UNDER DISCUSSION

WOMEN PIONEERS:
A N INTERVIEW WITH FOUR FOUNDING
FIGURES O F ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM

: PATSY ASCH, SARAH ELDER,

JEAN L YDALL, JUDITH MACDOUGALL

EDITED BY WILMA KIENER & EVA MEIB

The politically and aesthetically turbulent decade
of the 60s were certainly decisive years in the formation
of the documentary genre. They were also the period in
which ethnographic filmmaking and visual anthropol-
ogy were recognized and given a huge boost through
conferences and the beginning of academic programs.
The history of ethnographic film reflects a hybrid genre-
crossing from adventure/discovery films to cross-cul-
tural purist descriptions; from documentary film to
academic research; and from an elite specialized audi-
ence to the audiences of popular television. This history
has begun to be developed but much remains to be
written. This was the purpose of the international
conference Origins of Visual Anthropology—Putting
the Past Together which took place in Gottingen,
Germany, in June 2001. The conference offered an
excellent opportunity for an international get-together,
as the creme de la creme of directors and scholars,
including the pioneering heroes of the field, were in
attendance. It was simply wonderful, but in time a
question from the students who participated emerged:
"Where are the women?"
In response to the question, a number of us gathered
in the garden outside the conference building: Patsy
Asch (Australia), Sarah Elder (USA), Judith MacDougall
(Australia) and Jean Lydall (Germany). These women
filmmakers have shown us images from far away
cultures like the Hamar of Southern Ethiopia (Lydall),
the Inuit of Alaska (Elder), the Turkana in East Africa
and images from Australia and India (MacDougall) and
from Central Asia and Bali (Asch). A worldwide
audience could also profit from the humanist insights
of these women. At that time we had the chance to ask
them about their biographical and political backgrounds,
and why it took them as long as it did to finally pick up
the camera and film on their own.
Like the Flahertys, three of them started filming in
a team with their husbands. Robert Flaherty is often
referred to as the "father of documentary film." To say
that Frances Hubbard-Flaherty was the "mother of the
documentary" sounds awkward. Yet, its awkwardness
only reveals how narrow our traditional mindset of
filmmaking and especially camerawork still is.
For the interviews, the questions were put to these
filmmakers by Anja Dreschke, Barbara FuB, Stefanie
Glatz, Wilma Kiener, Eva Knopf, Eva MeiB and Nicole
Wolf. The interview was edited by Wilma Kiener and
Eva MeiB.
Special thanks to BeateEngelbrecht,Institutfiirden
Wissenschaftlichen Film (IWF)—Knowledge and
Media, for organizing the Congress.
(WK)

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Question: During the conference it has been stated
s-everal times that women are underrepresented here
and maybe that is because they were underrepresented
in the field of visual anthropology from the 5O.s to the
70s in general. Can you please tell us about your opinion
on this?
JM: Well, Patsy, Jean, and I were working with our
husbands in a team situation and I think that was
probably more normal than women working by them-
selves, in the early days. There were women working in
visual anthropology, but not making films that much.
Am 1 wron??
PA: No, I think that's true, but it's also true with
anthropology in general. There were very few women
working in anthropology. I remember Hilly Geertz
saying to me that she felt she could only work on
women's lives, because there weren't enough women Patsy Asch. 2001. Photo: IWF
working. And so you couldn't, as a woman, have a full
range of things to study
JM: But on the other hand I didn't feel like we could
work on women s things because of .
PA: Yes, that s the other point I was goinii to make,
is that all the women were trained in male institutions
with male teachers, male textbooks, so they were trained
in anthropology itself to use the same kind of structures*,
analysis that had been determined by a male.
JL: I also had the feeling that women and children
were not important. I wanted to study kinship, econom-
ics and politics, and to be equal to men in these thinas.
But it was only by doing fieldwork that I discovered that Judith MacDougall. 2001. Photo: IWF.
women and children are the most important and most
interesting And it involves all of these things: kinship,
economics, politics, religion.
SE: Actually it was fieldwork that taught me the
very same thing. I was going to go out to study hunting
and subsistance, and then I got into the villages, and I
realized that the hunters would be dead if the women did
not have the technology to make certain equipment and
men's clothes, especially in the Arctic. The feminists had
not been ahead of me to teach me. so fieldwork taught
me how much was centered around women.
PA: I wondered about the evolution ot /urkana
Conversations, as your earlier films seemed more male-
focused.
JM: We had a small child with us and I think one
ot the constraints is that a lot ot responsibility usually
does tall on the mother. Not that the father isn't willin T Jean Lydal! and Sarah Elder. 2001. Photo: IWF

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 17 Number 1 Spring-Summer 2001 61


but it's just something about nurturing. I suppose
everybody worries about the dangers. In the old days,
when it was remote, it was very remote, and we didn't
have a radio, there was no way of communicating If
somebody fell ill, your best bet was to drive lor a couple
of days in a Land Rover over a bad road to try to get to
a radio or a hospital. So you really were on your own.
But actually our child was more healthy living in the
desert in East Africa than he ever was before or after.
PA: I guess what I meant was about the focus of the
films, it seemed to me to shift...
JM: ...into more of a feminine focus, sure. It's
much easier to be with other women if you have a child
in places where having children is so valued. And you
can't say "I'm practicing birth control and we've chosen
not to have a child," because it would be totally
inconceivable to people. In fact I think that one reason
we had a child when we did was because people in Jie
worried about us so much that we thought maybe we'd
better do it. Also you do have a certain seniority as a
woman with a child and other women accept you. Cross-
culturally it's very easy to talk about children. I was
interested in how they raise their children and they also
were very interested in how we did it. They thought that
what we did was really barbaric.
Question: Do you feel that women always contrib-
uted a lot, but didn't get their credits?
SE: As filmmakers7 Sure, I remember in the 70s
people would always refer to David MacDougall's films,
not to David and Judith's films, .not in the credits, but
certainly in conversations.
PA: And in publications.
SE: Patsy was also pretty invisible for a long time,
Sarah E der. 2001. Photo: ivan Boiko
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and I telt the same way with my work. I would answer
the phone and because it was a female voice the caller
would assume I was the secretary. Once I had an
enormous argument with Jean Malaurie (Director of
Arctic Studies at FEcole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales). I was going over our material with him
because he wanted to buy some of our footage. He did
not like our price so he demanded to see the ' man. My
film partner was Leonard Kamerling and Lenny had to
say, T m sorry, she has the authority. That was
somewhere in the mid seventies. But on a more signifi-
cant level what I did not understand then was the behind-
the-scenes old boy networking and self promoting
Gender issues were constant, but a lot of women
didn't particularly want to talk about them because it
looked like you might be complaining. We didn't have
a lot of words for feminist concerns. We wanted to
compete the same way as men and didn't want to have
the a special handicap, you know, 'she s a woman. At
the same time I experienced enormous bias and preju-
dice every step of the wa>. I think women in the
generation after me were immediately feeline more
comfortable with the space that they were inhabiting.
Question: So, a lot of the I imitations came from the
outside, but did they come from the inside as well? That
you thought you couldn't do it?
JL: Ivo [Strecker] and I were just doine anthropol-
ogy. But he had the idea that one could use a camera.
I never even thought that I could use a camera. M\
feeling was that all I could do was assisting jobs, like
taking the sound.
Question: Like being a "cheap sound recordist0'
JL: Yes. I did the sound because that w as more of
an assistant kind of job. The one behind the camera is
making the decisions: what's going to be. what's being
filmed. At least that's how I saw things. \\ ell, the films
were Ivo's films, because he was the cameraman. And
even though we had discussed e\er> thine together and
were there together and dome things together, it s clear
that they are his films, and it foiced me then e\entuall\
to act, to make films without Ivo. I still can"t break out
of that. And that may be a shame that we can't work
together as a team an\more. I also want to make films
and 1 can onh do it without him and preferabh with
women.
Question: But why did you have to do assisting
jobs'.1
JK: I think it came from inside, the w a\ 1 erew up.
Visual Anthropology Review

My mother was not very well educated, my father was
a professor and I think I internalized this role-taking,
that the man does the directing and the woman does the
supporting. Of course they are complementary, you
can't do without. And I fell into this pattern quite
naturally.
SE: My experience was, when you are shooting,
in many ways you're myopic, because you have to
worry about exposure and about the very present zen-
moment of being there. Behind the camera you can not
be aware of what's going on in terms of human
relationships and movement. My partner was shooting
and I as the co-director/sound-person was saying,
"O.K., shoot this, don't miss that." Or in the sound I was
doing the interviewing, so I was making the contact and
I asked the questions. I sat squashed to the camera, so
it seemed as if they were looking into the lens, but they
were actually looking into my eyes. I built up relation-
ships with people while shooting. Films are made very
much by relationships, always relationships. The cam-
era captures all of that, and all of us had great camera-
men that we worked with.
JM: I did a lot of cinematography at film school,
so I would have felt confident to take the camera myself,
but when we were in Uganda I was worried I wouldn't
have the physical strength to do what was needed. It was
a very big camera, an Eclair NPR, that's a very heavy
camera, and we were using it in very hard terrain, and
in very hot weather, from before dawn until late at night.
Maybe I would have been physically strong enough to
do it in the city, if I could put it down once in a while and
have a cup of coffee, or a cup of tea, or a scotch at five
o'clock in the afternoon. But I still don't know if I could
have done it under those circumstances. I think that
made me back off.
PA: I think that made many women back off. But
it also means that we' re accepting a certain notion of how
one goes about filming. The notion that you film from
before dawn till after dark is an assumption about what
you're covering and how you're covering it.
JM: Isn't that true?
PA: I don't think it would have to be. What I
wondered about is why the camera wasn't shared. There
are kinds of events that occur in the field where women
would have filmed differently. Let me give you an
example: in Afghanistan Tim [Asch] was really ill and it
looked like the whole project was going to go down the
drain. He had to leave and I was left with a woman who
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spoke a bit of Farsi. I thought we'd better at least get
some footage because this may be the end of the whole
project. So I filmed about 30 minutes of women and
children in this tent and it's completely different footage
than any of the rest. I'm not saying it's better or worse,
it's just different and it has a different feel and a different
aesthetic. Subsequently when I looked at it later I
thought: why didn't we make that division earlier? That
when we were filming inside tents with women, I did the
filming and when we were filming outside, he did the
filming. It never even rose to the surface as a possibility.
Apparently it didn't for you either.
JM: Well, it did.
PA: Well, did you shoot with the Turkana at all?
JM: Not much. Partly because the women's and
the men's lives were so separate, and also because we
made the decision that Lorang [the headman] would be
at the center of the film. Although I thought he was a
very interesting man, I also wanted badly to do a film
about his senior wife, who was a remarkable woman.
But because we were focusing on the wedding event,
there was no way we could be in two places at the same
time. As it turned out, it was the women who determined
the outcome of the wedding, but we had to choose one
or the other. I regret that we couldn't have done both.
If we were doing it now, it would be wonderful, we
would each have a camera.
SE: I was scared of the physical part of the camera,
but I would say that I was a prisoner of my mind. My
cameraman, he was a small guy, not particularly strong,
I think I was as strong as he. There were a few
camerawomen then, for example Sandy Sissel and
Dyanna Taylor who now work on Hollywood features,
although she started out doing documentary. She is a
very small woman, climbed Annapurna and was the
camerawoman for the climb. These were models who
were just a little bit younger than me. I think I was a
prisoner of my own mind. I was convinced I couldn't
figure it all out, the exposure and pushing film and
changing magazines quickly and so on. It was just my
own socialization. It was too bad. But later I did make
it. I wanted to make my own films, and I got an all
woman crew. My approach has always been to have the
subjects of the film decide what would be in the film.
This film was about alcohol abuse. I really wanted to do
it on women, but the community decided to do it on both
men and women. It was interesting working with an all
woman crew, because the subjects we were dealing
Number 1 Spring-Summer 2001 63

with were very delicate and people were talking about
things they had done that they were ashamed of. It was
very tricky to talk about alcohol abuse. I'm sure that
they would not have been as revealing with their lives
had there been men on the crew. They said on occasion,
"We're glad that you are women, because we can talk
about these things."
Question: So you as women anthropologists spe-
cialize on certain subject matters like gender issues or
women in the field. Isn't there the problem of being
ghettoized, like some women anthropologists have said,
"I don't like to talk only about women or children." What
is your opinion on that?
JL: Oh, I think it's great to be a woman anthropolo-
gist. You can do so much better anthropology than if
you were a man.
SE: Why do you say so? I agree, but why do you
say so?
Question: Is it sexist or so?
JL: The reason why I say so is, for example: among
the Hamar—who are a semi-pastoral, agricultural soci-
ety—they present themselves as if the men are the ones
in control and the women are the ones who do the
fulfilling jobs and who listen when the men are speaking.
Maybe this varies from society to society, but if you
come to Hamar as a woman, and you assume this
submissive role, listening and watching, you get inte-
grated in a way, and people come and talk to you. The
men come and talk to you, not only the women. The men
come and talk to you in a way, which they wouldn't do
if you were a man, because with a man they have to
present themselves always; that they are dominant, that
they are in control. But if you are a woman, you have
men coming to you and weeping on your shoulder, telling
you their problems, being like your sons or lovers or
whatever. And you get to see and experience things,
which as a man you have less opportunity to do. And
that's why I think it is great to be a woman doing
anthropology and fieldwork. And then, I never learned
to use a camera, but my daughter does it now, and that's
wonderful. She can be in that situation where she can
film such intimate and spontaneous interactions, which
I think as a man she would just have so much more
difficulty doing; that would be much more formal, it
would be much more a presentation of the official view
of things.
PA: I always thought it was really interesting to look
at Melissa Llewelyn-Davies' films. Because if you
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look at Masai Women, one of the absolute key scenes
is about men and men's concerns. It is bizarre, but it is.
As you say, she can get intimate material from both men
and women and it opens up a woman's world. That's
completely different than being only about Masai women.
Her later films, like The Women's Olamal, were about
men and women but made from a woman's perspective
with the focus on women; scenes about men were
included, because they were pertinent to understanding
women's lives.
JM: That's an interesting point. That's true, I think.
SE: That's what I was saying when we had the all
woman crew. In the beginning people didn't take us
seriously because we were women, which was fine.
Because if they don't take you seriously, you're not
threatening. You can just move around and be wherever
you want to be.
Question: Referring to the situation in the 70s, the
political discussion at that time and the women' s move-
ment—did you connect your work to a certain political
movement? Do you call yourself a feminist? And see
your work in that kind of context?
SE: I did position myself (as a feminist) by the time
I got out of graduate school in 1972. When I went to
college in 19651 thought that identifying as a woman was
silly. That I could be equal to a man, that I could compete
exactly like a man, that there was no difference. Six years
later I could also see my self-hatred, the female parts of
me which I thought earlier were things I had to get rid
of. So I had turned around. But when I started making
films, in 1973,1 succumbed. I didn't pick up the camera.
I remember every single time we would come back from
shooting, I would say to my film partner, "You didn't
shoot the women. I asked you this morning at breakfast
to shoot the women, and you were shooting the men
doing the activity, but you weren't showing the in-
between-spaces." Like in dancing, the men are singing
and drumming, but what are the women doing, what's
happening? And he said, "Hell, I forgot, tell me again
tomorrow." And then again and again. As the editor, I
remember looking at my "outs" and saying, 'Twenty-
five cutaways of men and two cutaways of women. So
I'm going to put the women in even though they are not
the best shots." I did that for years. It was very hard with
all my feminist ideas to actually find ways that they could
happen.
JM: Maybe my feminist streak showed when I tried
to make a feminist film out of my first editing exercise,
Visual Anthropology Review

editing Gunsmoke. At that lime many film schools
would give you a dozen shots from a television serial
western called Gunsmoke It was given to teach people
how to put together shots that were meant to be edited
in the Hollywood style. And I thought, "Well, I will
change this all around and make it into the woman s
story." The only thing that happens to Kitty, the
woman, is that one of the bad guys says, 'Let s throw
her in the back,' and somebody wraps poor Kitty up in
a blanket and throws her into the back of a wagon and
then the horses drive off. It was a very silly thing to
try to do. I tried unsuccessfully for days to make Kitty
tobethecenterofthisstory. I learned a lot about editing
and perhaps about feminism. I started doing ethno-
graphic film at about the time I started working with
David. Although we sometimes don't agree, we really
had the same vision from when we first met one
another. After a male cameraman had ruined half of my
student thesis film and my budget was almost gone, I
asked David to shoot it for me. I felt like you, that I
couldn't shoot, direct, and maintain my personal rela-
tionships with people I knew quite well. He shot it
beautifully and has continued to shoot. I've always
been happy with the way he shoots film and I admire
it. Now I am shooting my own material again.
JL: When I came to make films with Joanna Head
at the end of the eighties we were not militant. We were
saying, well, that the militants had already done their
work for us so we didn't have to be militant anymore.
Jean Lydall with Duka and children in Hamar, 1993. Photo: Debbie
Kaplan
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We didn't have a message to put across, but we wanted
to be feminine and have a feminine view ui thinf and
deal with feminine topics. That—women and women's
concerns and women's view of things wasvcrv essen-
tial for us. That's why we also wanted to have an all
female crew. About the political motive we could relax
because the work had been done tor us.
PA: My experience was much earlier and more at
the level of, "I'm not gonna iron your shirts anymore."
Itdidn'thavetodo with the widerworld. I mean, initially
it had to do with what is the domestic life like. I ha\ e four
children, you know. Who does all that? I think my inner
battles were more with the question of what is it to be
a woman who has some agency in the world, I suppose.
I dealt with a lot of these issues long before I got into film-
making. The first project I did was in 1975. I'd taken
some sound earlier, but I had no training in anthropolo :y.
no training in filmmaking. Tim was my teacher. So
initially I did whatever I was told to do. We would go off
and shoot little films in neighbors' houses so that I could
learn how to hold the microphone without pointing it in
the wrong direction or use the camera and get something
in focus. Well, I'm exaggerating a bit. My editing was
something just learned. I mean no one taught me. That's
the difference. I envy your having the work at college
when you have a group of people really working
together.
SE: Why did you pick up the microphone to begin
with? Was it just to be a an inexpensive sound-person,
you know, to make it more convenient'7
PA: Well, we talked about wanting to
work together and when the Afghanistan
project came up Tim had three da\ s to decide
whether he was going to go or not. He was
supposed to go and teach with Gregory
Bateson. At the same time Asen Balikci
wanted him to go to Afghanistan. So Tim
said, 'Well actualh this will be a chance to
.see if we want to work together." I didn t
know anything about recording, but it w as an
opportunity to go. And then what happened
was: the crystal broke in the little SN tape
recorder and I had to synchronize a hundred
rolls of film with no crystal-s\nch. And so I
learned to use a Steenbeck editnm table, and
I learned to edit, and 1 learned to look \er>
carefully at people s mouths.
Question* To go back to the conference
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and to the problem that women are underrepresented
here, what do you think about the hypothesis that men
have a greater need to represent themselves in the
academic world or maybe that women don t like to
represent themselves''
PA: Well, a lot of men are speaking at the confer-
ence. They are up there, you know. As soon as the
moment comes when you can raise your arm, we know
who is going to do it.
JL: Has it not got a lot to do with the situation':* My
experience—in all countries that I've been in—is that in
a public situation—like the conference—men are able
to—throueh their upbringing or whatever, also through
their deep voices—they are able to present. But in Judith MacDougall. Australia, 1990. Photo: David
informal situations women will be talking at length and MacDougall
eloquently. They can tell long stories in great detail and
analysis, maybe because they are liberated from the
public situation and don't have the audience there
immediately in front of them. There are plenty of women
who have written in the past as anthropologists and are
continually writing. And they are also filming. All the
prizes at the RAI Film Festival, well one prize was tor
a man—but all the others were for women.
SE: But I had a conversation last night with one of
the male scholars here, and I said that we were going to
talk about women's involvement in visual anthropology.
And he said, "What involvement9 There were no
women doing anything between the 50s and the 70s!'
And I said, "Are you saying that seriously?" And he said.
"I don't see the problem in the fact that it was white males
that started everything and that did everything. There is
nothing wrong with that. And now women are doing it.
And I said, 'Have you no idea that women were doing
things then'7 There was the public performance that was
going on, but simultaneously there was a parallel perfor-
mance. 1 always felt we were underground. It was,
"Show your secret hand-signal." It was after the film or
paper was given you'd go out into the hallway and you 'd
say, 'What did you think of that?" And someone would
say, That was bullshit.' And then you talked about it.
You might bring up (gender issues) maybe in class-
rooms. Perhaps one or two female professors would be
attuned, although I never had any. All ot my professors
and all my film-making colleagues everybody was
male. I was the only female professional in my circle.
Question: In Germany this didn't change much!
But do you think we are now kind ot repeating sitting Patsy Asch Roti, Eastern Indonesa. 1985.
outside1.'

66 Volume 17 Number 1 Spring-Summer 2001 Visual Anthropology Review


SE: Yes we are! 1 was saying that whin I saw this
group here. There was a similar situation at the Flaherty
Film Seminars in Riga in 1989. The conference was
going on for a few days and all of a sudden the women
just said: "This is their conference We are tired of
hearing this.' And we caucused into another room and
upset everybody because they wanted us as listeners.
We were their audience. So, the audience went away
and they talked among themselves. And we had really
fantastic conversations. It was a very exciting moment,
because there were women from all over Europe.
Question: So would you say there is a kind of
solidarity between women in visual anthropology?
SE: No, I don't think so. I mean this is the first time
I have ever talked to Judith. I think most of us made our
way by ourselves. Would you agree with that9
JL: Yeah, I would.
Question: And what would be the strategies7 Is it
good to be a lonely fighter or to have a husband to help
you or how should we go about it7
JM: I think that once you ve started to produce
your own work, you'll have no problem. You won't just
be an observer and you'11 have legitimate work that you
can put down on the table, it will be there, and you don't
have to be represented by anybody because you have
done it. You are presenting it. I can't imagine that good
work isn't going to be powerful and recognized.
JL: I would say that, too. But one doesn't want to
just work with women because one is a woman. One
wants to do good things, and if one has some luck and
one succeeds, then one should be able to present it to the
whole world and not just go into hiding because one is
a woman.
PA: I also think what you, Judith, said before is
important, that you and David shared a perspective; you
didn't say aesthetic, but that would be another way of
saying it. And I think that most film work has been and
perhaps will continue to be collaborative in a variety of
ways. I think you need to find someone you share a
vision with, while bringing different things to that vision.
And it may be that gender becomes less significant, if
there is more equality of opportunity of course, but not
sameness, so that it becomes less an issue. And you can
choose to work with the person that adds the most to
whatever your project is. But the other thing is, lhat if
you are looking around us. we are not dealing with racial
or let's say extreme class differences. It may be that this
will become the next issue around. Whether, e g., only
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Alrican-Americans should make films t jlher. And I
think that's probably more significant now especially
in terms of indigenous media.
JM: I'm excited about this new digital technology
because it offers more opportunity to work \\ ilh some-
one from the communit Collaboration with a local
person is now more practicable and how closeh you
work with them will vary. But the possibility is tremen-
dously important, working either w ith a man or another
woman, and how the relationship can develop o\ er time.
It's going to be a very, very interesting and important
element of change in future work.
Question: For u.s, what we experience here, the
unequalness in the number of women and men, is not
representing what we experience in life now. So we were
interested whether this situation here is representing the
status that women had within visual anthropology orthat
they have at the moment and we wanted to hear \ our
view about that, whether for you it was striking to come
here and see that, or whether this is just a normal
situation and you had expected it that way.
PA: I think I expected it.
SE: I expected it, but it still makes me angr>.
JM: But this conference is 'putting together the
past,' so yes, this is representative of what has hap-
pened in the past. But I think, in my teaching experi-
ence, it's now mostly women who are doing this. If
there's one lone male student doing an ethnographic
film course, I feel sort of protective of him. So yes. it
probably does reflect a past situation and most likeh in
fifty years its the men who will feel \ er\. \ ery left out.
SE I doubt it.
Number 1 Spring-Summer 2001 67