Another Look

I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. – DZIGA VERTOV, "We: Variant of a Manifesto"

In the last fifteen years, experimental film has diversified into a range of different media, styles, and practices, many of which impinge on both documentary and fiction. Parallel to an increasing interdisciplinary interest in visual culture, experimental filmmaking is flourishing within a postcolonial, postmodern context. More and more artists and theorists are turning to film and video as a means of addressing social questions, from gay and lesbian identities, to diasporic politics, cultural and family memory, and histories of oppression, resistance, and criminal justice systems. These "issues" are all questions of representation and cannot be separated from the way that they enter and circulate in the media. To consider this vast spectrum of filmmaking as "ethnographic" is to recognize the expanding horizon of visual anthropology. To consider it as "experimental" is to recognize its challenge to conventional forms of representation and the search for new languages and forms appropriate to a more pluralist social formation.

A new critical vocabulary is desperately needed, appropriate to filmmaking that is simultaneously "aesthetic" and "ethnographic," work in which formal experimentation is brought to bear on social representation. Theorists and critics preoccupied with form, with modernism/postmodernism debates, with mainstream media, and with various political agendas have failed to keep up with this innovative work. And yet, as interest in experimental film has faltered in film studies, it has ironically been rediscovered by anthropologists and ethnographic theorists. George Marcus, for example, has embraced cinematic montage as an invaluable technique to "disrupt and reconceive the way social and cultural process as action is represented in ethnography." Marcus argues that cinema is the medium most suited to the "increasing de-territorialized nature of cultural process" because it is able to articulate the complex relations of time and space that characterize postmodern, postcolonial culture. I want to suggest that ethnographic theory might provide the critical tools appropriate to recent developments in experimental film and video practice–and even to the historical convergence of ethnographic and experimental cinemas.

Trinh T. Minh-ha has been one of the most prominent of recent filmmakers to deploy a radical film practice within a specifically ethnographic milieu. Her written critique of the conventions of ethnographic objectivity has been a catalyst in the rethinking and renovation of documentary practice. Trinh's most cogent critique of ethnographic film is the way it implies a division of the world into those "out there" (the subjects of ethnography) and those "in here" (in the theater, looking at them). She argues that the assumptions of documentary truth and veracity perpetuate a Cartesian duality between mind and matter in which the Other is objectified and the filmmaker and his or her audience are the subjects of perception. A more fluid conception of reality is required to transcend this paradigm, one in which meaning is not "closed" but escapes and evades representation. It is the otherness of reality itself that she argues must be reconceptualized, although she offers little advice on how this might be put into (film) practice. My objective in this book is to demonstrate how filmmakers have in fact experimented with the "otherness" of reality, and how that paradigm of objective realism is also a temporal historical one, with great implications to forms of cultural memory.

In her own films, Trinh is preoccupied with rural Third World cultures (in Reassemblage [1982], Naked Spaces [1985], and Shoot for the Contents [1991]), and to a large extent, her filmmaking remains locked within theethnographic model that James Clifford has described as "the salvage paradigm": "In a salvage/pastoral setup most non-Western peoples are marginal to the advancing world system. Authenticity in culture or art exists just prior to the present." In his key article "On Ethnographic Allegory," Clifford explains, "the most problematic, and politically charged aspect of this 'pastoral' evocation is its relentless placement of others in a present-becoming-past." The ethnographic pastoral embraces the myth of primitivism but is also characteristic of the very structure of ethnographic representation. "Every description or interpretation that conceives itself as 'bringing culture into writing,' moving from oral-discursive experience ... to a written version of that experience ... is enacting the structure of salvage. To the extent that the ethnographic process is seen as inscription, the representation will continue to enact a potent, and questionable, allegorical structure."

Johannes Fabian has argued that anthropology constructs Otherness by "using" time. The salvage paradigm is a "denial of coevalness" that is part and parcel of the forms of ethnographic representation: "Time is involved in any possible relationship between anthropological discourse and its referents." This is especially true of film, which feeds on photographic properties of preservation, fixing its referents in the prior time of shooting. In the cinema, the pastoral allegory becomes exaggerated by the role of technology in the act of representation, further splitting "the modern" from "the premodern."

Ethnographic allegory also refers to the process by which individuals are abstracted into general social patterns; individual subjects become representative of cultural practices and even "human" principles. Although ethnography will always be allegorical, Clifford argues that "the assumption that something essential is lost when a culture becomes 'ethnographic'" can be avoided through a "recognition of allegory" in ethnographic practice itself. In other words, ethnographic practices of salvage can be transformed by means of a structure of doubled representation in which singularities persist within the techniques of textual meaning production. Indeed, such a structure is necessary for a transformation of ethnographic practices.

Clifford insists that resistance to the salvage paradigm lies not in abandoning its allegorical structure "but by opening ourselves to different histories." By this I take him to mean two different things, both of which I intend to take up as forms of experimental ethnography. "Different histories" refers first of all to the voices and histories of the colonized, and to new forms of subjectivity articulated through texts that might be described as autoethnographies and indigenous ethnographies. Secondly, and...