To accompany the Early Monthly Segments screening (July 14th at 8PM at the Gladstone hotel) of Robert Gardner's Rivers of Sand I'm grateful to my friend Samuel Adelaar for letting me put up this essay that he wrote on it. - D.D.
***
The aim of this essay is to explore how David
MacDougall's distinctive vision for visual anthropology sheds light upon Robert
Gardner's ethnographic film Rivers of
Sand (1973). I will begin by explicating the key facets of this vision. In
order to do so I will synthesize MacDougall's various elaborations and
articulations of it across several articles. Then I will mobilize his critical
lens not only to examine the film, but also to assess criticisms of it from the
field of anthropology.
MacDougall begins his inquiry into the epistemological
dimension of visual anthropology by posing these questions: "what can
images convey that may lead to new knowledge, and when is such knowledge
relevant to anthropology?"[1] At the level of individual
images, he argues that cinema expresses "knowledge by acquaintance,"
which consists of, amongst other things, "direct awareness of
sense-data." Spectators apprehend not only ideas about a thing, but a
mimetic reproduction of the thing itself. According to him, this form of
knowledge differs from that of writing, which delivers "knowledge by
description." Knowledge by description holds a thing at a distance,
occluding the possibility of getting a sensorial grasp of it. Put another way,
he explains, this form of knowledge is engendered by the "generality"
of language, which he opposes to the "specificity" of the image.[2]
One critique of visual anthropology, he notes, is that is
has less control over the encoding and decoding of meaning than writing. He
explains that the source of this lack is the specificity of the image. Because
it is an iconic signifier the image will consist of parts conveying meaning not
intended by the filmmaker. This excess presents the possibility of modifying,
contradicting or muddying the intentional meaning. In terms of reception, this
offers the spectator excessive interpretive freedom.[3] However, he argues that
visual anthropology elicits a different kind of reception than written
anthropology. He describes this as "exploratory" and
"imaginative." From the aggregate of shots and cuts the spectator is
engendered to apprehend meaningful juxtapositions and note motifs and themes
created by larger structural patterns. This points to the idea that film
viewing is an imaginative activity in which the film as a whole exists only in
the mind of the spectator, and the thoughts and feelings it conveys are
therefore made intelligible in the process of interpretation.[4]
He also examines the mode of reception elicited by the
form of knowledge produced by visual anthropology through a concept he calls
the "cinematic imagination." The cinematic imagination denotes the
idea that the construction of texts is designed to create "an interpretive
space for the reader or spectator."[5] A text whose form is
guided by the cinematic imagination, he writes, exemplifies "a
multi-positional perspective that acknowledges the fragmentary nature of
experience and, by extension, the constructed nature of human knowledge. It
also involves a displacement of the reader/spectator from the margins of the
work toward its center."[6] In terms of technique, the cinematic
imagination prescribes a filmmaking practice that depicts actions, scenes and
spaces in a piecemeal fashion. Put another way, it suggests the use of what
David Bordwell calls constructive editing, in which actions, scenes and spaces
are never depicted in their totality, but rather realized through an
accumulation of various perspectives. This yields gaps in which the spectator
mobilizes her interpretative capacities.[7]
He links the image's knowledge by acquaintance to the
anthropological concept of relational knowledge. This is the concept, he
explains, that cultural meaning is immanent to, and therefore can only be made
intelligible at the level of, actions and events. "Many cultural
institutions..." he writes, "should not be understood primarily as
communicating specific symbolic or social messages. Their meaning resides as
much, or more, in their performance."[8] The aim of anthropological
interpretation then is to avoid abstraction from the data. In practice this
involves forging a network of relations between data points rather than
connections to other facets of the culture. According to him, relational knowledge
generates "more intimate
anthropological truths that can only with some absurdity be developed into
general statements [emphasis mine]." In short, cinema produces relational
knowledge by "direct acquaintance with social moments, physical
environments, and the bodies of specific social actors."[9]
Beyond relational knowledge, he argues, cinema can also
produce "explanatory" and "affective" knowledge.
Explanatory knowledge comprises theoretical statements about data. Cinema can
furnish this form of knowledge, he asserts, through its comparative and aggregative
features. By contrast, affective knowledge is a function of the triangulated
relation between the things depicted by images, the actions they are involved
in, and the spectator. From this relation, he argues, the spectator apprehends
"the quality of experience" of the potential of the thing in action.[10] This is a felt, embodied
form of knowledge. According to him, written anthropology privileges the
explanatory over the relational and affective; visual anthropology reverses
this hierarchy.[11]
In terms of written anthropology, alternative forms of
knowledge elicit transformations in the relationship between author, text and
reader. Therefore, he examines how the reader, or rather the spectator in this
case, apprehends the author's placement in anthropological texts. This
relationship is addressed through the concept of self-reflexivity.
"Reflexivity..." he explains, " involves putting representation
into perspective as we practice it."[12] He argues that cinema
fosters a deep reflexivity, which denotes the idea that filmmakers are
inscribed within the ensemble of sounds and moving images constituting their
films. He cites James Clifford, who writes, "it has become clear that
every version of the 'other,' wherever found, is also the construction of a
'self.'"[13]
Moreover, MacDougall argues that deep reflexivity reflects the process of
anthropological work. This process is defined by a shifting, evolving
relationship between the anthropologist and her subject. He also asserts that
the practice of filmmaking corresponds to the anthropologist's
"consciousness of inscription" in her work.[14] This consciousness, he
explains, is evoked by the stylistic character and content of each individual
shot. He further shows that deep reflexivity mirrors one of the objectives of
documentary cinema in the 1960s, which was to "[embody] the perspectives
of actual observers, even if these observers were not seen."[15] In terms of cinematic
technique, this aim was achieved through camera movements that expressed the
corporeality of the filmmaker. He explains that in this period self-reflexivity
constituted an ethical imperative. It "[permitted] a more contingent and
historicized basis of social and cultural description."[16]
MacDougall's examination of the specificity of the medium
of cinema fosters a conceptual pathway between forms of knowledge created by,
and fields of inquiry of, visual anthropology. He argues that one of the key
"expressive structures" of cinema is designated by "the principle
of co-presentation."[17] This is a feature of the
medium's fundamental unit, the shot. He argues that shots exhibit an intrinsic
"multivalency." Shots are ambiguous because although their contents
are concretely unique, the ways in which their distinct parts interact yield
not only an uncontrollable polysemy, but also an unsignifying cinematic excess.
According to him, the simultaneity of the interaction of the elements of the
shot is expressively powerful, but also problematic. He compares the expressivity
of shots to our phenomenal experience of the world, arguing that shots must
offer form, and therefore delimit this experience, but also enrich it through
explanation and understanding. The construction of a film involves harnessing,
controlling and eventually giving in to the chaotic nature of a shot's
"combinative power."[18] Moreover, he notes the
multi-sensory experience of simultaneous sound and image and the synaesthetic
effects it has on the spectator. "A shot of a child's fingers rubbing
across the surface of a balloon,"
he writes, " evokes more than the actions and sounds involved: it
suggests the way the balloon must feel, and even an imminent explosion".
The more evocative of our corporeal experience, the more a film can provoke
memories of our own experiences, which can function as a model for
understanding the film.[19] In this light,
co-presentation also signifies the simultaneous reproduction of the sensory
qualities of the shot's elements, that is, he writes, their "form,
texture, color, and volume."[20]
According to him, co-presentation allows cinema to render
the various dimensions of interaction between individuals, which is a powerful
tool for understanding the lived experience of both the everyday and the ritual
in culture. Moreover, because these dimensions can be depicted simultaneously,
human interaction can be captured in its complexity. These dimensions, he
writes, include "gesture, facial expression, speech, body movement, and
physical surroundings."[21]
He also asserts that co-presentation offers a distinct
understanding of how objects are experienced within a culture. The mediation of
objects by images grasps the fact that the former are experienced by
individuals both in terms of their symbolic meaning and their raw materiality.
Moreover, objects might only exercise a symbolic function as a part of a set.
This constellation can be uniquely captured by the shot's property of
simultaneity. Co-presentation, he explains, also points to the fact that
whenever an object, action, place, event and so on is reintroduced in a film
the fullness of its sensory quality is reiterated. He argues that this is an
interpretively valuable feature of the medium because it fosters the perception
of connections.[22]
He claims that narrative resists and delimits the shot's
chaotic multivalency. Narratives exert an "explanatory power" that
can "[make] clear the forces working on the protagonists." This
explanatory dimension emerges from the fact that cinema is a medium of
succession, that actions accumulate as the narrative's duration unfolds.
Another dimension of film's explanatory power is its ability to juxtapose
things, and therefore make connections between them despite their potentially
disparate identities.[23]
Cinema's capacity to individuate people, he argues, is
derived from both the uniqueness of mimetic reproduction and the linkage of
voice to body. A person's face is the key to the process of individuation.
Perception of it fosters the viewer's identification with the person which in
turn can elicit a better understanding of "the emotional content of social
interaction and agency." Moreover, all of the features of the face are
simultaneously presented in their mediation through film. The interaction of
these features, when depicted in close up, opens up a continuum between the
visible and the invisible, that is, between the surface of the face and the
person's thoughts and feelings.[24]
He asserts that cinema's medium specificity allows for an
examination of the "the aesthetic dimension of social experience."[25] This is the idea that
humans are shaped by, but also shape, their sensorial experience of the
environments they inhabit. An emphasis on the sensorial foregrounds the idea
that this experience does not need to coalesce consciously in the form of
language. He writes, "it is possible (and in fact normal) to go through
life participating in social rituals, reproducing aesthetic forms, and obeying
rules of behavior chiefly because not to do so invites criticism. At the same
time, one is shaped and, in terms of personal pleasure, rewarded by these
forces and in subtle (and sometimes more definitive) ways one has power to
transform them."[26]
MacDougall's theorization of the features of the medium
of cinema most beneficial to, and the collateral forms of knowledge produced
by, visual anthropology point him towards a prescriptive delimitation of the
areas of inquiry visual anthropology suggests a proclivity for examining. In
general, visual anthropology endeavours to understand, he writes, "how
people perceive their material environment and interact with it, in both its
natural and cultural forms, including their interactions with others as
physical beings."[27] More concretely,
MacDougall divides social experience into four "conceptual domains:"
the topographic, the temporal, the corporeal and the personal. Each conceptual
domain comprises a broad range of issues, subjects, themes and so on.
Therefore, I will outline those that I think are most relevant to an analysis
of Rivers of Sand. The topographic
domain, then, comprises "the anthropology of space and place" and
"the study of social life-worlds as they are materially and culturally
constructed." The temporal domain designates "socialization, cultural
reproduction, and social change." The corporeal domain consists of
"the anthropology of the senses; studies of sexuality, gender, movement,
posture, and gesture; the forms of intersubjective behaviour... patterns of
self-presentation and the rituals of everyday life." Finally, the personal
domain constitutes "social identity... family roles" and "hierarchy."[28]
Rivers of Sand
depicts the social experience of the Hamar community, which is located in
Ethiopia. The film's duration is dedicated to elaborating the idea that the
Hamar culture is largely defined by its patriarchal social relations. Charles
Warren sheds light on the historical context informing the film's feminist
perspective: "Rivers of Sand's
mood of social critique... resonates with much thinking worldwide in the later
1960s and the 1970s."[29] In an interview with
Ilisa Barbash, Gardner not only affirms this idea, but also adds to it a
personal dimension: "Indeed [the film] does owe something to the climate
of thought about the situation of women in the late 60s, but it also owes
something to what was happening in my own life as a father and husband."
He goes on to say that he took for granted, and therefore exploited, his own
role as patriarch. He was made aware of the power afforded to him in this
position by his experience in the Hamar community.[30] Rivers of Sand constitutes a "dialogue" between an
interview with a woman of the Hamar community and long observational sections
depicting both everyday and ritual practices. My analysis will focus on the
interview and everyday life in the Hamar community.
The interview features the woman, named Omali Inda,
describing the typical social experience of a woman in her community.
Throughout the interview she articulates this in terms of family roles,
cultural reproduction, ideology, ritual, and material culture. More specifically,
she describes transitional moments in the lives of Hamar women, which function
to place them in subordinate positions determined by the culture's patriarchal
structure. For example, she describes the ways in which a husband disciplines
his new wife in order to establish and maintain his dominance. Two critiques of
the film from the field of anthropology elaborate their complaints by pointing
to problems with the interview. Jean Lydall and Ivo Strecker accuse Gardner of
framing subjective impressions as an objective account of Hamar culture.[31] Not perceiving the film
as an act of deceit, Jay Ruby, finding fault with its animating principle,
charges it with being driven by a personal vision, rather than an ethnographic
impulse.[32]
I will return to these central claims in my analysis of the film's deep
reflexivity. Both of them are reasoned, however, by figuring the interview as a
deliberate misrepresentation. According to Lydall and Strecker, "instead
of recognizing that Omali Inda's account was a conventionalized story of
womanhood, Gardner treated it as though it were a factual commentary."[33] Commenting on this
assertion, which he also cites in his text, Ruby argues that Gardner has
conflated anthropological "truth" with "data."[34] Distinguishing between
story and fact, or data and truth, Lydall and Strecker explain that although
Omali Inda describes a Hamar Woman's process of socialization, she herself was
never subject to its disciplinary tactics. Moreover, they argue that the
observational sections illustrate the bits of interview they follow, putting
forth a perspective that affirms Omali Inda's account.[35]
It seems to me, however, that this critique is partially
determined by an inability to grasp the film as mode of visual anthropology.
Lydall and Strecker posit the effect of Gardner's treatment of Omali Inda's
account, without addressing how it was achieved. Focusing on this gap suggests
that the misrecognition of her story of others' experience as her own personal
testimony is engendered by cinema's capacity to individuate the subjects it
depicts, which is a function of the specificity of images and the principle of
co-presentation. More specifically, the majority of the interview's duration is
shot in close up. This fosters an extended contemplation of her face.
Therefore, she becomes recognizable; she is the only member of the community we
grasp as an individual because we can clearly differentiate her from the
others. Also, typically the bits of the interview begin in long shot before
zooming in to a close up. This stylistic feature allows us to see her beside
her home, her habitual environment, which evokes domesticity, her role within
the family ("she has always been a model wife,"[36] write Lydall and
Strecker). Therefore, our apprehension of her―as the exemplary Hamar Woman, occupying her typical position within
the culture―makes possible Lydall and Strecke's feeling that Gardner's mediation
presented a story narrating the Hamar Woman's process of socialization as an
account of lived experience.
The film's central claim―that Hamar culture exhibits a
gendered division of social experience―is a form of explanatory knowledge that
emerges out of the gestalt of the film. This argument assumes the form of
relational knowledge at the level of individual scenes, mainly those depicting
the practice of everyday life. Put in terms of knowledge by acquaintance―within
conceptual parameters delimited by material culture and the aesthetics of
everyday life―the claim is that Hamar men's and women's experiences of sonic
and corporeal rhythm, time, space, individual and intersubjective behaviour,
and self-presentation are gendered. In other words, the film depicts female
bodies of labour and domination and male bodies of play and repose. Commenting on
the film's main theme, Gardner asserts that "[it] is an attempt to
disclose not only the activities of the Hamar, but also the effect on mood and
behaviour of a life governed by sexual inequality."[37] Karl G. Heider's
reflections on the film illuminate the process of translation from relational
knowledge to explanatory knowledge. The film, he writes, centres on "a
particularly nonvisual subject," that is, "cultural attitudes and
values."[38]
He suggests, moreover, that the film examines this topic through contextualization,
which is, according to him, the concept that "things or events must not be
treated in isolation; they have meaning only in context." This conception
resonates with MacDougall's definition of relational knowledge.
Contextualization, Heider asserts, is furnished by the film's "meandering,
often repetitive" form.[39] That is, the sections of
the film depicting everyday life constitute a series of scenes iterating the
dichotomy of the social experience of Hamar men and women.
Hamar culture's gendered division of social experience
obtains in two areas of inquiry: everyday actions and personal aesthetics. In
terms of everyday actions, the majority of the time we see the women at work;
by contrast, the men's time is split between work and recreational activities.
For example, in the morning women head off to complete the day's tasks.
Meanwhile, the men stand idly by their abodes; later, they play a game in the
shade. Also, there is a qualitative difference in the kind of work each gender
do. A Hamar woman's work conforms, in a sense, to Fordist logic―large tasks are
subdivided into a series of smaller, simpler and more repetitive jobs―whereas a
man's work resembles more so non-alienated, artisanal labour. The forms of labour we see the women partake in
include the process of making edible the sorghum plant, and the extraction of
water from the sandy riverbed. The former involves stripping the grain off
plant stocks and grinding it against a stone. Recalling Heider's analysis of
the film's form, Peter Loizos writes that through the repeated articulation of
the "Women grinding sorghum" motif, it "becomes a running
metaphor for the gendered division of labour, for the integration of person in
direct production, for bodily grace confirming lived-in acceptance of a gender
role, and for the drudgery that is the lot of women in a male-dominated culture."[40] The way in which the
process is depicted in the film reveals its sensorial and relational
dimensions. For example, two tasks in the process exhibit sonic and corporeal
repetition: the back-and-forth movement and the swish of sweeping the ground
(one of the initial tasks, we learn earlier in the film, involved in the man's
"domestication" of the woman), and the undulating thrust and scrape
of grinding the grain. This conveys the idea that Hamar women's bodies are
regimented. This practice of corporeal discipline is another means by which
Hamar culture subjugates them. Moreover, through the principle of
co-presentation the film grasps the social dynamic of the process: we
simultaneously see one woman grinding grain, while another delivers her more of
it, and tends to a child. The harvesting of the sorghum plant is also exemplary
of the film's synaesthetic effect on the viewer. A series of shots depicting a
woman scooping and pouring grain into a sack evoke the visual, aural and
tactile qualities of the task, namely, the sensation of the bowl plunging into
the grain, and the grain brushing up against the woman's hands. Women's labour
is not only managed corporeally, it is also responsible to time: while Omali
Inda is being interviewed we see her order other women to fetch water before
the sun sets.
By contrast, Hamar men's work is independent, relaxed,
less regulated, and imaginative. The tasks we see the men perform include
upkeep of a firearm, fabrication of a stool, and hunting for an ostrich. That
the men's work is qualitatively different from the women's is reflected in
their experience of doing it. In general, this experience manifests either an
irregularly rhythmic or non-rhythmic physicality. Whether it is a man fixing a
gun or whittling away at his stool, the film depicts the process as marked by
pauses, breaks, moments of reflection on the task. There is no sense in which a
goal has to be achieved by a deadline. During the ostrich hunt, the film
figures the men's bodies as peripatetic. This freedom of movement is reflected
in the cinematographic style. The camera lopes alongside the men, panning back
and forth to capture visual phenomena as it happens to enter the frame. Even
feeding cattle, a job ostensibly similar to those of the women, is
experientially different. The scene in which this work is depicted, realized in
an enervated, digressive style, not only shows the cattle's idle grazing, but
also suggests that the men are equally idle, sometimes directing the livestock,
other times fixing each other's hairstyles. Daily prayer, another practice of
the everyday life of Hamar men, speaks to both the form of knowledge created
by, and the features of the cinematic medium mobilized by, visual anthropology.
The film's depiction of this mundane ritual marshals the principle of
co-presentation to yield relational knowledge. We see men, sitting in a circle
and reciting a prayer, its form a call and response evoking a sense of
musicality. The prayer also involves spitting coffee, ingested from a bowl.
Because of the specificity of the image, however, the coffee and its container
not only convey their symbolic function, but also assert their brute
materiality. "Inherently a theatrical piece of ritual," this practice,
writes Loizos, "makes abundantly clear...the extent to which certain
rituals are performances."[41]
The aesthetic dimension of the Hamar's social experience
is also gendered. Loizos notes that the film not only depicts the women at
work; we also see them at leisure, at play. However, he argues, this depiction
of a time away from work is militated by the "Women grinding sorghum"
motif, in that it conveys the idea that a Hamar women's lived experience, in
comparison with that of a man's, is still consumed by labour. Moreover, some of
the activities he outlines, as in, as he puts it, "playing a melodious
phrase on a flute in the afternoon heat," seem to offer the women relief
from the roles assigned to them by the patriarchal structure of the Hamar
culture.[42]
Yet I deviate from this perspective in that I argue that the Hamar woman's
subjugation subtends other leisure activities, namely those centred on personal
dress and cosmetics. In her interview, Omali Inda says that "they pound on
neck rings and fill you up with things." What she is referring to is the
process of socialization whereby metal rings are fastened around Hamar women's
ankles, wrists and necks by hammering them shut. One of the film's most
striking moments involves the way in which it evokes the ring's symbolic
meaning―men's domination of women. Mobilizing the technique of the montage of
attractions, Gardner cuts from the fixing of a ring onto a woman's neck to the
branding of a cow, recalling the scene in Fritz Lang's Fury (1936) in which clucking chickens are juxtaposed with talking
women. Moreover, the dual existence of the rings as both symbol and material thing
speaks to the fact that their signification pervades the Hamar Woman's social
experience, hovering just below the threshold of enunciability. For example,
the film's depiction of Hamar women's work and leisure activities, namely
grinding sorghum grain, and dancing at a ceremony, includes a focus on the
rings they are adorned with. The aim of this is to show that the rings
constantly assert their presence, that they are always felt by the women, both
tactilely and aurally, in that they emit a rhythmic rattle during these
activities. Therefore, the film posits that they are perpetual reminders of the
woman's servitude. Yoking the symbolic meaning from everyday cultural objects
is a preoccupation of Gardner's filmmaking. Commenting on this tendency, he
says that "finding small and insignificant items to draw from the actual
world... that can signify more than themselves has seemed to me one of the few
ways there are to convey meaning pictorially in films."[43]
The film also manifests a link between the dress of a
member of the Hamar community and her work. A woman's dress, for example,
embodies her life of labour. Several times throughout the film's duration we
see a woman walking along a path, clothed in a heavy dress adorned with many
rings, as well as other decorative ornaments, transporting jugs―either fixed to
a cloth strip and slung over her shoulder, attached to her garment or carried
by hand―and often a child. Hamar women, then, are literally weighed down by the
sensory-aesthetic mark of their culture's patriarchal structure. By contrast,
Hamar men's clothing is light and minimal. This corresponds to the practice of
their everyday lives: typically, they are not burdened by arduous work; they
exercise unimpeded mobility; they are free to apply themselves to their
artisanal tasks, lounge and play games, or roam.
Lydall and Strecker's, and Ruby's critiques of the film,
which I introduced earlier, can be explicated and mitigated by illustrating two
features of the film that designate it as a mode of visual anthropology: the
mode of reception it elicits, and the deep reflexivity it exemplifies. But
first, I will elaborate on their principle claims: according to Lydall and
Strecker, the film's portrayal of the Hamar culture's gendered division of
social experience "derives from
[Gardner's] own view." Furthermore, they argue, the film disingenuously
puts forward this view as "'an accurate portrayal of the essence of Hamer
[sic] traditional life.'" They also find Gardner's use of formal strategies,
such as the arresting juxtaposition I illustrated earlier, to be problematic,
in that they "[succeed] in distorting rather than recreating the meaning
and rhythm of Hamar life." Ultimately, they implicate the film in the
practice of using ethnography "to indulge in prejudiced visions that have
little to do with the people under 'study.'"[44]
Ruby echoes the thrust of Lydall and Strecker's argument, adding: "The artistic vision of Gardner as auteur dominated the project."[45]
It seems to me, however, that these criticisms, although valid in that the
film, in the last instance, fails to depict Hamar culture on its own terms,
represent something of a category error. That is, they do not grasp the fact
that as a mode of visual anthropology the film exercises an anthropological
methodology and form of knowledge alternative to that of the dominant paradigm
of the anthropological discipline. Recall that, according to MacDougall, the
form of knowledge produced by visual anthropology places a greater interpretative
obligation on the spectator―it requires her to mobilize a cinematic
imagination. This further accounts, I think, for the misreadings of Omali
Inda's interview I posited earlier. Loizos' analysis of Lydall and
Strecker's critique speaks to my assertion. Loizos writes, "[they] seemed
to have been hoping for a conventional descriptive-analytic ethnographic
film... Such a film tends to define and specify, to reduce uncertainty."
He calls this type of film a "relatively
closed text." By contrast, he argues that Rivers of Sand is a "relatively
open text" in that it furnishes the viewer with "puzzles,
contexts for reflection, and [adds] to the list of questions [she] might have
about human natures and human cultures."[46] Addressing the
interpretive openness of his film, Gardner says, " I feel I am accountable
for the particular [arrangement] called... Rivers
of Sand but not for the meanings [it engenders]."[47]
Moreover, it seems to me that examining critiques of the
film under visual anthropology's paradigm effects a redistribution of the
sensible, an idea put forth by Jacques Rancière.[48] That is, from this
alternative episteme, an ethical weakness ascribed to the film, such as the
presence of an authorial vision, becomes a virtue. In fact, that is how
MacDougall's concept of deep reflexivity qualifies this feature. Deep
reflexivity reflects an awareness of the unavoidable fact that anthropological
practice involves a mediation of other cultures. In her interview with Gardner,
Barbash notes that translation of a subject's speech is always determined by
the ideological position of the translator. In response, Gardner adds that
translation is a process that is not only mediated by ideology, but also by
other "filters" such as "personality." He goes on to say,
"I think the important thing is that knowing this about translation,
whether in the narrow sense of rendering verse from one language to another or
in the larger sense of portraying an entire culture in images, should not
paralyze the effort to do all these things in the most discerning and sensitive
way possible."[49] Rivers of Sand's deep reflexivity, I think, addresses this central
issue of ethnographic filmmaking in that it makes visible its process of
mediation by foregrounding the fact that it is authored. The film's depiction
of the Hamar's harvest dance ceremony exemplifies its deep reflexivity. Many
features of the scene point to Gardner's presence behind the camera. For
example, it takes place at night, and yet it is illuminated wholly by the
camera's light. Therefore, the camera is confined to picking up only portions,
details, or snatches of action. Moreover, the camera swings erratically,
fixating on a sudden movement. The composition's are chaotic―bodies move
towards the camera, dominate its view, and block out the light. Also, a freeze
frame highlights a man's coat lifting off his body as he dances. These formal
features suggest that Gardner was absorbed in the lived experience of the
event; they represent attempts to inscribe the film with the affect of its unfolding
on his sensorium.
[1] David MacDougall, "Visual
Anthropology and the Ways of Knowing," in Transcultural Cinema, ed. Lucien Taylor (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998), 76-77.
[2] ibid., 78.
[3] ibid., 69.
[4] ibid., 70-71.
[5] David MacDougall, "Anthropology's
Lost Vision," in Film, Ethnography,
and the Senses: The Corporeal Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2006), 245.
[6] ibid., 246.
[7] MacDougall 2006, 247.
[8] MacDougall 1998, 79.
[9] ibid., 80-81.
[10] ibid., 82.
[11] ibid., 84.
[12] ibid., 87.
[13] ibid., 89.
[14] ibid.
[15] ibid., 86.
[16] ibid., 87.
[17] David MacDougall, "Voice and
Vision," in Film, Ethnography, and
the Senses: The Corporeal Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2006), 42.
[18] ibid., 40-42.
[19] ibid., 42.
[20] ibid., 49.
[21] ibid., 50.
[22] ibid., 50-52.
[23] ibid., 54-55.
[24] ibid., 55-56.
[25] ibid., 59.
[26] ibid., 58-59.
[27] David MacDougall, "New Principles
of Visual Anthropology," in Film,
Ethnography, and the Senses: The Corporeal Image (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006), 269.
[28] ibid., 272.
[29] Charles Warren, "The Music of
Robert Gardner," in The Cinema of
Robert Gardner, ed. Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor (Oxford: Berg, 2007),
25.
[30] Ilisa Barbash, "Out of Words: A
conversation with Robert Gardner," in The
Cinema of Robert Gardner, ed. Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor (Oxford:
Berg, 2007), 107.
[31] Jean Lydall and Ivo Strecker, "A
Critique Of Lionel Bender's Review Of Rivers of Sand." American Anthropologist, New Series vol.
80, no. 4 (December 1978): 945.
[32] Jay Ruby, "An Anthropological Critique of the Films Of Robert Gardner," Journal
of Film and Video vol. 43,
no. 4 (Winter 1991): 11.
[33] Lydall and Strecker, 945.
[34] Ruby, 12.
[35] Lydall and Strecker, 945.
[36] ibid.
[37] Peter Loizos, "Robert Gardner's Rivers of Sand: Toward a
Reappraisal," in Fields of Vision:
Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology and Photography, ed. Leslie
Devereaux and Roger Hillman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995),
316.
[38] Karl G. Heider, Ethnographic Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), 36.
[39] ibid., 75-76.
[40] Loizos, 320.
[41] Loizos, 321.
[42] ibid., 319.
[43] Barbash, 95.
[44] Lydall
and Strecker, 945.
[45] Ruby, 11.
[46] Loizos, 316.
[47] Barbash, 113.
[48] Jacques Rancière, "The Emancipated
Spectator," Artforum (March
2007): 277.
[49] Barbash, 103.
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