Filmed Ethnography or Ethnographic Film?

Voice and Positionality in Ethnographic,

Documentary, and Feminist Film
Author(s): Nandini Sikand
Source: Journal of Film and Video , Vol. 67, No. 3-4 (Fall/Winter 2015), pp. 42-56
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the University Film & Video
Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jfilmvideo.67.3-4.0042

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 Filmed Ethnography or Ethnographic Film? Voice and
Positionality in Ethnographic, Documentary, and Feminist Film

nandini sikand

And tomorrow? Tomorrow will be the time of completely portable colorvideo, video editing, and instant replay (“in-
stant feedback”). Which is to say, the time of the joint dream of Vertov and Flaherty, of a mechanical cine-eye-ear
and of a camera that can so totally participate that it will automatically pass into the hands of those who, until now,
have always been in front of the lens. At that point, anthropologists will no longer control the monopoly on obser-
vation; their culture and they themselves will be observed and recorded. And it is in that way that ethnographic
film will help us to “share” anthropology.
—Rouch (46)

in 2009 i directed and produced, along
with Alexia Prichard, Soma Girls, a twenty-
seven-minute documentary that explores the
lives of children of sex workers in Kolkata,
India. Alexia, whom I met at a start-up cable
channel in New York City in 2001, told me about
New Light,1 a nonprofit, community-based or­
ganization in Kolkata, a city that is my mother’s
ancestral home and where I had spent many
summers as a child. New Light conducts com­
munity work in the Kalighat area, and Alexia,
impressed with their activism, wanted to
collaborate on a film about them. I politely
declined her suggestion in 2001 for I had sev­
eral concerns. One, I feared that Alexia had
asked me to collaborate on this film because I
was Indian and that my involvement would be
intended simply to give the film a stamp of au­
thenticity. Two, and more importantly, I did not
want to add to what is an oversaturated body
of work, especially in Western media, featuring
poor, malnourished images of Indian women
and children in need of saving. To my mind,
trafficking in such images perpetuates the sta­
tus quo, reifies Orientalist assumptions, and
nandini sik and is a filmmaker and assistant
professor at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, in
the interdisciplinary film and media studies pro­
gram. She is currently working on a book about the
Indian neoclassical classical dance odissi titled
Bodies, Bells and Borders.
further alienates those whom we claim to care
about. Alexia was incredibly persistent over the
ensuing years, and as I got to know her better,
I became more trusting of her intentions. In
2006, we decided to work on a film together
about New Light’s community activism. Alexia
made a reconnaissance trip in early 2007 with­
out me, and we returned together a year later,
me with toddler in tow, and began work on
what eventually became Soma Girls (2009).
Borders and Boundaries: Anthropology
and Ethnographic and Documentary Film
Having worked as an experimental and docu­
mentary filmmaker for several years, I returned
to graduate school to study anthropology in
2001. Despite slippages between the two
disciplines, I discovered some reassuring over­
laps between documentary filmmaking and
ethnographic fieldwork. Both methodologies
look to document and understand the human
experience through careful research and the
willing participation of subjects. Both struggle
with issues of power and representation of their
informants, and thoughtful anthropologists
and filmmakers worry about the ethical con­
sequences of the end product. These overlaps
aside, during the shooting of Soma Girls in Kol­
kata, I wondered why I never described Soma
Girls as an ethnographic film (as opposed to a
documentary). I certainly never hesitated to call

42 journal of film and video 67.3–4 / fall/winter 2015

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JFV 67_3-4 text.indd 42 8/17/15 3:16 PM
 my doctoral research “ethnographic,” which
was considered an essential badge of honor for
good anthropological training. If it was permis­
sible, even prideful, for me to be working on a
written ethnography of odissi dancers in India
and the United States, why did I hesitate to call
Soma Girls an ethnographic film? What were
some of the key differences between documen­
tary filmmaking and ethnographic filmmaking?
Had ethnographic film become unfashionable,
and if so, when and why?2 Were there differ­
ences in the approach to ethnographic cinema
in the United States and other parts of the
world? After all, both methodologies involve
significant immersion in the community and a
good level of participant observation. Although
I am certainly not the first to raise such ques­
tions, I was interested in unearthing my hesita­
tion—and this hesitation became a point of
entry to examine some of the differences and
similarities in what may be two approaches to
filmmaking, ethnographic and documentary.
A significant number of events began in
the mid- to late 1950s through the late 1960s
and mid-1970s: the civil rights movement, the
Vietnam War, various international wars for
independence, and the feminist movement.
This broad political and social upheaval world­
wide was coupled with a critique of positivism
and poststructuralism and with the birth of
postmodernism. Theoretical interventions by
Edward Said, Talal Asad, and others identified
the problematic nature of the epistemological
and discursive relationship between the West
and the Third World. Consequently, a critique
of disciplinary methods and boundaries deeply
affected the study of anthropology and ethno­
graphic film such that the study of anthropol­
ogy, a “bourgeois discipline” (Asad 17), became
entwined with how the Third World subject is
understood. The self-critique of anthropology is
well documented in the publication Writing Cul-
ture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,
edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus
and published in 1986; this was a moment that
served to destabilize ethnographic writing for
anthropological positivists, and the discipline
was forced to field critiques from Marxists and
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JFV 67_3-4 text.indd 43
feminists.3 Yet it appears that the study of an­
thropology, unlike that of ethnographic cinema,
survived the poststructuralist and postmodern
critique and the subsequent anxiety around the
crisis of representation. Even though anthro­
pology has a well-documented and checkered
history of being “the handmaiden of colonial­
ism”4 or the “elder daughter of colonialism,”5
it survived this past by engaging in self-critique
and reflection. Art critic and historian Hal Foster
argues that one of the many reasons anthropol­
ogy has been able to achieve “vanguard” status
is that anthropology has become “the science
of alterity.” The ability to be self-reflexive and
elastic makes it a discipline that is seen to
police itself: “Finally it is the self-critique of
anthropology that renders it so attractive, for
this critical ethnography invites a reflexivity at
the center even as it preserves a romanticism at
the margins” (Foster 305).
Ethnographic film, complicated by the issues
of representing the “other” and the inevitable
encoding of the cinematic subject, fell into
disrepute (despite several examples to the con­
trary),6 and ethnographic cinema after a post­
structuralist and postmodern critique never
quite emerged with its reputation unscathed.
Perhaps one of the problems was that the
visual within anthropology was always consid­
ered an ancillary practice of anthropologists; it
certainly did not receive as much attention or
training. It was very often an “add-on” to an­
thropological practice, a visual happenstance.
In 1973, Jean Rouch wrote of ethnographic film
as still being in its “experimental stage” and
not having realized its full potential (45). His
essay “Camera and the Man” remains a valu­
able manifesto not just for ethnographic film­
makers but for socially conscious documentary
filmmakers too. Ethnographic film, especially
in the United States, has since been recast in
terms of an “anthropology of media” by Faye
Ginsburg, Brian Larkin, and Lila Abu Lughod;
as “visual ethnography” by Sarah Pink; or as
“anthropological cinema” by Jay Ruby. This
renaming has allowed for a more holistic under­
standing of media and its social processes and
consequently has enabled anthropologists to
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 divorce ethnographic practice from the some­
what discredited ethnographic film. Conversely,
films that may not be made by anthropologists
can still function as anthropological texts or
at least provide viewers with anthropological
insight, such as Frederick Wiseman’s series on
American institutions.7 In the film In the Wilder-
ness of a Troubled Genre, visual anthropologist
Paul Henley discusses the work of ethnographic
filmmaker MacDougall and reminds us,
The central issue summed up in David Mac­
Dougall’s rather wonderful phrase is that
observational filmmakers should adopt a
stance of humility before the world. And
although we’ve sort of long given up the idea
and indeed the sort of prophets of observa­
tional cinema of the ’60s never had the idea
that filming could ever be objective, we still
have got the idea that the center of gravity of
our representation should be out there and
not in the heads of the filmmakers. So that
if you misrepresent an indigenous reality,
it’s more a question of betrayal rather than a
falsification.
As Henley points out, the anthropological film­
maker and the observational filmmaker have
much in common in terms of ethical represen­
tations.
Jay Ruby describes the existence of an­
thropological cinema as a “fantasy”: “films
designed by anthropologists to communicate
anthropological insights” (Ruby 1). Ruby’s
solution is for anthropologists to divorce
themselves from the practice of ethnographic
filmmaking altogether in favor of an anthropo­
logical cinema where the term ethnographic
is used only if the maker/designer of the film
is actually trained in ethnographic research.
Ruby further argues “that ethnographic and
documentary film, as commonly practiced, is
only marginally related to anthropology and
that these films are actually an impediment to
the development of anthropological cinema”
(Ruby 2). His reasoning is that anthropologists
are qualified to be ethnographers, but film­
makers are not. Although this is debatable, in
order for one to use the cinematic apparatus
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JFV 67_3-4 text.indd 44
(as described by Jean Louis Baudry) in a way
that allows one to be cognizant of its potential,
it is not sufficient for anthropologists alone to
communicate anthropological insights. Judging
by early ethnographic cinema, being trained
as an ethnographer does not necessarily
mean being trained in the ideological encod­
ing of the cinematic apparatus, as evidenced
by several examples of ethnographic cinema
conducted by ethnographers. An anthropolo­
gist may film an “anthropological insight” but
despite his or her best intentions may use non-
anthropological film techniques. For example,
the simple framing of an informant can have
serious consequences; camera placement, the
angle, the lighting, the ambient sound, and the
background all play a role in how we “see” the
subject.
According to Ruby, one of the impediments
for the production and distribution of anthro­
pological cinema is that anthropological films
need to be approached like any other form
of scholarly activity and not with aspirations
for wider distribution and/or commercial suc­
cess allowing one to “convey the results of
their ethnographic studies and ethnological
knowledge” (Ruby 2). Further, if the fantasy of
anthropological film is to be enacted, wider
distribution needs to include the production
and dissemination of such work. Most docu­
mentary filmmakers are not affiliated with an
educational institution, such that they have to
rely heavily on public funding and grants. By
contrast, many anthropologists are attached to
an educational institution. Consequently, their
main source of income is not their filmic prac­
tice, allowing them more freedom in terms of
whether their film is commercially viable or not.
Prior to Soma Girls, I had made several films
about India8 and the Indian diaspora.9 These
were mostly films about my personal family
history and my experience growing up in New
Delhi, and they explored broader issues of
voice and positionality. Situating these films in
a personal vein freed me from the responsibility
of speaking for millions of Indians. These films
avoided the replication of the images of Third
World poverty that have come to represent the
©2015 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
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 Indian subcontinent. Some media colleagues
and film festival directors would sometimes
ask why my films were not more dramatic (read:
sensationalist). The form that many of these
films took was that of experimental documen­
tary, a form that became a refuge for me. It
freed me from being the sole authority on India
and her people and from being enslaved to
“documenting” her through documentary films.
Until we worked on Soma Girls, my films were
very self-conscious portraits of an alternate
reality, such as Don’t Fence Me In (1998), a
film about my mother growing up in postcolo­
nial India. I tried to steer clear of the burden
of representation and the kinds of films that
have recently come to be described as “poverty
porn.” Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina coined
pornomiseria (León de la Barra) or “poverty
porn,” a term to describe a Western fascination
and voyeurism of developing nations in extre­
mis (Odede). London Times columnist Alice
Miles has been credited more recently for using
the term after the release of Slumdog Million-
aire (2008) (Williams).
Further, institutional funding and global
markets often dictate funding and visibility.
To illustrate, during the grant writing and
preproduction phase of Soma Girls, we had
to address how our film was going to be differ­
ent from Born into Brothels (2004), the highly
publicized, Oscar-winning film.10 In very general
terms, Born into Brothels is also about children
of sex workers who live in a red-light district of
Sonagachi, not far from Kalighat. In fact, some
of our grant applications were rejected with
feedback that films on brothels in Kolkata had
been “done.” After these evaluations I felt it
necessary to include an explanation in sub­
sequent applications emphasizing how Soma
Girls would be different from Born into Broth-
els. To my mind, the films are very distinct, but
in terms of funding and the realities of distribu­
tion, it was up to us to justify why “another”
film about the children of sex workers in Kol­
kata was even necessary or valid. The implicit
assumption was that Born into Brothels, having
won an Oscar, had become the defining film on
this subject.11
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JFV 67_3-4 text.indd 45
The Native Filmmaker/Anthropologist
One of the ways that the discipline of anthro­
pology has countered charges of concerning
inaccuracy or misrepresentation has been
to stress the “insurance” provided by ethno­
graphic fieldwork, participant observation, and
local rapport. The assumption of ethnographic
fieldwork and participant observation is that
by living and learning for an extended period
alongside our informants, we are able to
document and analyze their experience more
accurately—through everyday immersion, we
are able to better understand their reality.12
For the “native” anthropologist, there is the
understanding or belief that those who write
from within their own cultures write from a po­
sition of knowing, of affinity, of wielding insider
knowledge. Hence, it is a widely held belief that
such an anthropologist has privileged access to
the complexities of cultural practices. But this
position is not without critique, especially since
the perceived insider may not be an insider
after all. The question of who is inside or out­
side any cultural milieu is far more complicated
than it might seem at first glance.
Earlier, I noted that one of my hesitations
in the making of Soma Girls was the frequent
assumption that I had privileged status as
an Indian woman making a film about Indian
women sex workers and their children, a status
that Hal Foster describes as “automatic” (Foster
302). Although I do have certain advantages
researching in this milieu (I speak Bengali,
know the city of Kolkata reasonably well, and
have insider knowledge of certain cultural
codes), other aspects of my subject position
are more problematic: I am a half-Bengali
academic/filmmaker raised in New Delhi now
living in the United States, and I do not make
my living as a sex worker or have insider status
when it comes to their communities. This reality
of my subject position qualifies my status and
renders me short of “automatic.” In fact, during
our time spent at Kalighat, Alexia and I were
treated differently by some of the sex workers,
especially during the initial phase of our visit.
I attribute this to the fact that the residents of
45
8/17/15 3:16 PM
 Kalighat were used to non-Indian volunteers
from different parts of the world, and Alexia,
who is a second-generation Latina of mixed
parentage and raised in the United States, was
similarly “foreign.” Although I was Indian, my
liabilities included my inhabiting a middle-
class persona—perhaps “people like me” were
more responsible for the marginalization of
these subjects than were people like Alexia.
Being Indian and Bengali in this case helped in
terms of language and cultural contexts, even
though initially I was treated with wariness by
some of the women at New Light. Interestingly
enough, when I took my thirteen-month-old
son with me, the Kalighat community was more
welcoming. Perhaps this humanized me more
in their eyes, and they saw me as a mother as
well as a researcher/filmmaker. In fact, one of
the New Light staff members remarked on how
brave I was to bring my child with me. Respond­
ing to my quizzical look, she explained that
not many Indian women would travel to such a
part of Kolkata with a young child. Even though
the crèche at Kalighat is full of children, her
implication was that I was among women of a
certain class who were, perhaps, imbued with a
middle-class morality. In her article “How Na­
tive Is a Native Anthropologist?” Kirin Narayan
addresses this very issue of “insiderness”:
Factors such as education, gender, sexual
orientation, class, race or sheer duration of
contacts may at different times outweigh the
cultural identity we associate with insider/
outsider status. Instead what we must focus
our attention on is the quality of relations
with the people we seek to represent in our
texts: are they viewed as mere fodder for
professionally self-serving statements about
a generalized other, or are they accepted as
subjects with voices, views and dilemmas—
people to who we are bonded through ties of
reciprocity and who even may be critical of
our professional enterprise. (Narayan 672)
To Narayan’s point, each culture is highly differ­
entiated, and although I may look and play the
part of the “insider,” I will never be able to fully
understand the lived reality of these women.
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JFV 67_3-4 text.indd 46
It needs to be pointed out that this insider/
outsider status is both situational and dynamic
because it depends on who is doing the “look­
ing.” Some of my colleagues may think that I
have the ultimate insider status of language
and ethnicity; however, by the sex workers, I
was seen as an outsider and a potentially hos­
tile one.
The Filmmakers’ Dilemma/Trafficking
in Brothels
To better understand these vexed issues of
access, representation, and voice, it is help­
ful to consider Poonam Arora’s article on the
trend within the Western academy to show
films made by non-Western women about the
non-Western world. Arora problematizes the
use of such films as feminist ethnographies
and argues that no matter who makes the film,
these texts are ultimately “implicated in the
regimes of spectatorship that cinema has uni­
versally instituted, and that feminist film theory
has so extensively analyzed” (Arora 1). In her
analysis of Mira Nair’s much-celebrated Salaam
Bombay! (1988), Arora argues that this film per­
petuates a discourse of “third world subject,”
making it another tale of urbanization and
Third World degradation without addressing
any of the geopolitical specificities of the sex
and drug trades in India and Nepal, and that
it commodifies the Third World for First World
consumption. Aparna Sen’s Parama (1987),
the other film addressed in Arora’s article, is a
critique of ethnography and the “indigenous
ethnographer.” In the film, Rahul Rai, a pho­
tographer for National Geographic, returns to
his native Kolkata and has a relationship with a
married Indian woman. He leaves, and Parama
is left to suffer the consequences of her now-
public affair, discovered via the pages of Life
magazine. Arora argues that although neither
film can be viewed unproblematically, Parama,
as a feminist ethnography, succeeds in posing
a problem and offers a critique of patriarchy
and the indigenous ethnographer. Even though
both Parama and Salaam Bombay! are narra­
tive fiction films (rather than nonfiction films),
©2015 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
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 Arora’s article alerts us to the ways in which
the Third World subject is constituted and con­
sumed. One of the problems with the classic
Hollywood narrative is that female characters
are often circumscribed within that narrative.
In other words, for the narrative to work, the
ending of the film is a resolution that fixes her
character and fate in space and time. Interest­
ingly enough, director Aparna Sen created two
distinct endings to Parama, one more palat­
able for mainstream Indian audiences, where
Parama returns rehabilitated to her husband
and family, and the other for a more Western­
ized alternate reading where Parama seeks out
a more tenuous but independent existence.
This is a brilliant move on the part of Sen, who
recognizes the importance and fluidity of audi­
ence reception and provides us with a strategy
for films that come to be read as feminist eth­
nographies outside of their indigenous context
and unwittingly do double duty.
Similarly, reading documentary and/or
nonfiction films as feminist ethnography is not
without its problems either. Eileen McGarry’s
1975 essay critiques the use of realism in US
cinema verité and rejects it as an adequate
solution for a feminist counter-cinema. McGarry
does not explicitly take a formalist, antirealist
stance, but rather challenges the realist aes­
thetic of US Direct Cinema at that time. Embed­
ded within this critique is a rejection of docu­
mentary film that relies heavily on the master
narrative and an “objectivity” that leaves little
room for representation of disjuncture(s) and
rupture(s) of multiple selves. Julia Lesage has
explored how the last few decades of feminist
art and scholarship, especially women’s au­
tobiographical video, have reflected on and
addressed the material and social schisms
of women’s experience and their fragmented
identities.13 Although the documentary form
may allow for “personal” stories, the form itself
remains mired in preserving the illusion of an
“objective” view of reality. The publication of
Laura Mulvey’s seminal article the same year
as Lesage’s shifted the discussion away from
documentary to narrative fiction. Consequently,
the avant-garde becomes a strategy for a femi­
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JFV 67_3-4 text.indd 47
nist counter-cinema as a way to address the
issues embedded within realist and narrative
cinema. Films such as Citron’s Daughter Rite
(1979) challenge the realist aesthetic of US
direct cinema and the assumptions made by
its viewers by combining elements of fiction
and nonfiction. Of all the genres available to
the feminist movement, the avant-garde and
experimental14 ones have perhaps provided the
most adequate means of addressing the ways
in which women choose to represent them­
selves. At the same time, they have not been
widely accepted in mainstream film and media
circles. It is important to stress here that many
feminist film theorists have complicated these
formalistic concerns such that the debate is not
simply documentary versus experimental or
fiction versus nonfiction.15
In many of my other films, I have made exten­
sive use of this legacy of feminist experimental
cinema, one that allows for a voice of interiority
and a more open-ended filmic “resolution.”
However, with Soma Girls, we realized quickly
that this strategy was not a good option for
this genre of filmmaking. The “interior/insider”
voice as a framing device for the children of sex
workers seemed disingenuous, given our own
positionality as filmmakers, so we instead re­
lied on a more realist/documentary approach.
An additional reason to stay away from a more
“subjective” approach was provided by Born
into Brothels. Made by filmmakers Zana Briski
and Ross Kauffman, this feature-length docu­
mentary portrays the journey of a photographer
from the West teaching photography to the
children in a Kolkata brothel. Briski provides
them with cameras and seeks to turn them
into street photographers and perhaps even
ethnographers. Born into Brothels has been
written about fairly extensively,16 and although
I do not intend to replicate the extensive cri­
tiques against the film, I do want to discuss
more specifically the issues that Alexia and I
engaged with during the making of our film. The
first issue that we needed to address in Soma
Girls was one of “voice.” In Born into Brothels,
the film centers on the narrative of Briski and
her quest to teach these children photography.
47
8/17/15 3:16 PM
 Briski narrates the film with a voice of “interior­
ity,” one closely associated with feminist ex­
perimental cinema. However, in this particular
context it falls into an all-too-familiar trope of
the authority of the Western filmmaker/savior
voicing over and interpreting her experience in
the East for viewers in the West. The downside
of this kind of pose is something we wanted to
avoid in Soma Girls.
Our decision to use various voices was
partly based on trying to avoid the trap just
described. Our first entry into Soma Home was
memorable. The hostel houses approximately
thirty-two girls and is located in a residen­
tial area of Kolkata several kilometers from
Kalighat. As Alexia and I walked up to the
two-story home on a late January afternoon,
we heard loud Bollywood music playing. Open­
ing the door, we saw girls ranging in age from
five to sixteen, dancing without a care in the
world. In that moment the film crystallized for
us—we decided that were we to make a film,
we wanted to make one that depicted these
girls as the funny, smart, and talented girls we
encountered that day and in the days to fol­
low. Even though the girls of Soma Home were
poster children for a project of rehabilitation,
the film we wanted to make was one that most
closely honored how the girls saw themselves.
So the challenge for us became how to repre­
sent children from a disenfranchised commu­
nity but in a way that did not represent them
in a one-dimensional way. In Soma Girls, we
were faced with the dilemma of how we were
going to tell the story of these girls without ask­
ing them about their background. Instead we
were looking for these subjects to show us who
they were now and what was most important to
them now.
Neither Alexia nor I were willing to ask the
girls detailed questions about the particulari­
ties of their personal circumstances. The girls at
Soma Home were so acutely aware of them that
the last thing we wanted was for them to “re­
tell” or “relive” their circumstances for the glory
of the camera. Even though we knew that this
approach of sensationalizing lives would be
considered “dramatic storytelling,” it was a trap
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JFV 67_3-4 text.indd 48
we wanted to avoid. We wanted to show the
beauty, intelligence, and resolve of the girls as
we saw them and as they saw themselves. As
we talked to them about their lives and ambi­
tions, it became clear that their biggest concern
was finding a way out of Kalighat for their moth­
ers. Even girls as young as nine years old spoke
of wanting to study hard and get a good job so
that they would be in a position to support their
mothers. We saw their strength, their humor,
and their commitment to their mothers and a
deep understanding of their lives and situa­
tion. Consequently, the “voice” of Soma Girls
is enacted via the sex workers, their daughters,
and the counselors and through Urmi Basu, the
founder of Soma Home. Even though we recog­
nized that using Basu to guide us through the
narrative was not without problems because
of Basu’s middle-class positionality, we made
a conscious choice to use her instead of the
girls to provide some of the backstory. The film
is intercut with the girls of Soma Home talking
about their ambitions, studying Kathak (a form
of Indian classical dance), working on comput­
ers, and going to school.
Conversely, Born into Brothels begins with a
shot of a naked lightbulb encircled by moths.
It cuts to an unsmiling close-up of a girl’s face
and shots of a narrow alleyway from above.
These are followed by more images of women
waiting, intercut with close-ups of children’s
solemn faces. The music picks up after a
minute of this slow montage and cuts to a fast-
paced montage of people moving in and out of
alleyways at night. The filming has been done
with the camera held below hip-height as the
shooters walk in and out of crowded streets.
From experience,17 it is possible to surmise
that the presence of cameras, if known, would
have been a serious cause for objection. These
crowd shots continue to be intercut with close-
ups of unsmiling children’s faces. The montage
resolves into a close-up of a photographic
contact sheet, and the film title, “Born into
Brothels,” appears from the lettering on the
edge of the contact sheet images. The music
fades, and to the right, staring into a camera,
is an image of a child, bare-chested with paint
©2015 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
8/17/15 3:16 PM
 or grease smeared over his body, an image that
could have been taken at Holi, the festival of
colors. Over his unsmiling face the title gets
larger and comes into the foreground, and
the boy recedes into the background. The title
takes up the total of the frame over black and
disappears. The next frame we see is a close-up
of two rats eating what appears to be rice out
of a newspaper bag. We see their quick darting
eyes; one looks up at the camera, and the shot
cuts away. With this image juxtaposed with the
young boy in the previous frame, the viewer is
set up to see the film through these initial im­
ages: trapped animal, trapped child, both born
into brothels. Within the first few minutes of the
film, we are left with a feeling of inevitability
and desperation.
We see another example of this inevitability
later in the film, in a scene with Puja and her
grandmother and mother at home, with narra­
tion over the image: “The great-grandmother’s
a prostitute, the grandmother’s a prostitute,
the mother’s a prostitute, but they have better
surroundings. It’s a Brahmin family. It’s very
sort of regal . . . she eats well, she dresses well,
she’s not obviously poor, but she’s heading
for prostitution.” The narration is a familiar
trope of Eastern destiny but is recast filmically
by Western editorialization, giving Puja and
the family no agency whatsoever. If Puja is
doomed to prostitution, she is doubly doomed
in the filmic narrative of her future. No one is
given the opportunity to speak, neither mother
nor grandmother. All we are given is the film­
maker’s interpretation of the moment and situ­
ation. The narrative of Born into Brothels is built
on inevitability and the plight of these children
in need of rescue. There is little understanding
of their situation except that they are “born
into brothels.” The approach reifies narratives
of the caste system, an unchanging present
which conflates class with caste. Interestingly
enough, it falls into much of the development
(Lee) and child welfare literature in the United
States that is interested in “protecting” chil­
dren from their parents rather than finding a
way to work with the children and the commu­
nity to solve systemic issues.
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JFV 67_3-4 text.indd 49
Right after this opening sequence, we hear
a voice-over of a young girl. She is not given a
name, but we hear her say, “The women ask
me, ‘When are you going to join the line?’ They
say it won’t be long.” The feeling of inevitability
is here again reinforced by this young girl. The
film cuts to highly stylized black-and-white im­
ages, and again the slow, moody music returns.
Briski’s voice-over begins with slow music be­
neath:
It’s almost impossible to photograph in the
red-light district. Everyone is terrified of the
camera. They’re frightened of being found
out. Everything’s illegal. It’s a whole separate
society within itself. I mean, you just walk
down that one lane, and it’s another world.
[Briski pauses.] I knew I couldn’t do it as a
visitor. I wanted to stay with them, live with
them, and understand their lives. And of
course as soon as I entered the brothels, I
met the children.
Briski positions herself as the participant
observer, a role crucial to ethnographic field­
work. Although the film is based on her living
with the children in this film, this role in the
context of the final film becomes more of a
pose than one that retains the ethics of an
anthropologist. The last image in this section
of black-and-white stills is a shot of Zana Briski
aiming a still camera at the camera. As Briski
finishes her last sentence—“And of course as
soon as I entered the brothels, I met the chil­
dren”—there is a change in music from a slow,
haunting melody to an upbeat, hopeful one
accompanied by the chatter of children; the
shots too change from night to day. The change
in pace signals a clear demarcation between
the children trapped in their brothels and the
arrival of the filmmaker as deliverer. In Soma
Girls, the film opens with Shahana, a six-year-
old with headphones on who is speaking into
a microphone: “Hello, hello. Hello, hello. My
name is Shahana. My best flowers are rose and,
er, lotus. My best fruit, mango and orange. My
best animals, tiger and lion.” This information
was freely provided to us by Shahana during an
enthusiastic sound check. Shahana’s cheerful
49
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introduction of herself sets the tone for the film
and the other girls in it.
A major issue with Born into Brothels is
the lack of attention paid to community18 and
grassroots activism. Briski and Kaufman mis­
represent any community participation and
activism in Sonagachi, creating the impression
for the viewers that if it were not for the benevo­
lence of the filmmakers, life for these children
would be hopeless and inevitably would end
in prostitution. In Briski’s voice-over she says,
“Everything is illegal.” It is unclear what “every­
thing” here refers to, thereby encouraging an
impression of a dark underworld in which the
viewer is voyeur. We hear the voice of a young
girl at the beginning. However, Briski’s voice
trumps it with her editorialization, creating a
scenario of a closed and illegal world. Partha
Banerjee,19 a journalist who worked as a post­
production translator on the film, argues that
Briski and Kaufman ignore the presence of a
network of communities for sex workers. More­
over, as Banerjee points out, the film poten­
tially works to undercut any global movement
for the rights of sex workers. Banerjee wrote an
impassioned letter to the Academy of Motion
Pictures and Sciences (AMPAS) after the film
was nominated for Best Documentary Feature,
detailing some of these lapses. The film went
on to win the award anyway. The following sec­
tion is an excerpt from Banerjee’s letter:
Further, the film forgets to mention that
Calcutta is a city where its red-light district
is a safe refuge for its sex workers and their
trade. With help from hundreds of Calcuttan
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JFV 67_3-4 text.indd 50
Figure 1: Still from Soma Girls (2009). Photo
by Alexia Prichard.
activists, social workers and medical practi­
tioners, Sonagachi (the district depicted in
the film) has become synonymous with many
struggles won by its inhabitants (for one, the
HIV rate among sex workers in Sonagachi
is remarkably low: 5% compared to 80% in
Mumbai). These sex workers and their activ­
ist comrades have set up—however rudimen­
tary—financial institutions, health clinics,
sex education schools and blood banks in
that labyrinth of alleys that would otherwise
be ignored and rejected by the other side of
Calcutta and its elite doctors, artists, poets,
filmmakers and politicians (and I must say,
I was one of this other side for more than
twenty five years of my life before I moved
into U.S.). The conjecture drawn by the mak­
ers of Born into Brothels that it was only
them that were responsible for any humanity
and benevolence doled out to these children
and their parents is simply absurd. “It takes
a village . . .” (Banerjee, “Documentary ‘Born
into Brothels’ and the Oscars”).
As we discovered, and as Banerjee states, there
is a high rate of activism and grassroots com­
munity work in Kolkata within the commercial
sex trade. Many of these grassroots workers
come out of the sex trade industry themselves.
Unfortunately, this is given no mention in Born
into Brothels, contributing to the idea that it is
a “closed and illegal” world. In fact, Kalighat
and Sonagachi are communities that intersect
with Kalighat’s temple and shops and a bus­
tling commerce, such that complexity and com­
munity are early casualties in Briski’s film.
In the making of Soma Girls, one of the most
©2015 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
8/17/15 3:16 PM
 compelling aspects of the girls at Soma Home
was their relationship to their mothers. Unfor­
tunately, in Born into Brothels, this connection
between the mothers and their daughters is
intentionally elided. In fact, the mother-daugh­
ter relationship is rendered as a sign of indig­
enous indifference or callousness. The mothers
are depicted as ruthless, vile women, and the
children as trapped and in need of saving.
Although ten minutes into the film Briski talks
about feeling “very connected to the women,”
the film vilifies the women at every opportunity.
When they are not on the street waiting for
clients, they are shown in domestic situations
that place them in the worst light possible.
Banerjee details many egregious lapses to­
ward the children and their families.20 He has
criticized the use of hidden camera work by
the filmmakers because it portrays the families
as callous and abusive. According to him, no
legal consent was obtained by the filmmakers.
Briski’s opening introduction makes it seem
that by living with this community, she was able
to get this unique access and that the filming
was legally obtained. Further, Banerjee argues
that the film has made life harder for many of
the film subjects.
Since films do not come with a glossary, film­
makers need to find a balance between allow­
ing the images to unfold to tell the story and
providing an explicit context for the viewer. This
is further complicated for films with a global
market and/or intended for a wider audience.
Consequently, how much does one translate,
and how much context does one or can one
provide? Because I was an “insider,” in many
ways much of the context was a given for me.
How much of an explanation was too much?
How much would take away from the cinematic
pleasure of an unfolding story? For written eth­
nographies, one is able to provide a detailed
historical context for a contemporary setting.
Although imperfect, ethnographic practice—or
at least its contours and tensions—offers a path
toward achieving a balance (as opposed to
participating in the colonial narrative that con­
quers a people all over again).
The irony of Kalighat is that it is the home
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JFV 67_3-4 text.indd 51
of one of the most revered temples in India,
where devotees from all over India come to
worship goddess Kali. At the same time, it is
also one of the best-known red-light districts
in Kolkata. Further, Durga Puja is a prominent
Hindu festival celebrated by Bengalis with
much reverence, during which they immerse a
clay idol of the goddess Durga into the Hooghly
River at the culmination of ten days of festivi­
ties. Traditionally, during the making of these
idols, the potters are to include a fistful of clay
from a courtesan’s courtyard. Recently, sex
workers in Sonagachi, in another part of the
city, refused to allow potters to take clay from
their homes. Sheela Bose, a fifty-five-year-old
former sex worker who now runs a brothel
inside the red-light area, said, “Once, I used
to feel honored when priests asked me for
dirt from my doorstep. They told us Ma Durga
would be displeased if those who worship her
do not take our blessings. But over the years,
I’ve begun to ask, what are we getting out of
it? They can’t make goddesses out of us once
a year and then call us whores for the rest of
the year” (Mitra). Philosophically, this confla­
tion and contradiction of religiosity and female
sexuality at the site of Kalighat was fascinating
to me. Unfortunately, none of this nuance made
it into the final cut of the film, but we provided
a brief introduction to Kalighat through opening
shots of devotees and glass-encased images
of Kali for sale outside the temple. This was a
subtle but probably lost nod to this interesting
collapse of what are often seen as two distinct
arenas. If Soma Girls had been a written eth­
nography, I would have been able to explore
this in some greater depth. In his book Trans-
cultural Cinema, filmmaker and anthropologist
David MacDougall speaks to the slippage be­
tween filmed anthropology and written anthro­
pology, each of which has its own blind spots
providing each information and insight that the
other cannot. Yet the very questions raised by
anthropology are a crucial tension for the film­
maker who hopes to resist the commodification
of images of her subjects. There is no such ten­
sion in Born into Brothels, and because such
questions remain unacknowledged, the film
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 subjugates while wearing the guise of illumina­
tion.
The Promise of Collaboration
In 1934, Walter Benjamin discussed the prob­
lematic of placing a frame around the poverty of
others. He illustrated this via the photographic
documentary, an example of the “new objec­
tivity” that has “even succeeded in making
misery itself an object of pleasure, by treating
it stylishly and with technical perfection.” He
continues, “When I turn to the ‘new objectivity’
as a literary movement, I must go a step further
and say that it has made the struggle against
misery into a consumer good” (Benjamin,
“Author as Producer” 90). Although Benjamin
here does not refer explicitly to the Third World
subject, his articulation of the commodifica­
tion of misery is one that is scathingly relevant
to the study of ethnography and ethnographic
film. For Benjamin this reframing has turned
others’ misery into not only a commodity, but a
commodity that produces pleasure for others—
reminiscent of the pornomiseria discussed ear­
lier in this article. Even if the intention behind
such a reframing is a benevolent one, Benjamin
argues that it is insufficient to experience ideo­
logical solidarity with the proletariat. Doing so
is “counterrevolutionary,” and the attempt to
position oneself, as a producer of these im­
ages, beside the proletariat is an “impossible
place.” Further, photography that functions
simply as bourgeois art has no revolutionary
value because it does not transform the ap­
paratus. We need an apparatus that “leads
consumers to production, in short that . . . is
capable of making co-workers out of readers or
spectators” (Benjamin, “Author as Producer”
93). Therefore, the apparatus must function as
a form of activism and transform readers/view­
ers into producers,21 the audience into makers.
Although Briski’s film attempts to turn the chil­
dren into producers (by giving them cameras),
her overall framing of the film via her posi­
tionality and voice belies these very attempts.
Ultimately, both films, Soma Girls and Born
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JFV 67_3-4 text.indd 52
into Brothels, attempt to straddle the worlds
of documentary cinema and the traps of com­
mercial filmmaking, and both films must ne­
gotiate the issues of audience, demographics,
and distribution. Although my focus for Soma
Girls was guided by a wish to make a film for
the girls of Soma Home, the goal was not fully
achieved in the ways of being able to shoot and
edit the film with their input and feedback, and
the film is a far cry from “making co-workers out
of readers or spectators” (Benjamin, “Author as
Producer” 93).
So what of Benjamin’s cautionary words?
Are we as filmmakers doomed to simply frame
unless we transform the apparatus and turn our
viewers (and subjects) into coproducers? Is the
only path to an “impossible place” to blur the
line between the framer and framed?22 Perhaps
this explains the seduction of anthropology
and its accompanying ethnographic practice—a
practice that attempts to blur the lines be­
tween the ethnographer and the ethnographic
subject, or the producer and the produced,
through methods of participant observation.
This ethnographic turn within the arts is well
documented in Hal Foster’s insightful piece
“The Artist as Ethnographer” (the title invokes
Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer”). Accord­
ing to Foster, the subject of contemporary left­
ist art has moved toward the “cultural and/or
ethnic other.” In the old productivist model of
Benjamin, the site of transformation exists with
“the social other, the exploited proletariat,”
whereas “in the quasi-anthropological model,
the site of transformation exists in the cultural
other, the oppressed postcolonial, subaltern, or
subcultural” (Foster 302). Foster cautions us to
the development of what he calls the “pseudo
ethnographic” role of the artist—he outlines a
scenario where an artist works with a commu­
nity that has been identified by an institution
that provides monetary support. Because of a
lack of time and/or money, the project design
is followed with an installation and/or work in
the community, and despite the well-meaning
intentions of the artist, she or he then leaves to
work on the next project. Consequently, the art­
©2015 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
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 ist, critic, or historian is seen as “authentically
indigenous” (Foster 307), and the benefit to the
community is questionable.
Like Benjamin, Jean Rouch too exhorts us
toward a shared vision of the images we create.
When asked the question, “For whom, and why,
have you made this film?” he gives a threefold
answer. He says, “My first response will always,
strangely, be the same: For me” (43). The sec­
ond response, which is deeply relevant here, is
“Film is the only means I have to show some­
one else how I see him. For me, after the plea­
sure of the cine-trance in shooting and editing,
my first public is the other, those whom I’ve
filmed” (43). Rouch23 reminds us that our audi­
ences are not always the careful niche markets
of today’s television and film-going audiences
where billions of dollars are spent, and he re­
minds us of our responsibility to the subjects
we seek to frame and with whom we work; the
audience is our subject and vice versa. Rouch
describes the importance of feedback or “au­
diovisual reciprocity,” the process by which the
ethnographic filmmaker is now able to get feed­
back from his or her subjects and incorporate
it into the film (44). The progression of technol­
ogy from film (which needs to be developed) to
video with instant playback makes this much
more of a possibility for filmmakers in the field.
Unfortunately, the tendency within commercial
cinema and television is to go into the field
and shoot and return with footage to be edited
without the input of one’s informants. For many
ethnographers and filmmakers, the relation­
ship with the community may continue, but
the filmmakers and ethnographers eventually
leave, and the problem of enacting a Rouchian
“shared anthropology” remains. It is perhaps
Rouch’s third response, “for everyone, for the
largest viewing public possible,” that is the
most hopeful (44).
Conclusion
After completing Soma Girls (2009), I worked
on another documentary film, Cranes of Hope
(2011), a short piece about a ten-year-old boy
journal of film and video 67.3–4 / fall/winter 2015
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JFV 67_3-4 text.indd 53
who had neuroblastoma, a form of pediatric
cancer. The boy, David Heard, was my neigh­
bor, and soon after his diagnosis, he became
committed to building one thousand crane
origami mobiles to send to pediatric centers
across the country. The making of the film was
originally motivated by the need to send an
accompanying DVD to these hospitals to ex­
plain the origin of these mobiles. As I became
more involved in the film and with the Heard
family, my intention for the film shifted. I recall
a colleague asking me who my intended audi­
ence was for the film. In answering, I realized
I had not really thought about my audience
demographic—an essential component to any
grant application. I was most concerned about
Susan, David’s mother. David had passed dur­
ing the production of the film, and I realized
that the filmmaking process served a role in
the immediacy of his death. Susan viewed
a few cuts of the film; we talked extensively
about the focus. She and her family had shot
footage with David on their last family vaca­
tion together that became the spine of the
piece. Susan was an informal collaborator,
but she was also my audience. The goal of an
accompanying DVD became less important to
me, and the family’s approval became para­
mount in the face of the loss of David. Simi­
larly, with Soma Girls, our intention was to
make a film we could show the girls at Soma
Home without hesitation, a film they would
be proud of—a film where we might arrive at
some proximity to what Benjamin has urged
all along, “making co-workers out of readers
or spectators” (93), and Rouch’s vision of a
“shared anthropology” (44). In short, I suggest
we blur the line not simply between subject
and filmmaker, but between subject, film­
maker, and audience. This approach allows for
a reflexivity and transparency that addresses
the ideological coding of cinema but also
makes the subject, the filmmaker, and the
audience part of the creative process and has
the potential to build toward deeper, if mess­
ier, collaboration but perhaps one closer to
Rouch’s “shared anthropology” or Benjamin’s
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 “impossible place.” However imperfect and 15. For a detailed discussion, see Juhasz.
16. For one such example, see Rangan.
impossible, it remains a worthwhile ideal, one
17. As we walked in and out of the alley, even dur­
that has guided and will continue to guide my ing the day, it was clear that we were outsiders, and
own ethnographic research and filmmaking. most of the sex workers would always avert their
gaze. To me this did not signal a willingness to engage
NOTES with us, let alone be interviewed.
18. The use of the term “community” here war­
I am grateful to William Bissell and Andy Smith for
rants more discussion. “Historically, anthropologi­
their thoughtful comments and suggestions on an
cal ethnographies were concerned exclusively with
earlier draft of this article.
non-Western people. Ethnographies that dealt with
1. For more information about New Light, visit the
people in the United States tended to be called
organization’s Web site at www.newlightindia.org
‘community studies.’ ‘They’ are ethnographic sub­
(accessed 1 June 2013).
jects, whereas ‘we’ are sociological” (Ruby 27).
2. For a discussion of the canon of ethnographic
One of the developments we have seen recently as
filmmaking, see “Ethnographic Film: Failure and
an antidote to the use of the ethnographic other
Promise” in MacDougall (178–96).
is the word “community.” This term is not without
3. Twenty-five years later, Writing Culture at 25, a
problems because it is used less critically. Conse­
special issue of the journal Cultural Anthropology, con­
quently, it collapses people who may share certain
textualizes the moment of this particular history and its
commonalities into a homogenous other. This notion
relevance to the discipline of anthropology (Starn).
of community is illusory. Anthropologist Kate Crehan
4. The term “handmaiden of colonialism” has been
writes, “Communities are probably better thought
attributed to Talal Asad. See Hirschkind and Scott
of as collectivities of many different types that come
(258).
into being in the context of particular circumstances,
5. This term has been attributed to Jean Rouch in Le
in response to particular issues and concerns, or
Monde. See Ruby.
some shared history” (75). For a deeper discussion,
6. Several films made by Margaret Mead, Jean
see Crehan.
Rouch, Tim Asch, David and Judith MacDougall, and
19. Partha Banerjee is a freelance journalist in New
others provide notable exceptions.
York and holds a master’s degree from Columbia Uni­
7. Some prominent examples of Frederick Wise­
versity’s Graduate School of Journalism; he also has a
man’s films are Titicut Follies (1967), High School
PhD in plant biology from Southern Illinois University
(1968), and Hospital (1970).
at Carbondale. He is the executive director of the New
8. Don’t Fence Me In (1998), Amazonia (2001), and
Jersey Immigration Policy Network and the author of
In Whose Name? (2004).
the book In the Belly of the Beast: The Hindu Suprem-
9. The Bhangra Wrap (1994).
acist RSS and BJP of India.
10. By contrast, Tania Khalaf’s film Journey to
20. On his Web site, Partha Banerjee discusses the
Hope (2012) is an excellent example of a film that
fallout for many of the children involved in the project,
problematizes the Western educational specialist in a
reminding us once again of the dangers of this kind of
developing-world context.
ethnographic work as critiqued in Parama. See Baner­
11. Addressing this directly in our grant proposals
jee, “Born into Brothels Kids.”
helped us immensely, and we received two produc­
21. Toward the end of another seminal and oft-
tion grants from the New York State Council on the
quoted piece, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Arts in 2008 and Center for Asian American Media
Technological Reproducibility” (1936), Benjamin
(CAAM) in 2009. The grant from CAAM was instrumen­
develops these ideas further and talks of the dan­
tal toward securing a PBS broadcast.
gers of aestheticization of violence and of it being
12. There are alternate criticisms to this view, such
the logic of fascism. “Humankind’s self-alienation
as that the native anthropologist has little to no ob­
has reached the point where it can experience its
jectivity or perspective as evidenced in a critique of
own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure”
“going native.”
(248). It is easy to see how Benjamin critiques aes­
13. Feminist scholarship has addressed this in
thetics for the sake of aesthetics and alerts us to its
several ways, looking at the particularities of race,
dangers, at least one of which is to recast one man’s
language, geography, gender, and class long before
misery into another man’s pleasure. See Benjamin,
the interventionist history of “Writing Culture.” See
“The Work of Art.”
Waldman and Walker.
22. This is an intentional reference to Trinh Minh-
14. I use the terms “experimental” and “avant-
ha’s book Framer Framed.
garde” mostly to indicate non-narrative nonfiction
23. Thanks to Jamie Berthe, PhD candidate at New
film (and video).
York University, in the Department of Media, Culture,

54 journal of film and video 67.3–4 / fall/winter 2015

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56 journal of film and video 67.3–4 / fall/winter 2015

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