the Maison Lumière and early French cinema, see Richard
Abel, Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896–­1914 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998); Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma: L’invention
du cinéma (Paris: Denoël, 1973).
13. Key engagements with this canon include Marshall Deutelbaum, “Struc-
tural Patterning in the Lumière Films,” in Film before Griffith, ed. John Fell,
299–­310 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); André Gaudreault,
From Plato to Lumière: Monstration and Narration in Literature and Cinema, trans.
Timothy Barnard (1988; repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999);
André Gaudreault, “Film, Narrative, Narration: The Cinema of the Lumière
Brothers,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, 68–­75
(London: British Film Institute, 1990); Tom Gunning, “‘Primitive’ Cinema:
A Frame Up? Or the Trick’s on Us?,” Cinema Journal 28, no. 2 (1989): 3–­12;
Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous
Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams, 114–­33
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Dai Vaughan, “Let There
Be Lumière,” in Elsaesser, Early Cinema, 63–­67; Alan Williams, “The Lumière
Organization and Documentary Realism,” in Fell, Film before Griffith, 153–­61.
14. The seminal 1978 Brighton Conference of the Fédération Internationale
des Archives du Film (FIAF) gave scholars and archivists unprecedented ac-
cess to early cinema. I discuss the event in the introduction to this book; see
also Roger Holman, ed., Cinema 1900–­1906: An Analytical Study by the National
Film Archive (London) and the International Federation of Film Archives (Brussels:
FIAF, 1982).
15. For biographical accounts of Kahn and Brunhes, as well as histories of
their mutual projects, see Jeanne Beausoleil and Pascal Ory, eds., Albert Kahn,
1860–­1940: réalités d’une utopie (Boulogne, France: Musée Albert-­K ahn, De-
partment des Hauts-­de-­Seine, 1995); Beausoleil, ed., Jean Brunhes: Autour
du Monde (Boulogne, France: Musée Albert-­K ahn, Department des Hauts-­
de-­Seine, 1993); Les Cahiers de la cinémathèque 74 (December 2002); Amad,
Counter-­Archive, 25– ­63.
16. Mariel Jean-­Brunhes Delamarre and Jeanne Beausoleil, “Deux témoins de
leur temps, Albert Kahn et Jean Brunhes,” in Jean Brunhes, 92. Translation mine.
17. For a discussion of this ethnographic mode, see Jacob W. Gruber, “Ethno-
graphic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology,” American Anthropology 72,
no. 6 (1970): 1289–­9 9.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 303

18. The autochrome collection includes an image of Louis Lumière taken

during his visit to the Boulogne estate by Georges Chevalier on June 17, 1930
(inv. A 63085).
19. Nathalie Boulouch sketches a detailed history of this invention in her
essay “The Documentary Use of the Autochrome in France,” History of Photog-
raphy 18 (Summer 1994): 143–­45.
20. See François de la Bretèque, “Les films des Archives de la Planète d’Albert
Kahn. D’un certain regard sur le monde et sa place dans l’histoire du cinéma,”
Les Cahiers de la cinémathèque 74 (2002): 137–­45; Amad, Counter-­A rchive,
56–­61, 150.
21. See Abel, Ciné Goes to Town, 9–­18.
22. See Serge Berstein and Pierre Milza, Histoire de la France au XXe siècle
1900–­1930 (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1990), 188–­89; see also C.  M.
Andrew and A. S. Kanya-­Forstner, “French Business and the French Colonial-
ists,” The Historical Journal 19, no. 4 (1976): 981–­1000.
23. Jeanne Beausoleil, Pour une reconnaissance africaine, Dahomey 1930
(Boulogne, France: Le Musée Albert-­K ahn, 1996), 244; see also Gilles Baud
Berthier, “Un financier dans la cité. Les origines de la fortune d’Albert Kahn,”
in Beausoleil and Ory, Albert Kahn, 106–­18; Gilles Baud Berthier, “Le métier
de la banque,” in Beausoleil and Ory, Albert Kahn, 119–­31.
24. The encounters between the French colonial empire and its film industry
have been charted carefully elsewhere. See Peter Bloom, French Colonial Docu-
mentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 2008); Martine Astier Loutfi, “Imperial Frame: Film Industry and
Colonial Representation,” in Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism, ed. Dina
Sherzer, 20–­29 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996); Panivong Norindr, “La
Trace Lumière: Early Cinema and Colonial Propaganda in French Indochina,”
in The Cinema: A New Technology for the 20th Century, ed. André Gaudreault,
Catherine Russell, and Pierre Véronneau, 329–­39 (Lausanne, France: Éditions
Payot, 2004).
25. Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière, 27–­4 0. See also Gaudreault, “Film,
Narrative, Narration,” 72.
26. Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière, 36. See also André Gaudreault, “Frag-
mentation and Assemblage in the Lumière Animated Pictures,” Film History 13,
no. 1 (2001): 77–­88.
27. Tom Gunning, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early
Film and Its Relation to American Avant-­Garde Film,” in Fell, Film before Griffith,
366. See also Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions,” in Elsaesser, Early Cin-
ema, 56–­62; Gunning, “Non-­continuity, Continuity, Discontinuity: A Theory
of Genres in Early Films,” in Elsaesser, Early Cinema, 86–­94.
28. Gunning, “Aesthetic of Astonishment,” 121.
29. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contin-
gency, the Archive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 178.
30. See Hiroshi Komatsu, “The Lumière Cinématographe and the Produc-
tion of the Cinema in Japan in the Earliest Period,” Film History 8, no. 4 (1996):
 304 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

431–­38; Michael Allan, “Deserted Histories: The Lumière Brothers, the Pyra-
mids, and Early Film Form,” Early Popular Visual Culture 6, no. 2 (2008):
159–­70; Zdeněk Štábla, “The First Cinema Shows in the Czech Lands,” Film
History 3 (1989): 203–­21.
31. See Sam Rohdie, Promised Lands: Cinema, Geography, Modernism (Lon-
don: British Film Institute, 2001).
32. I first drafted this chapter, including its reflection on the heterotopian
qualities of the Archives de la Planète, in 2007 and published the work as part of
my PhD dissertation in 2009. While Amad and I ultimately come to quite differ-
ent conclusions about where Foucault’s boat leads (and what motivates its depar-
ture in the first place), I attribute our shared investment in Foucauldian figures
to the strength of Foucault’s argument and the Archives de la Planète itself. At
once an archive, a garden, a colonial excursion: the Kahn archives are not simply
an example of heterotopia but encompass nearly every example of heterotopia that
Foucault offers in the essay. Though the Kahn estate had fallen into disrepair and
was not open to the public at the time of Foucault’s writing, one wonders whether
he had not somehow encountered the site or come to know of its existence.
33. Amad, Counter-­Archive, 5.
34. Amad, 21.
35. Amad, 56.
36. Amad, 58–­59.
37. Amad, 49.
38. Amad, 56.
39. For example, Sam Rohdie describes the autochromes as indistinct gen-
eralities and remarks that “not a single image . . . startled me or arrested my
attention.” Fatimah Tobing Rony finds the Kahn films less arresting than the
autochromes, but she ultimately dismisses them both and focuses her research
elsewhere. See Sam Rohdie, “Geography, Photography, the Cinema: Les Ar-
chives de la Planète,” Screening the Past 4 (2014), http://www.screeningthepast
.com/2014/12/geography-photography-the-cinema; Rony, Third Eye.
40. Lyon républicain, April 18, 1897, quoted in Michelle Aubert and Jean-­
Claude Seguin, eds., La production cinématographique des frères Lumière (Lyon:
Bibliothèque du Film, 1996), 175–­76. Excerpts from the production catalog are
my translation.
41. Operators and publicists from the Maison Lumière drafted these brief
texts. See Aubert and Seguin, La production cinématographique, 27.
42. Aubert and Seguin, 175–­79.
43. Aubert and Seguin, 176.
44. For a discussion of this tradition, see Griffiths, Wondrous Difference,
86–­126.
45. I take this phrase from Roland Barthes’s analysis of the photographic
image. Barthes argues that the photograph guarantees ça a été (this was, or
this has been). See Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans.
Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 9.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 305

46. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cin-
ema?, trans. Hugh Gray (1967; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005), 1:14.
47. André Bazin, “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” in What Is Cin-
ema?, 1:48.
48. Tom Gunning, “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: The Temporality of the
Cinema of Attractions,” The Velvet Light Trap 32 (Fall 1993): 11.
49. Gunning.
50. Gunning.
51. Gunning, 5–­6.
52. See Gunning, “Aesthetic of Astonishment,” 114–­33.
53. Vaughan, “Let There Be Lumière,” 66.
54. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 66.
55. Lyotard, “Acinema,” 351–­53.
56. Tom Gunning provocatively links the ideological instability of early travel
images to Giuliana Bruno’s concept of transito. See his essay “The Whole World
within Reach: Travel Images without Borders,” in Virtual Voyages: Cinema and
Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), esp.
39– ­4 0.
57. Jacques Aumont, “Lumière Revisited,” trans. Ben Brewster, Film History
8 (1996): 417.
58. The intersection between travel and early cinema has been explored ex-
tensively. See Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Dur-
ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); Charles Musser, “The Travel Genre
in 1903–­1904: Moving towards Fictional Narrative,” in Elsaesser, Early Cinema,
123–­31; Jennifer Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and
Early Nonfiction Film (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013); Lauren
Rabinovitz, “From Hale’s Tours to Star Tours: Virtual Voyages and the Delirium
of the Hyper-­real,” Iris 25 (Spring 1998): 133–­52; Ruoff, Virtual Voyages.
59. For histories and analyses of the Lumière exhibition strategy, see Abel,
Ciné Goes to Town, 9–­19; Paul Genard, “Les opérateurs de la Société Lumière
dans le monde,” in Le Cinéma français muet dans le monde, influences réciproques
(Paris: FIAF, 1988), 47–­56; Alan Williams, “The Lumière Organization and
‘Documentary Realism,’” in Fell, Film before Griffith, 153–­61.
60. Aumont argues that processions “must take up a good half of the docu-
mentary views.” See Aumont, “Lumière Revisited,” 425.
61. Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and
the Senses (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 162–­63.
62. Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 142.
63. Griffiths, 168.
64. John Fullerton, “Creating an Audience for the Cinématographe: Two
Lumière Agents in Mexico, 1896,” Film History 20 (2008): 95. See also Philippe
Jacquier and Marion Pranal, eds., Gabriel Veyre, opérateur Lumière (Lyon: Insti-
tut Lumière and Actes Sud, 1996).
 306 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

65. Fullerton, “Creating an Audience,” 96–­97.

66. “Le cinématographe,” L’Echo du Mexique, August 21, 1896, 3; quoted in
Fullerton, “Creating an Audience,” 97.
67. Fullerton, “Creating an Audience,” 96.
68. Fullerton.
69. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (1969;
repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 256.
70. Deleuze.
71. Fullerton, “Creating an Audience,” 100.
72. Marie Mattera Corneloup, “Albert Kahn autour du monde, 1908–­1909,”
in Beausoleil and Ory, Albert Kahn, 65.
73. Cited in Nathalie Clet-­Bonnet, “Les bourses Autour du Monde. La fonda-
tion française, 1898–­1930,” in Beausoleil and Ory, Albert Kahn, 141. Translation
mine.
74. For a detailed account of this first expedition, see Amad, Counter-­Archive,
25– ­63.
75. See Clet-­Bonnet, “Les bourses Autour du Monde,” in Beausoleil and Ory,
Albert Kahn, 137–­52.
76. Jeanne Beausoleil, “Portrait en creux,” in Beausoleil and Ory, Albert Kahn,
30.
77. Clet-­Bonnet, “Les bourses Autour du Monde,” in Beausoleil and Ory,
Albert Kahn, 141.
78. Jean Brunhes, Atlas photographique des formes du relief terrestre: Effets de
la désagrégation mécanique, vol. 1 (Paris: Boissonnas, 1910); La Géographie hu-
maine: Essai de classification positive. Principes et exemples (Paris: Librairie Félix
Alcan, 1910).
79. Jean Brunhes, Human Geography: An Attempt at Positive Classification,
trans. I. C. LeCompte (New York: Rand McNally, 1920), 642.
80. Mark Jefferson, “Review: La Géographie humaine: Essai de classification
positive. Principes et exemples,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 46,
no. 6 (1911): 467.
81. See Sophie Couëtoux, “Jean Brunhes au Collège de France,” in Beausoleil,
Jean Brunhes, 234–­37; see also Delamarre and Beausoleil, “Deux témoins,” in
Beausoleil, Jean Brunhes, 91–­107.
82. See Marie Bonhomme and Mariel Jean-­Brunhes Delamarre, “La méthode
des missions des Archives de la Planète,” in Beausoleil, Jean Brunhes, 194–­219.
83. Kahn left very few material traces in the archive he developed and fi-
nanced. Only one known photograph of him exists. For a discussion of this ab-
sence, see Beausoleil, “Portrait en creux,” in Beausoleil and Ory, Albert Kahn,
27–­28.
84. Marie-­Claire Robic, “La géographie dans le mouvement scientifique,” in
Beausoleil, Jean Brunhes, 52.
85. Cited in Brunhes, Human Geography, 24. See also Paul Vidal de La Blache,
Atlas général Vidal-­Lablache (1894; repr., Paris: Armond Colin, 1910), ix.
86. Brunhes, Human Geography, 3–­2 6.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 307

87. Brunhes, 2.
88. Olivier Kuhlen examines the relationship between aerial photography
and human geography in his essay “Le renouvellement technique,” in Beausoleil,
Jean Brunhes, 301–­7; see also Anthony Vidler, “Terres Inconnues: Cartographies
of a Landscape to Be Invented,” October 115 (Winter 2006): 13–­30.
89. Brunhes, Human Geography, 47.
90. Brunhes, 16.
91. For a more comprehensive analysis of Brunhes’s disciplinary departure
from his teacher, see Didier Mendibil, “Deux ‘manières’: Jean Brunhes et Paul
Vidal de La Blache,” in Beausoleil, Jean Brunhes, 152–­57.
92. See Jean Brunhes, “Ethnographie et Géographie humaine,” L’Ethnographie:
Bulletin de la Société d’ethnographie de Paris (October 1913): 29–­4 0.
93. Brunhes, Human Geography, 50.
94. Delamarre and Beausoleil, “Deux témoins,” in Beausoleil, Jean Brunhes,
95.
95. Brunhes, Human Geography, 50.
96. Amad, Counter-­Archive, 22.
97. As I have noted, the archive is in the process of renovating its physical and
virtual spaces. The structures of the digital collection may soon change.
98. For further details of the Société Autour du Monde, see Nathalie Clet-­
Bonnet, “La société Autour du Monde, 1906–­1949,” in Beausoleil and Ory,
Albert Kahn, 237–­41.
99. Susan Sontag, “Melancholy Objects,” in On Photography (New York: Pen-
guin, 1977), 52.
100. Brunhes, Human Geography, 47.
101. Brunhes explains the significance of costume for the discipline of human
geography in “Ethnographie et Géographie humaine,” 39.
102. Roland Barthes famously argues that the Eiffel Tower functions as an
empty sign, in part because it transgresses the “habitual divorce of seeing and
being seen” and “achieves a sovereign circulation between these two functions;
it is a complete object which has, if one may say so, both sexes of sight.” See
Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1997), 5.
103. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (1977; repr.,
New York: Vintage, 1995), 202.
104. Foucault.
105. See, e.g., Amad, Counter-­Archive, 72.
106. Amad situates the Kahn footage between the predocumentary forms of
nonfiction film (including the newsreel) and the documentary tradition. See
Amad, Counter-­Archive, 64–­95.
107. For further information on the Kahn bulletins, see Helena Lemanska,
“Albert Kahn éditeur, 1916–­1931,” in Beausoleil and Ory, Albert Kahn, 211–­16;
Helena Lemanska, “Le ‘quinzième’ bulletin,” in Beausoleil and Ory, Albert Kahn,
217–­26. See also Frédérique Le Bris, “Le XVe bulletin, résultat d’une hypothèse,”
Les Cahiers de la cinémathèque 74 (2002): 47–­4 8.
 308 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

108. This approach often ensured that the cameramen arrived in the aftermath
of a significant event, as was the case in Lucien Le Saint and Camille Sauvageot’s
film of the Printemps fire, L’incendie du Printemps (1921).
109. See Amad’s discussion of this film in Counter-­Archive, 278–­80.
110. Amad, 73.
111. See Tom Gunning, “Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and
the ‘View’ Aesthetic,” in Uncharted Territory, ed. Daan Hertogs and Nico de
Klerk, 9–­2 4 (Amsterdam: Netherlands Filmmuseum, 1998).
112. Amad, Counter-­Archive, 175.
113. Rony, Third Eye, 81.
114. For an analysis of temporality and early motion studies, see Doane, “Tem-
porality, Storage, Legibility: Freud, Marey, and the Cinema,” in Emergence of
Cinematic Time, 33– ­68.
115. Bretèque, “Les films des Archives de la Planète d’Albert Kahn,” Les Ca-
hiers de la cinémathèque 74 (2002): 143.
116. Jacques Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2),” in Without
Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002),
135–­36, emphasis original.
117. Derrida, 136.
118. Mary Louis Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and the Transculturation
(New York: Routledge, 1992), 59.
119. Rony, Third Eye, 82.
120. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 60, emphasis original.
121. Amad, Counter-­Archive, 284.
122. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (1968; repr.,
London: Continuum, 2004), 97.
123. See Gilles Deleuze, “A New Archivist,” in Foucault, trans. Seán Hand,
1–­22 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
124. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
(1975; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986). The essay is, in this
way, a “minor” articulation of the minor.
125. Gilles Deleuze, “One Less Manifesto,” in Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime:
The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought, ed. Timothy Murray,
trans. Eliane dal Molin and Timothy Murray, 239–­58 (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1997).
126. Tom Gunning makes the case for a different (and somewhat more con-
servative) understanding of what a “minor cinema” might be. He sees this for-
mation in a small collective of American avant-­garde filmmakers who manage
to resist the dominant forms of experimental cinema in the late 1980s. See
Gunning, “Towards a Minor Cinema: Fonoroff, Herwitz, Ahwesh, Lapore,
Klahr, Solomon,” Motion Picture 3, no.½ (1989–­9 0): 2–­5 .
127. Deleuze, “One Less Manifesto,” 245.
128. Deleuze, 242.
129. Deleuze, 254, emphasis original.
130. Jean-­François Lyotard, “Notes on the Critical Function of the Work of
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 309

Art,” in Driftworks, trans. Susan Hansen, 80–­83 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1984).
131. Deleuze, “One Less Manifesto,” 241, emphasis added.
132. Deleuze, 254.
133. Deleuze, 255.
134. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 27.

2. Historical Figures
1. Anne Morgan moved to France from the United States in 1917 and devel-
oped the American Friends of France aid organization to help the country re-
cover after World War I. She traveled extensively with the French government in
the years that followed and amassed a considerable collection of colonial films.
See Danses de Dogons, de Sanga, and de Bandiagara (New York: American Mu-
seum of Natural History, 1930); “Anne Morgan Dies in Mt. Kisko. Daughter of
Late J. P. Morgan Was Known for Her Work in Reform and Philanthropy,” New
York Times, January 30, 1952.
2. For further reading on Alfred Cort Haddon, see Griffiths, Wondrous Dif-
ference, 129– ­4 8.
3. In her chapter dedicated to “ecstatic ethnography,” Catherine Russell ex-
amines the pattern of possession rituals in ethnographic cinema. See Russell,
Experimental Ethnography, 193–­237.
4. Gunning, “Aesthetic of Astonishment,” 114–­33.
5. Randy Martin, “Dance Ethnography and the Limits of Representation,”
in Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane Desmond (Dur-
ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 324.
6. Giorgio Agamben, Nymphs, trans. Amanda Minervini (London: Seagull
Books, 2013), 10.
7. Jean-­François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary
Lydon (1971; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 5.
8. Lyotard, 7, emphasis original.
9. Lyotard.
10. Lyotard, 40, 9. See also 222–­2 4.
11. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free
Press, 1995), 34. For a concise history of Durkheim’s role in the development of
both British and French anthropological traditions, see Donald Bender, “The
Development of French Anthropology,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral
Sciences 1, no. 2 (1965): 139–­51.
12. Anya Peterson Royce, The Anthropology of Dance (1977; repr., Hampshire,
U.K.: Dance Books, 2002), 19.
13. Edward B. Tylor, Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and
Civilization (London: Macmillan, 1881), 296.
14. James George Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy: A Treatise on Certain Early
Forms of Superstition (1887; repr., London: Macmillan, 1935), 370; see also
James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1894).
 310 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

15. Alfred Radcliffe-­Brown, The Andaman Islanders (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1933), 128.
16. Franz Boas, “On Certain Songs and Dances of the Kwakiutl of British
Columbia,” Journal of American Folklore 1, no. 1 (1888): 49–­6 4; Franz Boas, ed.,
The Function of Dance in Human Society, 2nd ed. (1944; repr., New York: Dance
Horizons, 1972).
17. Boas, “On Certain Songs,” 61.
18. Boas, 60.
19. E. E. Evans-­Pritchard, “The Dance,” Africa: Journal of the International
African Institute 1, no. 4 (1928): 446.
20. Claire Holt and Gregory Bateson, “Form and Function of the Dance in
Bali,” in Boas, Function of Dance, 56. Bateson collaborated with Margaret Mead
on the study of Balinese dance and possession rituals.
21. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (1935; repr., London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1963), 126.
22. W. O. E. Oesterley, The Sacred Dance: A Study in Comparative Folklore
(New York: Dance Horizons, 1923), 107.
23. Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Macmillan, 1911),
229–­30.
24. Tylor, Anthropology, 299.
25. Beyond the anthropological texts already mentioned, see examples of
this description in Franz Boas, ed., General Anthropology (New York: D.  C.
Heath, 1938); Geoffrey Gorer, “The Function of Dance Forms in Primitive Af-
rican Communities,” in Boas, Function of Dance, 21–­39; Loomis Havemeyer,
The Drama of Savage Peoples (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1916);
William Ridgeway, The Dramas and Dramatic Dances of Non-­European Races
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915); Curt Sachs, World History of
the Dance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937).
26. Gorer, “Function of Dance,” 33.
27. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Ballets,” in Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays,
and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (1886; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1956), 62.
28. Mallarmé, 66, emphasis original. For Tom Gunning, Mallarmé’s writing
on dance presciently describes Loïe Fuller. See Gunning, “Loïe Fuller and the
Art of Motion: Body, Light, Electricity, and the Origins of Cinema,” in Camera
Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, ed. Richard Allen
and Malcolm Turvey (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2003),
81–­82.
29. Paul Valéry, “Philosophy of the Dance,” in What Is Dance?, ed. Roger
Copeland and Marshall Cohen (1936; repr., New York: Oxford University Press,
1983), 60–­61.
30. Valéry, 60.
31. James Clifford writes extensively on the encounters between artists and
ethnography in the twentieth century. See Clifford, Predicament of Culture.
32. Georges Bataille, ed., Documents (1929–­3 4; repr., Paris: Éditions Jean-­
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 311

Michel Place, Les Cahiers de Gradhiva, 1991). For further reading on the struc-
ture and strategy of Documents, see Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writ-
ings of Georges Bataille (1974; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).
33. Georges Bataille’s essay on the human face is illustrated with a series of
publicity portraits of female dancers and performers from the French music hall
and early cinema, including Cécile Sorel, Zulma Bouffar, and Léonie Yahne. See
Bataille, “Human Face,” trans. Annette Michelson, October 36 (Spring 1986):
17–­21. Originally published in Documents 4 (September 1929): 194–­201.
34. Michel Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1935), 359,
my translation.
35. See Antonin Artaud, Le Théâtre et son double (1938; repr., Paris: Folio,
1985). Nicola Savarese carefully traces the development of Artaud’s theory of
“pure theatre” through the Exposition Coloniale. See Savarese, “Antonin Artaud
Sees Balinese Theatre at the Paris Exposition,” The Drama Review 45, no. 3
(2001): 51–­77.
36. Antonin Artaud, “On the Balinese Theatre,” in The Theatre and Its Double,
trans. Victor Corti (London: Calder and Boyars, 1970), 40.
37. Artaud, 37.
38. Michel Leiris, Manhood, trans. Richard Howard (1939; repr., Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 109, emphasis original.
39. Samir Dayal, “Blackness as Symptom: Josephine Baker and European
Identity,” in Blackening Europe, ed. Heike Raphael-­Hernandez (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2004), 39.
40. André Levinson, “The Negro Dance: Under European Eyes,” in André
Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Twenties, ed. Joan Acocella and Lynn
Garafola (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1991), 72.
41. Levinson, 75.
42. Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–­1900: An Annotated Film-
ography (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 34–­35.
43. Tom Gunning notes that dance is “one of the most stable genres of early
cinema before 1904,” and dance numbers appear frequently in the early narra-
tive (or transitional) era. He also reminds readers that Edison once referred to
his invention as a “machine to make little pictures that danced.” See Gunning,
“Dance Films,” in The Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel (New York:
Routledge, 2005), 163–­6 4.
44. Richard Abel, Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896–­1914 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), 158–­6 0.
45. Abel, 78.
46. In a variation on Kracauer’s “Two Tendencies” argument, Tom Gunning
understands this theatrical framing of the body (e.g., the human body posed in
front of a black curtain) in early cinema as distinct from the early impulse to
record the world. Ethnographic cinema challenges the claim that these catego-
ries of early film practice are discrete. See Gunning, “Loïe Fuller and the Art in
Motion,” esp. 85–­86.
47. For a detailed history of hand coloring in the serpentine films, see Joshua
 312 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 37–­75.
48. Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 49, 116, 139, 339.
49. Michelle Aubert and Jean-­Claude Seguin, eds., La production cinémato-
graphique des frères Lumière (Lyon: Bibliothèque du Film, 1996), 324.
50. For origin stories of the serpentine dance, see Loïe Fuller, Fifteen Years
of a Dancer’s Life: With Some Account of Her Distinguished Friends 1869–­1928
(1913; repr., New York: Dance Horizons, 1975); Ann Cooper Albright, Traces
of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller (Middleton, Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 2007); Richard Nelson Current and Marcia Ewing
Current, Loïe Fuller: Goddess of Light (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1997); Jody Sperling, “Cosmic Voyages in Advance of Cinema: La Loïe Skirts
the Universe,” in Birds of Paradise: Costume as Cinematic Spectacle, ed. Marketa
Uhlirova, 79–­88 (Köln: Walther Köning, 2014); Giovanna Lista, Loïe Fuller:
Danseuse de la Belle Époque (Paris: Stock-­Éditions d’Art Somogy, 1994).
51. Sally R. Sommer, “Loïe Fuller,” The Drama Review 19, no. 1 (1975): 54.
52. André Levinson was likely one of the first to remark upon Mallarmé’s
writings on Fuller in a 1923 essay titled “Mallarmé, métaphysicien du ballet,”
La Revue musicale 5 (1923): 21–­33. Frank Kermode discusses Mallarmé’s writ-
ing on Fuller at length in “Poet and Dancer before Diaghilev,” in Copeland and
Cohen, What Is Dance?, 145–­60. See also Dee Reynolds, “The Dancer as Woman:
Loïe Fuller and and Stéphane Mallarmé,” in Impressions of French Modernity,
ed. Richard Hobbs, 155–­72 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press,
1998); Felicia McCarren, “Stéphane Mallarmé, Loïe Fuller, and the Theater of
Femininity,” in Bodies of the Text, ed. Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea
Murphy, 217–­30 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
53. For writing on Fuller’s place in the broader field of modernist movements,
see Rhonda Garelick, Electric Salome: Loïe Fuller’s Performance of Modernism
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); Felicia McCarren, Danc-
ing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Palo Alto,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003); Elizabeth Coffman, “Women in Mo-
tion: Loïe Fuller and the ‘Interpenetration’ of Art and Science,” Camera Obscura
49 17, no. 1 (2002): 73–­104.
54. Kermode, “Poet and Dancer,” 157.
55. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York:
Henry Holt, 1911), 3–­4.
56. Gunning, “Loïe Fuller,” 85–­86.
57. Erin Brannigan, Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 29.
58. Brannigan, 38.
59. Brannigan.
60. Laurent Guido offers a detailed overview of the intersections between
dance, early cinema, and the avant-­garde. See Guido, “Rhythmic Bodies/
Movies: Dance as Attraction in Early Film Culture,” in The Cinema of Attractions
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 313

Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven, 140–­56 (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam

Press, 2007).
61. Élie Faure, “The Art of Cineplastics,” in French Film Theory and Criticism,
1907–­1929, ed. Richard Abel, trans. Walter Pach (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1988), 1:261. Originally published as “De la cinéplastique,” in
L’Arbre d’Eden, 277–­304 (Paris: G. Crès, 1922).
62. This passage appears in Dulac’s film Thèmes et variations (1928). Tami
Williams’s study of Germaine Dulac reminded me of this short text. See
Williams, Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations (Urbana: University of Il-
linois, 2014), 157–58; see also 148–­6 0.
63. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 1.
64. See Georges Bataille, “The Big Toe,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings
1927–­1939, trans. and ed. Allan Stoekl (1903; repr., Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1985), 20–­23.
65. For accounts of performances by the Royal Cambodian Ballet during the
early twentieth century, see George Bois, Les danseuses cambodgiennes en France
(Hanoi et Haiphong: Imprimerie d’Extrême-­Orient, 1913); George Groslier,
“Le théâtre et la danse au Cambodge,” Journal Asiatique 214 (1929): 125–­43.
66. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 69.
67. Dmitri van den Bersselaar, “Missionary Knowledge and the State in Co-
lonial Nigeria: On How G. T. Basden Became an Expert,” History in Africa 33
(2006): 435.
68. George Thomas Basden, Among the Ibos (London: Seeley, Service, 1921).
See also George Thomas Basden, “Notes on the Ibo People and the Ibo Country,
Southern Nigeria,” The Geographical Journal 39, no. 3 (1912): 241–­47; George
Thomas Basden, Niger Ibos (London: Seeley, Service, 1938).
69. Basden, Among the Ibos, 9.
70. Basden.
71. Basden, 132.
72. These reels were held by the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum
until its closure in 2012. They are now archived at the Bristol Record Office:
Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives ref 2006/070.
73. This performance of mimicry approximates Homi Bhabha’s conception
of the term. See Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial
Discourse,” in The Location of Culture, 121–­31 (New York: Routledge, 1994).
74. La Croisière noire belongs to a series of expedition films funded by Citroën
in the 1920s and early 1930s, including La Traversée du Sahara (Paul Castelnau,
1923), La Croisière jaune (Léon Poirier, 1932), and a film that was never com-
pleted, La Croisière blanche (Charles E. Bedeaux, 1934). Of the three films that
Citroën released, La Croisière noire is by far the most well known. See Peter
Bloom, French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 65–­94. For more on the Romantic
imperialist Léon Poirier, see Dudley Andrew, “Praying Mantis: Enchantment
and Violence in French Cinema of the Exotic,” in Visions of the East: Orientalism
and Film, ed. Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar, 232–­52 (London: I. B.
 314 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

Tauris, 1997); David Slavin, “French Cinema’s Other First Wave: Political and
Racial Economies of ‘Cinéma Colonial,’ 1918–­1930,” Cinema Journal 37, no. 1
(1997): 23–­4 6.
75. For autobiographical accounts of the journey, see Léon Poirier, Vingt-­
quatre images à la second: Du studio au désert, journal d’un cinéaste pendant
quarante-­cinq années de voyage à travers les pays, les événements, les idées, 1907–­
1952 (Tours: Maison Mame, 1953); Georges-­Marie Haardt and Louis Audouin-­
Dubreuil, La Croisière noire: Expedition Citroën Centre-­Afrique (Paris: Librairie
Plon, 1927).
76. On the touristic underpinnings of the projects, see Alison Murray
Murphy, “Le tourisme Citroën au Sahara (1924–­1925),” Vingtième Siècle: Revue
d’histoire 68 (2000): 95–­107. Peter Bloom situates the film within a larger net-
work of Saharan crossing films as well as French colonial discourses and strate-
gies. See Bloom, French Colonial Documentary, 65–­94. See also Ellen Furlough,
“Une leçon des choses: Tourism, Empire, and the Nation in Interwar France,”
French Historical Studies 25, no. 3 (2002): 441–­73; Amy Staples, “Safari Adven-
ture: Forgotten Cinematic Journeys in Africa,” Film History 18 (2006): 392–­411.
77. Gaston Muraz also published an account of his travels entitled Sous le
grand soleil, chez les primitifs: images d’Afrique Équatoriale (Coulommiers: Paul
Brodard, 1923).
78. See Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Con-
tingency, the Archive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). I dis-
cuss Doane’s writing on cinematic time at greater length in chapters 1 and 3.
79. Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” in Means without Ends, trans.
Cesare Casarino and Vincenzo Binetti (1996; repr., Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000), 58–­59, emphasis original.
80. For comprehensive accounts of the ethnofiction genre, see Griffiths, Won-
drous Difference, 171–­254; Rony, Third Eye, esp. 77–­156; Russell, Experimental
Ethnography, in particular 51–­118. For discussion of Nionga, one of the lesser-­
known works of ethnofiction, see Emma Sandon, “Representing ‘African Life’:
From Ethnographic Exhibitions to Nionga and Stampede,” in Young and Innocent?
The Cinema of Britain 1896–­1930, ed. Andrew Higson, 191–­2 07 (Exeter, U.K.:
University of Exeter Press, 2002).
81. David MacDougall singles out In the Land of the Head Hunters as an
ethnographic failure precisely because of its status as a “story film.” Robert
Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, in his view, “did not emphasize dramatic con-
ventions” but experimented with a “more conceptual kind” of sophistication.
See MacDougall, “Ethnographic Film: Failure and Promise,” Annual Review of
Anthropology 7 (1978): 405–­25.
82. Fatimah Tobing Rony’s critique of Nanook of the North as “taxidermy,”
which I examine in chapter 3, exemplifies this strand of scholarship. See Rony,
Third Eye, 99–­128. Flaherty’s film has been the subject of relentless critique as
a documentary film, both before and after Rony’s intervention. See Ella Shohat
and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism (New York: Routledge, 1994), esp.
100–­113; Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Grierson Documentary and Its
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 315

Legitimations (London: British Film Institute, 1995); William Rothman, Docu-

mentary Film Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Shari
Huhndorf, “Nanook and His Contemporaries: Imagining Eskimos in American
Culture, 1897–­1922,” Critical Inquiry 27 (2000): 122–­4 8. One exception to this
approach is a recent reevaluation of the film’s ethnographic merits and an argu-
ment for understanding the film as a cinematic attraction. See Anna Grimshaw,
“Who Has the Last Laugh: Nanook of the North and Some New Thoughts on an
Old Classic,” Visual Anthropology 27, no. 5 (2014): 421–­35.
83. See Alison Griffiths, “Playing at Being Indian: Spectatorship and the
Early Western,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 29, no. 3 (2001): 100–­111.
Brad Evans grounds the film more specifically in “the Northern” film genre. See
Evans, “Indian Movies and the Vernacular of Modernism,” in Return to the Land
of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka’wakw, and the Making of
Modern Cinema, ed. Aaron Glass and Brad Evans (Seattle: University of Wash-
ington Press, 2014), 201.
84. For a discussion of Curtis within a much broader tradition of Northwest
Coast ethnographic writing and film, see Rosalind Morris, New Worlds from
Fragments: Film, Ethnography, and the Representation of Northwest Coast Cultures
(Boulder, Colo.: Northwest View Press, 1994).
85. Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian: Being a Series of Volumes
Picturing and Describing the Indians of the United States and Alaska, ed. Frederick
Webb Hodge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1907–­30). See also
Bill Holm and George Irving Quimby, Edward S. Curtis in the Land of the War
Canoes: A Pioneer Cinematographer in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1980), 13.
86. Holm and Quimby, Edward S. Curtis, 22, 26.
87. Holm and Quimby, 31.
88. Holm and Quimby.
89. Holm and Quimby, 15, 107–­12. See also Aaron Glass and Brad Evans,
Introduction to Return to the Land of the Head Hunters, in particular 24–­2 6.
90. Film preservationist Jere Guldin notes (by way of explanation for the dif-
ficulty of the process) that Curtis “was not much of a hand with a motion-­picture
camera.” See Guldin, “In the Land of the Head Hunters: Reconstruction, Not Res-
toration,” in Glass and Evans, Return to the Land of the Head Hunters, 260– ­68.
91. Many scholars note that Curtis’s understanding of Kwakwaka’wakw
culture—­and his access to resources for the production of both his photographs
and film—­was made possible by George Hunt, who served as cultural broker,
translator, interpreter, and guide (among other roles) for numerous ethno-
graphic projects in the region, including the work of Franz Boas. In this way,
Hunt plays a significant—­if largely unseen—­role in shaping early twentieth-­
century ethnographies of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples. See Holm and Quimby,
Edward S. Curtis, 31, 57–­61, 89; Jeanne Cannizzo, “George Hunt and the Inven-
tion of Kwaikutl Culture,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 20,
no. 1 (1983): 44–­58; Mick Gidley, “Three Cultural Brokers in the Context of
Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian,” in Between Indian and White
 316 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

Worlds: The Cultural Broker, ed. Margaret Connell-­Szasz, 197–­215 (Norman:

University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); Ira Jacknis, “George Hunt, Collector of
Indian Specimens,” in Chiefly Feasts: The Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch, ed. Aldona
Jonaitis, 177–­224 (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1991); and
Glass and Evans, Introduction, 16–­22.
92. Mick Gidley, “Edward Curtis and In the Land of the Head Hunters: Four
Contexts,” in Glass and Evans, Return to the Land of the Head Hunters, 52.
93. Gidley.
94. In 1930, Boas brought along a 16mm camera and wax cylinder record-
ing device during his last field trip to the Northwest Coast. He did not edit or
circulate the footage and never published any analysis of his recordings. For a
sketch of Boas’s critique of Curtis (as well as the correspondences between their
approaches), see Ira Jacknis, “Franz Boas and Photography,” Studies in Visual
Communication 10, no. 1 (1984): 2–­6 0; see also Jay Ruby, “Franz Boas and Early
Camera Study of Behavior,” Kinesics Report 3, no. 1 (1980): 7–­11; Ira Jacknis,
“The Picturesque and the Scientific: Franz Boas’s Plan for Anthropological Film-
making,” Visual Anthropology 1, no. 1 (1987): 59–­6 4.
95. Vachel Lindsay, “Sculpture-­i n-­Motion,” in The Art of the Moving Picture,
series ed. Martin Scorsese (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 69.
96. “The Vanishing Race” is the title of one of Edward S. Curtis’s most famous
lithographs, shot in 1904. It would also become the title of his “musicale” tour in
1911. For scholarship on the ideology and ethnographic framework of “vanish-
ing,” see Christopher M. Lyman, The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photo-
graphs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institu-
tion Press, 1982); Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and
U.S. Indian Policy, 2nd ed. (1982; repr., Lawrence: University of Kansas Press,
1991); Susan Applegate Krouse, “Photographing the Vanishing Race,” Visual
Anthropology 3, no. 2–­3 (1990): 213–­33; and Mick Gidley, “The Repeated Re-
turn of the Vanishing Indian,” in Americana: Essays in Memory of Marcus Cunliffe,
ed. John White and Brian Holden Reid, 209–­32 (Hull, U.K.: University of Hull,
1998).
97. Curtis, North American Indian, xxviii.
98. Glass and Evans, Introduction, 4. For further discussion of Curtis’s photo-
graphic style, see Lucy Lippard, ed., Partial Recall: With Essays on Photographs of
Native Americans (New York: New Press, 1993); Mick Gidley, Edward S. Curtis
and the North American Indian, Incorporated (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998).
99. Paul Chaat Smith, “Twentieth Century Fox,” in Glass and Evans, Return
to the Land of the Head Hunters, 358. In the same volume, Shamoon Zamir argues
against the view that Curtis represents his subjects as atemporal. See Zamir,
“Images of Time: Portraiture in The North American Indian,” in Glass and Evans,
Return to the Land of the Head Hunters, 61–­81.
100. Curtis’s letter is reprinted in Holm and Quimby, Edward S. Curtis, 32–­33.
101. Holm and Quimby, 44–­63. As Curtis scholars often insist, the film inad-
vertently contains numerous signs of intercultural contact not only because of
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 317

Curtis’s manipulations but also due to the influence of George Hunt, Curtis’s
cultural broker and guide. Hunt was the son of a nonindigenous employee of the
Hudson’s Bay Company and a Tlingit noblewoman from Alaska. Many of the
performers from the film—­i ncluding the leading roles—­a re members of Hunt’s
family. Brad Evans has more recently argued, following Miriam Hansen’s con-
cept of “vernacular modernism,” that the exhibition of the film would have likely
generated further sites of intercultural encounter (between the Kwakwaka’wakw
peoples and Curtis’s image of them). See Evans, “Indian Movies and the Ver-
nacular of Modernism,” 190–­211.
102. Holm and Quimby, Edward S. Curtis, 31. According to Aaron Glass and
Brad Evans, when Curtis began filming, the Kwakwaka’wakw community “al-
ready had a long history of theatrical self-­representation to anthropologists,
tourists, missionaries, and colonial agents.” See Glass and Evans, Introduc-
tion, 6.
103. Glass and Evans, Introduction, 25–­2 6.
104. Glass and Evans, 24. See also Holm and Quimby, Edward S. Curtis, 57–­61.
105. Holm and Quimby, Edward S. Curtis, 57.
106. Rony, Third Eye, 94.
107. Russell, Experimental Ethnography, 100.
108. Russell, 108.
109. Russell, 115. In 1996, Catherine Russell published a version of this argu-
ment in the journal Visual Anthropology. In 1998, Brad Evans responded to the
article—­and, in particular, Russell’s claim that the film belongs to the genealogy
of attractions—­w ith a detailed comparison of Holm and Quimby’s 1972 restora-
tion to the archival print still held at the Field Museum in Chicago. Evans noted
significant differences between the two versions of the film. Russell responded
to the critique by noting that her work was “an attempt to theorize an experi-
mental form of intertexual ethnography” and that she was “less concerned with
the authenticity of either film.” In Experimental Ethnography, she is careful to ac-
knowledge the interventions of Holm and Quimby and the differences between
the two versions of the film, but the connections she draws between the film and
the concept of attractions still stands. See Russell, “Playing Primitive: ‘In the
Land of the Headhunters’ and/or ‘War Canoes,’” Visual Anthropology 8, no. 1
(1996): 55–­77; Evans, “Catherine Russell’s Recovery of the Head-­Hunters,”
Visual Anthropology 11, no. 3 (1998): 221–­41.
110. Evans, “Indian Movies and the Vernacular of Modernism,” 200–­209.
After the failure of In the Land of the Head Hunters, Curtis abandoned ethno-
graphic practice, moved to Los Angeles, and worked as a photographer in Holly-
wood. For discussion of the film’s release and reception, as well as Curtis’s sub-
sequent career, see Holm and Quimby, Edward S. Curtis, 107–­12; Aaron Glass
and Brad Evans, “Consuming the Head Hunters: A Century of Film Reception,”
in Glass and Evans, Return to the Land of the Head Hunters, 146–­6 6; Barbara
Davis, Edward S. Curtis: The Life and Times of a Shadow Catcher (San Francisco:
Chronicle Books, 1985), 70–­72, 238–­43.
111. The 1972 restoration condensed or changed many of the intertitles that
 318 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

survived in the print held by the Field Museum in Chicago. The 2008 resto-
ration reinserted the original title cards and added some that were discovered
in another nitrate print and a scenario held by the Getty Research Institute.
See Guldin, “In the Land of the Head Hunters,” 260–­63; Aaron Glass and Brad
Evans, “Appendix 4: Title Cards from the 2008 Reconstruction of In the Land
of the Headhunters,” in Glass and Evans, Return to the Land of the Head Hunters,
383–­87.
112. In the 2008 restoration of the film, another intertitle—­“ Wind Dancer”—­
and image precede this scene. The footage of the Wind Dancer, however, re-
mains missing and a photographic image (of a woman, costumed but with her
face exposed, dancing on the same stage) appears to mark this absence. The pho-
tograph comes from the Library of Congress’s collection of “copyright frames”
from In the Land of the Head Hunters. This intertitle and image is not included in
the 1972 restoration. For more on the inclusion of photographic images in the
most recent restoration of the film, see Guldin, “In the Land of the Head Hunters,”
264–­6 6.
113. There is another, even more remarkable example of this earlier in the film.
When Yaklus leads a war party to burn Motana’s village, the scenes of smoke
and fire are obscured by the extraordinary appearance of “flames” created by
celluloid decay.
114. The 1972 restoration condenses these two strange titles into one: “The
Fire Dancer destroys the fire with his bare hands, while his attendants try to
restrain him. The Bear, Wolf, Mountain Goat, Wasp, Dog, and Deer perform.”
115. Holm and Quimby, Edward S. Curtis, 102.
116. Holm and Quimby, 31. See also Glass and Evans, Introduction, 16–­17.
117. Though many scholars acknowledge the inaccuracies in Curtis’s film in a
general way, Klisala Harrison offers a detailed analysis of traditional music and
dance in the film. See Harrison, “Musical Intertextuality in Indigenous Film:
Making and Remaking In the Land of the Head Hunters,” in Glass and Evans,
Return to the Land of the Head Hunters, esp. 217–­20.
118. Colin Browne, “Unmasking the Documentary,” in Glass and Evans, Re-
turn to the Land of the Head Hunters, 169.
119. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 7. In this passage, it is worth noting, Deleuze refers to
dance in a different film-­generic context: the musical.
120. Browne, “Unmasking the Documentary,” 169.
121. See Evans, “Catherine Russell’s Recovery of the Head-­Hunters,” 221–­41;
Guldin, “In the Land of the Head Hunters,” 260–­68. For a discussion of preserva-
tion and restoration as historiographic operations, see Philip Rosen, “Entering
History: Preservation and Restoration,” in Change Mummified, 43–­88 (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
122. Holm and Quimby, Edward S. Curtis, 13–­19. See also Glass and Evans,
Introduction, 28–­30.
123. Glass and Evans, Introduction, 28–­30. See also Guldin, “In the Land of the
Head Hunters,” 260–­68.
124. Edward S. Curtis, In the Land of the Head-­Hunters (Yonkers-­on-­Hudson,
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 319

N.Y.: World Picture Company, 1915). Curtis notes that, “in the working out of
the photo drama and the book, there came to be slight differences between the
two; but in the main they are the same.” There are, in fact, extraordinary differ-
ences between these versions. The book ostensibly serves the film rather than
ethnographic knowledge of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples. It is unburdened by
the obligation to “show” real indigenous subjects and practices and therefore
does not oscillate between fictional and documentary registers. It retells the
central fiction of the film in a coherent chronological way, but with modes of
narrative experimentation, including first-­person dialogue, that are not used in
the film.
125. In a review of the most recent release of the film, J. Hoberman of the New
York Times described the project as a “restoration of a restoration.” See “‘In the
Land of the Headhunters’: A Recreated Artifact of Ancient Ways,” New York
Times, February 19, 2015.
126. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 205.
127. Lyotard, 205–­6.
128. Lyotard, 211–­12.
129. Lyotard, 213.
130. Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda, trans. Alan Upchurch
(Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986), 3.
131. Eisenstein, 12.
132. Eisenstein, 21.
133. David Rodowick, Reading the Figural; or, Philosophy after the New Media
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2001), 171.
134. Rodowick, 191, 201.
135. Nietzsche also wrote extensively on dance. See, e.g., The Birth of Trag-
edy: Out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Shaun Whiteside (1872; repr., New York:
Penguin Classics, 1994); The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1882; repr.,
New York: Vintage Books, 1974); and, among other passages, his “dance song” in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(1883–­85; repr., New York: Penguin Classics, 1961).
136. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans.
R. J. Hollingdale (1874; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 71.
137. Nietzsche.
138. Nietzsche, 93.
139. Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 7.
140. Lyotard, 15.
141. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader,
ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Donald F. Bouchard (1971; repr., New York: Pantheon
Books, 1984), 95.

3. Following Derrida
1. For further accounts of the trip, see “Kermit Roosevelt Tells of Big
Hunt: Into the Wilds of Africa for a Year, Out of Touch with the World,” New
York Times, July 2, 1908; Frederick Seymour, Roosevelt in Africa (1909; repr.,
 320 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2010); Marshall Everett, Roosevelt’s Thrilling Experi-

ences in the Wilds of Africa (1909; repr., Chicago: Elibron Classics, 2005).
2. See “African Game Trails,” Scribner’s Magazine, October 1909–­September
1910.
3. Theodore Roosevelt, African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wan-
derings of an American Hunter-­Naturalist (1910; repr., New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1988).
4. Roosevelt, 2.
5. Roosevelt.
6. Roosevelt, 241.
7. “Roosevelt’s Travel Plans,” New York Times, April 12, 1908; “Jungle Tale
in the White House,” Chicago Tribune, November 1, 1908; “Lions Must Wait for
Roosevelt’s Baggage,” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 1909.
8. “Report from Colonel Roosevelt,” Charles D. Walcott Collection, Smith-
sonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 7004, 1850–­1927.
9. Donna Haraway, “The Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden
of Eden, New York City, 1908–­1936,” Social Text 11 (Winter 1984–­85): 20–­6 4;
see also Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World
of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1990).
10. Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” 23, emphasis original.
11. Roosevelt, African Game Trails, 552.
12. Cherry Kearton, Wildlife across the World (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1914); Cherry Kearton, Adventures with Animals and Men (London: Longmans,
Green, 1935).
13. The result of this collaboration, Roosevelt in Africa, premiered in 1910 and
survives in fragments at the Library of Congress. The film was produced by the
Motion Picture Patents Company and distributed by Pathé. Kearton had hoped
to record a dramatic hunting scene with Roosevelt but was ultimately unsuccess-
ful. The Chicago-­based Selig Polyscope Company took advantage of Kearton’s
disappointing footage and Roosevelt’s media popularity, releasing Hunting Big
Game in Africa in 1909. The film featured “a fake Roosevelt shooting a real lion
in a staged scene in Chicago.” It was far more popular than the real footage of
Roosevelt’s safari. See Scott Curtis, “Animal Pictures,” in The Encyclopedia of
Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 25.
14. This event was reported in, among other publications, the National
Audubon Society’s bimonthly magazine “devoted to the study and protection
of birds.” See Lucy W. Maynard, “President Roosevelt’s List of Birds: Seen in
the White House Grounds and about Washington during His Administration,”
Bird-­Lore 12, no. 2 (2010): 53–­55.
15. For further evidence and discussion of Roosevelt’s multimedia presi-
dency, see “Theodore Roosevelt: The Picture Man,” Moving Picture World 7
(October 22, 1910): 920; Raymond Fielding, The American Newsreel, 1911–­1967
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972); Veronica Gillespie, “Theodore
Roosevelt on Film,” Library of Congress American Memory Collection, http://
memory.loc.gov/.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 321

16. Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 89.

17. Griffiths, 168.
18. Griffiths.
19. David MacDougall, “Ethnographic Film: Failure and Promise,” Annual
Review of Anthropology 7 (1978): 424.
20. Karl Heider, Ethnographic Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976),
96.
21. MacDougall and Heider belong to a group of visual anthropologists—­
including Timothy Asch, Jay Ruby, Richard Sorenson, and Sol Worth—­who
wrestled with the place of cinema in the discipline during the 1960s and 1970s.
For examples of this expansive discussion, see Timothy Asch, “Ethnographic
Film: Structure and Function,” Annual Review of Anthropology 2 (1973):
179–­87; Asch, “Ethnographic Film and the Yanomamö Indians,” Sight Lines 5,
no. 3 (1972): 5–­12; Timothy Asch and Patsy Asch, “Film in Anthropological
Research,” Senri Ethnological Studies 24 (1988): 165–­89; Jay Ruby, “In a Pic’s
Eye: Interpretive Strategies for Deriving Significance and Meaning from Pho-
tographs,” Working Papers in Culture and Communication 1, no. 2 (1977): 22–­38;
Ruby, “Is an Ethnographic Film a Filmic Ethnography?,” Studies in the Anthropol-
ogy of Visual Communication 2 (1975): 104–­11; Ruby, “The Professionalization of
Visual Anthropology in the United States, the 1960s and 1970s,” Visual Anthro-
pology Review 17, no. 2 (2000–­2001): 5–­12; Richard Sorenson, “Anthropologi-
cal Film: A Scientific and Humanistic Resource,” Science 189, no. 4169 (1974):
1079–­85; Sorenson, “A Research Film Program in the Study of Changing Man,”
Current Anthropology 8, no. 5 (1967): 443–­69; Sol Worth, “Doing Anthropol-
ogy of Visual Communication,” Working Papers in Culture and Communication
1, no. 2 (1977): 2–­21.
22. Roosevelt includes the complete list of titles he carried with him on safari
in his appendix. See African Game Trails, 569–­70.
23. Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 1:10.
24. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 38.
25. Derrida, 38.
26. Derrida, 22.
27. Derrida, 29.
28. Derrida, 11, emphasis original.
29. Derrida, 9.
30. For examples of this approach (in addition to titles already mentioned),
see Emilie de Brigard, “The History of Ethnographic Film,” in Principles of Visual
Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings, 13–­43 (The Hague: Mouton, 1975); Peter
Loizos, Innovation in Ethnographic Film: From Innocence to Self-­Consciousness
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Dan Marks, “Ethnography and
Ethnographic Film: From Flaherty to Asch and After,” American Anthropologist
97, vol. 2 (1995): 339–­47.
31. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-­L ouise Mallet,
trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 11.
 322 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

32. Derrida, 105.

33. In a gesture that makes literal the analogy with Roosevelt’s pigskin library,
Nicole Shukin argues for an understanding of film material as inextricably tied to
animal remains. See Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
34. Sarah O’Brien, “Why Look at Dead Animals?,” Framework 57, no. 1
(2016): 34–­35.
35. Derrida, Animal, 10.
36. I am not suggesting that a causal or historical link joins structuralism and
poststructuralism, as Derek Attridge, Geoffrey Bennington, and Robert Young
have warned against. See their Post-­structuralism and the Question of History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 8.
37. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(1967; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 105.
38. Claude Lévi-­Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russell (1958; repr.,
London: Hutchinson, 1961), 17.
39. Lévi-­Strauss, 43. This resonance is all the more apparent when one consid-
ers that Lévi-­Strauss retraces the path of Roosevelt’s second safari to Brazil.
40. Lévi-­Strauss, 44.
41. Susan Sontag, “The Anthropologist as Hero,” in Against Interpretation
(New York: Picador, 1966), 73. This article was first published in the New York
Review of Books, November 28, 1963.
42. Lévi-­Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 45.
43. Lévi-­Strauss, 63.
44. See Claude Lévi-­Strauss, “Introduction: History and Anthropology,” in
Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf,
1–­27 (1958; repr., New York: Basic Books, 1963).
45. Lévi-­Strauss, 17.
46. Claude Lévi-­Strauss, “Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, fondateur des sciences de
l’homme,” in Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, 179–­91 (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1962).
47. The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz also compares Lévi-­Strauss
to Rousseau (and criticizes them both). See Geertz, “The Cerebral Savage,” in
The Interpretation of Cultures: On the Work of Claude Lévi-­Strauss, 345–­59 (New
York: Basic Books, 1973); Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author
(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983), 25–­4 8.
48. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 121.
49. Derrida, 11, emphasis original.
50. Derrida.
51. Derrida, 118.
52. Derrida, 135.
53. Derrida, 107–­8.
54. Derrida, 121.
55. In The Writing of History, published just a few years after Derrida’s Of
Grammatology, Michel de Certeau makes a similar argument. See de Certeau,
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 323

The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (1975; repr., New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1988), 209–­43.
56. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Ob-
ject (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 87–­88. The invisibility of
coexistence inspires a number of “autobiographical” ethnographies in the post-
structural era. See Catherine Russell, “Autoethnography: Journeys of the Self,”
in Experimental Ethnography, 275–­314.
57. Fabian, Time and the Other, 31.
58. Fabian, 123. See also Jay Ruby, “Exposing Yourself: Reflexivity, Anthro-
pology and Film,” Semiotica 10 (1980): 153–­79.
59. Derrida, Animal, 41.
60. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987), 361.
61. Deleuze and Guattari, 371.
62. I discuss the “minor” in Deleuze’s writing and thought in the first chapter,
“Of Other Archives.”
63. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 386.
64. Nina J. Root, Catalog of the American Museum of Natural History Film Ar-
chives (New York: Garland, 1987).
65. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the
(In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda
Williams, 114–­33 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994).
66. Jonathan Auerbach, Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007), 125.
67. Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 153.
68. Stewart, 159, emphasis original.
69. Stewart, 161.
70. Russell, Experimental Ethnography, 146.
71. Russell.
72. Russell, 147.
73. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 164.
74. Doane.
75. Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 1:9.
76. For a history of the hunting film, see Derek Bousé, Wildlife Films (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 46–­57; Palle B. Petterson,
Cameras into the Wild: A History of Early Wildlife and Expedition Filmmaking (Jef-
ferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2011).
77. Curtis, “Animal Pictures,” 25–­2 6.
78. Rony, Third Eye, 99–­126.
79. Rony, 101.
80. Rony, 102.
81. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981; repr., Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 2006), 7–­8, emphasis original.
 324 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

82. Finis Dunaway, “Hunting with the Camera: Nature Photography, Manli-
ness, and Modern Memory, 1890–­1930,” Journal of American Studies 34, no. 2
(2000): 220.
83. See Sontag, On Photography; Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003).
84. Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” 20–­4 8.
85. Mark Alvey, “The Cinema as Taxidermy: Carl Akeley and the Preservative
Obsession,” Framework 48, no. 1 (2007): 23–­45.
86. Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” 25.
87. Haraway, 38.
88. Rony, Third Eye, 104.
89. Rony, 102.
90. See Gruber, “Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology.”
91. This chapter arrives amid a robust reconsideration of the epistemic func-
tion of animals in cinema and, in particular, the event of animal death. For a
reading of cinematic animals that turns away from Derrida and toward the “eth-
icoreligious” dimensions of Simone Weil, see Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Ani-
mality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2011). Jonathan Burt offers a broad historical overview of animal death
in both documentary and narrative film. See Burt, “Animal Life and Death,”
in Animals in Film, 165–­98 (London: Reaktion Books, 2002). See also Michael
Lawrence and Laura McMahon, eds., Animal Life and the Moving Image (Lon-
don: British Film Institute, 2015); Shukin, Animal Capital. For writing on ani-
mal death beyond the boundaries of film studies, see Animal Studies Group,
ed., Killing Animals (Urbana-­Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006);
Jay Johnston and Fiona Probyn-­R apsey, eds., Animal Death (Sydney: University
of Sydney Press, 2013).
92. For examples of this visual analogy, see Grass (Merian C. Cooper and
Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1925), La Croisière noire (Léon Poirier, 1926), Chang
(Cooper and Schoedsack, 1927), Simba: King of the Beasts (Martin and Osa
Johnson, 1928), and Congorilla (Martin and Osa Johnson, 1931).
93. Pivoting from John Berger’s canonical “Why Look at Animals?,” Sarah
O’Brien argues that the representation of animal death—­in the context of in-
dustrial slaughter films—­is symptomatic of “an ethically ambivalent desire for
visual knowledge of death.” See O’Brien, “Why Look at Dead Animals?,” 48.
See also Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” in About Looking, 1–­28 (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1980).
94. Akira Mizuta Lippit, “The Death of an Animal,” Film Quarterly 56, no. 1
(2002): 13. See also Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of
Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000).
95. Lippit, “Death of an Animal,” 14.
96. André Bazin, “Death Every Afternoon,” in Rites of Realism: Essays on Cor-
poreal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies, trans. Mark A. Cohen (1958; repr., Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 30.
97. Lippit, “Death of an Animal,” 18.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 325

98. Lippit, 18–­19.

99. Derrida, Animal, 13.
100. Derrida, 12.
101. Derrida, 11.
102. Lippit, “Death of the Animal,” 18.
103. Derrida, Animal, 31, emphasis original.
104. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (1967; repr., Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1978), 282, emphasis original.
105. Derrida, 280.
106. Derrida, 286, emphasis original.
107. Derrida, 279–80, emphasis original.
108. Derrida, 289, emphasis original.
109. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 25.
110. Derrida.

4. Language Games
1. Cavell offers a concise defense of ordinary language philosophy in the
titular essay of Must We Mean What We Say?, 1–­43 (1969; repr., Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989). William Rothman and Marian Keane also
draw the connection between the final chapter of The World Viewed and Cavell’s
philosophy of ordinary language. See Rothman and Keane, Reading Cavell’s “The
World Viewed”: A Philosophical Perspective on Film (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State
University Press, 2000), 233–­6 0.
2. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 163.
3. Cavell, xx. See also William Rothman, ed., Cavell on Film (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2005).
4. In Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, the passages contained in
§§243–­71 are commonly referred to as the “private language argument” (though
he himself never uses the phrase). He writes (§243), “The words of this language
are to refer to what can be known only to the speaker; to his immediate, private,
sensations. So another cannot understand the language.” Wittgenstein goes on
to argue that this kind of language is ultimately impossible. The secondary litera-
ture on private language is vast and beyond the scope of this chapter; suffice it to
say that there is no consensus on whether the Philosophical Investigations actually
contains an argument for private language, and among those who accept that the
argument exists, there remains considerable dispute about the details of the argu-
ment, as well as the implications of Wittgenstein’s conclusion (that private lan-
guage is impossible). See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans.
G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1967).
5. Cavell writes in defense of context in “Must We Mean What We Say?,”
in particular, 17, 33. On the “revolutionary” dimensions of Cavell’s view, see
Paola Marrati, “On the Significance of Disagreement: Stanley Cavell and Or-
dinary Language Philosophy,” in How the West Was Won: Essays on the Literary
 326 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

Imagination, the Canon, and the Christian Middle Ages, ed. Willemien Otten, Arjo
Vanderjagt, and Hent de Vries, 239–­54 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2010).
6. The term acknowledgment to which Cavell’s final chapter refers stands in
contradistinction to knowledge or knowing. For more on this distinction, see
Cavell’s essay “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say?,
238– ­6 6.
7. Cavell, World Viewed, 154.
8. Cavell, 24.
9. Cavell, 148.
10. Cavell, 155, emphasis original. D. N. Rodowick further underscores the
historical dimension of Cavell’s ontology. See Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film, 65.
Paola Marrati locates fundamental points of contact between Cavell’s concep-
tion of historical time and that of Gilles Deleuze. See Marrati, Gilles Deleuze:
Cinema and Philosophy, trans. Alisa Hartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2003).
11. Rodowick offers a compelling response to this objection in Virtual Life
of Film: “Although the subtitle of [Cavell’s] book is Reflections on the Ontology of
Film, Cavell’s idea of ontology in no way assumes an essentialism or teleology. It
refers, rather, to a mode of existence for art and to our relationships with given
art forms. This mode of existence is not static, however. A medium, if it is a liv-
ing one, is continually in a state of self-­t ransformation.” See Rodowick, Virtual
Life of Film, 42. Although Rodowick does not consider the linguistic stakes of
Cavell’s writing on film, this defense of Cavell nevertheless implies a further
connection between his views of ordinary language (as lived, social, etc.) and
media ontology.
12. The impulse to compare cinema to language—­or to conceive of film
as a language—­extends across the twentieth century. Even as they pursued a
theory of medium specificity, French film theorists of the 1920s—­figures like
Jean Epstein, Ricciotto Canudo, Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc, and Émile
Vuillermoz—­often framed this pursuit as a search for the particular language
of film. Béla Balázs described cinema, especially in the silent era, as a kind of
universal, Esperanto-­esque mode of expression. Sergei Eisenstein insisted on
the link between montage and the graphic aspects of writing, in particular the
visual formations of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Japanese ideograms. And in
the mid-­t wentieth century, André Bazin’s conclusion to the “Ontology of the
Photographic Image” suggested that the linguistic qualities of cinema were so
self-­evident that they required no further explanation (“On the other hand, of
course, cinema is also a language”). All this, before a rigorous semiotics of the
image, influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure, begins to take shape. For a selec-
tion of canonical interventions in the study of language and cinema, see Richard
Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–­1929 (Princeton, N.J.: Prince­
ton University Press, 1988), esp. 5–­34; Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character
and Growth of a New Art (London: Dennis Dobson, 1952); Sergei Eisenstein,
Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949); Roland
Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (1964;
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 327

repr., New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Barthes, Image–­Music–­Text, trans.
Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977); Bazin, What Is Cinema?, esp.
1:16–­4 0; Umberto Eco, “Articulations of the Cinematic Code,” Cinesemantics 1,
no. 1 (1970): 590–­6 05; Christian Metz, Film and Cinema: Approaches to Semiot-
ics, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok, trans. Donna Jean Umiker-­Sebeok (Paris: Mouton,
1974); Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor
(1971; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Pier Paolo Pasolini,
Pasolini on Pasolini: Interviews with Oswald Stack (London: Secker and Warburg,
1969); Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-­L ewis, New Vo-
cabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-­structuralism, and Beyond (New
York: Routledge, 1992); Peter Wollen, “The Semiology of the Cinema,” in Signs
and Meaning in the Cinema, 79–­106 (London: British Film Institute, 1998). See
also the special issue of Screen 14, no. 1–­2 (1973), dedicated to cinesemiotics in
general and the work of Christian Metz in particular.
13. In addition to works by Metz already cited, see Stephen Heath, “Film/
Cinetext/Text,” Screen 14, no. 1–­2 (1973): 102–­28; Heath, “Metz’s Semiology:
A Short Glossary,” Screen 14, no. 1–­2 (1973): 214–­2 6; Heath, “The Work of
Christian Metz,” Screen 14, no. 3 (1973): 5–­28. For a critique of the organicist
and auteurist underpinnings of Metz’s cinesemiotics, see Sam Rohdie, “Metz
and Film Semiotics: Opening the Field,” Jump Cut 7 (1975): 22–­2 4.
14. I am not the first to critique the metaphors of language that subtend
Metz’s film theory. See, e.g., Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-­Image, trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (1985; repr., Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1989), 25–­30. As D. N. Rodowick argues, Deleuze’s concep-
tion of image as a “mobile material” is crucial to understanding his disagree-
ment with Metz and his preference for the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce.
See Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1997), 38–­78.
15. The argument in the previous chapter approaches the difference between
ethnographic writing and cinema by drawing on Derrida. For an examination
of the points of contact between Derrida and Cavell, see Gordon C. F. Bearn,
“Sounding Serious: Cavell and Derrida,” Representations 63 (Summer 1998):
65–­92. Also worth noting here is Derrida’s explicit disagreement with another
theorist of ordinary language, J. L. Austin. For Derrida’s response to Austin,
and in particular his claims about illocutionary acts and context, see Derrida,
“Signature Event Context,” in Limited, Inc., trans. Alan Bass, 1–­23 (1977; repr.,
Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
16. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.  M. Sheridan
Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), esp. 21–­78; Derrida, Of Gramma-
tology; de Certeau, Writing of History; de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on
the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986).
17. Raymond Bellour, “The Unattainable Text,” in The Analysis of Film, ed.
Constance Penley, trans. Ben Brewster (Bloomington: University of Indiana
Press, 2000), 25.
 328 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

18. Bellour, 27, 26.

19. Bellour, 27.
20. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 97, emphasis original.
21. The uneasy relationship between language and image in the study of inter-
titles manifests itself in the very process of naming the phenomenon of inserting
language into early and silent-­era films. The term intertitle does not appear until
the early 1930s, when it was used to differentiate the writing of silent-­era cinema
from subtitles, or the translations of spoken language that began to appear at the
bottom of foreign-­language films. However, a number of terms circulated during
the silent era to describe what we now call the “intertitle,” including title, subtitle,
caption, and heading. For further writing on this proliferation of language, see
Claire Dupré la Tour, “Intertitles and Titles,” in The Encyclopedia of Early Cin-
ema, ed. Richard Abel, 326–­31 (New York: Routledge, 2005).
22. For histories of the practice, especially its development out of the magic
lantern show and its industrial effects, see the aforementioned summary by
Dupré la Tour, “Intertitles and Titles,” 471–­76, as well as Rick Altman, Silent
Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), esp. 140–­43, 165–­68;
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, eds., The Classical Holly-
wood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Routledge,
1988); Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Katherine Nagels, “‘Those
Funny Subtitles’: Silent Film Intertitles in Exhibition and Discourse,” Early
Popular Visual Culture 10, no. 4 (2012): 367–­82; Stephen Prince, A History of the
Screenplay (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Martin Sopocy, “The Role of
the Intertitle in Film Exhibition, 1904–­1910,” in The Beginnings and the Future:
Essays Marking the Centenary of the First Film Show Projected to a Paying Audience
in Britain, ed. Christopher Williams, 123–­3 4 (London: University of Westmin-
ster Press, 1996).
23. See Dupré la Tour, “Intertitles and Titles,” 328; Nagels, “Those Funny
Subtitles,” 374–­75.
24. Dupré la Tour, “Intertitles and Titles,” 328.
25. Dupré la Tour.
26. For more on the transition, see Dupré la Tour; Musser, Emergence of Cin-
ema, 366–­67; Nagel, “‘Those Funny Subtitles,’” 373; Germain Lacasse, “The Lec-
turer and the Attraction,” in Strauven, Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, 183–­203;
Germain Lacasse, “The Film Lecturer,” in Gaudreault et al., A Companion to
Early Cinema, 487–­97. Tom Gunning examines the intermittent rediscovery of
the lecturer in film-­h istorical scholarship in “The Scene of Speaking: Two De-
cades of Discovering the Film Lecturer,” Iris 27 (Spring 1999): 67–­79.
27. For discussions of the authorial and authoritative function of the lecturer,
see Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 206–­8. Griffiths’s study of ethnographic
amusements also includes detailed histories of Burton Holmes and Lyman
Howe. See also Altman, Silent Film Sound, 133–­55; Lacasse, “The Lecturer and
the Attraction,” 182–­203; Lacasse, “Film Lecturer,” 487–­9 7; Musser, Emergence
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 329

of Cinema, 38–­42, 223; Jennifer Peterson (on Burton Holmes), Education in the
School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 2013), 35–­55.
28. For examples, see Heider, Ethnographic Film, 25; Rony, Third Eye, 41–­4 4;
Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams, 149–­50. Alison Griffiths offers an in-
teresting counterperspective on the location of power in the exchange between
intertitle and image. She notes that anxieties about the moving image led the
American Museum of Natural History to exert significant control over the inter-
titles displayed by visiting lecturers. See Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 261–­70.
29. Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image–­Music–­Text, 32–­51,
40; Barthes also proposes “relay” as the language–­i mage relation in cartoons and
comic strips.
30. Debates about the deictic (or nondeictic) function of cinema are central
to the history of cinema semiotics. As Warren Buckland outlines, the disagree-
ment between Francesco Casetti and Christian Metz about the “enunciative”
function of narrative cinema rests on their distinct views on this particular
linguistic category. See Buckland, The Cognitive Semiotics of Film (Cambridge:
University of Cambridge, 2000); Francesco Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction
Film and Its Spectator (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Christian
Metz, “The Impersonal Enunciation, or the Site of Film (In the Margin of Re-
cent Works on Enunciation in Cinema),” trans. Béatrice Durand-­Sendrail and
Kristen Brookes, New Literary History 22, no. 3 (1991): 747–­72.
31. For an overview of Pathé’s role in the Dutch film market, see Ivo Blom,
Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade (Amsterdam: University of Amster-
dam Press, 2003). For discussion of the Pathé studio’s seeming “foreignness” and
its influence on American film production, see Richard Abel, The Red Rooster
Scare: Making American Cinema, 1900–­1910 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999). See also Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams, 77–­9 0.
32. Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams, 149.
33. See, for examples, Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play”; Derrida, Of Gram-
matology, 95–­130. I also discuss Derrida’s critique of Lévi-­Strauss in chapter 3.
34. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass
(1972; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3, emphasis original.
35. Metz, Film Language, 67, emphasis original.
36. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 5, emphasis original.
37. Michel Foucault, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” trans. Richard Howard, Octo-
ber 1 (Spring 1976): 11. See also Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, ed. and trans.
James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
38. Foucault, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” 12.
39. Foucault, 16.
40. Foucault, 14.
41. Derrida, “Différance,” 11.
42. Douwe Adolf Rinkes, N. van Zalinge, and J. W. de Roever, Het Indische
boek der zee (Batavia: Weltevreden, 1925), np. Translation mine.
43. Though very little has been published on Henk Alsem, his Dutch titles
 330 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

are held by the EYE Filmmuseum, which has also compiled a few bibliographic
details and photographic images at https://www.eyefilm.nl/.
44. It is worth nothing that the Latinate term patria had a rather ambiguous
meaning in Dutch for centuries, given the Netherlands’ complex provincial and
colonial histories. More broadly, patria signifies a physical place and geographic
origins (e.g., country, homeland, origin of one’s ancestors) as well as masculine
mythologies of the nation (e.g., fatherland) and the no-­places of the imperial
imagination. For a discussion of the particularities of Dutch conceptions of pa-
tria, see Simon Schama, An Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch
Culture in the Golden Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), esp.
51–­68, 257–­88.
45. Other examples include Au pays des cannibales (1912), with French and
Dutch intertitles; Aux environs de Hanoï (Indo-­Chine Film, unknown date), with
French, English, and Vietnamese intertitles; Kitega: Capitale de l’Urundi (Éclair,
1916), with intertitles in French and German; Bou Saâda (René Moreau, 1921),
with French and English intertitles; and La Vie indigène chez les Bahutu (Éclair,
1920), with French and German intertitles.
46. See “Treaty between His Britannic Majesty and the King of the Nether-
lands, respecting territory and commerce in the East Indies,” in The Edinburgh
Annual Register, for 1824, vol. 17, part III (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne, 1825),
25–­28; see also Harry J. Marks,  The First Contest for Singapore, 1819–­1824
(S’-­Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959); Keng We Koh, “Travel and Survival
in the Colonial Malay World: Mobility, Region, and the World in Johor Elite
Strategies, 1818–­1824,” Journal of World History 25, no. 4 (2014): 559–­82.
47. Dupré la Tour, “Intertitles and Titles,” 330.
48. Leo Spitzer, Representative Essays, ed. Alban K. Forcione, Herbert Linden-
berger, and Madeleine Sutherland (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1988), 35.
49. I first encountered this passage in Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone: A
New Comparative Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005),
61. Here Apter positions Spitzer at the center of an ethics of original language
and what she describes as “transnational humanism.”
50. Theodor Adorno, “Words from Abroad,” in Notes to Literature, trans.
Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:187.
For more on Adorno’s understanding of language, see Samir Gandesha, “The
‘Aesthethic Dignity of Words’: Adorno’s Philosophy of Language,” New German
Critique 97 (Winter 2006): 137–­58.
51. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1975), 67.
52. Lawrence Venuti, Scandals of Translation (New York: Routledge, 1998),
11. See also Antoine Berman, “La traduction et la lettre, ou l’auberge du lointain,”
in Les tours de Babel: Essais sur la traduction, 33–­150 (Mauvezin: Trans-­Europ-­
Repress, 1985), 33–­150; Berman, Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne
(Paris: Gallimard, 1995).
53. Venuti, Scandals of Translation, 11.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 331

54. Abé Mark Nornes, Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 155.
55. Nornes also speculates on a dubbing method that would “fuck [the origi-
nal] up with love and respect.” See Nornes, Cinema Babel, 221–­28.
56. Walter Benjamin, “One-­Way Street,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–­
1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et
al. (1928; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 476.
57. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Se-
lected Writings, 1:253–­63, 258, 260.
58. Benjamin, 1:262.
59. Benjamin, 1:255–­57.
60. Benjamin, 1:254–­55.
61. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings,
4:389–­4 00; see also Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’”
4:401–­11.
62. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota, 1986), 82.
63. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 1:262. One might draw a strong con-
nection between Benjamin’s image that “flashes up” and the intertitle; his con-
ception of the “expressionless” also shares in some of the tensions of the deictic
mode I have described here. See Selected Writings, 1:340–­41. I am grateful to Paul
Flaig for bringing these resonances to my attention.
64. Linguists sometimes use the term utterance to refer to any unit of speech
under study. For others, the term refers to the theories of speech action devel-
oped by philosophers of language like John Searle, J.  L. Austin, and Stanley
Cavell. Mikhail Bakhtin constructs a robust theory of utterance across several of
his major works. See Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. Caryl Emerson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Bakhtin, Speech Genres
and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W.
McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); and Bakhtin, The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992).
65. Cooper and Schoedsack would collaborate on another work of com-
mercial docufiction for Paramount Pictures, Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness
(1927), before producing their most famous work, King Kong (1933), for RKO
Radio Pictures.
66. La Tour, “Intertitles and Titles,” 330.
67. Amy Malek makes this argument with specific reference to Grass. See
Malek, “‘If You’re Going to Educate ’Em, You’ve Got to Entertain ’Em Too’:
An Examination of Representation and Ethnography in Grass and People of the
Wind,” Iranian Studies 44, no. 3 (2011): 313–­25.
68. According to accounts at the time of his death, Robert Imbrie, U.S. consul
in Iran, was killed in Tehran on July 23, 1924, when a crowd of anti-­Bahá’i dem-
onstrators mistook Imbrie for a member of the minority religion. See “Imbrie
Murder Laid to Religious Hate,” New York Times, July 24, 1924.
69. The history of musical and vocal accompaniment during the silent era has
 332 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

been well documented by Rick Altman, among many others. See Altman, Silent
Film Sound; see also Altman, “The Silence of the Silents,” Musical Quarterly 80,
no. 4 (1997): 648–­718; Norman King, “The Sound of Silents,” Screen 25, no. 3
(1984): 2–­15.
70. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans.
Edith Bone (New York: Dover, 1970), esp. 194–­231; Michel Chion, Audio-­Vision:
Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (1990; repr., New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1994). For further contemporary writing on the acous-
tic qualities of silent film, see Richard Abel and Rick Altman, eds., The Sounds of
Early Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). See also Christian
Metz, “Aural Objects,” trans. Georgia Gurrieri, Yale French Studies 60 (1980):
24–­32.
71. Melinda Szaloky, “Sounding Images in Silent Film: Visual Acoustics in
Murnau’s Sunrise,” Cinema Journal 41, no. 2 (2002): 127.
72. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999), 113.
73. On the voice as a phenomenon that divides the subject and the “living
present,” see Jacques Derrida, “The Voice That Keeps Silent,” in Voice and Phe-
nomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans.
Leonard Lawlor, 60–­74 (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2010).
74. De Certeau, Writing of History, 215–­16.
75. Roland Barthes similarly insists upon the specificity of the voice and its
separation from language and communication. See Barthes, “The Grain of the
Voice,” in Image–­Music–­Text, 179–­89.
76. De Certeau, Writing of History, 215.
77. De Certeau.
78. De Certeau, 230.
79. De Certeau, 235, emphasis original.
80. W. J. T. Mitchell, “What Is an Image?,” New Literary History 15, no. 3
(1984): 529.

5. Ethnography Won’t Wait

1. Alison Griffiths and Fatimah Tobing Rony locate several important ex-
ceptions at the intersection of popular culture and ethnographic practice. See
Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 171–­252; Rony, Third Eye, 157–­92.
2. See Sigmund Freud, “A Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad,” Standard Edi-
tion 19 (1925; repr., London: Hogarth Press, 1961): 227–­34. See also Derrida,
Archive Fever, 13–­18.
3. This statement comes from a document titled “Project Goals,” https://
beeldenvoordetoekomst.nl/.
4. Director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive Jan Christopher Horak
has commented widely on the instability of digital futures. See, for example,
his review of Caroline Frick’s Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation in The
Moving Image 12, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 172–­74; his comments on Paramount’s tran-
sition to digital distribution, “Paramount Cuts Film, Giving the Starring Role
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 333

to Digital,” narrated by Rachel Martin, Weekend Edition Sunday, January 26,

2014, http://www.npr.org/; and his response to proponents of digital archiving
in “Paramount’s All Digital Distribution,” http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/blogs/.
Similar arguments are made by Paolo Cherchi Usai, David Francis, Alexander
Horwath, and Michael Loebenstein in their edited collection of discussions on
the future of the archive and curatorship, Film Curatorship: Museums, Curator-
ship and the Moving Image (Vienna: Austrian Film Museum Press, 2008).
5. Usai, Death of Cinema, 11.
6. Thomas Elsaesser, “The New Film History as Media Archaeology,” Ciné-
mas: Journal of Film Studies 14, no. 2–­3 (2004): 78. See also Thomas Elsaesser,
“Early Film History and Multi-­media: An Archaeology of Possible Futures,” in
New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
and Thomas Keenan, 13–­2 6 (New York: Routledge, 2006).
7. In her study of nitrate flammability, Heather Heckman notes that “‘cellu-
loid’ was the name given to the material [of nitrate] in 1870 by the Hyatt brothers,
who ran an early cellulose nitrate manufacturing company, the Albany Dental
Plate Company. Technically, nitrate is the only film stock that can rightfully be
called celluloid, though safety stock is also derived from a cellulose base. Poly-
ester stock contains no cellulose whatsoever.” Nearly every title I examined in
the process of researching this book was originally printed on nitrate film stock.
Many of these films were transferred—­at some point in their archival lives—­to
acetate or polyester safety stock (and, thereafter, were migrated to other for-
mats). In this chapter, I often use the term celluloid to refer to the films I am
examining, even if my access to the nitrocellulose print was mediated by other
formats. This is a more expansive usage than the Hyatt brothers originally in-
tended and more imprecise than Heckman’s definition allows. While important
differences separate nitrate, acetate, and polyester stock, these materials are mu-
tually entangled in the archival lives of ethnographic film, equally vulnerable to
the kinds of noniconic environmental indices I explore in this chapter, and very
often inseparable. The transfer prints preserve traces of the unrestored nitro-
cellulose (as they contribute traces of their own), and the original nitrocellulose
prints are often not easily viewable or no longer extant at all. I insist on using the
term celluloid because I want to draw attention to the material features of the
nitrocellulose print but also because there is no easy alternative. The imprecision
of these encounters (between surfaces and formats) is precisely what is at stake
in this chapter. See Heckman, “Burn after Viewing, or, Fire in the Vaults: Nitrate
Decomposition and Combustibility,” The American Archivist 73, no. 2 (2010):
487n10.
8. Caroline Frick offers an excellent overview of this history and the ideo-
logical commitments of the film preservation movement (and the archival insti-
tutions of film preservation). See Frick, Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preserva-
tion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). See also Penelope Houston,
Keepers of the Frame: The Film Archives (London: British Film Institute, 1994);
Tom McGreevey and Joanne L. Yeck, Our Movie Heritage (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1997); Anthony Slide, Nitrate Won’t Wait: A History of
 334 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

Film Preservation in the United States (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1992); Roger
Smither and Catherine A. Surowiec, eds., This Film Is Dangerous: A Celebration
of Nitrate Film (London: Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film, 2002).
There are important exceptions to the modes of archival salvage that dominate
the field. See, for examples, Frick’s fifth and sixth chapters, “Toward a More In-
clusive Film Heritage: Challenging the National” and “The Plurality of Preserva-
tion,” 119–­50, 151–­80; and Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival
Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2014).
9. Usai, Death of Cinema, 21.
10. Laura Marks, The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the
Senses (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 133.
11. W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., introduction to Landscape and Power (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1994), 1.
12. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978), 29.
13. For examples of this genealogy of landscape scholarship, see Denis Cos-
grove and Stephen Daniels, eds., “Introduction: Iconography and Landscape,”
in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design,
and Use of Past Environments, 1–­10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), 1–­10; Ian Christie, “Landscape and ‘Location’: Reading Filmic Space His-
torically,” Rethinking History 4, no. 2 (2000): 165–­74; Hanna Johansson, “The
Revival of Landscape Art,” in Landscape Theory, ed. Rachel DeLue and James
Elkins, 221–­28 (New York: Routledge, 2008); Mitchell, introduction to Land-
scape and Power, 1–­4; Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power,
5–­3 4. For an account of the development of landscape as an idea before the
twentieth century, see John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place,
1730–­1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011).
14. Key contributions to this history of landscape include Walter Gibson,
Mirror of the Earth: The World Landscape in Sixteenth-­Century Flemish Paint-
ing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); Bob Haak, The Golden
Age: Dutch Painters and the Seventeenth Century (New York: Stewart, Tabori and
Chang, 1984); Wolfgang Stechow, Dutch Landscape Painting in the Seventeenth
Century (1966; repr., New York: Hacker Art, 1981); Peter Sutton, Masters of
Seventeenth-­Century Dutch Landscape (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1988).
15. Ann Adams, “Competing Communities in the ‘Great Bog of Europe’:
Identity and Seventeenth-­Century Dutch Landscape Painting,” in Landscape
and Power, 35.
16. Kenneth Clark’s lectures were adapted and published as Landscape into
Art (London: John Murray, 1949).
17. Clark, 29–­30.
18. Ernst Gombrich, Norm and Form (New York: Phaidon Press, 1966), 117.
19. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975), 121.
20. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972; repr., New York: Penguin, 1977), 109.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 335

Berger’s television series, Ways of Seeing (1972), preceded the release of the book
and offered a direct reply to Kenneth Clark’s thirteen-­part series Civilisation
(1969). For more on the televisual encounter (and antagonism) between Clark
and Berger, see Jonathan Conlin, “‘An Irresponsible Flow of Images’: Berger,
Clark, and the Art of Television, 1958–­1988,” in On John Berger: Telling Stories,
ed. Ralf Hertel and David Malcolm, 269–­92 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Rodopi,
2016).
21. Williams, The Country and City, 125.
22. For examples, see Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English
Rustic Tradition, 1740–­1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987);
John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting,
1730–­1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Mitchell, Land-
scape and Power; Pratt, Imperial Eyes.
23. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 51.
24. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, 17.
25. Mitchell, 15, emphasis original.
26. Mitchell.
27. Mitchell, 9–­10.
28. Mitchell, 14, emphasis in original.
29. See Brunhes, Atlas photographique des formes du relief terrestre, vol. 1;
Brunhes, La Géographie humaine; Brunhes, Human Geography.
30. I discuss Jean Brunhes, the development of human geography, and his
view of photography at length in chapter 1.
31. Mitchell, introduction to Landscape and Power, 1.
32. Gunning, “Whole World within Reach,” 34.
33. Rabinovitz, “From Hale’s Tours to Star Tours,” 45.
34. Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent
Films about Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 45–­88.
35. Martin Lefebvre, “Between Setting and Landscape in the Cinema,” in
Landscape and Film, ed. Martin Lefebvre (New York: AFI/Routledge, 2006), 52.
36. See Gunning, “The Whole World within Reach,” in Ruoff, Virtual Voyages,
34.
37. Jennifer Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early
Nonfiction Film (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), 14–­16.
38. The extant work of Lamster and Mullens is archived at the EYE Film-
museum. Nico de Klerk curated a collection of Lamster’s films, J. C. Lamster,
een vroege filmer in Nederlands-­Indië, which was distributed on DVD by the
Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (Royal Institute for the Tropics) in 2010.
39. “Wide World Pictures,” Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, April 16, 1913,
http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/.
40. For further details on Matthew Stirling, the expedition, and its visual rec­
ords, see Paul Michael Taylor, By Aeroplane to Pygmyland: Revisiting the 1926
Dutch and American Expedition to New Guinea (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institute Libraries, Digital Editions, 2006). See also the Smithsonian’s website
 336 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

dedicated to the expedition, http://www.sil.si.edu/expeditions/1926/index

.cfm/.
41. Taylor, By Aeroplane to Pygmyland, 2.
42. Taylor, 2–­4.
43. Taylor, 1.
44. In her account of the discourses surrounding and responding to aerial
photography, Paula Amad notes that the evidentiary powers of aerial images
often collide with their perspectival ambiguities and aesthetic properties. See
Amad, “From God’s Eye to Camera Eye: Aerial Photography’s Post-­humanist
and Neo-­humanist Visions of the World,” History of Photography 36, no. 1
(2012): 66–­86.
45. Despite his prolific career as an amateur visual anthropologist, Paul Julien
remains a relatively obscure figure in film history. The Nederlands Fotomuseum
has compiled a brief biography, “Fotografendossiers: Julien, Paul (1901–­2001),”
https://www.nederlandsfotomuseum.nl/. See also Angeliki Fotieni Koukoula,
The Amateur Is Dead! Long Live Amateur Film! The Visual Egodocuments of Paul
Julien (MA thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2008).
46. Koukoula, Amateur Is Dead!, 22–­23.
47. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 23.
48. Bennett, 24.
49. Charles Sanders Peirce describes the intersection between photography
and film himself. See, e.g., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles
Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1933), vol. 4, paras. 447–­4 8.
50. Charles Sanders Peirce, The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, Selected Philosophical
Writings (1867–­1893), ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1992), 7.
51. Dai Vaughan, For Documentary: Twelve Essays (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999), 182.
52. See Barthes, Camera Lucida.
53. Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 1:10.
54. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 115.
55. Lev Manovich, “What Is Digital Cinema?,” in Digital Dialectics: News Es-
says on New Media, ed. Peter Lunenfeld, 172–­92 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1998); Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2002).
56. Mary Ann Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specific-
ity,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2007): 133. The
essay is part of a special issue of Differences (edited by Doane) dedicated entirely
to the concept of indexicality.
57. Doane, 135.
58. Doane, 142.
59. See my discussion of Promio’s cinématographes in chapter 1.
60. Usai, Death of Cinema, 21.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 337

61. For a more detailed history of the archive, see Fossati, From Grain to Pixel,
171–­78.
62. Leenke Ripmeester, “Dutch Film Studios,” https://www.eyefilm.nl; see
also Ivo Blom, Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade (Amsterdam: Univer-
sity of Amsterdam Press, 2014).
63. Fossati, From Grain to Pixel, 172.
64. Fossati, 127.
65. The moving image content for the Scene Machine was curated by David
Lammers, Remco Packbiers, Maike Lasseur, and Rommy Albers; the project
was coordinated by Annelies Termeer and Irene Haan of the EYE Filmmuseum.
Images for the Future began in 2007 as a collaborative effort between the EYE
Filmmuseum, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, and the Dutch
Nationaal Archief. It is a large-­scale, government-­f unded project, dedicated to
preserving the audiovisual heritage of the Dutch archives, including 22,086
hours of film, 98,734 hours of video, and 2.5 million photographs.
66. I am influenced here by media archaeology’s attention to the noise, ac-
cidents, and failures of communication in digital networks. See, for examples,
Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with
Chris Cullens (1985; repr., Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990),
esp. section II, “1900”; Jussi Parikka, “Mapping Noise and Accidents,” in What
Is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 90–­112; and Wolfgang
Ernst, “Distory,” in Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka, trans.
Dawn Michelle d’Atri (2008; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2013), 66–­68.
This page intentionally left blank
INDEX
Page references in italics refer to illustrations
Abel, Richard: on early dance film,
120; Encyclopedia of Early Cinema,
12
acinématographie, 55–73; incoher-
ence of, 63
acoustics, silent film, 332n70
Adams, Ann, 263
Adorno, Theodor: on language,
330n50; “Words from Abroad,”
236
Adventures on the Upper Nile, 179–84;
audiences of, 179; cinematography
of, 180, 186; difference in, 180;
hunting in, 179, 181–82, 182,
191; intertitles of, 181; narrative
time of, 191; nomad trope of,
180–81; schizogenic time in, 182;
spatiotemporality of, 179, 180,
182; taxidermy in, 182, 183; time
in, 191
aerial views: ambiguities of, 336n44;
of Archives de la Planète, 85–87;
of By Aeroplane to Pygmyland, 272,
273; in human geography, 78–79,
307n88; making visible in, 87
Africa: dance of, 38, 105–7, 130–32;
premodernity in, 171. See also
African Game Trails; Cameroun;
Danses de Dogons
African Game Trails, 157–58, 160,
170; African peoples in, 158; on
animal films, 160; ethnozoologi-
cal confusion in, 158; on visual
technologies, 161
Agamben, Giorgio, 108, 135–36
Akeley, Carl, 194
Albany Dental Plate Company, 333n7
Algeria, autochromes of, 92, 93, 98
Allakariallak, 196
Allen, Robert C.: Film History, 13, 19
Alsem, Henk, 231, 329n43
Altman, Rick, 7, 332n69
Alvey, Mark, 194
Amad, Paula, 298n44; on aerial
images, 336n44; on Archives de
la Planète, 52–54, 89; Counter-­
Archive, 34; on counter-­a rchive,
80–81; on predocumentary film,
307n106
American Museum of Natural
History (AMNH), 1; Akeley
Hall of African Mammals, 179,
195; archive of, 5; control over
intertitles, 329n28; Curtis’s foot-
age in, 140; expedition films of,
38, 179–86; film fragments of,
2; Morgan Collection, 106, 109,
124–27, 128–29, 130; Roosevelt
safari specimens in, 159
Andrews, Yvette Borup, 184
339
 340 INDEX
Anglo-­Dutch Treaty (1824), 232
animal death, 14, 197–99; in Ad-
ventures on the Upper Nile, 179,
181–82, 182, 191; animals’ experi-
ence of, 200, 204; in Chasseurs
d’ivoire, 192–93; in cinema of
attractions, 187; Edison’s, 190;
epistemic function of, 324n91;
in expedition films, 107, 167–68,
187–89, 191, 193, 197, 202–3,
246; in Frontiers of a Forbidden
Land, 186; in industrial slaughter
films, 324n93; Lippit on, 198–99;
as metaphor, 189; in narrative
film, 324n91; during Roosevelt
safari, 158–59; in Simba: King of
the Beasts, 188–89. See also death
animals: Derrida on, 40, 167, 201–4,
324n91; following of, 167, 202;
gaze of, 201; human reconstruc-
tion of, 201; metaphoric, 198, 199;
multiplicity of, 72, 187, 200–201;
in racist jokes, 198; recollective
function for, 202; relationship to
the human, 200–204; in salvage
ethnography, 198–99; unknow-
ability of, 201
animals, ethnocinematic: boundaries
of, 167; in ethnographic intertitles,
245; in expedition films, 40–41,
201–2; Roosevelt on, 160
animation: Disney, 151, 153;
Eisenstein on, 153, 154; totemism
in, 151
anthropology: alliance with history,
172, 255; autonomous self in, 205;
avant-­garde of, 123; dance in, 40,
111–13; Derrida on, 36–37, 40;
difference/similarity in, 168–69,
170–78; disciplinary methods of,
169; ethnocentric fantasy in, 174;
ethnographic cinema and, 4, 6, 10,
162–63; hierarchy in, 181; human
geography and, 79; indexical arts
in, 160; knowledge production in,
110; logocentric epistemologies
of, 162; organizing structures of,
36, 205; poststructuralism and,
177, 205; privileging of writing,
165; racial binaries of, 41; racial
difference in, 115; structural, 173;
structural rupture in, 205–6;
visual, 36, 205, 321n21; written
tools of, 205
apparatus theory, 13
Apter, Emily: The Translation Zone,
330n49
archaeology, 43
archaeology, media, 300n90, 337n68;
technodeterminism of, 34
arche-­w riting, 174–76, 178, 249; in
archives, 174; geographic forma-
tions and, 175; image of, 176;
phonetic expression in, 175
archives: arche-­w riting in, 174; cata-
loging function of, 46; counter-­,
80–81; critiques of, 100–104;
Derridean, 7, 40, 44, 73, 164–65,
175, 301n4; destructive function
of, 165, 166, 197; difference in, 46;
discursive rules of, 44; the dispo-
sitif in, 283; Foucauldian, 39, 43,
44, 73, 301n4; future of, 333n4;
heterotopian, 45, 100; instan-
tiation of the mal, 44; as mirror,
45, 46, 49; in modernity thesis,
297n26; opposing forces in, 164;
origin of objects and, 164–65;
poststructural theorists of, 25;
preservation function of, 165;
racial difference in, 46; real and
copy in, 282; sites of departure in,
46; spatial concerns of, 45; strata
of, 164; theories of, 100
archives, early film: absences in,
21, 25, 38; animal memories in,
202–3; Archives de la Planète’s
conception of, 73; authorial author-
ity and, 103; celluloid artifacts of,
258; domestic, 54–55; excursive,
 INDEX 341
54–55, 63, 65–73, 91–99, 101–2,
119, 127, 153–54, 288; haptic im-
ages of, 67–68, 93, 96; hegemony
of, 46; historical agency of, 261;
instability of, 10, 39, 53, 90;
intertitles in, 253; making visible
in, 289; the minor in, 102–4, 153;
preservation in, 80, 99; salvage
mode of, 334n8; uncategorizable,
261
archives, ethnographic film, 5,
12; authority of, 38; concept of
archive in, 50; death drive in, 41,
167; digitization of, 256–57, 261;
interstitial spaces of, 253; as site of
reception, 27. See also Archives de
la Planète; ethnographic cinema;
Maison Lumière
archives, expedition film, 166, 168
Archives de la Planète, 18, 38, 39;
aerial views in, 78–79, 85–87;
amateur contributors to, 76, 80,
103–4; autochrome-­fi lm divide
in, 53–54; capitalism and, 48;
catalog of, 74; centralization of,
103; as closed system, 48; concept
of archive in, 73; as counter-­
archive, 80–81; current events in,
89; description in, 89; divisions
within, 50, 53–54, 80–81; domes-
tic collection of, 50, 54, 87–89,
95, 99; excursive collections of,
54–55, 91–98, 99, 288; French
colonialism and, 48, 49; French
modernity and, 52; geographic
displacements in, 54; geographic
divisions of, 50; global representa-
tion in, 102; heterotopia of, 51–52,
304n32; human geography in, 80;
Kahn’s travel in, 75–76; Kahn’s
vision for, 74; limits of looking in,
95; Maison Lumière and, 47–49,
80, 102; materiality of, 82; the
minor of, 102, 153; multioperator
works of, 102; non-­h ierarchical
films of, 90; ontological insecuri-
ties of, 81; organization of, 82;
panoramic views of, 86, 96, 97,
98, 99; philanthropic character
of, 48; positivism of, 80; powers
of vision in, 97–98; predocumen-
tary forms of, 307n107; presence
in, 78; preservation function of,
80; recuperative paradigm of,
100; scale of, 47; scholarship on,
50; scientific credentials of, 77;
scope of, 90; subtractions from,
101–2; technological divisions
of, 50; temporality of, 87–88;
35mm films of, 50, 87–89, 96–97,
102; unfinished aspects of, 87, 90,
104; unstructured quality of, 51;
utopianism of, 75, 103–4, 138;
variations in, 76; visibility in, 78;
visual equivalences in, 82. See also
autochromes; Kahn, Albert
Artaud, Antonin, 116
artifacts: moving images as, 240;
photo-­fi lm materiality of, 278. See
also film-­h istorical artifacts
“artist-­hunters,” 194
Ashanti. See Village Ashanti film
series
attractions: the avant-­garde and,
25; nonnarrative, 24; pseudo­
morophic, 299n60
attractions, cinema of, 59–61; animal
death in, 187; eroticism of, 60;
In the Land of the Head Hunters
as, 141, 142, 144–45, 317n109;
Lumière cinématographe as, 51, 73;
mode of reception in, 61; shock
in, 59, 61; spectators of, 60–61;
temporality in, 57; visual stimula-
tion in, 60
Audouin-­Dubreuil, Louis, 133
Auerbach, Jonathan: on cinematic
death, 187–88, 190
Aumont, Jacques, 64; on processions,
305n60
 342 INDEX
Austin, J. L., 211, 327n15
autochromes, 47, 50, 303nn18–19;
absence of humans in, 83, 89;
action in, 94; of Algeria, 92,
93, 98; catalog of, 74; of China,
94; chrono­photographic series,
92–94; colonialism of, 91–95;
details in, 94; disciplinary gaze of,
87; domestic, 82–87; epistemo-
logical vacancies in, 95; erasure of
humans from, 83–84, 93; ethno-
graphic knowledge in, 93; exclu-
sions from, 82; excursive, 91–95;
exposure time of, 104; vs. films,
53–54; as generalities, 304n39;
human subjects in, 85, 91–92;
immobility of, 87; laboratory for,
81–82; materiality of, 91; of Mon-
golia, 94–95; national power in,
86–87; of Paris, 83–84, 86, 94; the
picturesque in, 91; popularity of,
53; rural French, 84–85; salvage
ethnography of, 91; spectators of,
91; of street addresses, 84; sub-
tractions from, 102; violence in,
94–95, 102; visual control in, 86;
visual knowledge in, 95. See also
Archives de la Planète
autoethnography, 323n56; of empti-
ness, 170; Lévi-­Strauss’s, 170–76;
Rohdie’s, 52
avant-­garde, the, 52; anthropo-
logical, 123; attractions and, 25;
ethnographic dance and, 118–19,
312n60; ethnography and, 33; in
minor cinema, 308n126; moving
image in, 123
Baer, Nicholas, 296n22
Baker, Josephine, 118
Bakhtiari tribe: in Grass, 242, 244,
245, 249
Balázs, Béla, 326n12; “sound-­
explaining pictures” theory, 246
Barque sortant du port, 61–62
Barrow, John, 97
Barthes, Roland, 307n102; on cap-
tions, 220; on informative film,
267–68; on language-­i mage
relations, 329n29; on photo­
chemical reproduction, 227–28;
on photographic images, 304n45;
on photographic indexicality, 229;
on the voice, 332n75
Basden, George Thomas, 153, 154;
Among the Ibos, 130; expedition to
Nigeria, 130–32
Basden Collection: dance film of, 38,
130–32, 133, 313n72; intertitles
of, 132; mimicry in, 132, 133
Bataille, Georges, 125; Documents
journal, 116, 311n32; on the
human face, 311n33
Bateson, Gregory, 112, 162, 310n20
Baudrillard, Jean, 194
Bazin, André: on animals, 200; on
cinematic death, 200; “Death
Every Afternoon,” 199; on mov-
ing image, 164; “Ontology of the
Photographic Image,” 326n12; on
photo-­fi lms, 278; on technologies
of realism, 195
Bédouin d’origine soudanaise, 92
Bellour, Raymond, 217
Belton, John: Film Sound, 13–14
Bene, Carmelo, 103; on minoration,
100–101
Benedict, Ruth, 112
Benjamin, Walter: on dialectical
image, 34; on the expressionless,
331n63; historical materialism
of, 33; on history, 238; “One-­Way
Street,” 236–37; “The Task of the
Translator,” 237–38; on transla-
tion, 236–39, 240
Bennett, Jane, 276
Berger, John, 324n93; on landscape,
263, 264; Ways of Seeing, 335n20
Bergson, Henri: Creative Evolution,
121–22; on duration, 121–23
 INDEX 343
Bernard, Claudio Fernando Bon, 70;
Veyre expedition films of, 69–72
Besjes, Marcus, 285
Bhabha, Homi, 313n73
Bloom, Peter, 314n76
Boas, Franz, 315n91; on Curtis, 139,
316n94; on dance, 112; media
use, 316n94; The Mind of Primitive
Man, 113
Bordwell, David: on empiricism, 18;
on Grand Theory, 297n37; “His-
torical Poetics of Cinema,” 16–17;
on modernity thesis, 297n26
boredom, gendered experience of,
27
Borneo, ethnographic landscape of,
269–71, 270
Bottomore, Stephen, 13
Boulouch, Nathalie, 303n19
Bowser, Eileen, 295n12
Brannigan, Erin, 122
Braudel, Fernand, 18
Bretèque, François de la, 93
Brewster, Ben, 13
bricolage, 206, 207, 225
British Film Institute, 2; archive of, 5
Brunhes, Jean, 47, 85, 266, 335n30;
aerial views of, 78–79, 85–87;
Archives de la Planète director-
ship of, 76, 77, 79–80; Atlas
photographique des formes du relief
terrestre, 76; biography of, 302n15;
La Géographie humaine, 76–77,
78; on transformation, 80; use of
visual technologies, 79; Vidal and,
77, 79, 307n91
Bruno, Giuliana, 305n56
Buckland, Warren, 329n30
Bugniet, R., 124, 125, 126
Buñuel, Luis, 106
Burch, Noël, 23
Burt, Jonathan, 324n91
Buscombe, Edward: “Notes on
Columbia Pictures Corporation
1926–1941,” 12–13
Busy, Léon, 104; films of, 96, 98–99;
photographs of, 74, 93, 94
Butler, Alison, 27
By Aeroplane to Pygmyland: aerial
view, 272, 273; landscape in,
271–72, 279; viewers of, 272
Cabiria, 141
Cambodge: Angkor-­Vat, 96; virtuality
of, 130
Cameroun: Danses dans les régions,
124–26; dancing body of, 124–25,
125, 126; fragmentation in,
124–26, 127; temporality of, 127
Carroll, Noël, 19, 20
Carver, Richard P., 242
Casetti, Francesco, 329n30
Castelnau, Paul: autochromes of, 92
Cavell, Stanley, 41; on acknowledg-
ment of cinema, 212, 326n6;
on historical time, 326n10; on
incommunicability, 251; movie­
going experience of, 211–12,
214; Must We Mean What We
Say?, 325n1, 325n5; ontology of,
326n11; on ordinary language,
211, 214, 252, 325n1, 326n11; on
spectatorial experience, 213; The
World Viewed, 211, 213, 214
celluloid: annihilation of, 258; deteri-
oration of, 143, 318n113; encoun-
ter with landscape, 284; indexical
formations of, 259; manufacture
of, 333n7; reorganization to code,
279; surface of, 259; transparency
of, 287; unrestored, 268. See also
film; preservation
Centre national du cinéma et de
l’image animée (CNC): archive
of, 5; Et cetera, 2
Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness,
331n65
change, mummified, 57
Chasseurs d’ivoire, 192–93
Chevalier, Georges, 83, 85
 344 INDEX
Chion, Michel, 246, 247
chronophotography, 72, 127; Busy
series, 92–93, 95, 99
cinema: anthropological use of, 162;
barriers to, 213; challenge to
logocentrism, 162; colonialism
in, 48, 49, 289, 303n24; com-
munication categories of, 217;
counter-­a rchival order of, 81;
deictic view of, 226, 329n30; de-
stabilizing, 267; difference in, 136;
the everyday in, 52; explanatory
power of, 198; false memories of,
213; the figural in, 151; forms of
writing in, 34, 37, 165–66, 196; as
historiography, 16; incompatibil-
ity with writing, 217; indexicality
and, 168, 196; instabilities within,
10, 15, 35–36, 39, 53, 54, 155;
intercultural, 259–60; landscape
and, 267, 268, 274, 277; as mass
medium, 25, 32; multiple mean-
ings of, 212–13; ontology and,
199, 213; “outside” viewers of, 213;
participation in history, 32; points
of reception, 212; postwar French,
151, 153; private experience of,
212; silence of, 136, 212, 213, 214;
specificity of, 52; stability of, 267;
subject-­object separation in, 67;
taxidermy in, 191–97; temporal
expressions of, 196; “thereness”
of, 220; “third,” 260; transitional,
260; undifferentiated ontology of,
201. See also ethnographic cinema;
expedition films; film
cinema, classical, 17, 226; pleasure
in, 61
cinema, commercial: ethnographic,
107, 191–92, 197, 242, 243;
expedition, 198; leisure in, 32; of
Maison Lumière, 47–48; narra-
tive, 15, 138, 139; taxidermy in,
191–92
cinema, narrative, 141, 218; causal
connections in, 130; commercial,
15, 138, 139; conventions of, 147;
early ethnographic, 2, 6, 137;
enunciative function of, 329n30;
temporal regimes of, 137
cinema, single-­shot, 50–51; death
in, 191; duration of, 104; episte-
mological risks of, 191; Lumière,
62, 63, 66, 89, 90; real time in,
191; temporality of, 51; of Village
Ashanti series, 62, 63
Cinema Journal, 30–31
cinema-­language relationships, 211,
215
cinématographe, Lumière, 46, 47, 281;
“arriving train,” 64–65; of Cairo,
63; as cinema of attractions, 51,
73; domestic, 51, 71; of Egypt,
63, 65–66, 67; excursive, 51, 63,
65–73, 67, 101–2; expressive
qualities of, 50; instabilities of, 50;
narrative units of, 50; passersby
in, 66; photographic base of, 72;
repetition in, 73; single-­shot, 62,
63, 66, 89, 90; street scenes, 94;
technology of, 64; of Tunisia, 63,
65, 93; Veyre expedition films,
69–72; visual failures of, 66
cinesemiotics, 42, 214, 215, 217. See
also semiotics
Citizen Kane, 190
Citroën, expedition films of, 133–34,
313n74, 314n75
Clark, James Lippitt, 179
Clark, Kenneth: Civilisation series,
335n20; on landscape, 263; Ways
of Seeing, 264
Clark–O’Donnell expedition (1931),
179–84
Clifford, James, 36–37, 310n31
code: digitality of, 280; losses of, 288;
reorganization from celluloid, 279
colonial expositions, 115–16; Lyon
(1897), 49, 55–64
colonialism, 4; of autochromes,
 INDEX 345
91–95; in cinema, 48, 49, 289,
303n24; Dutch, 231, 232; in
Dutch film industry, 289; ethnog-
raphy and, 5; in film fragments,
288; in intertitles, 220; landscapes
of, 264–65; in Southeast Asia,
232; travel and trade in, 231; travel
writing of, 244; in Village Ashanti
series, 57–58; violence of, 99, 288;
written practices of, 161, 249
colonialism, French: Archives de la
Planète and, 48, 49; film industry
of, 303n24
Comolli, Jean-­L ouis, 13
control: authorial, 103; panoptic,
100; visual, 86
Cooper, Merian C., 198, 244; docu-
fiction of, 331n65. See also Chang;
Grass
correspondence theory, 16
Crick, Malcolm, 36
Croisière noire, La, 133–34, 186;
dance in, 134; route of, 133; slow
motion in, 135; spatiotemporality
of, 134
culture: of early ethnographic
cinema, 6; Kwakwaka’wakw,
315n91; popular, 332n1; turn-­of-­
twentieth-­century visual, 39
culture, Western: dislocation of, 205;
orality in, 248
Curtis, Edward S., 154; anachro-
nisms of, 139–40; atemporal
subjects of, 316n99; ethno-
graphic practice of, 137, 138,
139–40, 315n84, 317n110; on
Kwakwaka’wakw culture, 315n91;
The North American Indian, 138;
“The Vanishing Race,” 316n96.
See also In the Land of the Head
Hunters
Curtis, Scott, 192
dance: avant-­garde, 114; becoming
in, 135; concealment/disclosure
in, 113; counterdiscursive opera-
tions of, 110; deictic expressions
and, 144; difference in, 39, 107–8,
118–19; discontinuities of, 156;
drawing and, 109; in experimental
cinema, 148; the figure in, 119,
153–56; fin-­de-­siècle modernism
and, 110; gesture in, 135–36; as
historical index, 106, 107, 108; in-
stability of form in, 108; Japanese,
120; knowledge production in,
118; meaning in, 115; mediality
of, 135–36; metaphor in, 114–15;
nineteenth-­century study of, 110;
otherness in, 123; play-­acting
and, 113; in production of time,
136–37; sacred, 112–13; seeing
and, 110; spectators of, 114–16,
118; Symbolists on, 114–15, 121,
122; temporality of, 108; virtual,
148
dance, ethnographic: accessories of,
116; Akonolinga, 124–26; in an-
thropology, 40, 111–13; Balinese,
115–16; communal, 112; commu-
nion of, 117; in comparative reli-
gion studies, 111–12; contingency
in, 155; Dionysian, 107, 112, 113,
118, 134, 151; the figure in, 119,
153; formative aspects of, 113–14;
gesture in, 136; historical know-
ing in, 156; line in, 154; mimicry
in, 132; modern dance and, 119;
naming in, 112; Native American,
112, 120; as past performance,
147; “primitive,” 111, 118; silence
in, 136; sorcery in, 106, 115; the
supernatural in, 113; Western ap-
petite for, 116–17
dance, ethnographic cinematic, 38,
39; African, 38, 105–7, 130–32;
Ashanti, 56–58, 59, 63; of Basden
expedition, 38, 130–32; dis­
continuities of, 124; in expedition
films, 130–37; extracinematic
 346 INDEX
dimensions of, 40, 109–10; the fig-
ure in, 119, 153; illettrées, 115, 119;
intertitles of, 136; in In the Land
of the Head Hunters, 137, 142–50,
143, 144; intracinematic function
of, 40, 109; irregularity of, 109; of
Maison Lumière, 56–59, 59, 63,
119, 120; of Morgan Collection,
106, 109, 124–27, 128–29, 130;
Native American, 120; perfor-
mance of, 109; phantasmatic quali-
ties of, 108–9; possession in, 108,
116; rites of passage in, 111–19;
slow-­motion, 135; temporality
of, 109, 124
dance, modern, 119; counterforce of,
123; Loïe Fuller’s, 121–23
dance, serpentine, 119–24; costume
in, 120; in early film, 120–21;
hand-­colored films of, 310n47;
materiality of, 121; of “negro”
night clubs, 151; origin stories of,
312n50; on stage, 121; temporal-
ity of, 121
dancing body: abstraction of,
124–26; difference in, 108, 119;
fluidity of, 114; fragmentary,
124–26, 127; incommunicability
of, 136; media character of, 135;
mediality of, 136; non-­European,
115–16; racial/sexual difference
in, 39; sensory experience of, 117;
unfamiliar, 116; visible surface
of, 113
Danse du sabre I, 56; camera in, 59;
rhythm of, 58
Danse du sabre II, 56, 58
Danses Cambodgiennes, 126–27, 130;
split-­screen technique of, 127,
129; time in, 130; transitions in,
127, 128; virtuality of, 130
Danses de Dogons, de Sanga, et de
Bandiagara, 105–7; curatorial
notes of, 106–7; intertitles of,
106, 110; material condition of,
107; repetition in, 106; sorcerer’s
dance, 106; temporality of, 107
Danse serpentine dans la cage aux
fauves, 120
Daring Daylight Burglary, A, 190
Dayak Village: as artifact, 269;
digitization of, 269; intertitles of,
269–71; landscape in, 269–71,
270, 279
Dayal, Samir, 118
death: anthropocentric under-
standing of, 200; desire for, 193;
mechanically reproducible, 200;
simulacrum of, 199–200; in
single-­shot cinema, 191; visual
definition of, 188; visual knowl-
edge of, 324n93; visual stasis of,
188–89; in Western metaphysics,
200. See also animal death;
hunting
death, cinematic, 187–96; cinematic
time and, 189; diegesis of, 188;
epistemologically productive,
189; in ethnographic cinema, 39,
40, 41, 178, 200–201, 203, 209;
presentation to spectators, 190;
repeatable, 199–200; represen-
tational limits of, 189–90; shock
in, 59, 61, 189, 190, 193, 199; in
single-­shot cinema, 191
de Certeau, Michel: on unfamiliar
speech, 250; on the voice, 249–50;
The Writing of History, 217,
248–49, 322n47
deconstruction, 36
deixis: of ethnographic images, 226,
227; indexical claims of, 227; in
linguistics, 221; photochemical
reproduction and, 227, 230; of
photography, 228; signified and
signifier in, 221; spatiotemporality
of, 221. See also intertitles, deictic
de Klerk, Nico, 335n38
de Kuyper, Eric, 283, 284
Deleuze, Gilles: on antihistorical
 INDEX 347
ethnic, 104; The Archaeology of
Knowledge, 100; on cinematic
dance, 148, 318n119; conception
of image, 327n14; on disconti-
nuity, 124; on historical time,
326n10; on minor archive, 103;
on movement, 122; nomad figure
of, 180–81; philosophy of history,
152; taxonomy of cinema, 151;
time-­i mages of, 130, 152
Delpeut, Peter, 283, 284
de Man, Paul, 238, 239, 240
departure, 39
Derrida, Jacques, 37; on the ani-
mal, 40, 167, 201–4, 324n91; on
anthropology, 36–37, 40, 169,
176, 205–6; on arche-­w riting,
174–76, 178, 249; archive theory
of, 7, 40, 44, 73, 164–65, 175,
301n4; conception of the lived,
201; critique of Lévi-­Strauss,
168, 172, 173, 175–76, 206, 225,
329n33; on différance, 225, 227,
249; on discursive formation, 168;
on ethnocentric fantasy, 174; on
ethnocentrism, 169; on following,
167, 169, 202; on free play, 207; on
Freud’s Bible, 164; on language,
217; Of Grammatology, 166, 168,
209; on phonocentrism, 173;
on repetition, 225; response to
Austin, 327n15; on self and other,
173–74; on structuralism, 169; on
structural rupture, 205–6; “Struc-
ture, Sign, and Play,” 36, 166,
205; on supplementarity, 207; on
trauma, 95; on word and image,
252; on “A Writing Lesson,” 249
deterioration, film, 277; celluloid,
143, 318n113; of ethnographic
cinema, 42, 253, 255–56, 288;
of intertitles, 253; of landscapes,
279, 281
de Vaal, Jan, 283
Dickinson, James, 76
diegesis: of cinematic death, 188; of
ethnographic cinema, 154; spatio-
temporality of, 267
différance: Derrida on, 225, 227, 249;
temporal dimensions of, 229, 230
difference: in anthropology, 115,
168–69, 170–78; in archives, 46;
in cinema, 136; in dancing body,
108, 119; distance and, 213; in
ethnographic cinema, 6, 119, 177;
in ethnography, 81, 117, 181; in
expedition films, 186–87; Lévi-­
Strauss on, 170, 172; in Lumière
vues, 72; in phonocentrism, 174;
racial, 39, 46, 115; taxonomies of,
177
digitization: annihilating operations
of, 42, 279; critics of, 257; effect
on film artifact, 257–58; EYE
projects, 256–57, 261, 283, 285,
287; of film-­h istorical artifacts,
256–57; future instability in,
332n4; by Images for the Future
Project, 285; losses through, 282;
media/material interaction in,
287; at Musée Albert-­K ahn, 74;
pixellation in, 287; spectators of,
258; watermarks in, 257
discourse: ethnographic, 130;
nineteenth-­century scientific, 10,
91; rules of, 44; temporality in,
130
Doane, Mary Ann, 54, 198; anthro-
pocentrism of, 280; on cinematic
death, 189, 190–91, 199–200; on
ecstatic image, 190; on indices,
280–81, 336n56; on multishot
cinema, 135, 201; on single-­shot
cinema, 51, 201–2; on temporality,
61–62
domination, visual, 98
Droysen, Johann Gustav, 16
Dulac, Germaine, 123–24; Thèmes et
variations, 313n62
Dumas, Roger, 94
 348 INDEX
Dunaway, Finis, 194
Dupré la Tour, Claire, 219, 233
duration: Bergson on, 121–23; of
single-­shot cinema, 104
Durkheim, Émile: in development
of anthropology, 309n11; The
Elementary Forms of the Religious
Life, 111
Dutch Indies Committee for Scien-
tific Research, 271
Dutch Nationaal Archief, 337n65
Dutertre, Albert: Archives de la
Planète photographs of, 75–76
earth as archivable surface, 80. See
also geography, human
Echo du Mexique, L’, 69
Edison, Thomas Alva, 311n43; Black
Maria of, 64, 142; “Carmencita”
film, 119; Electrocuting an
Elephant, 190
Egypt, Lumière cinématographe of,
63, 65–66, 67. See also In Egypte
Eiffel Tower, 84, 86; as empty sign,
307n102
Eisenstein, Sergei: on animation, 153,
154; on dance, 109; on the line,
151; on montage, 326n12; popular
influences on, 151; Strike, 199
Elsaesser, Thomas, 13–14, 24; on
digitization, 257–58; on imagi-
nary places, 36
empiricism, 298n45; early film his-
tory and, 182–83; of ethnographic
cinema, 10, 11; etymology of,
20; evidence in, 19–23, 24; film
theory on, 18; in Grand Theory,
18; of new film history, 14, 20; ra-
tionalism and, 18; skepticism and,
21; spectatorial encounters in, 22;
the unobservable in, 21
enterrement, Un, 66, 67
ethnocentrism: Derrida on, 169; of
speech and writing, 176
ethnofiction, 137, 314n80; In the
Land of the Head Hunters as, 142,
145–46
ethnographic cinema, 2–6, 10,
38; anthropology and, 4, 6, 10,
162–63; “bad” aspects of, 7–8,
9, 38; circulation of, 27, 42, 256;
colonial, 4, 48, 49, 231; commer-
cial, 107, 191–92, 197, 242, 243;
contingency in, 207, 208; death
in, 39, 40, 41, 178, 200–201, 203,
209; deterioration of, 42, 253,
255–56, 288; diegetic function of,
154; difference in, 6, 119, 177; as
digital formation, 258; discursive
regimes of, 153; disordering of
time, 33; displacement in, 208;
“early” aspects of, 6–7; empiri-
cism of, 10, 11; ethnofiction in,
137; ethnographer and subject in,
178, 204; ethnographic writing
and, 34, 37, 165–66, 327n15;
ethnos in, 200, 260; evidence in,
23; “family meal” films, 71; force
of, 38; forgetting in, 177; historic-
ity of, 8, 27, 33, 34, 282; human
subjects of, 260; hunting in, 178;
image-­language relationships
in, 213–14, 217, 220, 224, 245;
imagined spectators of, 41; impe-
rialism in, 10, 27; as incomplete
document, 209; instability of, 10,
39; internal/external features of,
42; intertitles of, 41–42, 219–20,
234–35, 243; of Koloniaal
Instituut, 286; landscapes in,
260–61, 262, 265, 266–74, 275,
276–77; later film practices and, 7;
logocentric modes of, 242; maps
in, 1; materiality of, 262; metahis-
toricity of, 3, 34, 36; metaphorical
associations of, 182; multivalent
forms of, 31; narrative, 2, 6, 137;
nineteenth-­century science and,
 INDEX 349
10, 11; patriarchy in, 27; period-
icity of, 179–80; plurality of, 8;
popular genres of, 179; possession
rituals in, 309n3; preservative
impulses of, 196; racist aspects
of, 4, 6; sites of practice, 38; sonic
aspects of, 216, 219; specificity of,
261; subjectivities of, 68; supple-
mentarity of, 204–9; surface of,
42; taxidermy in, 191–94, 202;
translation in, 241; visuality in,
27, 68, 215, 218, 260, 288. See also
Archives de la Planète; dance, eth-
nographic cinematic; film, early;
Maison Lumière
ethnographic expeditions. See expe-
dition films
ethnographic writing, 161; eth-
nographic cinema and, 34, 37,
165–66, 327n15; vs. fieldwork,
177; film supplement to, 207;
intersubjectivity in, 176–77;
intertitles and, 220; mediations
of, 176; schizogenic time in, 203;
spatiotemporal separations in,
204; travel, 170; utterance in, 250;
voice and, 248, 249–50
ethnography: amateur, 242; artists’
encounters with, 310n31; the
avant-­garde and, 33; binaristic
taxonomies of, 248–49; center
and periphery in, 207; cinema-
tography and, 4–5; destructive,
197; difference in, 81, 117, 181;
discursive practices of, 215;
discursive violence of, 179;
docufiction, 137, 242; etymology
of, 4; experimental postwar, 260;
film historiography and, 32, 281;
intertextual, 317n109; logocen-
tric, 40, 166; memory and, 172;
movement away from structure in,
206; neutral observer in, 176; non-­
European alterities, 46; ocular-­
centric, 40, 260; photography and,
4–5; popular cinema and, 117;
popular culture and, 332n1; repre-
sentation in, 206–7, 245; rupture
with subject in, 204; second-­order
practice of, 207; spatiotemporal
difference in, 177; spatiotemporal
rhetoric of, 166; state power in,
158; vanishing in, 316n96
ethnography, salvage, 80, 139–40,
156; animals in, 198–99; Kahn
autochromes and, 91; methodolo-
gies of, 92; rhetoric of, 15
Evans, Brad, 140, 149, 317n102
Evans-­Pritchard, E. E., 112
expedition films, 5; AMNH, 38,
179–86; anachronism in, 180;
animal death in, 107, 167–68,
187–89, 191, 193, 197, 202–3,
246; animals in, 40–41, 201–2;
annihilation of structure, 178;
arche-­i mages of, 176; commercial,
198; corporeal sights of, 187–88;
dance in, 130–37; death drive of,
197–98; difference in, 186–87;
disorder of, 187; displacement
of human image, 202; effect
on natural sciences, 205; eth-
nographer and subject in, 204;
ethnographic text and, 166–67;
European, 186; exotic bodies in,
134; following in, 167; hunting in,
41, 202; of Maison Lumière, 49;
nomadic trope of, 191; repetition
in, 166; Sahara crossing, 133,
314n76; sensory-­motor apparatus
of, 132–33; service to state, 181;
spatiotemporality of, 179, 180,
182, 202; spectatorial desire in,
193; steamship cinematography
of, 186; supplementarity of, 207;
temporality of, 191; tourism and,
133, 314n76; writing and, 166. See
also ethnographic cinema
 350 INDEX
EYE Filmmuseum, 5, 337n65;
artifactual play of, 283; Bits &
Pieces, 2, 261, 284–88; digitization
projects, 256–57, 261, 283, 285,
287; dispositifs of, 283; ethno-
graphic landscapes of, 268–74,
275; ethnographies of, 38, 256–57,
261–62; film fragments in, 261,
284–88; historicity of documents,
282–83; integrative approach
of, 283; interactive encounters
of, 284; intertitles in, 330n43;
keyword use of, 285; proprietary
watermark of, 257. See also Scene
Machine
Fabian, Johannes, 176; on schizo-
genic time, 177
Famous Players-­Lasky Corporation,
242
Faure, Élie, 123
feminism, film historiography of,
26–27, 299n65
figure, the: in ethnographic cinema,
153; function in dance, 119,
153–56; historical dimensions of,
152; historico-­critical function
of, 154; letters in, 150; line in,
150; Lyotard on, 110, 150, 153; in
postwar French cinema, 151, 153;
spatial, 77
film: agents interacting with, 277;
animal remains and, 322n33;
collection system of editing,
222; dialogical aspects of, 38;
division from photography, 81,
90–92, 95–96, 98, 99, 336n49;
fragmentary nature of, 208;
historical meaning of, 259; as
hybrid form, 35; iconic aspects of,
278; impurity of, 15; indexicality
of, 277; internal histories of, 29;
knowledge from, 30; as language,
326n12; materiality of, 35, 42,
259, 272, 277, 281, 282; mean-
ings of, 259, 300n75; multiple
copies of, 30; nitrocellulose prints,
333n7; obsolescence of, 257;
photographic foundation of, 188;
physicality of, 258; polyester
safety stock, 333n7; radical par-
ticularity of, 277; recuperation of
origins, 258–59; spectator recep-
tion of, 14; un­certain status of, 35;
unidirectional communication in,
214. See also celluloid; cinema
film, early: Bergsonian duration in,
122–23; contemporary media
and, 299n60; continuity of bodies
in, 123; as enigmatic, 30; fluidity
of, 15; framing of body in, 311n46;
haptic, 67–68, 93, 96; instability
of, 15, 50, 90; minor subject in,
104; musical accompaniment of,
331n69; new historicism study of,
11; nineteenth-­century represen-
tation and, 72; poststructuralism
and, 37; self-­evidentiary, 34; as
simulacra, 72; subjectivity in, 68;
“synaesthetic” of, 247; technology
of, 61; temporality of, 62; thrills
in, 60; travel and, 305n58; as uni-
versal expression, 326n12; viewed
on iPod, 283; visual ontologies
of, 90
film fragments, ethnographic, 1–3, 5,
23; circulation of, 288; colo-
nial violence in, 288; of dance,
124–26, 127, 134; of EYE Film­
museum, 261, 284–88; recupera-
tion of, 24; visual mysteries of,
285
film-­h istorical artifacts, 5; access to,
257; celluloid, 258; degradation
of, 29; digitization of, 256–58;
dispositifs of, 283–84; elsewhere
of, 208; film-­h istorical telling and,
42; forces acting on, 13; good/
bad, 8; historicity of, 14, 32, 261;
instability of, 15, 50, 90; meta-
 INDEX 351
physical views of, 29; model im-
ages of, 258; multiple materialities
of, 262; nonindexical understand-
ing of, 42; objective existence of,
20–21; other historical documents
and, 29; plural conceptions of,
8; recovery with language, 209;
statistical analyses of, 13; visibility
of, 30
film-­h istorical practices: approxima-
tion of historical method, 209;
dialogism of, 31; evidence in,
20–22; good, 7–8, 9; immaterial-
ity of, 42, 259; multiple, 9; service
to history, 9; stability of, 262;
temporality in, 7, 52
film historiography: creative pro-
cesses of, 289; digitization in,
256–57; early ethnography and,
32, 281; ethical obligations of, 9;
ethnographic image in, 208; femi-
nist, 26–27, 299n65; metahistori-
cal taxonomies of, 29; methodol-
ogy of, 27, 255; particularism in,
8–9; preservation in, 28; recupera-
tive, 3, 18, 209; virtual operations
of, 289
film history: analogy in, 209; “bad,”
3, 7; causation in, 259; concepts
shaping, 3; empiricism and,
18–23, 31; evidence in, 19, 26; ex-
perience in, 22; historical practice
and, 28; indexical formations of,
259; metahistoriographic per-
spectives on, 31; methodological
hermeticism of, 39; nineteenth-­
century epistemology in, 10; after
1970s, 28; objectivist, 16; original
objects of, 261; presence in, 209;
production in present, 25; recu-
perative thought in, 208; resurrec-
tion in, 209; scope of, 17; theories
of fantasy for, 24; totalizing, 18.
See also history
film history, new, 296n22; conser-
vative, 23; economic-­i ndustrial
aspects of, 14; empiricism and,
14, 20; ethnographic cinema and,
10; exhibitionary-­spectatorial
aspects of, 14; German historiog-
raphy and, 297n30; Grand Theory
of, 14; methodology of, 14, 15;
objectivism of, 21; origins of, 12;
poststructuralism and, 11; scope
of, 15; in Screen, 12; silent films in,
11; sources for, 14; textual-­formal
aspects of, 14
film industry, Dutch, 231; colonial-
ism in, 289; early, 286; global
contributions of, 283
film industry, French: colonialism
in, 48, 49, 303n24; newsreels, 88;
postwar, 151
filmmaker-­lecturers, 219, 328n27
filmmaking: ethnographic, 6; histori-
ography and, 32
film preservation, 2, 5, 14–15;
contemporary approaches to,
296n15; of ethnographic films, 2,
5, 14–15; in film historiography,
28; ideological commitments of,
333n8; nitrate, 333n7. See also
preservation
film scholarship: in Anglo-­A merican
academy, 211; comparative, 7–8;
empiricism and, 18; historio-
graphic demands of, 32–33; his-
tory in, 23; on intertitles, 218–19,
328n21; metahistorical arguments
in, 12
film surfaces, 42, 255, 259; destabili-
zation of, 49; nonhuman energies
on, 261
film theory: dance in, 111; on empiri-
cism, 18; French, 326n12; impre-
cise doctrines of, 17
fils de Cham, Les, 134
Flaherty, Robert, 196. See also
Nanook of the North
following: ambiguities of, 168; of
 352 INDEX
animals, 167, 202; spatiotemporal
slippages in, 169
Fonds Albert-­K ahn Informatisé pour
la Recherche (FAKIR) research
system, 74, 82
Fossati, Giovanna, 283, 284
Foucault, Michel, 37; The Archaeol-
ogy of Knowledge, 43, 217; on the
archive, 39, 43, 44, 73, 301n4;
Deleuze on, 100; on discursive
practices, 44; on the dispositif, 23;
on heterotopia, 44–45, 52, 54,
304n32; “The Historical A Priori
and the Archive,” 43; on histori-
cal knowing, 156; on language,
43–44; on Magritte, 228; “Of
Other Spaces,” 43, 44, 73
Frampton, Hollis, 25
Francis, David, 295n12
Frazer, James George: dance studies
of, 111–12
Fregoli, Leopoldo, 120
Freud, Sigmund: Bible of, 164; foun-
dational concepts of, 165
Frick, Caroline, 333n8
Frontiers of a Forbidden Land: animal
death in, 186; catalog description
of, 185–86; collection in, 184–85,
186; disorder of, 186; geographic
and temporal markers of, 185; ver-
sions of, 186
Fuller, Loïe, 310n28; modernism
of, 312n53; serpentine dance of,
121–23; Symbolists’ interest in,
121–22
Fullerton, John, 69
Gadmer, Frédéric: autochromes of,
75, 84, 85, 92, 98
Gaiety Girls, 121
Gaines, Jane, 23; on film historiogra-
phy, 28–29, 30, 31
Gaudreault, André, 13, 50
gaze: of animals, 201; disciplinary,
87; ethnographic, 98; imperial, 97;
in Village Ashanti series, 63
Geertz, Clifford, 322n47
Gehr, Ernie, 25
Geispolsheim, Bas-­R hin, 8 Décembre
1918, 85
geography, human, 76–77, 266,
335n30; aerial views in, 78–79,
307n88; anthropology and, 79;
development of, 77; disciplinary
ends of, 104; surface of earth in,
78–79; visual objectivity in, 79;
world-­human relationships in,
77–78
Glass, Aaron, 140, 149, 317n102
Gledhill, Christine, 13
Godard, Jean-­Luc, 153
Gombrich, Ernst: Norm and Form,
263–64
Gomery, Douglas: Film History, 13,
19; “Writing the History of the
American Film Industry,” 12–13
Gorer, Geoffrey, 113
Gramsci, Antonio, 24
Grand Theory, 297n37; empiricism
and, 19, 26; new film history and,
14
Grass, 179, 247; aparté in, 251;
Bakhtiari tribe in, 242, 244, 245,
248; bilingual intertitle of, 244,
245, 246; as docufiction, 242;
ethnographic subject in, 243;
image-­language rhythms in, 245;
intertitles of, 242–46, 248, 251;
re-­presentation of written docu-
ment, 244; spectators of, 244; syn-
esthesia in, 251; writing in, 245;
“YO ALI!” intertitle, 246, 248
Gravier, Ferdinand, 55
Griaule, Marcel, 162; Dakar-­Djibouti
mission, 116, 117
Griffith, D. W., 141
Griffiths, Alison: on cinematic threat,
161–62; on intertitle and image,
 INDEX 353
329n28; methodology of, 10–11;
on popular culture, 332n1; on
visuality, 68; Wondrous Difference,
10, 34
Groupe au Hongnengong, 94
Guido, Laurent, 312n60
Guldin, Jere, 315n90
Gunning, Tom, 24–25, 310n28;
on aesthetics of view, 89; on
animal death, 187; on cinema
of attractions, 59; on cinematic
landscape, 267; on early dance
film, 120, 311n43; on early film
spectators, 193; on early travel
images, 305n56; on framing of
body, 311n46; on Loïe Fuller,
122; on minor cinema, 308n126;
on modernity thesis, 297n26; on
single-­shot camera, 50–51
Haardt, Georges-­Marie, 133
Haddon, Alfred Cort: Torres Strait
expedition, 68, 107
Hale’s Tours, 51, 267
Hansen, Miriam, 17; on the archive,
25
Haraway, Donna: on Roosevelt safari,
159–60; on taxidermy, 168; on
“Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” 159–60,
166, 194–95
Harrison, Klisala, 318n117
Harrison, Marguerite, 242, 244
Heckman, Heather, 333n7
Heider, Karl, 163, 207, 321n21
heterotopia: in archives, 45, 100; of
Archives de la Planète, 51–52,
304n32; Foucault on, 44–45, 52,
54, 304n32; Kahn’s, 47; of librar-
ies, 45; visual, 39
Hispano Film Fabriek production
company, 231, 232
historicity, filmic, 259, 289; of arti-
facts, 14, 32, 261; of digital images,
279; of ethnographic cinema, 8,
27, 33, 282; indexicality and, 277;
internal/external features of, 259;
materiality and, 277; reimagining
of, 262; through television, 24. See
also film history
historiography: cinema as, 16; crisis,
7; nineteenth-­century, 45; objec-
tivist, 295n10; realist, 295n10. See
also film historiography
history: alliance with anthropol-
ogy, 172, 255; Annales school
of, 18; brought into presence,
152; cinema’s participation in,
32; construction process in, 16;
creative work of, 152; discursive,
215; ethnographic cinema as, 34;
Hegelian dialectic of, 151–52;
mediation of facts, 16; mytholo-
gies of, 171; poststructuralist, 4,
152; post-­t heory, 10; practice in
present, 28; temporality of, 101;
theory in, 28; unstable objects of,
17; virtual process of, 282. See also
film history
history, bad: feminist, 27; theory of, 3
Hoberman, J., 319n125
Holm, Bill, 140, 144, 148–49,
317n109
Holt, Claire, 112
Horak, Jan Christopher, 332n4
Hume, David, 18
Hunt, George, 149, 315n91
hunting: in Adventures on the Upper
Nile, 179, 181–82, 182, 191; am-
biguities of, 168; in ethnographic
cinema, 178; in expedition films,
41, 202. See also animal death;
Roosevelt safari
Hunting Big Game in Africa, 320n13
hunting films, 192–93; desire
for death and, 193; history of,
323n76; the unexpected in, 193.
See also expedition films
Hyatt brothers, 333n7
 354 INDEX
icons: autographic, 228; indices and,
279–80; photographic, 278; in
semiotics, 278
image-­language relationships, 40, 41,
216–17; of bilingual intertitles,
239–40; dependence on language
in, 217; in ethnographic cinema,
213–14, 217, 220, 224, 245; in
Magritte, 228–29; referentiality
in, 229. See also intertitles
images: of arche-­w riting, 176; cap-
tions of, 220–21; dialectical, 34;
digitized, 279; haptic, 67–68, 93;
indexical, 252; omission of agency
from, 281; referents of, 227; re-
fusal of speech, 251; repetition of,
227; semiotics of, 326n12; writing
and, 5, 251–53
images, ethnographic: ambivalences
of, 11; contingency in, 241;
deictic, 226, 227, 229; destabiliz-
ing, 38; encounters with other
modes, 262; imperfection of, 9;
of the nonhuman, 261; otherness
of, 216; poststructuralism in, 39;
preservation of, 14–15; sentence-­
like expressions of, 226
images, moving: avant-­garde of,
123; containment by text, 245;
counter-­a rchive of, 80; deictic,
223, 226; destabilization of land-
scape, 268; Disney, 151; Hegelian
dialectic and, 151; heuristic func-
tion of, 212; as historical artifacts,
240; intertitles and, 215–16,
222–26, 229–30, 239–40, 252,
329n28; intertitular utterance
and, 251; mediation of, 217; meta-
linguistic function of, 212; minor,
104, 308n126; missed origins in,
99; of modern dance, 119; multi-
layered reception sites, 24; ontol-
ogy of, 216; as ordinary speech,
216; past time of, 216; preceding
intertitles, 221, 240; preservative
genealogy of, 164, 165; private
understanding of, 212; pseudo-
morphic relationships of, 24–25;
reconfiguration of landscape,
276–77; recuperation of, 30;
reorganization of, 279; resistance
to, 161–62; scientific-­voyeuristic,
98; silence of, 212; temporal
relationship with intertitles, 241;
writing and, 5
Images for the Future Project
(Nether­lands), 256, 261; collabo-
rators on, 337n65; digitization by,
285. See also EYE Filmmuseum
Imbrie, Robert: murder of, 244,
331n68
imperialism, in ethnographic cinema,
10, 27
incendie du Printemps, L’, 308n108
indexicality: in anthropology, 160;
of celluloid, 259; of cinema, 168,
196; of deictic intertitles, 229;
of deixis, 227; in film historiog-
raphy, 259, 277; of images, 252;
in photochemical reproduction,
278; of photography, 196, 229; in
writing, 163
Indian Act (Canada, 1884), 146
indices: digital annihilation of,
279; of ethnic landscapes, 281;
in ethnographic cinema, 227;
ethnographic unconscious of, 281;
historical sources of, 281; icons
and, 279–80; multiplicity of, 281;
nonphotographic, 269; object and,
278; photochemical, 228, 281; in
semiotics, 278; severing from icon,
279; tactile operations of, 280;
un-­iconic, 280, 282, 287
indigenous peoples, representation as
dying, 193
In Egypte: “De Blikslager” (intertitle),
222, 224–26, 229; deictic image
of, 223, 229; intertitle/image
relationship in, 222–26, 229
 INDEX 355
inquiry, historical, 19–20
International Federation of Film Ar-
chives (FIAF) conference Cinema
1900–1906, 12, 295n12, 302n14
intertitles: “abusive,” 239; in Adven-
tures on the Upper Nile, 181; an-
choring of image, 220; animated,
253; of Basden Collection, 132;
capital letters in, 219; colonialism
in, 220; in Danses de Dogons, 106,
110; in Dayak Village, 269–71;
detachment from negatives, 233;
deterioration of, 253; differences
among, 233, 234–35; as heuristic
devices, 216; images preceding,
221, 240; in In the Land of the
Head Hunters, 142, 143, 318n112;
language-­i mage relationship of,
328n21; length of, 219; linguistic
conventions of, 226; mediation of
image, 217; metalinguistic claims
of, 226; mixed reception of, 219;
moving images and, 215–16,
222–26, 229–30, 239–40, 252,
329n28; naming function of,
216; in nonfiction, 219; pilcrows
in, 244; printing of, 233, 253;
scholarship on, 218–19, 328n21;
in Simba: King of the Beasts, 188;
spatio­temporality of, 216, 226–27;
vs. subtitles, 328n21; tempo-
ral relationship with images,
241; transition from narrators,
219, 328n26; utterance in, 41,
216, 241–51. See also utterance,
intertitular
intertitles, bilingual, 230–41,
330n45; as act of interpretation,
235; before and after of, 239;
challenges to similarity, 239–40;
criticality of, 235; events preced-
ing, 240; of Grass, 244, 245, 246;
historical operations of, 239;
language-­i mage relationship in,
239–40; of Met het SS “Patria,”
232–34, 233, 239, 240, 241, 243;
translation of, 41, 216, 235, 237,
241
intertitles, deictic, 41, 215–16, 220–30,
331n63; context-­dependent, 221;
ethnographic subjects of, 224;
indexicality of, 229; of In Egypte,
222, 222–25; naming function
of, 220–21; one-­word, 222, 226;
pointing function of, 221; viewers
of, 221–22. See also deixis
intertitles, ethnographic, 41–42,
219–20, 234–35; address in, 243;
animal sound in, 245; for dance,
136; dialogic, 243; ethnographic
writing and, 220; invisible images
of, 243–44; multiple personas of,
243; relations to image, 229
In the Land of the Head Hunters, 40,
137–50; accompanying materi-
als for, 149, 319n124; agency in,
147; animal mask dance, 143–44,
146; “Bear, Wolf, Mountain Goat,
Wasp and Dog” dance, 143–44;
bird costume, 142, 144; celluloid
decay in, 143, 318n113; as cinema
of attractions, 141, 142, 144–45,
317n109; as commercial narrative
cinema, 138, 139; contingency
in, 147; Curtis’s promotion of,
138–39; dance in, 137, 142–50,
143, 144; disorder of, 140–42;
fabrications of, 146–47; failure in,
314n81, 317n110; “Fire Dance,”
142–43; historical absence in, 148,
149–50; inconsistencies in, 140;
intercultural contact in, 316n101;
intertitles of, 142, 143, 318n112;
Kwakwaka’wakw peoples in,
137–38, 139–40, 145–46,
317n101; lost footage of, 148,
149; narrative-­dance interaction,
148; as narrative fiction, 142,
145–46; narrative structure of,
147, 148; nonnarrative expression
 356 INDEX
in, 142; past performance in,
147; premiere of, 138; recupera-
tion of, 149; restorations of, 140,
142, 148–49, 317n109, 317n111,
318n112, 318n114, 319n125; run-
ning time, 142; smoke in, 143, 145;
sound track for, 149; spectators of,
140; suspension of signification in,
150; “Thunderbird Dancer,” 142;
tinting of, 149; traditional music
in, 318n117; versions of, 140, 148,
149, 318n113; vision quests in,
142; visual exhibitionism of, 141;
whale hunting in, 140
Jacobs, Ken, 25
jazz, 117, 118
Jefferson, Mark, 76–77
Jeune femme revêtant le costume tradi-
tionnel: chronophotographic series
of, 93; déshabillage in, 99
Jeune fille chiquant le bétel: chrono-
photographic series of, 93, 99
Jeune fille en costume traditionnel, 75,
92
Johnson, Martin and Osa, 198; “Bel-
gian Congo,” 1–2; ethnographic
adventure films of, 242; visual
practices of, 242. See also Simba
Julien, Paul, 336n45; Tanzania expe-
dition of, 272
Kahn, Albert, 77; autochrome invest-
ment of, 53; autochrome portrait
of, 303n18, 306n83; autour
du Monde scholarship of, 76;
biography of, 302n15; conceptu-
alization of earth, 80; enquête de
réalités of, 75; global travel of, 75,
306n74; heterotopian projects of,
47; instructions to cameramen,
88; interest in mass media, 88;
laboratory of, 81–82; nationalism
of, 79–80; news bulletins of, 88,
307n107; photo-­fi lm tours of, 5;
positivism of, 52; scholarship on,
51–52; utopianism of, 75; vision
for Archives de la Planète, 74;
wealth of, 48. See also Archives de
la Planète; autochromes
Kearton, Cherry: bird photography
of, 320n14; film exhibitions of,
219; Roosevelt safari film of, 160,
320n13
Kearton, Richard: bird photography
of, 320n14
Keil, Charlie, 17–18, 298n41; on
modernity thesis, 297n26
Kermode, Frank, 121
King Kong (1933), 331n65
Klinger, Barbara: on histoire totale, 18
knowledge: acquisition of, 22;
anthropocentric, 178; differing
regimes of, 115; from film, 30;
nonvisual forms of, 260; visual,
95, 98, 102
knowledge production: in anthropol-
ogy, 110; in dance, 118; in present,
24; through sensory experience,
11
Koloniaal Instituut, 286
Kracauer, Siegfried: “Two Tenden-
cies” argument, 311n46
Kuhlen, Olivier, 307n88
Kuhn, Annette, 12, 296n20; on
empiricist/empirical distinction,
19–20
Kwakwaka’wakw peoples: cul-
tural practices of, 139, 141, 144,
145–46; Curtis on, 315n91;
ethnographies of, 315n91; in In the
Land of the Head Hunters, 137–40,
145–46, 317n101; rituals of, 147;
theatrical self-­representation by,
317n102
Lacan, Jacques, 201
Lammers, David, 285
Lamster, J. C., 269, 335n38
landscape: in art history, 262–63,
 INDEX 357
268; assemblages of, 276; in
By Aeroplane to Pygmyland,
271–72, 279; colonial, 264–65;
as critical category, 263; cultural
codes of, 266; in Dayak Village,
269–71, 270, 279; decay of film
and, 279, 281; destabilization by
moving images, 268; dispersive
powers of, 276; in Dutch art,
263; dynamic medium of, 267;
encounter with celluloid, 284; in
ethnographic cinema, 260–61,
262, 265, 266–74, 275, 276–77;
ethnographic project and, 264;
expression across media, 267; of
fact, 263; historical claims of, 263;
historiographic, 262–82; history
of, 334n14; human presence in,
265, 266; as idea, 334n13; impe-
rialism of, 265; as index of force,
42; indices of, 281; landowner-
ship and, 264; as medium, 276;
as multisensory medium, 266;
the nonhuman in, 276; obstruc-
tion of narrative, 268; ontological
claims of, 263; otherness of, 265;
panoramic, 86, 96, 97, 98; pure
and impure, 265, 276; reconfigu-
ration by moving image, 276–77;
relationship to culture, 263;
scholarship on, 334n13; specta-
tors of, 268; stability of image,
267; symbiotic operations of, 288;
of symbol, 263; of Tusschen Nijl en
Congo, 272–74; as verb, 274; visual
exchange in, 266; writing on, 264
language: authority of, 245; in
commercial ethnographic film,
243; différance in, 225; disjunc-
tive temporality of, 225; of film
experience, 212; grammar of, 215;
instability of, 214; limits of, 235;
as medium, 218; metaphors of,
327n14; objects and, 43–44; or-
dinary, 211, 214, 251, 252, 325n1;
private, 325n4; recovery of film
artifact and, 209; separation from
voice, 332n75; ways of seeing,
175–76. See also image-­language
relationships
Leander sisters, 120
Lefebvre, Martin, 267–68
Leiris, Michel: L’Afrique fantôme, 116,
117; Manhood, 117
Léry, Jean de: Histoire d’un voyage
faict en la terre du Brésil, 250
Le Saint, Lucien: Archives de la
Planète films of, 88, 89, 308n108
letters: immaterial signification of,
150; textual, 150. See also writing
Levinson, André, 312n52; “Negro
Dance,” 118
Lévi-­Strauss, Claude: arche-­w riting
of, 175; autoethnography of,
170–76; Brazil expedition of,
170, 250, 322n39; on bricolage,
206, 225; Derrida on, 168, 172,
173, 175–76, 206, 225, 329n33;
on difference, 172; on ethno-
graphic travel writing, 170; on
insignificance, 181; on memory,
171; on Nambikwara people, 173;
Rousseau and, 172, 322n47; struc-
turalism of, 173; terrestrial figure
of, 172; Tristes Tropiques, 168,
170–76; “Writing Lesson,” 173
Liard, Louis, 76
Lindsay, Vachel, 139
line: animated, 151; code of, 151;
Eisenstein on, 151; in ethno-
graphic dance, 154; in figures,
150; illettrée, 150; multiple points
of, 155; separation from significa-
tion, 150
linguistic signifiers, 175
Lippit, Akira Mizuta, 198–99
listening, primacy of, 173
literary criticism, Anglophone, 235
Little Hans, fort-­da game of, 60, 61
Locke, John, 18
 358 INDEX
Lovell, Alan, 13
Lumière, Andrée, 71
Lumière, Auguste, 46; “family meal”
film, 71. See also Maison Lumière
Lumière, Louis, 46; autochrome
process of, 47; interest in technol-
ogy, 64
Lumière, Marguerite, 71
Lyon républicain (periodical), 55–56
Lyotard, Jean-­François: acinema of,
6, 63; Discourse, Figure, 110; on
evidence, 20; on the figure, 110,
150, 153; on revolutionary art, 103
MacDonald, Scott, 267
MacDougall, David, 314n81, 321n21;
on ethnographic cinema, 162;
visual anthropology of, 37
magic lantern shows, textual slides of,
218, 220, 328n22
Magritte, René, 228–29
Maison Lumière, 38, 39; actualities
of, 5; Archives de la Planète and,
47–49, 80, 102; canon of, 302n13;
capitalism and, 48; catalog
descriptions of, 56, 304n41; coher-
ence of, 51; colonialism and, 49;
commercial enterprise of, 47–48;
departures of, 54; digressive bod-
ies of, 102; distribution network
of, 47–48; domestic canon of,
51, 54, 66, 119; ethnographic
film of, 49, 55–64, 96; excursive
collections of, 54–55, 63, 65–67,
67, 69–73, 101–2, 119, 127, 288;
exhibition strategy of, 305n59; ex-
pedition films of, 49; geographic
displacements in, 54; haptic
images of, 68; history of, 302n12;
industrial aspects of, 103; insecure
encounters in, 63; micronarratives
of, 50–51, 58; the minor of, 102,
153, 288; recuperative paradigm
of, 100; scholarship on, 50; simu-
lacra of, 71–72, 102; spatiotempo-
ral divisions in, 49; stability of, 49;
subject matter of, 64–65; subtrac-
tions from, 101–2; technology of,
64; Veyre expedition films, 69–72.
See also cinématographe, Lumière;
Village Ashanti film series; vues,
Lumière
Malek, Amy, 331n67
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 312n52; on
dance, 114–15, 121, 310n28; on
female body, 115
Malu-­Bomai ceremony, 68
Marey, Étienne-­Jules, 92, 123
Marker, Chris, 153; Sans Soleil, 148
Marks, Laura, 67–68; on inter-
cultural cinema, 259–60
Marrati, Paola, 326n10
Marty, Pierre: Togo, 134–35
Mead, Margaret, 162
meaning: cinematic, 4, 212–13, 259,
300n75; in dance, 115; determina-
tion of, 214, 215
media: analog vs. digital, 42; mixture
theory, 41, 217–18. See also archae-
ology, media
Méliès, Georges, 51, 60; dance film
of, 120; Voyage dans la Lune, 141
memory: distant, 171; ethnography
and, 172
Met het SS “Patria” der Rotterdamsche
Lloyd naar Nederlandsch Oost-­
Indië, 231–34; bilingual intertitle
of, 232–34, 233, 239, 240, 243;
historical operation of, 240; street
scene, 234; surviving print of,
232, 233
Metz, Christian, 41; on cinema-­
language relationship, 218;
cinesemiotics of, 214, 217, 327n13;
on classical cinema, 226; on film
image, 216, 251; on histoire, 226
Meyer, Mark-­Paul, 284
Mi-­Carême, 88
Ministère des Colonies: dance films
of, 38, 124–27, 128–29, 130
 INDEX 359
minor, the, 153, 323n63; becoming
in, 103; in film archives, 102–4,
153; of Maison Lumière, 102, 153,
288
minoration, 75, 100–101; of
Richard III, 101
Mitchell, W. J. T., 217, 218, 252; on
cinematic landscape, 266, 268,
274; on landscape, 261, 265–67,
276; on photographic image, 266
modernism, fin-­de-­siècle, 110
Mongolia, autochromes of, 94–95
Moreno, Carmen Dauset, 119
Morgan, Anne, 106, 138, 309n1
Morgan, John Pierpont, funding of
Curtis, 138
Morgan Collection (AMNH): ethno-
graphic dance films of, 106, 109,
124–27, 128–29, 130
Motion Picture Patents Company,
320n13
motion studies, 308n114
Moulin Rouge, boulevard de Clichy
(18°), Le, 83–84
Mullens, Willy, 231, 269, 335n38
Mundo Ilustrado, El: Repas de bébé
frames in, 72
Muraz, Gaston, 134; Sous le grand
soleil, 314n77
Murnau, F. W.: intertitles of, 252;
Sunrise, 246–47; use of close-­ups,
247; as visual artifact, 252
Musée Albert-­K ahn, 255; digitization
at, 74; mappemonde of, 74; reno-
vation of, 73, 307n97; taxonomy
of, 82
Musser, Charles, 15
Muybridge, Eadweard, 92, 123;
female body studies, 98
Nambikwara tribe: Lévi-­Strauss on,
173; writing on, 175
Nanook of the North, 179, 195–96,
314nn81–82; as commercial
ethnographic cinema, 197; mum-
mification in, 196; as taxidermic
preservation, 193, 194
Native Americans: Curtis’s record-
ings of, 138; ethnographic dance
of, 112, 120. See also In the Land of
the Head Hunters
natural history museums: expedition
images in, 197; taxidermy in, 167
natural sciences, 10, 91
Neale, Steven, 13–14
Netherlands Filmmuseum. See EYE
Filmmuseum
Netherlands Institute for Sound and
Vision, 337n65
Netherlands New Guinea, Stirling
Expedition to, 271–72, 335n40
newsreels, French, 88
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 16, 24; on
dance, 319n135; philosophy of
history, 28, 152, 155; on realist
painting, 264
nineteenth century: representation
in, 72; scientific discourse of, 10,
91; spatial concerns of, 45; study
of dance, 110; travel writing of,
30
Nionga, 137
nitrate, 333n7
“Nitrate Won’t Wait!” campaign, 258
nomad figure, 180–81
nontranslation, ethics of, 235, 236
Nornes, Abé Mark: Cinema Babel,
236, 331n55
Nowell-­Smith, Geoffrey: “On His-
tory and the Cinema,” 23–24
objects: bodies as, 67; in film history,
261; indices and, 278; language of,
43–44; texts as, 163; unstable, 17
O’Brien, Sarah, 167, 324n93
observer-­h istorians, 11
Odin, Roger, 300n69
O’Donnell, Charles Oliver, 179;
eland hunting, 181, 182
Oesterley, W. O. E., 112
 360 INDEX
otherness: anthropocentric practices
of, 203–4; in dance, 123; ethno-
graphic, 41, 167, 216; of land-
scapes, 265; racial/cultural, 116;
of translation, 235–36; unknow-
ability of, 189
Palestine: Bethléem, documentation sur
ville, 96, 98
Pan-­A merican Exposition, 120
Panorama pris de la tour Eiffel en direc-
tion des Invalides, 86
panoramas: landscapes, 86, 96, 97,
98; making-­v isible in, 99
Paris: in Archives de la Planète films,
87–88; autochromes of, 83–84,
86, 94
Paris: Inondations, 87
Passet, Stéphane, 83, 86, 94
Pathé film studios, 120, 222, 269; in
Dutch film market, 329n31
patria (Latinate term), 330n44
Patria (ship), 231. See also Met het SS
“Patria” der Rotterdamsche Lloyd
naar Nederlandsch Oost-­Indië
patriarchy, in ethnographic cinema,
27
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 280, 327n15;
on photography/film relationship,
336n49; sign categories of, 277–78
Peterson, Jennifer, 222; on In Egypte,
223–24; on landscape, 268
Petro, Patrice: Aftershocks of the New,
26–27
phonocentrism, 250; anthropo-
logical, 175, 177; Derrida on, 173;
difference in, 174; geographic
divisions of, 175; poststructural
revisions of, 248; schizogenesis
and, 204; speech/writing division
of, 213–14
photochemical reproduction: deixis
of, 227, 230; iconic indexicality
of, 278
photography: anthropological use of,
162; chrono-­, 92–94, 99; division
from film, 81, 90–92, 95–96, 98,
99, 226n49; ethnography and,
4–5; iconic aspects of, 278; indexi-
cality of, 196, 229; proximity to
world, 93; role of rifle in, 194; tau-
tological deixis of, 228; taxidermy
and, 194. See also autochromes
place de la Bourse, vue de la rue Notre-­
Dame-­des-­Victoires, La, 83
poetics, historical, 16–17
poiesis, Aristotelian, 16, 17
Poirier, Léon, 134, 154, 314n75
positivism: of Archives de la Planète,
80; Kahn’s, 52; Ranke’s, 15; in
understanding of documents, 53
poststructuralism, 36; anthropology
and, 177, 205; concept of history,
152; early film studies and, 37;
ethnographic cinema in, 4; of
ethnographic images, 39; new film
history and, 11; revisions of pho-
nocentrism, 248; structuralism
and, 322n36; theory of archive
in, 25
Potlatch Ban (Canada, 1884), 146,
147
power: in creative work of his-
tory, 152; Foucauldian, 86; in
global cinematic relations, 283;
in intertitle/image exchanges,
329n28; in self–other relations,
37; in spectatorship, 23; of visible
evidence, 76; of vision, 97–98
power, state, 103; in ethnography,
158
Pratt, Mary Louise, 97; on colonial
landscape, 264–65
preservation: activism in, 258; histo-
riographic operations of, 318n121;
through taxidermy, 192; unblem-
ished Model Image in, 257. See
also film preservation
 INDEX 361
primitivism: in ethnographic dance,
111, 118; influence on Eisenstein,
151
Promio, Alexandre, 104; haptic im-
ages of, 68, 93; Lumière films of,
65, 66
pseudomorphs, 24–25, 299n60
Quimby, George Irving, 140, 144,
148–49, 317n109
Rabinovitz, Lauren, 267
Radcliffe-­Brown, Alfred, 112
Ramsaye, Terry, 242
Ranke, Leopold von, 297n30; posi-
tivism of, 15; theory of history, 16
rationalism, 298n46; empiricism
and, 18
reading, epistemological aims of, 169
realism: art-­h istorical, 266;
Nietzsche on, 264; technologies
of, 195
recuperation, historical: in film
archives, 100; of film fragments,
24; in film historiography, 3, 18;
harmful aspects of, 9; of moving
images, 30
Reeves, Daniel: Obsessive Becoming,
148
reflexion, ethnographic, 177–78
Repas de bébé, 49; choreographed
nature of, 62
Repas d’Indiens, 49, 69–72, 70;
authority in, 70; catalog descrip-
tion of, 70–71; choreographed
nature of, 62; composition of,
69–70; movement/stillness in, 71;
resistance in, 70; sexual violence
in, 102; as simulacrum, 71–72
reproduction, mechanical, 49
resistance: discursive, 116; in Repas
d’Indiens, 70; in Village Ashanti
series, 63
Resnais, Alain, 153
Richard III (Shakespeare), 101
rituals: diversity in, 113; in ethno-
graphic dance, 111–19; in every-
day life, 117; of possession, 309n3
Robertson, Jack: expedition film of,
179, 182
Robinson, James Harvey: The New
History, 296n22
Rodowick, David N., 326n10; on
Deleuze, 327n14; on the figure,
152, 153; on postwar French
film, 151; Virtual Life of Film, 35,
326n11
Rohdie, Sam, 13, 51, 304n39
Rony, Fatimah Tobing, 2; on Archives
de la Planète films, 304n39; on
ethnographic cinema, 197; on
ethnography, 4; on In the Land of
the Head Hunters, 140–41, 142,
144; on Nanook of the North, 193,
195–96, 314n82; on panoramas,
97; on popular culture, 332n1; on
taxidermy, 195; The Third Eye, 34
Roosevelt, André: Goona Goona,
137
Roosevelt, Kermit, 157, 159, 319n1
Roosevelt, Theodore, 159; on artist-­
hunters, 194; media popularity
of, 320n13; moving images of,
161; multimedia presidency of,
320n15; safari library of, 163–64,
165, 167, 321n22, 322n33; safari
to Brazil, 322n39. See also African
Game Trails
Roosevelt in Africa, 320n13
Roosevelt safari, 157–60; anachro-
nisms in, 158; animals killed in,
158–59; Kearton’s film of, 160,
320n13; naturalists accompany-
ing, 158
Rosen, Philip, 13, 278–79; Change
Mummified, 31–32, 33
Rotterdam Lloyd shipping company,
230
 362 INDEX
Rouch, Jean, 4, 162; Les maîtres fous,
132; visual anthropology of, 37
Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques: on forma-
tion of anthropology, 176; Lévi-­
Strauss and, 172, 322n47
Royal Cambodian Ballet, 313n65;
dance film of, 126–27, 128–29,
130
Royce, Anya Peterson, 111
Ruby, Jay, 177
rue animée, Une, 94, 98
Rue El-­Halfaouine, 65
Rue Sharia-­el-­Nahassine, 65
Russell, Catherine, 2, 198; on animal
death, 188; on ecstatic ethnog-
raphy, 309n3; Experimental
Ethnography, 33, 317n109; on the
flâneuse, 26; on In the Land of the
Head Hunters, 141, 144, 317n109
Ryle, Gilbert, 211
salon de la société Autour du Monde,
Le, 82, 89; erasure of humans
from, 83
Salt, Barry: Film Style and Technol-
ogy, 13
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 326n12;
conception of langue, 214
Sauvageot, Camille: Archives de la
Planète films of, 87–88, 96, 98,
308n108
Scène de déshabillage, Tonkin, 98–99
Scene Machine, 261, 285–88, 287;
keyword use of, 286; language/
image encounter in, 286; moving
image content of, 337n65; pre­
determined themes of, 285. See
also EYE Filmmuseum
Schoedsack, Ernest B., 198, 244;
docufiction of, 331n65. See also
Grass
Screen (periodical), 296n20; archives
of, 12; film theory in, 13
self: and other, 173–74; subject and,
172
Selig-­Polyscope Company, 320n13
semiotics: icons in, 278; of images,
326n12. See also cinesemiotics;
signs
serpentine symbolism, 119–24
Shining, The (1980), 190
Shukin, Nicole, 322n33
signs: categories of, 277–78;
meaning-­bearing, 282. See also
semiotics
silent film. See film, early
Simba: King of the Beasts, 1, 2, 5, 23,
179; animal death in, 188–89;
intertitles of, 188
Singer, Ben, 297n26
Sirmur, rani of, 25
Skladanowsky, Emil, 120
Skladanowsky, Max, 120
Sklar, Robert, 31
Smith, J. P., 222
Smith, Paul Chaat, 139
Sobchack, Vivian, 28, 29
social sciences, 10
Société Autour du Monde, 82, 89,
307n91
sociology, religious signification in,
111
Sontag, Susan, 171, 194
sound: in ethnographic intertitles,
245; for In the Land of the Head
Hunters, 149; technology, 14; in
writing, 251
spectators, 14; absented, 213; of
autochromes, 91; of cinema of at-
tractions, 60–61; complicity with
film, 57; of dance, 114–16, 118;
desires of, 60, 193; of digitization,
258; encounter with image, 217; of
exotic bodies, 134; of expedition
films, 187–88; experience of land-
scape, 268; of intertitles, 221–22;
“outside,” 213; presentation of
death to, 190; self-­awareness of,
61; of Village Ashanti series, 57
spectatorship: additive approach to,
 INDEX 363
284; archival, 287; artifactual,
289; authority of, 10; in em-
piricism, 22; historiographic ap-
proaches to, 24; imagined, 14, 41;
interaction with moving image,
25; limits of, 25; as nonlinguistic
process, 212; power in, 23; tradi-
tional modes of, 286–87
speech: anthropocentric, 176;
division from writing, 213–14,
248–49; images’ refusal of, 251;
ordinary language and, 251;
visible, 175–76. See also voice
Spitzer, Leo: Linguistics and Literary
History, 235
Spivak, Gayatri, 25, 26
Stacey, Jackie, 12, 296n20; on
empiricist/empirical distinction,
19–20
Stefanova, Dima, 285
Steiner, George: After Babel, 236
Stewart, Garrett, 188
Stewart, Jacqueline, 300n75
Stirling, Matthew W.: New Guinea
Expedition, 271–72, 335n40
structuralism: Derrida on, 169; Lévi-­
Strauss’s, 173; poststructuralism
and, 322n36
subject: schizogenic, 177; self and,
172; writing and speaking, 174
subject, ethnographic, 107
subject, Western, 108
supplementarity: Derrida on, 207; of
ethnographic cinema, 204–9
Supplice d’une femme condamnée à
mort pour adultère, Le, 94
Symbolists, on dance, 114–15,
121–22
Szaloky, Melinda, 247
Tanzania, Julien expedition to, 272
taxidermy, 41; in Adventures on the
Upper Nile, 182, 183; anthropo-
logical, 165; in cinema, 191–97;
in commercial ethnographic
cinema, 191–92; death drive of,
198; destructive processes of, 195;
in ethnographic cinema, 193–94,
204; former self in, 193; as
industrial process, 192; in natural
history museums, 167; photogra-
phy and, 194; preservative claims
of, 192, 193, 194; religious aspects
of, 195–96; salvage and, 168; as
scientific process, 192; spectators
of, 195
Taylor, Paul Michael, 271
television, cinematic historicity
through, 24
texts: ethnographic, 166–67; of
magic lantern shows, 218, 220,
328n22; as taxidermic objects,
163. See also writing
theater, 100–101, 103
Third Republic, French, 48
time: chronological thinking of,
154; continuous, 56; in Danses
Cambodgiennes, 130; empirical
conception of, 151; historical,
151–52; nonphotographic indices
of, 269; objective, 199
time, schizogenic, 177, 196; in Ad-
ventures on the Upper Nile, 182; in
ethnographic writing, 203
time-­i mages: cinematic, 151–52;
Deleuze’s, 130, 152; recurrent, 152
Torres Strait (Australia) expedition:
dance in, 107; ethnographic films
of, 68
translation: Adorno on, 236;
Benjamin on, 236–39; de Man on,
238, 239; as demystification, 236;
epistemology of, 239; in ethno-
graphic cinema, 241; interaction
with original, 237–38; limits of,
235; otherness of, 235–36; stabi-
lizing function of, 238; temporal
relationships of, 238. See also
intertitles, bilingual
travel writing: dominance in, 97;
 364 INDEX
ethnographic, 171; nineteenth-­
century, 30
truth, determinacy of, 16
Tunisia, Lumière films of, 63, 65, 93
Turquie, 96
Tusschen Nijl en Congo: landscape of,
272–74; locusts in, 273–74, 274,
275; virtual/material surfaces of,
273
Tylor, Edward B., 111, 113
Usai, Paolo Cherchi: The Death of
Cinema, 29; on preservation, 257;
Silent Film, 29
utterance, 241–42; as continuous
vocal expression, 242; in ethno-
graphic writing, 250; in linguis-
tics, 241, 331n64
utterance, intertitular, 41, 216,
241–51; of Grass, 242–46, 248,
251; image and, 251; representa-
tion of voice, 242; silence, 251;
voice in, 251. See also intertitles
Valéry, Paul: on dance, 115
Vaughan, Dai, 13, 61–62, 278
Venuti, Lawrence, 236
Veyre, Gabriel, 104; Mexican expedi-
tion of, 69–72
Vidal de La Blache, Paul, 79, 307n91;
Atlas, 77
Village Ashanti Exposition, 55–64
Village Ashanti film series, 49,
55–64; bodies/gaze in, 63; colo-
nialism in, 57–58; composition
of, 57; contingency in, 62; dance
in, 56–59, 59, 63, 119; Lyon in,
57–58; micronarrativity of, 58;
presence/absence in, 57; racial dis-
play in, 58; representation in, 59;
resistance in, 63; single-­shot cin-
ema of, 62, 63; spatial divisions of,
57–58; spectators of, 57; subject
and object in, 62; subjectivities of,
63; temporality of, 58, 62
violence: colonial, 99, 288; discur-
sive, 179; in Kahn autochromes,
94–95, 102
voice: aparté, 250–51; division of sub-
ject and living present, 332n73;
ethnographic writing and, 248,
249–50; as figure of resistance,
248; in intertitular utterance, 242,
251; separation from language,
332n75. See also speech
vues, Lumière: categories of, 51; con-
tinuous time in, 56; difference in,
72; geographic scope of, 46–47; of
processions, 64, 305n60; screen-
ing in Mexico, 69, 72; thrills in,
61–62; Village Ashanti, 55–64.
See also Maison Lumière
Weil, Simone: ethicoreligious dimen-
sions of, 324n91
Weis, Elisabeth: Film Sound, 13–14
White, Hayden, 3, 16; on historical
accident, 262; Metahistory, 28, 29
Whitford, Annabelle, 120
Williams, Christopher, 13
Williams, Raymond: on landscape,
263, 264
Williams, Tami, 313n62
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 211, 212;
Philosophical Investigations, 325n4
Wölfflin, Heinrich, 17–18, 298n41
writing: accumulation of past, 249;
anthropology and, 174, 176;
as archive, 249; colonial, 161,
244, 249; division from speech,
213–14, 248–49; epistemology
of, 249; images and, 5, 251–53;
imperialism of, 250; indexical arts
and, 163; putting sound into, 251;
relationship to cinema, 217–18;
signifier and signified in, 173;
visible, 175–76. See also ethno-
graphic writing; travel writing
Yerushalmi, Yosef, 164, 165
Zamir, Shamoon, 316n99
KATHERINE GROO is assistant professor of film and media studies
at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. She is coeditor of New Silent
Cinema.