A Form That Thinks
The Theoretical Possibilities of the Essay Film for
Visual Anthropology
Still from Sans Soleil (1983) by Chris Marker
BA Thesis Zeno Siemens-Brega 10023143
zeno.siemens-brega@student.uva.nl Behavioral Sciences
Department of Anthropology University of Amsterdam
Supervisor: Dr. Margriet van Heesch Second reader: Dr. Irene Stengs 22-05-2017
J’ai toujours pensé que le cinéma était un instrument de pensée
– Jean-Luc Godard1
Introduction: A Sensorial Submersion
A black screen. Indistinct rumbling, metallic clanging. The whirring of heavy machinery? A gust of wind? More clanging, rustling sounds, brief glimpses of murky green water. It takes a minute or two to orient yourself as a viewer, so suddenly are you immersed in the opening sequence of
Leviathan. But then a hand appears, the camera swerves to open up a view of a floodlit deck,
something large is hauled out of the water, and a red hooded figure materializes in the faint daybreak, wrestling with a knot of some sort in the chains. The camera – or the person who's point of view the camera is showing – proceeds to grunt something unintelligible to his crew-mates as the catch is reeled in, the bulging net erupting and the writhing silvery mass spilling out on the deck as a flock of seagulls begins to hover menacingly overhead.
There is a reason ‘at sea’ has come to mean confused or disoriented, and the filmmakers seem to be aware of this. Just as you may be beginning to get used to the idea of being a deck hand on a fishing trawler, the camera swerves, drops into the ocean, lifts back up, hangs upside down (seagulls now flying downwards), and continues in this unpredictable mobile fashion for the better part of the remaining hour and a half. Yet this demanding cinematic disorientation has moments of respite, too, and these moments stand in stark contrast with the dramatic speed with which the turbulent camera confounds perception at times. Daily life aboard a trawler, with moments of boredom smoking a cigarette, gutting fish, a seagull unsuccessfully trying to steal a fish, and a crew member slowly drifting off while watching TV, are afforded as much screen time as the more dramatic moments. The sensorial priming resulting from the tumultuous
opening twenty minutes allows these moments to impress in ways they otherwise wouldn’t have. The banality of being at sea coupled with an extremely sensorial audiovisual form of
representation affords the daily realities for this group of fishermen something exciting.
After watching Leviathan, it is hard not to feel (physically, emotionally) exhausted, but at the same time having learned or experienced something about what it is truly like to be on a fishing trawler in the North Atlantic. Lucien Castaing-Taylor, one of the directors, once wrote
that “Long takes, by exhibiting a deficiency of authorial intelligence … reflect an ambiguity that is at the heart of human experience itself (Castaing-Taylor 1996: 86)”. By affording the viewer little to no context to which to relate the audiovisual experience, she/he is plunged into the sensorial world of Leviathan and left to make of it what she will. While this certainly provides both an interesting sensory experience as well as a critique of traditional documentary and ethnographic realism, the desire for visual anthropologic works to move entirely beyond text, strikes me as an unrealistic one. Even in Leviathan, words are at the core of the experience at sea, even if they are gruffly shouted into the wind or form a voice-over on a television that someone falls asleep to. It is no coincidence that Leviathan’s director, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, is also the director of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, which aims to:
support innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography, with original nonfiction media practices that explore the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human existence. As such, it encourages attention to the many dimensions of social experience and
subjectivity that may only with difficulty be rendered with words alone.2
While asking very relevant questions about art, the senses, knowledge, and ethnographic practice, this move beyond ‘words alone’ precludes the type of discussion that can truly engage visual anthropology with theory. What is there left to do after watching films like Leviathan but relate personal experiences to one another3? Is this type of intuitive, sensory knowledge all visual anthropology can hope to produce?
In this thesis, I aim to explore these questions by relating them first of all to larger questions of representation and knowledge in anthropology that have gained traction in the past decades. To do so, I will briefly examine the ways in which the dominant mode of knowledge production in anthropology, writing ethnography, has been challenged. By relating this to the recent history of visual anthropology, I will show how it has in my opinion been unfairly neglected (much like many of the other ‘alternative’ voices throughout the discipline) when thinking critically about anthropological knowledge production, the general attitude being that film (and photography) looks good, but does not produce anything of (theoretical) substance. I will then show how visual anthropologists have in fact been concerned with problems central to
2 Taken from the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab’s website, https://sel.fas.harvard.edu/ accessed on 22-04-2017.
3 Assuming you haven’t watched the film alone and the people you have watched it with have some prior understanding of the SEL’s anthropological project.
anthropological theory for quite some time, examining the theoretical underpinnings of the SEL in more depth to make this point. I will then reiterate the questions I have asked above by looking at Leviathan in slightly more detail, and seek answers to these in a style some
filmmakers outside of the anthropological tradition have explored in the twentieth century: that of the essay film. From the characteristics of this type of film I will glean a certain attitude, a
mode, which I will argue that visual anthropology, precisely because of its history and its
position within the greater discipline, is suited to explore further. This mode, I will argue, represents a truly different form of knowing, of thinking, something that anthropology has always been concerned with, and offers a rebuttal to the critique that film cannot possibly produce theory. I will explore how this film ‘thinks’ by relating theoretical arguments made within visual anthropology to some made recently in media studies pertaining to montage, which open up possibilities for anthropological films to incorporate this mode, in order to ‘challenge the dominant epistemic procedures of the discipline’ (Allen & Johnson 2016: 134) in a durable, productive way. I will conclude by showing how this mode can be stretched beyond film itself, and suggest visual anthropology can incorporate it by looking towards some recent trends in media and film studies.
In an age which is saturated by images, one that has seen grand narratives of authority and objectivity increasingly challenged, the problem of how to situate a discipline concerned with knowledge production about others looms ever larger. Anthropology, like many other academic disciplines, must not only continually reaffirm its relevance, but also find ways to relate to this world in which rapid change seems to be the only constant. Incorporating the essay film into visual anthropology may seem like an insignificant adjustment when confronted with problems of this scale, but, I believe, it is one that carries the potential of heralding an increasing flexibility, one that anthropology owes not only to itself, but especially to those it attempts to produce knowledge about. This last line of thought is based on the premise that anthropologists should be held accountable for the ways in which they represent their findings and the people those are based on, something I was taught throughout my studies, yet fail to see being resolutely applied. In the next section, I will explore how and why this question of representation arose, and what has happened (or failed to happen) since.
‘What About Film?’ Crises of Representation, Reception, and Beyond
The issue of knowledge production in anthropology fascinates me, and for the past 30 years has been the subject of fierce debate4 both within and outside the field, ever since James Clifford’s call for the ‘confrontation of contingencies’ in anthropological writing (Clifford 1986a: 25). Much of this debate has to do with representation, and more specifically the consequences of how anthropology represents its subject matter, that infinitely loaded term: ‘the’ capital O
‘Other’. In 1989 already, it prompted Edward Said to write that ‘It is now almost impossible… to remember a time when people were not talking about a crisis in representation’ (1989: 205, original italics). His now infamous critique of anthropology’s colonial entanglement has in more recent decades been elaborated and expanded, with voices previously unheard rising from a faint buzz to full-blown calls to ‘decolonize’ the entire discipline (Said 2004; Allen & Jobson 2016).
Similarly, notions of ‘objective’ anthropological knowledge have been progressively deconstructed, objectivity itself becoming undesirable when it necessarily comes at the expense of those being represented (Haraway 1988). From feminist studies, the idea of situated
knowledge(s) emerged, of unique knowledges embedded in a unique context, be it ethnographic, socioeconomic, historical, (sub)cultural, (post)colonial, or anything else (ibid.). Not only is there no such thing as ‘unproblematic objects’, but knowledge produced in social science practices like ethnography is always both necessarily specific and ‘partial’ (ibid: 597). This idea, too, has been refined and broadened into the current spectrum including positionality, intersectionality, and
relationality.
Lastly, critique has centered on anthropological methods themselves, starting with debates in the 1980s and early 90s following the publication of James Clifford and George Marcus’ Writing Culture, which exposed power imbalances reinforced through the ‘literariness’, or ‘textualizing’ (echoing Said’s famous argument on how ‘the Orient’ was ‘textualized’)
tendencies of anthropological writing and knowledge production (Clifford 1986a: 4; 1986b:111). The impact of the ensuing debate has left a deep impression on anthropology as a discipline, its authors’ call for a more self-reflexive approach to writing ‘the Other’ still echoing throughout
4 See Clifford & Marcus 1986, Marcus & Fischer 1986, Geertz 1988, Etnofoor 21(1), which was entirely dedicated to the legacy of Writing Culture and featured essays by Michael Jackson, Paul Stoller, and Kirin Narayan, among others. Also, around the publication of the 25th anniversary edition of Writing Culture in 2012 a string of commemorating articles appeared, most notably
James Clifford’s own reflections on the afterlife of the book and the debate that ensued, from which I take the title of this subheading.
modern ethnographies, as well as today’s undergraduate courses. By being more attentive to how anthropology can textualize ‘the Other’, be it in space, time, myth, or allegory (ibid.), more emphasis can then be placed on the ways in which those ‘Others’ negotiate their lives, on their own terms. Increasing attention has since been accorded to the many ways in which power, authority, and historical processes work through ethnographic practices, representation, and knowledge production (most notably the writing of ethnographic texts).5 Yet the ensuing ‘literary turn’ which would create room for ambiguity, contestation, and positionality and thus solve the crisis of academic representation, has been relegated to a preference, a style that one can choose to do ethnography in, instead of the profound epistemological reconfiguration it sought to bring about (Clifford 2012; van de Port 2016: 168).
The eventual evaporation of these fundamental critiques has to do with their focus: they all center on the dominant mode of knowledge production in anthropology as an academic discipline. None truly seek to expand its scope beyond its dominant mode of construction: the academic text. As James Clifford acknowledges 25 years after the publication of Writing
Culture: ‘where is visual culture? What about film—so important in the reconfiguration of
ethnographic practice (Clifford 2012: 417)? It is film’s importance in the ‘reconfiguration of ethnographic practice’ that I would like to explore in this thesis. In a similar vein to the critiques presented over the past decades, I suggest not somehow moving ‘beyond’ text, but by
acknowledging the importance of film in shaping modern ethnographic practice, I aim to ask how film might instead enter into the debate. According to Writing Culture’s other editor, George Marcus, current ethnographic research is not in a crisis of representation but in one of ‘reception’ (2002). He argues that ethnographic knowledge suffers from a stereotypical reception outside of anthropology as ‘mere case-studies’ while within the field its reception is fragmented and tends to be ‘overly aesthetic’ (ibid.: 198). He has since suggested many possible solutions, while continually underscoring the necessity of escaping the ‘restrictive constructions’ that
5Some interesting and necessary critiques of Writing Culture that appeared shortly thereafter are illustrative: the lack of female
voices was addressed in Women Writing Culture (Behar & Gordon 1995), as well as the lack of ‘indigenous’ voices, by anthropologists like Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989). In 2012, James Clifford wrote an an essay about the book’s long afterlife in which he acknowledged these critiques, noting, among other things, ‘how little sense of their epistemological embeddedness, their precarious historicity’ (424) the authors of Writing Culture had at the time.
currently undercut many possibly interesting research projects (ibid.; Marcus 2009: 4-5)6. But what if a different way of recording the ethnographic experience altogether could offer a similar avenue of escape? What if, as Marcus’ old partner-in-critique suggests, one possible road to reconfiguration lies in the acknowledgement and engagement of film in the anthropological process?
Ultimately, this thesis can be read as a kind of essay in itself, for both its form and its content emerge from an observation and a question, and following these to where they lead by placing myself and my experience at the center of both. The observation being that Writing
Culture’s legacy of truly challenging knowledge production in anthropology seems to have
petered out somewhat, and the question simply a repetition of the one Clifford posed when reviewing that legacy: What about film? But before moving on to the essay film and discussing its potential for visual anthropology, I will give a brief overview of what film has done in anthropology in the last decades, and how this has generally been perceived by the rest of the discipline.
A Brief, Selective History of Visual Anthropology: ‘A Science of Words’?
In our culture, images are given too little significance. Images are appropriated and put into service. One investigates images to obtain information, and then only the information that can be expressed in words or numbers (Harun Farocki, quoted in Elsaesser 2004: 148).
Ethnographic films emerged when technological advances permitted carrying camera equipment into the field (even if it took an entire crew to gather just a few minutes of footage), but it wasn’t until after the Second World War that visual anthropologists began mounting a serious critique on their principle inhibiting factor: the unwillingness of social science to take film seriously (De Brigard 1994: 14-15). From the famous Torres Strait expedition, which set off in 1898, until deep into the twentieth century, ethnographic film was widely seen as little more than a useful tool for salvaging the remains of soon-to-be-forgotten cultures (ibid.: 17; Mead 1994[1975]). Visual anthropology’s status was further discredited by its confluence with colonialism, against which anthropology had a strong anti-reaction in the second half of the twentieth century,
6 The workings of the current academic landscape, according to Marcus, prevent many promising young students from taking on research topics which go against the grain. This is why when this type of research is published within anthropology, it is usually from the older, more established professors (like himself), who have the freedom to think and write beyond these constraints (e.g. Rosaldo 1989; Rosaldo 2013).
relegating anything seen as glaring evidence of anthropology’s troubled colonial heritage to the margins of scholarly engagement. However, this does not mean that in that period no interesting, valuable or innovative ethnographies were produced. Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s work in Indonesia, with its prescient documentary-realistic style, or Jean Rouch’s surrealist inspired take on West-African culture and customs would both have long-lasting influences in the world of cinema and anthropology (De Brigard 1994: 26-27, MacDougal 2006: 239-240). It is telling, though, that most engagement with such works came from either outside the realm of anthropology7 or happened quite some time after these films were released (ibid.: 220-225; Jacknis 1988).
It goes beyond the scope of this thesis either to provide a detailed overview of the history of visual anthropology or to fully flesh out the combination of factors that have for the last century cast visual anthropology in its bigger brother’s shadow. I can, however, say a few things about words and images, and something of the the state of visual anthropology since this
debate’s reinvigorated return in the mid ‘90s. The words vs. images debate will therefore be the lens through which I will examine visual anthropology’s recent history, which will lead to the creative ways in which filmmakers have sought to address this, in turn leading to the essay film.
After World War II, following decades of rapid technological innovation and visual media becoming an ever larger part of cultural imagination all across the world, visual
anthropology was poised for a comeback. Since the 1950s, it had slowly been gaining traction as a valuable scientific, political and artistic endeavor (De Brigard 1994: 28-29), and increasing recognition of high-profile visual ethnographic work of people like Rouch, Bateson, and Mead in the ‘70s and ‘80s spurred a general reinterpretation of ethnographic film as a ‘process of
communication’ between filmmakers and filmed (ibid.: 32), offering perhaps new ways of seeing ethnographic data collection.
However, as Mead’s 1975 introduction to Principles of Visual Anthropology shows, there were those, like herself, who saw film as a tool for gathering research data and those that
(following Rouch) had higher hopes for its possibilities of generating new kinds of
anthropological knowledge (MacDougall 2006: 240). Mead’s stance is, I believe, indicative of a general attitude, one that acknowledges that the discipline of anthropology has probably
7 Jean Rouch’s influence on the birth of cinema-verité in France, as well as his engagement with what is now known as The Left
Bank and Nouvelle Vague forms an important link between anthropology and experimental subjective cinema, to which I will later return.
neglected audiovisual media for too long, and yet denies film any possibility of truly engaging with anthropological knowledge production. While anthropology remains a ‘science of words’ (Mead 1975[1994]: 5), film can be nothing more than a tool in the ethnographer’s kit, and fundamentally less valuable than text (Hastrup 1992).
David MacDougall equates such a view with an idea of ‘looking’ versus one of ‘seeing’. In his view, seeing is what one does who thinks of the camera as a technological extension of the human eye, a ‘passive form of vision’ (MacDougall 2006: 242), whereas looking is more
selective, more intentional, purposeful, and participatory (ibid.). Anthropology’s general idea of filmmaking is one of seeing, whose origin can be traced back to the Victorian era and even Renaissance stylistic conventions (ibid.: 247) and, while always somewhat contested, claims to the contrary have been relegated to the margins much in the same way that counter-narratives have tended to be throughout the history of the discipline. Mead and Bateson’s visual
anthropological project, while being accredited with the status of a classic, thoroughly embodied this way of seeing, thus failing both to legitimize visual research methods and to turn visual media into a ‘channel of anthropological discourse and argumentation’ (ibid.: 223). This
becomes especially apparent in the extremely didactic nature of the voice-overs in the films they produced, Mead’s voice constantly hovering over the image, telling the viewer what she is seeing, at one point even suggesting ‘you will have to watch very carefully to follow any of this at all’8.
Critiques of this patronizing of the viewer emerged as the Writing Culture debate was beginning to gain steam, Ira Jacknis writing that ‘Bateson and Mead faced the same problems of representation as their colleagues relying solely on words’ (1988: 160). His conclusions,
however, echo the sentiments of the time, namely that film can provide nice, pretty data to interpret and reinterpret, but that it offers nothing unique over text (even facing ‘the same problems’). While even Mead herself stated that there was something of a ‘criminal neglect of the use of film’ (Mead 1975[1994]: 6) in anthropology, until the 1990s there was still a
prevailing idea that film was a kind of ‘thin’ description when compared to text (Hastrup 1992:15).
8 From Mead’s commentary in Childhood Rivalry in Bali & New Guinea (1952) See filmography. For a general idea of the style, the film can easily be found on the internet, for example at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NqQ6KL-aUY
Despite these sentiments of film’s place in the hierarchy under text, this attitude did not inhibit the increasingly important role of film began to play in ethnographies towards the turn of the century, and continues to play in the world today, where every informant potentially has a camera in his or her pocket, as well as the means to share those images produced with others. Yet, despite this increasingly ‘mediatized’ landscape in which anthropology is situated, audiovisual media was still generally thought of as inferior, not least because of its supposed inability to contribute to theory (ibid.; Van de Port, forthcoming). The idea being that, although we may ‘write cultures, we do not depict them’ (Hastrup 1992:19).
However, as MacDougall put it: ‘There may be many types of knowledge and understandings that may be accessible only by nonverbal means’ (2005: 224), that require breeching the boundaries of traditional textual knowledge reproduction in anthropology. This type of idea focuses on a certain type of sensory knowledge not so easily put into words that film could be an avenue towards exploring, but it also implies a real rethinking of the epistemological categories in which anthropological knowledge situates itself.
McDougall’s more radical call to rethink entire ‘categories of anthropological
knowledge’ through a more encompassing exploration of the ‘nonverbal’ (MacDougall 2005: 224), seems to open up cinema and the visual beyond being ‘pretty data’, antagonists to the textual habit. It suggests a more open stance towards different forms of knowing that can be explored at their own level and pace, while not shying away from the profound epistemological implications this carries in potential for anthropology as an academic field of study. By moving past beyond simply seeing, but allowing looking to become the guiding principle of (visual) anthropological knowledge production, recent anthropological scholarship in the vein of MacDougall has opened up the possibilities to ask questions about the relationship between anthropological ways of understanding the world, aesthetic practices and sensory perception (Grimshaw 2011; Law 2016). In short, of all that there can be ‘beyond text’:
What might be gained, we must ask, in taking seriously the ephemeral and fleeting senses that we encounter in the field but that do not achieve the requisite stability to enter into language, let alone theoretical interpretation? Can these sense impressions be ascribed an equal but different status to other forms of knowing and, if so, what epistemological and ontological underpinnings should we draw on to differentiate the modes of knowing and understanding that emerge, and how might these be represented? (Cox, Irving and Wright 2016: 5)
That these types of questions are being formulated by the editors of the 2016 volume Beyond
Text? underscores both their current urgency as well as their neglect by mainstream
anthropology, which for much of the past century has remained focused on its more trusted, traditional modes of knowing. While film is by no means the only avenue through which these questions might be explored, it is one in which an explicit tradition of such exploration already exists. One especially fruitful avenue of exploration is known as Sensory Ethnography, which has produced many films under the auspices of Lucien Castaing-Taylor, whose ideas and selected works I will explore next.
Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Sensory Ethnography
To make a film, for me, is to write with one’s eyes, with one’s ears, with one’s whole body. (Jean Rouch, quoted in MacDougall 2006: 251)
In his 1996 article Iconophobia, Lucien Castaing-Taylor pries apart what he perceives to be anthropology’s ‘anxiety’ (67) towards images, especially film. This article can be read as
something of a mission statement, considering the work he would go on to produce and supervise in the next decades. He believes, like many other anthropological filmmakers9, there to be an anthropological form of ‘abhorrence of imagery’ (ibid.: 68), which is rooted in a constant (and wrong) comparison of film to text, and a misrecognition of the unique sensibilities and
possibilities film can present anthropology. Therefore, much like MacDougall (with whom he has collaborated), he makes a case for anthropologists to stop judging film on linguistic terms and loosen language's ‘paradigmatic’ hold on anthropology (ibid.: 85). Echoing the authors of
Writing Culture, he calls for anthropology to no longer intimidated by a medium which threatens
the antiquated idea of going out into the field, coming back, and writing a text based on that experience as being the only viable path towards anthropological knowledge, and to see that human expression travels ‘through images as well as through language’ (ibid.:85). In short: to judge film on its own terms and thoroughly investigate what that could mean for anthropology.
However, he doesn’t go so far as to say film is better than text, just as he believes text is not necessarily better than film. This is a nonsensical argument, because film and text, language
9 Starting as I already indicated as early as Mead ([1975]1994), but continuing into MacDougall (1998; 2006) and Grimshaw
and footage, constantly overlap (ibid.: 86). This overlap happens both through the insertion of text in film – as narration, credits, etc. – as well as through film being inextricably tied to basic rules of sequential structure and visual representation, lest a random combination of noise and image become completely unintelligible (ibid.: 86-87). The anthropological attempt to ‘linguify’ film, however, completely neglects film’s complexity, as well as its alterity, and ultimately, its potential (ibid.).
In practice, Castaing-Taylor’s films have a penchant for long takes and certain evasion (though, as he points out, not a total negation) of text in film. Indeed, his style seems to represent everything he argues for (and against) in his 1996 article:
… Castaing-Taylor’s approach does not proceed according to the conventions of
academic argument. Instead it draws on the synesthetic, spatial, and temporal properties of film to open a space of suggestive possibilities between the experiential and
propositional, between the perceptual and conceptual, between lived realities and images... (Grimshaw 2011: 257-258)
In this sense, Leviathan, the 2012 film set aboard (and overboard) a fishing trawler he co-directed with Véréna Pavel, stands out as the pinnacle of Castaing-Taylor’s exploration of the ‘suggestive possibilities between the experiential and propositional’. For the full 90-minute run time, the film forgoes many principles of narrative structure, allowing the viewer to be
completely submersed (literally even) in its world. As Anna Grimshaw suggests while discussing an earlier film of Castaing-Taylor’s, his work represents an aesthetic engagement with
anthropological themes, opening up possibilities for some different, sensorial forms of knowing (ibid.). Likewise, many reviewers of Leviathan employ a language of ‘immersion’, ‘modes of interpreting beyond seeing and hearing’, being an ‘embodied spectator’ and of invoking similar kinds of ecstatic revelations coming from the feeling of ‘being there’ and becoming ‘part’ of the film, which provides a truer picture of life aboard fishing trawler than would be conceivably possible in a more traditional documentary (MacDonald 2012, Snyder 2013, Scott 2013, Jenkins 2013, Stevenson & Kohn 2015).
One of the only critical responses to Leviathan (apart from some critics lamenting its lack of narrative structure and characterization) came from Christopher Pavsek, who accused its directors, ironically mimicking Castaing-Taylor himself of course, of a certain type of
in and of itself, he argues, but it does preclude some types of critical engagement, and reinforces certain ideas of how film conveys experience and represents the sensory world. He suggestively asks:
is it an abdication of aesthetic, intellectual, and political responsibility if one refuses to provide an interpretation of the world viewed, and instead leaves the viewers to make sense of that world on their own terms, and perhaps thereby leave them to project onto that world a whole host of preconceptions with which they approach the film? (ibid.8-9) At the same time, touting film as ‘the’ medium for affective engagement presupposes that in anthropological texts have no effect on the affect of those that engage with them (Van de Port 2016:187-189). Pavsek points to the fact that the ways many reviewers use of the words ‘immersion’ and ‘experience’ assumes that there is some absolute, untouched world out there, which in our current moment of constant mediatization can never exist (Pavsek 2015: 6). He even argues that the ‘freedom’ that spectator would supposedly receive, overwhelmed by sensory stimuli, is not as free as it seems: ‘Can one not speak of an embodied oppression of the spectator, one perhaps as ominous as that of the sorts of conceptual domination that an authoritative
voiceover might impose’(ibid.)? These New England fishermen, perhaps, do not constitute the most vulnerable population in the world (though one could argue that they represent a
historically oppressed class and are among the first to feel the consequences of an age of economic and ecological downturn), but if we transpose the arguments of the Writing Culture debate to the practice of filmmaking, could not a thousand more dangerous forms in which ‘the Other’ is exoticized be imagined (ibid.: 7; Van de Port, forthcoming)? If you strip someone of their voice and fail to contextualize, how do you make the audience aware that it is always, in some sense, ‘being played’ (ibid.)? Shouldn’t anthropology invite us to challenge the
appropriateness of our own (‘western’) affects, perceptions, and preconceptions when witnessing cultural practices so far removed from our own (ibid.; Allen & Jobson 2016)?
Funnily enough for a film accused of logophobia, the snippets of text that Leviathan does have offer the easiest window through which to pose these kinds of (to my mind necessary) questions. The biblical opening quote10, together with the name Leviathan, of course, invite all sorts of interpretations. Is it a conceptual framing? Does it provide a mystical setting for the film? Or does it suggest that our mystical analytical frameworks are somehow unequipped to
10 The quote in its entirety: ‘he maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he maketh he sea like a pot of ointment/ he maketh a path to
analyze what will come? To Pavsek, it serves as no more than a kind of ‘ornament’ (Pavsek 2015: 6), a bunch of text in fancy gothic letters to make us feel like something big is about to happen. It certainly does seem to do that too, but the theoretical and historical11 background of the filmmakers to me suggests that they realize that how text is used is, at the very least, something worth paying attention to. The final credits, in the same (over the top?) gothic font, pay homage first to the vessels lost at sea off the new Bedford coast, before crediting the various humans and species of fish (Hippoglossus Hipoglossus, a.k.a. Atlantic Halibut, for example) on the same pages with their roles in the film. Within the type of ‘interspecies anthropology’ framework this suggest, the film can gain yet again several different meanings, not least theoretically and epistemologically.
However, the colorists being referred to as ‘monkeys’ (although it could be some industry joke I’m not aware of) makes less sense, except as a practical joke, and throws that earlier
interpretation somewhat into question. After the credits have rolled, the film ends with another almost entirely black frame, the only light emanating from a flock of seagulls faintly visible and audible in the distance, the familiar sloshing of water and whirring of machinery returning once more before the black completely envelops the frame at last.
By surrounding text with sights and sounds that seem to be of a different realm, that text becomes more accentuated and rich, for interpretation at least. Similarly, the most
interpretatively rich scene in the film comes after about an hour of sensorial overload when audible text makes a startling appearance. The camera sits motionless, as a crewmember watches TV in a cabin inside the ship somewhere. Discovery’s Deadliest Catch (as well as some
advertisements), a highly dramatized fishing documentary, is on, its very audible American-style voice-over contrasting with the slight hum of an engine purring in the background. The camera watches on as the man takes one last sip of his drink, and slowly drifts asleep. This scene, no more than four minutes long, is striking because it represents a moment of self-referential awareness for Leviathan, an awareness of its own position in a (overly) mediatized landscape perhaps? Pavsek contends that this would be nice, but that Leviathan’s denial of the history its genre denies that interpretation, Deadliest Catch instead becoming ‘a placeholder for all those forms of cinema that sensory ethnography opposes’, showing that what you are now seeing is in fact more real than the obvious fakeness of reality TV (ibid.: 9).
My point is not that one or the other interpretation is more valid, in fact I disagree with Pavsek’s easy dismissal of affect and the sensorial as essential parts of anthropological inquiry and find most of his interpretation cynically dismissive of the theoretical underpinnings of the directors’ work. He does, however, point to some undeniable shortcomings, both in the sensorial ethnographic project as well as in prevalent perceptions of Leviathan, when thinking of the question of representation in anthropology.
I suggest, instead, following Writing Culture, that visual anthropology can perhaps do more than just immerse the viewer sensorially, and that a more active, critical engagement with text presents the most obvious and fertile avenue of doing so. In the spirit of looking in stead of
seeing, can text not function as a multi-interpretable contextual tool? While I’m not arguing for a
Margaret Mead-style, classical documentary approach, what MacDougall memorably called an ‘illustrated lecture’ (2006: 223), there is perhaps more room for text – when used subtly, reflexively, and probably, yes, sparingly – than Castaing-Taylor would seem to suggest in his work. By exploring the tension between ways of knowing in film and in text, visual
anthropology can perhaps get to the very heart of questions of knowledge production. But how to make the viewer aware of this? And how to pose such questions in ways that are stimulating intellectually as well as open-ended? Thankfully, this is where the essay film comes in. In the next section, I will therefore briefly explore its literary and filmic history, and how the
impossibility to definitively pin it down reflects its potential for exploring the tension between visual and textual knowledge.
The Essay Film: Images and Words Recombined
A documentary aware of its own artifice is one that remains sensitive to the flow between fact and fiction. (Minh-Ha 1990: 41)
In the 1940s, new types of cinema began to emerge in Europe, and with them, new forms of classification. Hans Richter first wrote of the essay film as a new type of documentary, able to speak to both emotion and intellect and ‘portray a concept’ (quoted in Rascaroli 2008: 27). A few years later Alexandre Astruc would introduce his concept of the stylo (the camera-pen) to address a similar type of authorial cinema, one able ‘to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language’ (2009[1948]: 17-18). This new type of cinema,
therefore equates film with ‘gradually becoming a new language’, a form through which the camera will therefore be able to ‘write’ the thoughts and feelings, however abstract, of the author (ibid.: 18).
This idea of authorial cinema quickly gained ground in Europe, and reflected a general impulse to take film beyond simply reproducing reality but to use it as a form of expression and reflection instead (Pantenburg 2015: 77). This line of thinking, using film as a way to move beyond reality, originated with the early experimenters of Russian cinema in the 1920s like Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, whose conception of the cine-eye, a mechanical eye that is explicitly able to see and do more than its human counterpart can, proved greatly influential throughout cinema in the decades to come12 (Graham 1964, Pantenburg 2015:147).
The aim of the cine-eye is not to show reality as it appears to us elsewhere, but a kind of ‘film-truth’ (‘kino-pravda’), one that transcends ordinary human ways of seeing and offers a kind of super-real quality which emerges from the juxtaposition of perspectives that could otherwise never co-exist (Suhr & Willerslev 2011: 285). These ideas were instrumental in the
establishment of the hugely influential cinema-verité movement13, spearheaded by
anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch (Graham 1964: 30), and reverberated in the conditions that in Europe would lead to the first essay films and their theorization14 (Rascaroli 2008: 30; Pantenburg 2015: 144-147).
The first literal comparison of a film to a literary essay, however, would not come until 1958. In a review of Chris Marker’s film Lettre de Sibérie (Letter from Siberia), André Bazin writes of something hitherto unknown in the realm of documentary cinema: ‘an essay
documented by film’ (Bazin 2003[1958]: 44):
The important word is ‘essay’, understood in the same sense that it has in literature — at once historical and political, written by a poet as well […] the primary material in the essay film is intelligence [...] its immediate means of expression is language, and the image only intervenes in the third position, in reference to this verbal intelligence. (ibid.)
12 Leviathan (2012) echoes this legacy in many ways with its use of GoPro technology to submerse cameras underwater and in
the midst of wriggling masses of fish, for example.
13 A movement which is closely related to types of films often classified as ‘observational cinema’ or ‘direct cinema’, to which I
will return in later comments on montage.
14 Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most famous and influential filmmakers associated with the essay film, even founded an affiliated
group of filmmakers called the Dziga Vertov Group in 1968, which produced a handful of Marxist, polemical films, eventually disbanding after the essay film Letter to Jane in 1972.
Interestingly, Bazin juxtaposes the verbal intelligence in relation to a visual intervention, a words vs. images dialectic propelling the essay film forward. Astruc’s idea of film as language also seems to resonate in this definition, although Bazin places words, his ‘verbal intelligence’, above image.
When watching Letter from Siberia, the thread is Marker’s train of thought in the form of his voice-over, which meanders from playfulness to seriousness to a mocking sensibility, the juxtaposition of images and animation to voice and sound different in every cut. Indeed, in one of the most famous scenes from the film15, the same shot is replayed four times in a row, with a different narration every time, raising questions about objectivity, memory, association, and the power of film.
In this scene, street workers fixing a road, cars, a bus, and a passing man form an ostensibly typical street tableau in Yakutsk, Siberia. The first time it is shown the narration is silent; the second sounds like a Soviet propaganda film, ‘happy Soviet workers’ and
modernization under communism painting an optimistic picture of the bright future these people and their nation are working towards; in the third, the workers have turned to miserable slaves performing degrading, primitive labor, the wealthy elite flaunting its superiority in their suggestively inferior cars (compared to the great European and American automobiles?); the fourth is somewhere in between, ‘simply’ stating how it is as ‘objectively’ as possible. However, this last voice-over, presumably the closest to Marker’s own view, is rendered both reasonable and problematic by those that precede it: ‘A walk through the streets of Yakutsk isn’t going to make you understand Siberia’, it seems (Corrigan 2011: 48). Not only does Marker nudge the viewer to ask questions of how cinema can be used and misused, in the process he exposes his own filmmaking practice, calling into question his own project of ‘understanding’ Siberia by going there and making a film about it. This wandering, self-questioning and self-exposing style of image and word juxtaposition is what lead Bazin to refer to Letter from Siberia as driven by language, by something essayistic, a ‘verbal intelligence’. But Bazin’s foundation for
comparison of Marker’s film with the literary essay, based on his definition of an essay as historical, political, and poetic, remains somewhat vague.
It is useful then, to look at some of the definitions the literary essay has accumulated over the years in order to understand the space films like Marker’s occupy16. Ever since its inception, which most argue would be the 16th century personal reflections by Michel de Montaigne, the essay has been difficult to pin down. Yet some characteristics have stood the test of time, notably the description of a bond between a personal point of view and public events that somehow surround that point of view in time and space (Corrigan 2011:13). While acknowledging the importance of a subjective viewpoint trying to relate to an external context, Theodor Adorno wrote that despite these ever present ingredients, as it were, ‘the essay’s innermost formal law is heresy’ (Adorno 1984[1958]:171). György Lukács adds that the essay must ‘make itself’, and for Aldous Huxley it constitutes ‘a device for saying almost everything about almost anything’ (quoted in Rascaroli 2008: 25 & Corrigan 2011: 14). Most of these definitions are grand,
sweeping and open to interpretation, or, to put it more bluntly, vague. Indefinability, then, seems to account for the literary essay’s many permutations ever since Montaigne put pen to paper trying to flesh out an idea, and therefore leads to the difficult question: what, then, is an essay
film?
According to Laura Rascaroli, the reason that this is such a difficult question is that the essay film remains under theorized, and the struggle to classify it mirrors the struggle to think about it in terms of classification (2008: 25-26). However, she points out that two features do always seem to occur when the essayistic is invoked, both in film and in literature, and these are reflectivity and subjectivity (ibid.: 25). Reflectivity, which Bazin understood as ‘intelligence’, was worked out by Aldous Huxley only a few years later as consisting of three ‘poles’: the pole of the ‘personal and autobiographical’; the pole of ‘the objective, factual, the
concrete-particular’; and ‘the pole of the abstract-universal’ (Huxley [1964]2002: 330). Once again the personal, subjective nature of the essay is also apparent in this definition, as well its relation to the world in which that subjectivity is situated, both in the ‘concrete-particular’ sense as well as the ‘abstract-universal’ sense. The reflectivity of the essay lies in the tricky combination of these three poles, the balancing act that ‘richly satisfying’ (ibid.) essays manage to pull off. Likewise, essay films can most easily be identified by their ability to somehow balance these poles, with different scholars emphasizing different parts, or even their ability to interact and form
overlapping ‘registers’ (Corrigan 2011: 14-15).
Since Marker in 1958, film essayists from Jean-Luc Godard to Harun Farocki, from Agnès Varda to Trinh T. Minh-Ha, have all somehow addressed all three ‘poles’ to varying degrees, employing their ‘camera-pen’ to write, think, and edit different combinations of Bazin’s verbal intelligence and visual interference. Building on the literary essay but reformulating it, ‘making itself’ as Lukács would say, essay films are able to engage these different poles in different ways. Heretic by nature (following Adorno), this entails a dynamic combination of absorption and mobilization of different artistic and cinematic practices (ibid.), as well as a reflexive betrayal of these forms (Rascaroli 2008: 27).
What ultimately links all these disparate films and filmmakers together is a kind of open-ended way of thinking, an essayistic exploration of the combination of subjectivity with an inquisitive attitude, always ready to second-guess itself (Corrigan 2011:8, Rascaroli 2008:33).
…rather than answering all the questions that it raises, and delivering a complete,
‘closed’ argument, the essay's rhetoric is such that it opens up problems, and interrogates the spectator; instead of guiding her through emotional and intellectual response, the essay urges her to engage individually with the film, and reflect on the same subject matter the author is musing about. This structure accounts for the ‘openness’ of the essay film.
(Rascaroli 2008.: 33) It is this form of writing with the camera-stylo, this ‘openness’ of thought, which invites the viewer to engage his/her own subjectivity with that of the film. This way of engaging, of
producing meaning in dialogue with the film and filmmaker, when coupled with the essay film’s inherent indefinability, is what prompts Rascaroli to state that the essay film is not a genre as such, but a mode (ibid.: 39). By thinking of the essay film as a mode, of thought, of interacting with the world, of meaning-making perhaps, its inherently idiosyncratic, undogmatic, and experimental nature becomes filled with possibilities, its options for engaging the viewer limitless (ibid.).
Because it resists definition, imposing the constrictions of genre on the essay film, or using other concepts like the frequently invoked ‘auteur’ to classify it are counterproductive, according to Volker Pantenburg (2015: 135). Because ‘…the essay film not only differs from the conventional definition of the genre but also questions the meaningfulness of a separate genre at all’ (ibid: 151), to think about the essay film involves thinking about how ‘the essayistic’ arises. To Pantenburg, like in the many other definitions described above, this happens in its
sound-image relationships, or text-sound-image relationships, be it a ‘productive discrepancy between commentary and image’(ibid.), an explicitly subjective and questioning narrative, or any other rhetorical strategy one can imagine combining image, sound and text (Rascaroli 2008: 39). This invocation of the essayistic, or the essayistic mode, always involves somehow addressing the viewer, and the essay film’s critical self-awareness therefore manifests itself in the
co-construction of meaning between the subjectivity of the filmmaker and that of the viewer (Alter 1996: 171, Rascaroli 2008, Pantenburg 2015: 44).
This brings us back to the viewer and sensory perception, but the essay film’s ‘embodied spectator’ does not just let sensory impulses wash over him/her. Following Rascaroli, the
essayistic mode:
…allows answers to emerge somewhere else, precisely in the position occupied by the embodied spectator. The meaning of the film is constructed via this dialogue [with the filmmaker], in which the spectator has an important part to play; meanings are presented by the speaking subject as subjective, personal meditation, rather than as objective truth. (2008: 36)
In sum, the essay film takes from its literary counterpart a general attitude, as well as what Rascaroli has called a certain ‘commitment’ to text, by using it both critically and creatively (ibid.). This attitude manifests itself not in various characteristics that can constitute a genre, but in an essayistic mode, which is both reflective and reflexive, subjective and self-critical,
inherently heretic and aware of its history, and combines thought with film in unique ways, occupying its own space ‘at the crossroads of fiction, nonfiction, and experimental film’ (ibid.: 43). As such, the essayistic mode is perfectly suited for the exploration of different types of knowledge in anthropology, a meeting point, perhaps, between the sensorial methods MacDougall and Castaing-Taylor advocate and the textual, self-reflective modes of contemporary ethnographic writing.
How, then, to explore this tension between image and text that has also had such an impact on history of visual anthropology? In the next sections, I will attempt to offer several answers to this question. First of all, I will show how using techniques of voice, making the authorial presence known (as Rascaroli suggests above), as Marker already realized in his Letter
from Siberia, can engage the spectator. This will inevitably lead to a discussion of montage,
Finally, I will address the question I have been tiptoeing around: that of image-image
relationships, by combining contemporary anthropological writings on theory with those of some film scholars working on essay films, in doing so show how the essayistic mode of ‘thinking’ in film is something visual anthropology can fruitfully explore.
Montage: Approaching the Invisible
When one doesn’t have money for cars, shooting, nice clothes; when one doesn’t have money to make images in which film time and film life flow uninterruptedly, then one has to put one’s effort into intelligently putting together separate elements: a montage of ideas17 (Farocki 1977).
The way in which essay films most frequently evoke the essayistic is by engaging the spectator, and this in turn is most frequently achieved by means of an authorial voice (Rascaroli 2008: 32-35). To be included in a filmic thought process, to follow the ways in which the essay film is constantly second guessing itself, is to be addressed in a provocative reflection, one that calls upon the spectator to enter into dialogue with the author (ibid.:36). To engage on an intellectual and emotional level, it seems, one has to feel there to be some kind of human (thought) presence with which to interact. As Chris Marker’s Letter from Siberia shows (tellingly, the scene before the one I described earlier, one of a man in a horse-drawn cart passing a truck, is introduced as: ‘the shot you have been waiting for’), this voice can be used ironically, critically, polemically, humorously, skeptically (heretically, in the Adornoan spirit of the essay), but also poetically or lyrically, or even ‘neutrally’, to ‘convey information’ in documentary style (ibid.: 39). This voice may take the shape of a provocative narration, but can also include music, camera movement, intertitles (or other forms of insertion of text), found footage, or special effects, all serving to form ‘other traces of authorial presence’ (Arthur 2003: 58-59; Corrigan 2011:30). The place where all this happens is of course in the editing room, during montage.
In 2012, anthropologists and filmmakers Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev published an article on montage in ethnographic filmmaking, in which they explore Dziga Vertov’s idea of the cine-eye I briefly referred to before, expanding this notion in an attempt to form an
17 ‘Wenn man kein Geld für Autos, Schießereien, schöne Kleider, wenn man kein Geld hat für Bilder, die Film-Zeit, das Filmleben von selber verstreichen lassen, dann muss man seine Kraft in die Intelligenz Verbindung der einzelnen Elemente legen: Die Montage der Ideen’.
understanding of how disruptive forms of editing can help to reveal what they call the ‘invisible aspects of social life’ ethnography seeks to approach (Suhr & Willerslev 2012: 283):
…using film to reveal the invisible aspects of social life depends crucially on maintaining a tension between a strong sense of reality and its occasional, and therefore only then effective, disruption through montage (ibid.).
This disruption, very much akin to the authorial trace in essayistic modes of filmmaking,
produces a kind of productive ‘shock’, which can in certain situations shed light on precisely that invisible aspect of sociocultural life that anthropology seeks to explore (Suhr & Willerslev 2014).
To do so, however, requires moving beyond the idea, so prevalent in reviews of
Leviathan, as well as being the overriding presumption for much of visual anthropology’s recent
history, that film can do nothing more than show reality ‘as it is’ (ibid.: 92, Suhr & Willerslev 2012). Since the critiques of those like Castaing-Taylor and MacDougall of the type of
anthropological documentary à la Mead and Bateson, the tradition of observational cinema has been closely associated with ethnographic filmmaking (ibid.: 283-284), and especially with sensory ethnography (Nakamura 2013: 134). In observational cinema, the camera is used in a way that merges perception and perceiver, a ‘physical extension’ of the cameraperson’s body (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009: 548; MacDougall 1998: 200), which grants the spectator a more sensorial engagement like that of the filmmaker with the social reality depicted. This entails showing so much observable detail, so much thick description, that the viewer can interpret along with the filmmaker, forsaking contextualization in abstractions and categories for long, detailed scenes more suited to depict, following Castaing-Taylor, the ‘ambiguity of meaning that is at the heart of human experience itself’ (1996: 86; MacDougall 1998).
However, as Suhr and Willerslev point out, this all builds on the epistemological premise that insight into social life can be produced by showing ‘the invisible’ aspects of daily reality, which in this view are minute, quotidian details that are observable but often go unnoticed, combined with a certain humility and respect of the filmmaker toward his or her subjects, which ‘humanizes’ the camera (Grimshaw 2001: 130; Suhr & Willerslev 2012: 284). But what if, as they propose, ‘the invisible’ anthropology so seeks to capture lies not in the accumulation of
detail, but in something beyond the visual, something that the humanized camera-eye cannot simply ‘capture’?
Once again, Dziga Vertov provides an impulse to thinking of film in such possibilities. One of the earliest experimenters with cinematic montage, whether while filming or in the editing room, he saw it not as an enterprise in emulating reality as best as possible, but as a way to rearrange the way we experience time and space. The cine-eye is thus not a mechanical eye to be humanized as much as possible, but one that can transcend typically human perception and offer different views on reality, views that emerge from the ‘juxtaposition of otherwise
incompatible perspectives’ (ibid.: 285). This, Suhr and Willerslev argue, is particularly suited for anthropology, for transcending the impossibility of imagining the cultural worlds of others. Our ordinary vision is inadequate for translating the visions of others, just as our words often are (something of a mantra in anthropology since Writing Culture). Therefore, montage must seek to ‘shock’ the spectator into engaging with these other realities, by way of opening up the
possibilities beyond what one can see, by intuiting the realm of ‘the invisible’ (ibid.; Suhr & Willerslev 2014). However, shock for shock’s sake misses the point and loses touch with social reality, so cinematic manipulations must be employed sparingly, according to them, so as to not be lost in a ‘haze’ of obscurity (Suhr & Willerslev 2012: 294). In its sparing application, its use for effect, lies its true potential.
The effective film shock, we could say, forces us out and away from the traditional representationalist position trapped in realism to a position invested with the power to liberate the human eye from the world (Suhr & Willerslev 2014: 93).
It is precisely this shock which the essayistic mode seeks to produce. By ‘confound[ing] the perception of untroubled authority or comprehensive knowledge that a singular mode of address projects onto a topic’ (Arthur 2003: 58), and doing so through the disjunctive use of montage, essay films allow the viewer to reflect, interact, and become part of whatever mode of knowing is being produced. This does not mean that essay films eschew long takes, or reject the
possibility of sensorial immersion. On the contrary, the power in the type of shock montage in the essayistic spirit can produce lies in the ways that it can incorporate tropes from observational cinema one moment and just as easily question them the next (Van de Port, forthcoming). This mode therefore necessarily runs counter to the epistemological premises of observational cinema
that Suhr and Willerslev critique, and thus offers a different answer to the question of how anthropology can seek to represent different ‘modes of knowing’ (Cox, Irving & Wright 2016: 5). It does so by invoking the spirit of the essayistic and applying it to filmmaking in and about social worlds, suggesting going beyond straightforward visual modes of knowing by tapping into the infinite possibilities montage can afford. The validity in filmic knowledge can therefore not be judged by how well it corresponds to some reality ‘out there’, but requires different
epistemological presumptions, ones that the Writing Culture debates anticipated, which enable different modes of knowing to become available:
What we seem to suggest here is that (1) film can be understood as theory and (2) that [the general conception of] its validity lies in its way of pushing the limits of our perception, to make us see and understand other things (Suhr & Willerslev 2014: 93). But what about that first point, that film can be understood as theory? And how does this idea of montage work beyond the text-image tension in visual anthropology and essay films explored so far? In other words, can film really engage with theory, not as an object to be theorized, but as an active ‘intervention’ (van de Port, forthcoming)? In the next section, I will attempt to answer these questions, by showing how the essayistic mode can be thought of as a form of theory, in a different sense from the more traditional one perhaps, and can therefore provide ways in which to conceptualize different modes of knowing.
Thinking in Film/Film as Theory
Theory has not really been able to arrive at the image—to speak, to hold to, to live by the image… (Bellour 1985: 56.)
Theodor Adorno’s The Essay as Form, which I have so far only used for his provocative quote about the ‘heresy’ inherent in the essayistic, can also be read to imply some of the thoughts about the essayistic mode in montage and filmmaking I have sketched so far. Not only does the essay have a natural ‘affinity to the visual image’ (Adorno 1984[1958]: 170), but it is also ‘necessarily related to theory’ (ibid.: 165). Furthermore, the concepts the essay introduces, ‘immediately as it receives them’, much like image and sound, only ‘gain precision through their relation to one another’ (ibid.: 160), their ‘juxtaposition’ (ibid.:170) and their continuity by way of
‘discontinuity’ (ibid.:164). In other words, by the way elements are combined in montage18. So far, I have explored this notion as an essayistic mode in filmmaking, one that is indeed heretic, but not purely for the sake of heresy, its reflexivity and subjectivity combining to form a different mode of knowing than that of films derived from realist traditions. But how to understand the relationship between montage, the essayistic, and theory?
Film as a medium must always be somehow reflective of reality, lest it become totally abstract and lose its significance (academically, at least) (Suhr & Willerslev 2011:286). How can it then be used for theoretical abstraction, to ‘think’, as it were? Or, as Volker Pantenburg puts it: ‘How can concrete visible material be combined in such a way that something invisible and abstract can be perceived?’ (2015: 23) Similarly to Suhr & Willerslev, the answer to perceiving the invisible for Pantenburg lies in montage, where ‘cinematic thinking’ takes place (ibid., 68-72). But first, before I attempt to tie in montage and the essayistic, some brief notes on theory.
Theory, for Pantenburg, is something that arises when different elements collide, when different forms of audiovisual media are opposed, creating ‘an effect of difference’ (60), in which new conceptualizations are necessary to form a link. This means that theory does not pertain to conceptualizing reality in some ‘real’ way, much like the films he describes do not attempt to grasp reality, but reconfigure what it is we think about how we do so, through the medium in which this difference is represented, in this case film (ibid.:61). This resonates strongly with the type of conception of theory and what it should and should not do in anthropology (and some areas of humanities) as described by Annemarie Mol:
Its point is not to finally, once and for all, catch reality as it really is. Instead, it is to make specific, surprising, so far unspoken events and situations visible, audible, sensible. It seeks to shift our understanding and to attune to reality differently. (Mol 2010: 255) This, Pantenburg argues, is precisely what happens in the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Harun Farocki, who throughout their careers have been engaged in asking questions in and through film about what ‘real’ is when it has to be ‘grasped’ by an image, how film and text create the effect of objectivity, and what kind of conventions of cinematic argumentation these entail (Pantenburg 2016:61). It is no coincidence that these filmmakers represent two of the biggest proponents of the essayistic mode, and this is ultimately what makes their films theoretical. Theory then, as
conceptualized here, ‘provides neither an overview, nor a fixed set of solid handholds’ (Mol 2016: 257), but functions as ‘a repository of sensibilities’ (ibid.), a guide in experiencing something new, something that might not have existed before, and actively engaging with it while still maintaining something of a link to reality, just a different one than previously imagined.
This theoretical understanding of what film can do, what Pantenburg calls ‘film as theory’, therefore encompasses more than any one film and the images it provides of a certain world, but emerges in interaction, between viewer and film, but at a more fundamental level between one image and another, at the editing table. Montage, therefore, ‘turns theory into practice’ (Pantenburg 2016: 153). Thus, if theory produces some kind of surprising interaction, montage must seek to make this productive, an ‘effective shock’ (Suhr & Willerslev 2014: 93) which can shift our attunement to reality.
Pantenburg, too, finds the precedents to this type of engagement with theory in film in early history of the essay film in the Soviet Union, but he takes from Vertov’s experimental montage the idea that the cine-eye should stress the relationship between images and image sequences above that of text and image (ibid.: 152). He feels the visual aspect of a film alone:
…is perfectly capable of formulating its own non-predicative theory and of speaking for itself. The image comes before the structure; it adheres to its own laws and brings about theoretical ‘concepts’ in the conjunction of images themselves. (ibid. 26)
He therefore dismisses the essay film, which for him only serves to induce genre-related squabbling, while its name and origins in text obscure the fact that films like the ones he
discusses pose more fundamental, theoretical questions about images that cannot be approached by fitting them into a delineated genre (ibid.: 30). Film as theory, he argues, must necessarily transcend text and happens most frequently in the juxtaposition of images with other images and image sequences (ibid.: 152).
Similarly, David Oscar Harvey argues that essay films are commonly ‘vococentric’, prioritizing the human voice above other sounds and images, and thereby foregoing countless possibilities for inquiry, opinion, engagement, and speculation – in other words, for ‘thinking’– that could be explored (Harvey 2012). A ‘non-vococentric essay film’, by contrast, would consist of coherent purely visual image composition, and would use editing not to superimpose a voice
or contrast that voice with the images but seek to find ‘non-vocal manipulations of the soundtrack’ (ibid.: 9) in support of its claims.
Both these arguments seem to converge around a presumption that the essay film represents a fixed genre, definable by a set of certain characteristics that bind it, such as the necessary use of text for Pantenburg and voice for Harvey. However, the point I have tried to make in synthesizing Rascaroli’s idea of a mode and Suhr & Willerslev’s idea of montage is that the essayistic is something that can be invoked in filmmaking, turning theory into practice in the editing room, and therefore encompasses not only voice but an entire audiovisual mode of thought, a mode of knowing. A film can use voice-over in the essayistic sense, combining the many ‘heretic’ forms I described earlier in one section and in the next apply the registers of montage, in the combination sound and image, to infer something in a completely different, non-vococentric way. This flexibility of the essayistic mode is exactly what makes it so appealing for anthropologists interested in capturing modes of knowing that are otherwise invisible.
Furthermore, as Rascaroli has stated in her most recent publication on the essay film, she sees it as a
…dialectical form that thinks not exclusively through verbal commentary, but also via an audiovisual and narrative disjunctive practice that creates textual gaps in which new meanings are allowed to emerge (Rascaroli 2017: 34).
This practice of ‘narrative disjuncture’ is montage as I have understood it, a way of thinking through film that is inherently essayistic: aware yet skeptical of the effect of words and text, and therefore able to move beyond them when necessary. By invoking the essayistic mode when making a film19 its author can engage the viewer in the mode of knowing that is represented, and in doing so form unique, intersubjective, (inter)‘textual gaps’ where new meanings can shift understandings and allow the invisible to be approached. Abandoning the project of capturing ‘reality as it really is’ (Mol 2010: 255), it can, like theory in Mol’s sense, make hitherto unknown events and experiences visible, audible and sensible, making new modes of knowing available to those that are willing to engage with it.
19 But also surrounding film, after film (revisiting), engaging with people who engage with film, etc. It is no coincidence that
Harun Farocki, Jean-Luc Godard, and Chris Marker have all produced ‘a corpus of highly original writings’ (Pantenburg 2015: 8). See also Elsaeser 2004 for writings on and by Farocki, and https://chrismarker.org/chris-marker/ for some of Chris Marker’s writings.
