Can Film Show the Invisble

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Can Film Show the Invisible? The Work of Montage in Ethnographic Filmmaking

Author(s): Christian Suhr and Rane WillerslevReviewed work(s):Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 53, No. 3 (June 2012), pp. 282-301Published by: The University of Chicago Presson behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearch

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282 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 3, June 2012

2012 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2012/5303-0002$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/664920

Can Film Show the Invisible?The Work of Montage in Ethnographic Filmmaking

by Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev

This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by striving for ever more

realistic depictionsa position often associated with observational cinemabut rather by exploiting the artificial

means through which human vision can be transcended. Achieved particularly through the use of montage, such

disruptions can multiply the perspectives from which filmic subject matter is perceived, thus conveying its invisible

and irreducible otherness. This, however, is an argument not to dismiss the realism of much ethnographic filmmaking,

but rather to demonstrate how montage can and must be used to break with the mimetic dogma of the humanized

camera. The effective image, we argue, depends crucially on maintaining a tension between a strong sense of reality

and its occasional, and therefore only then effective, disruption through montage.

The tradition of ethnographic filmmaking has throughout its

history been the target of numerous scornful attacks by an-

thropologists dissatisfied with its incapacity for generalization

and abstract theory making. Increasingly, dissatisfaction has

also erupted within the community of ethnographic film-

makers. Depressed by the number of what he finds to be dull

observational films screened at current ethnographic film

festivals, Jay Ruby laments the future of the discipline:

The overwhelming majority of the student films I saw . . .

employed what I regard as the overtired, outdated and highly

suspect conventions of observational cinema. . . . Are stu-

dents actively discouraged from deviating from the ortho-

doxy. . . . How is our field going to advance if students have

to tow [sic] the line of one cinematic form? Why are the

young so timid? Are their mentors discouraging experi-

mentation? Where are the revolutionaries bent on changing

things? (Ruby 2008)

From a different quarter, James Weiner (1997) points out that

what is most notably lacking in ethnographic filmmaking is

recognition of the invisible dimensions of human life that

cannot be recorded by a camera. According to Weiner, the

genre of realist indigenous ethnographic filmmaking that sup-

posedly makes no attempt to teach Western notions or styles

of framing, montage, [and] fast cutting (Turner 1992:7) ac-

Christian Suhris a filmmaker and PhD candidate in the Section for

Anthropology and Ethnography of Aarhus University (Moesgaard

Alle 20, DK-8270 Hoejbjerg, Denmark [[email protected]]). Rane

Willerslevis Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Museum

of Cultural History of the University of Oslo (St. Olavs gt. 29, P.O.

Box 6762, St. Olavs plass, NO-0130 Oslo, Norway). Both authors

contributed equally to this paper. This paper was submitted 29 IX

09 and accepted 11 XI 10.

tually works counter to indigenous ritualistic strategies of

making things visible by their very concealment. For Weiner

(1997:199, 201), the gaps between shots created through mon-

tage along with other nonrealist cinematic manipulations

would be a precondition for visualizing indigenous notions

of invisibility.

In an older and much debated article, Kirsten Hastrup

(1992) argues that anthropology communicated through pho-

tography and film inevitably is stuck within visible forms and

patterns, which can only be appreciated from the na ve em-

piricist notion that the world is what it appears to be (JayRuby, quoted in Hastrup 1992:17). In her view, invisible as-

pects of human reality can only be evoked through words

and textual abstraction. Hastrups case is built around her

own failure to photograph an Icelandic ram exhibition: The

texture of maleness and sex had been an intense sensory ex-

perience, but it was invisible. The reality of the total social

event had been transformed into a two-dimensional image,

a souvenir (Hastrup 1992:9).

Hastrup admits that her photographs, ill-focused, badly

lit, lopsided featuring the backs of men and ram, could have

been more illuminating had she been more experienced with

a camera. Nevertheless, she maintains that the thick, in-visible, and secret meaning of the event could not have

been captured on celluloid, but had to be communicated in

words (Hastrup 1992:910). This, she argues, is because the

two media operate on quite distinct logical levels: the image

by means of its mimetic disposition is a mere simulacrum of

reality, only capturing features of social life that are visible.

By contrast, words are essentially formless in themselves, and

meaning, therefore, needs to be created through textual con-

struction by selection and ordering. This allows words to

communicate existential spaces of cultural experience (Has-

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Suhr and Willerslev Montage in Ethnographic Filmmaking 283

trup 1992:11) that are themselves invisible and therefore can-

not be captured by a camera.

It comes as no surprise that both Weiners and Hastrups

arguments were received with much disapproval by visual

anthropologists (Crawford and Turton 1992:5; Faye Ginsburg,

quoted in Weiner 1997:213; MacDougall 1998:71). Lucien

Taylor fiercely argued against what he took to be an icon-

ophobia in anthropology. In his view (Taylor 1996:88), an-

thropologys discomfort with images has to do with films

capacity to exceed theory and showing anthropologists pur-

chase on the lived experience of their subjects to be rather

more precarious than they would like to believe. In a similar

vein, David MacDougall (1998:71) suggested that Hastrup

quite simply was giving up on photography too easily. Ac-

cording to MacDougall, words are superior in their capacity

of showing us the rules of the social and cultural institutions

by which [people] live (1998:259), but images are far su-

perior in addressing subtle issues of social agency, body prac-

tice, and the role of the senses and emotions in social life.In this article, we wish to draw renewed attention to the

key question that underlies much of this debate for and

against visual anthropology: Can film show the invisible, or

is it trapped within the visible surfaces of the social world?

Despite the criticisms raised, we find that Hastrups main

assertion that the camera is incapable of capturing the invis-

ible meanings of social life needs renewed consideration. Of

key importance is the attention she draws to the fact that

although film and images taken by cameras may look similar

to our ordinary seeing, they do differ in significant ways.

Ethnographic filmmakers are quite certainly aware of these

differences, but their take on filmmaking has, as we shall see,

largely consisted in minimizing them, so as to let the cameraimitate the human eye.

Our period of accelerated technological innovations has

supported this development: first, with the advent of mobile

lightweight sound recording and, more recently, with digital

recording formats and affordable handheld camcorders,

which allow ethnographic filmmakers to make longer takes

than ever before. The shifts from black-and-white to color

film and more recently from 4 : 3 to 16 : 9 (widescreen) have

likewise enabled more realistic simulations of our normal field

of vision. Yet, as realized by Dziga Vertov (1929; Croft and

Rose 1977) almost a century ago, a camera is not a human

eye but a mechanical eye, which, rather than a continuous

stream of vision, provides a series of frames with a limitedrange of contrast, color reproduction, depth of field, and an-

gle. The real wonder of cinema, we venture to suggest, lies

not in its inferior imitation of the human eye, but rather in

its mechanical capturing of footage, which subsequently can

be put together with other pieces by way of montage.

Our task here is to explore how ethnographic filmmaking

may expand our horizon of experience if we take seriously

the key differences between the camera eye and the human

eye and consider the use of manipulative filmic devices for

transcending the limitations of human vision. We argue that

it is only when we embrace its mechanical, nonhuman nature

that the medium of film can become fully capable of con-

veying the invisible that Hastrup rightfully argues is so im-

portant to anthropology, but which she mistakenly holds can

be communicated only in words.

We shall begin our inquiry by looking into ideas about the

invisible in realist ethnographic filmmaking, then discussing

these ideas in relation to alternatives offered by cinematic

montage. Our aim is not to replace realist doctrines with the

radical constructivism of the Soviet and postmodernist mon-

tage schools (Eisenstein 1988:145; Kiener 2008:394; Michelson

1984; Minh-ha 1982). Rather, we want to offer a conceptual

framework through which to expand our understanding of

how montage and other disruptive devices can and must be

used to break the mimetic dogma of the humanized camera,

thus enabling an enhanced perception of the social realities

depicted in ethnographic films. Howeverand this is a key

pointusing film to reveal the invisible aspects of social life

depends crucially on maintaining a tension between a strongsense of reality and its occasional, and therefore only then

effective, disruption through montage.

Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Pontys (2002) work on the

primordial totality of vision and Emmanuel Levinass (1969)

ethics of irreducible otherness, we finally arrive at suggestions

for how such imposed tension between realism and construc-

tivism can open ethnographic filmmakings capacity for imag-

ining other planes of seeing.

The Observational Tradition

Closely associated with Taylors and MacDougalls critique of

Hastrup is the distinctive tradition of observational cinema,

which arguably has shaped ethnographic filmmaking to the

extent of being identical to it (Banks 1992:124; Kiener 2008:

405).1 As a movement, observational cinema aims to inquire

into the role played by ordinary lived time and space in the

constitution of social life. As such, it operates within an es-

sentially realist cinematic paradigm, using film mainly as a

medium of mimesis (Stam 2000:72; Taylor 1996:75). Ob-

servational filmmakers do not, however, see their goal in terms

of a simple one-to-one correspondence with everyday reality.

Clearly, it is misguided to confuse observational cinema with

naive empiricism or scientism. In fact, observational cinema

was partly developed as a reaction against the detached flyon the wall film approach as seen, for example, in Gregory

Bateson and Margaret Meads Childhood Rivalry in Bali and

New Guinea(1952). Mimesis in observational filmmaking, as

Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz (2009:552) assert, is not

1. Even though observational cinema at present appears to be the most

influential school of ethnographic filmmaking, it is by no means the only

one. The history of ethnographic filmmaking shows a wide range of

experiments with poetic forms of film editing, postmodern deconstruc-

tion, and even fiction film (see, e.g., Gardner 1986; Minh-ha 1982; Rouch

1967).

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simply a mirroring. Rather, it is a process of merging the

object of perception with the body of the perceiver. The mi-

metic camera is here used as a physical extension of the

camerapersons body (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009:548;

MacDougall 1998:200), thus allowing viewers intimate access

to the filmmakers sensuous engagement with the social life

portrayed. Paul Henley encapsulates this virtue eloquently in

his summation of observational cinema as

a cinematography based on an unprivileged single camera

that offers the viewpoint, in a very literal sense, of a normal

human participant in the events portrayed. This camera

should be mobile, following subjects and events. . . . When-

ever possible or appropriate, long takes should be employed

in order to preserve the integrity of the events in the whole-

ness in which they spontaneously occur . . . stylistically the

camerawork should be low-key: the observational camera-

person should take particular care that neither the distinctive

temporal and spatial configurations of the events portrayed

nor, more generally, the characteristic social and culturalaesthetics of their subjects world are smothered by dem-

onstrations of technical or aesthetic virtuosity. (Henley 2004:

114)

As Henley points out, observational cinema builds on the

epistemological premise that deep insight into social life en-

tails transmission of sufficient material detail of the observable

world from the viewpoint of a normal human participant

(Henley 2004:114). This brings us back again to the central

question of what constitutes the invisible. For observational

cinema, the invisible can be said to be that which is seen but

not usually noticed. By focusing on the most apparently triv-

ial details of everyday activities, the cameraperson, along withthe audience, comes to observe the finest grains of day-to-

day human existence. According to MacDougall (1998:255),

these concrete and detailed visible features of persons and

their environments have largely disappeared as signifiers of

culture in written anthropologys preoccupation with ana-

lytical abstractions: kinship systems, symbolic structures of

meaning, and intangible power relations.

MacDougalls recent filmGandhis Children(2008), about

the everyday lives of boys in a childrens shelter on the out-

skirts of Delhi, is a case in point. For more than three hours,

viewers are invited to explore shifting moments of joy and

despair as revealed in the boys facial expressions and bodily

gestures. The observable world thus becomes a pathway todeep insights into the emotional lives of the film subjects.

Instead of contextualizing their lives in terms of abstract an-

alytical categories, the scenes of the film drag us into what

Lucien Taylor (1996:76) has described as the ambiguity of

meaning that is at the heart of human experience itself.

Here, as in other observational films (see, e.g., MacDougall

1979; for more recent productions, see Grossman 2010; Spray

2007), a sense of reality is derived from the direct connection

of the camera to the lived body of the filmmaker. The camera,

in Grimshaws words, is humanized and submitted to a

particular humanist ethics premised upon humility or re-

spect, expressive of the filmmakers sensitivity towards their

subjects (Grimshaw 2001:12930, 138). Consequently, the

observational filmmaker has to be cautious with any form of

cinematic effectabnormal framing, grading, extradiegetic

music, commentary, disruptive juxtaposition of shots, and so

onwhich runs the risk of disturbing the transmission of the

camerapersons lived experience of the life-world filmed

(Henley 2004:11516; Kiener 2008:407).

By favoring in this way seeing over assertion, wholeness

over parts, matter over symbolic meaning, specificity over

abstraction (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009:539), observational

cinema proposes that the strangeness of even the most exotic

people can be counterbalanced by a sense of familiarity

(MacDougall 1998:245)that is, a sense of how, despite cul-

tural differences, we are ultimately all subject to the same

plane of embodied spatial and temporal existence. This is

exactly what MacDougall (1998:252) points to when he writes

that the image transcends culture . . . by underscoring thecommonalities that cut across cultural boundaries. In his

view, one of the key contributions of visual anthropology to

our discipline at large is the challenge that images and film

pose to abstract cultural representations, by returning our gaze

to transcultural commonalities of being human (MacDougall

1998:245).

The Invisible as Invisible

What if we do not buy into a notion of the invisible as that

which is seen but not usually noticedthat is, if the invisible

cannot be captured visually, but lies beyond visibility? Then

it seems to follow that the long camera takes of observationalcinema, indulging in abundance of visual detail, cannot be

sufficient for evoking the invisible. While observational film-

makers tend to avoid the use of manipulative filmic devices

and disruptive montage in order to preserve the congruency

between the subject as experienced by the film-makers and

the film as experienced by the audience (Colin Young, quoted

in Henley 2004:115), we find that montage, along with other

forms of cinematic manipulation, is a precondition for evok-

ing the invisible in its own right.

Let us clarify what we mean by the key word montage.

In French, montage refers to the technical process of film

editing in the strict sense of the word. The cut from one shot

to another may, among other things, convey action-reaction,make an effect of continuity or of time passed, visualize a

shift of perspective, make a jump from the whole to a part

or vice versa, perform a flashback, show parallel simultaneous

action, or simply contrast what was seen in the first shot with

the next. For the early American film director D. W. Griffith

(1915), montage was first and foremost used to depict organic

unity in diversity, in which parts act and react on each

other, threaten each other, and enter into conflict before unity

is eventually restored (Deleuze 2005:31). Hence, narrative co-

herence and consistency are the primary aim of this type of



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montage. Thompson and Bordwell (2003) also locate in Grif-

fith the beginnings of the continuity system, which aims at

preserving narrative clarity by avoiding shifts of camera angle

of more than 180 degrees, by using shot/reverse-shot to couple

the viewpoints of people within a scene and by cutting from

wide-angle shots to close-ups of the same actions taking place.

Through such techniques, the idea is to maintain unbroken

connection with each preceding [shot] (Alfred Capus, quoted

in Thompson and Bordwell 2003:46).

While editing in the continuity style of much American

cinema is provided to create an illusion of a smooth flow of

time, early Soviet filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein (1928)

and Dziga Vertov (1929) experimented in speeding up film

footage, slowing it down, making shots overlap so that actions

are repeated, or violently shortening the real-time duration

of events through jump-cutting (Thompson and Bordwell

2003:131). Rather than an illusion of real-time actions in

contiguous spaces, what they aimed for was a new cinematic

presentation of time and space (Sitney 1990:44). Thus, Ei-senstein emphasized how shots were to be placed not next to

each other but rather on top of each other, so that each cut

consists in a qualitative leap (Deleuze 2005:38).

What we take from Griffith and the early Soviet filmmakers

is their concern with the filmic possibilities of juxtaposing

shots, thus enabling visual experiences that differ from normal

perceptioneither in the form of organic narrative wholeness

or in the form of radical shock therapy. In contrast to this,

most ethnographic filmmakers in the observational tradition

have been preoccupied with the cinema of duration as ad-

vocated by Andre Bazin (2005:39; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009:

539)that is, the ability of the camera to capture events and

actions in human life in the order and pace that they actuallyoccur.

In Griffith and Eisenstein, but even more so in the cinema

of Vertov, the camera was valued not for its capacity to imitate

the human eye, but precisely for its mechanical nonhuman

nature. For Vertov, montage referred not only to the piecing

together of shots in the editing room, but also to the assembly

of shots as framed and recorded in the camera (Aumont et

al. 1997:65). We adopt montage in this broadest sense as a

production technique, which is evident both in film shooting

and in the subsequent juxtaposition of shots during editing.

Whether in the camera or in the editing room, montage can

be defined as cinematic rearrangement of livedtime andspace.

Its set goal is what Vertov referred to as Film-Truth (Petric1987:4, 8)that is, to transcend ordinary human perception

and offer views on reality of a super-real quality, emerging

from the juxtaposition of otherwise incompatible perspec-

tives. While the humanized camera provides footage from a

perspective, which stands in an indexical relationship to the

familiar regime of human perception, montage, as here un-

derstood, is the production of superhuman vision that pushes

the frontiers of the observable world into uncharted regions.

A somewhat similar take on films capacity to decode reality

has been pursued by scholars concerned with cinema and

globalization. Thus, George Marcus (1994) points to our pres-

ent-day entanglement in global cultural processes as a kind

of invisibility that is difficult to present with the long un-

obtrusive takes of observational cinema. Parallel editing, he

suggests, may be a method of setting the scene objectively,

so as to reflect the reality of the contemporary global world

(Marcus 1994:48). More recently, Wilma Kiener (2008:394)

has echoed this argument by pointing out how editing solves

the problem of showing whatwhile being absentis a nec-

essary part of the whole. Montage, she argues (Kiener 2006:

3), make[s] visible [the] social and psychological effects of

the globalising and the postcolonial world. Thus, for both

Kiener and Marcus, the simultaneity of global cultural pro-

cesses is a form of invisibility that can be rendered visible

through the use of montage.

In a similar vein, Dai Vaughan (1992:110) has addressed

the potential of montage for highlighting the constructed na-

ture of all filmmaking, which often remains invisible in the

low-key montage style of many ethnographic films:What are needed . . . are methods whereby the various

strands of the [ethnographic film] discoursethe referential

nature of the images, their demonstrative disposition, the

construction of narrative continuities in time and space, the

filmic and extra-filmic codingsmay be denied elision and

offered as separable to the viewers security.

Such methods could, Vaughan continues, consist in selective

jump-cutting, disagreeing voice-over commentaries, and ex-

cessively manipulative forms of grading that push the re-

ceived conventions to the point of parody so that, while still

functioning to articulate the material, they would be perceived

in their arbitrariness. Trinh T. Minh-has film Reassemblage(1982) applies several of these methods. Shot in a Senegalese

village, the film uses audio-video desynchronization along

with continuous abrupt jump-cuts of women breastfeeding

their babies, crying or laughing children, traditional dancing,

and corn grinding. In this way, the film effectively directs the

attention of viewers toward their own acts of seeing and the

ways in which ethnographic films conventionally establish

their subjects. The invisible that is made visible in Minh-has

deconstruction is effectively ourselves as ethnographic film

viewers and the politics of looking at others.

Despite their differences, filmmakers and theoreticians such

as Vertov, Marcus, Kiener, Vaughan, and Minh-ha share a

common understanding of the invisible. Whether in the formof global cultural processes or of concealed power relations,

the invisible is understood to be something that can and

should be made visible in filmmaking by means of montage.

Here we seek to take the montage argument to a more fun-

damental level of analysis by suggesting that juxtaposition of

perspectives through montage is a key cinematic tool for evok-

ing the invisible, without reducing it to forms of visibility.

The problem with the globalization of the film gaze, advocated

by Marcus and Kiener, is that it merely enlarges the field of

visibility to a global scale rather than deals with the question



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of invisibility in its own right (see, e.g., Furtado 1989; Gandini

2003).

The use of montage in the service of deconstruction, as in

the film work of Minh-ha, carries yet another problem. The

supposedly concealed power relations, inherent in the objec-

tifying gaze of ethnographic filmmaking, may perhaps be ren-

dered visible by Minh-has complete disruption of her footage,

but only at the expense of dissolving the social world por-

trayed into obscure haze (Crawford 1992:79). To paraphrase

the film critic Rudolf Arnheim: in order for film to be more

than a naive simulacrum of reality, it must interrupt and

challenge our conventional visual logicbut only partially,

for no statement can [ultimately] be understood unless the

relations between its elements form an organized whole

(Arnheim 1957:170). Successful evocation rests not with the

pleasures of chaos (Arnheim 1971:3033) but with the film-

makers success in counterbalancing disruption with a general

compositional order, hence enhancing the viewers perception

of reality.If the invisible is part of social reality, then how can we

approach it without merely substituting it with new forms of

visibility? In the following, we shall explore the notion of the

invisible shared by Merleau-Ponty and Levinas as a perceptual

impossibility, whichalthough it may be imagined intellec-

tuallyis not achievable from any one perspective. The in-

visible here is understood to be an excess of visibility or an

infinite totality of vision that cannot itself be accessed from

any actual human perspective, but whose presence is the pre-

condition for our possibility of perceiving anythingwhat

Merleau-Ponty refers to as the norm and Levinas as the

infinite Other. We shall suggest that by maintaining the

invisible as an excess or infinite totality of vision, montagein film may enable us to imagine views fundamentally dif-

ferent from those given to us in ordinary perception.

The Invisible in Vision

One of the most fundamental differences between the camera

eye and the human eye lies in the way the two perceive the

depth and distinct identity of objects. Let us, therefore, begin

by considering the rather tricky question of how human be-

ings are able to experience objects as three-dimensional. It

may appear to us that we perceive objects from the location

of our eyes: the world is centered upon the perceiver. Indeed,

the long observational takes and the humanized camera styleof much ethnographic filmmaking appear to reproduce this

egocentric experience of vision. This is also the basis of Ed-

mund Husserls (1997) theory of perception, in which the

three-dimensionality of objects emerges out of a cognitive

hypothesis. The only thing we perceive, Husserl asserts, is the

objects facade. The back side of the objectits invisible

sideis not perceived and can, therefore, only be assessed

cognitively by building on our previous experiences of moving

around the object.

However, as the philosopher Sean Kelly (2005:96) has

pointed out, the basic problem with this theory of perception

is that, insofar as the back side is part of the object, and

insofar as we can never see the back side of the object from

our present position, no experience of an object could pos-

sibly present it as it really is. Thus, the real object slips away

as an imperceptible sum of all possible perspectives on it.

But what if vision is not subjective, but rather an effect of

our relations with one another (Willerslev 2009)that is,

what if vision exists, so to speak, between us rather than

within us? Merleau-Ponty (2002:79) points to exactly this

when he writes: When I look at the lamp on my table, I

attribute to it not only the qualities visible from where I am,

but also those which the chimney, the walls, the table can

see. What Merleau-Ponty suggests is that when we gaze at

the facade of an object, its back side is also perceived posi-

tively. But whereas the facade is perceived as determinate,

the hidden side of the object is perceived as indeterminate

(Kelly 2005:78). That is, rather than not being perceived, the

hidden side is positively perceived asabsence of visibility. Thisis so, Merleau-Ponty argues, because at the same time as we

perceive the focal object, we also perceive the infinite web of

possible viewpoints in which this object is situated. Thus, the

chimney, the walls, and the table are all perceivedas alternative

viewpoints, from where we could have seen what, from our

present perspective, is hidden as the back side of the lamp

(fig. 1).

Hence, according to Merleau-Ponty, perceptual experience

is not, as Husserl argues, simply a presentation of sense data.

Neither is it simply something that goes on within us. Instead,

visual perception emerges as an intertwinement of our own

subjective viewpoint along with the focal object and the vast

sprawling web of viewpoints that surround it and provide itssupporting context (Merleau-Ponty 1997:248). It is, so to

speak, because vision is everywhere that we as perspectival

beings are able to see things fromsomewhere(Willerslev 2011;

Willerslev and Ulturgasheva 2007:92). So, contrary to Husserl,

the real three-dimensionality of objects is present in each and

every perception of them, but it is present in the sense of an

invisible and unattainable normthat is, the view from

everywhere (Deleuze 1994:37; Kelly 2005:91; Willerslev 2011:

519). As Merleau-Ponty (2000:187) expresses it: The proper

essence . . . of the visible is to have a layer of invisibility . . .

which it makes present by a certain absence. In other words,

while the view from everywhere implies the world seen in

totally clear and unambiguous visibilitythat is, the worldas laid bare in absolute transparencyit is a view that must

hide itself in order for the visible world to appear before

our eyes. As such, the view from everywhere is a view that

cannot be an object of our own perspectival seeing except

negatively, that is, by its absence(Holbraad and Willerslev

2007:334).

We may seem to have wandered a bit far in discussing the

perception of lamps, but it relates in an important way to the

key issue that interests us here, namely, the difference between

human perception and film. Criticizing Hastrup for neglecting



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Figure 1. A lamp (Christian Suhr). A color version of this figure is available in the online edition ofCurrent Anthropology.

how closely film resembles human perceptual experience, Tay-

lor (1996:7576) emphasizes how, in particular, the long take

of observational cinema honors the duration of real-life in-

teraction and the homogeneity of space by preserving the

relationships between objects rather than substituting [them

with] the abstract time and synthetic space of montage (cf.

Henley 2004:114). But is it really the case that the long take

of a camera so closely resembles our ordinary vision? One

major difference that comes to mind is the fact that the three-

dimensional reality we usually perceive is depicted two-

dimensionally in film. MacDougall (2006:270, 274) also points

to this fact, when describing how films construct for us a

three-dimensional space based on two-dimensional pieces.

But whereas MacDougall, in line with the observational doc-

trine, emphasizes how closely this construction resembles hu-

man perception, it is a construction nevertheless, which, in

order to achieve its reality effect, has to manipulate consid-

erably with frame, color, contrast, focus, and depth.



8/21


Let us clarify this by considering one of the most funda-

mental differences between the technological mediation of

vision by the camera and ordinary human visionnamely,

the difference between viewing through one rather than two

eyes. As Merleau-Ponty showed us, the three-dimensionality

of things is given to us in human vision because we simul-

taneously appropriate a multiplicity of other possible view-

points. Merleau-Pontys claim finds further support in the

fact that we normally never see an object from one position.

Most often, we see it as an intertwinement of two positions

that is, through our two eyes. As Arnheim (1957:11) has

pointed out, depth perception relies mainly on the distance

between the two eyes, which makes for two slightly different

images. The fusion of these two pictures into one image gives

the three-dimensional impression. Contrary to Taylor and

the realist codex of much ethnographic filmmaking, Arnheim

pointed to this fact as an example of how filmic vision rad-

ically differs from human double vision.

Hence, at the most elementary level, Hastrup is in factperfectly right when she states that the flat representation of

her camera did not reveal the same three-dimensional reality

that she had seen with her two eyes. Because of her two eyes,

whose vision bends around things, she was literally able to

see a bit more of the ram exhibition than what was later

depicted in her photographs. Human vision with its double

perspective is, therefore, always already one stepahead, toward

the view from everywhere, than is the single (Husserlian)

perspective of a camera lens. Despite current experiments in

3-D, film is still not able to reproduce the full human per-

ception of space that observational filmmakers have tried to

imitate. While we in ordinary double vision are able to see

around things, this is not possible with the single perspectiveof the camera lens. Whereas the three-dimensionality of things

is normally given to us as an inherent feature of our vision,

film has to shift angle, combine perspectives, and in other

ways manipulate the image in order to give a sense of the

three-dimensional features of what they depict.

Some Film Examples

If the camera eye is fundamentally inferior to human vision,

then how can film ever provide us with an anthropological

vision that challenges and enhances ordinary seeing? What

film can do (and what human vision cannot do) isthrough

techniques of montageto juxtapose its two-dimensionalpieces and combine them into multispatial and multitemporal

viewing experiences. In this way, montage offers the possibility

of breaking the boundaries of the ethnographically thin

2-D by delivering views of a multidimensional thick and,

if you like, super-real quality. This is what Vertov took to the

extreme with his dictum of the kino-eye, simultaneously

documenting and constructing reality: a cinema that, as its

first move, needed to break away from the mimetic disposition

of the camera.

Until now we have violated the movie camera and forced

it to copy the work of our eye. The better the copy, the

better the shooting was thought to be. Starting today we

are liberating the camera and making it work in the opposite

directionaway from copying. (Vertov, quoted in Roberts

2000:19)

Many ethnographic filmmakers have been inspired by thefilms and writings of Vertov. The cinema verite movement,

developed by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, is a direct trans-

lation of Vertovs concept of Kino Pravda, meaning film-

truth. But rather than the intersubjective truth provided

by Rouchs living participatory camera (Rothman 1997:80;

Rouch 2003), which functions as an extension of the film-

makers body, Vertov aimed at transcending the intersubjec-

tive and, through montage, obtaining a new and truer vision,

extending beyond the subjective viewpoint of our human eyes.

In his classic film from 1929,The Man with the Movie Camera,

we see the metropolis at dawn with its citizens still asleep.

Yet it turns out that the city is a roomful of eyes, in that every

object, from the cars headlamps to the dummies in the shop

windows, grows a face of its own and stares back. By being

pushed into this odd realm in which every object has a pres-

encea being and a face of its ownwe are forced upon us

a vision that does not begin and end in the human subject:

a vision that is already in place, waiting to inscribe us within

it. As James Elkins (1996:20) writes: Instead of saying I am

the one doing the looking, it seems better to say that objects

are all trying to catch my eye. Indeed, this echoes Merleau-

Pontys claim that without the vast tangled network of view-

points that surrounds us and weaves itself through us, there

would be no subjective viewpoint in the first place.

Within the world of ethnographic filmmaking, TimothyAsch and Napoleon Chagnons much-debated film The Ax

Fight(1975) reveals a similar capacity for constructing visual

experiences composed of several points of view (fig. 2). The

film is about a conflict that broke out among two groups of

Yanomamo Indians. It discloses and discusses the same violent

event no less than five timeseach time from a new cinematic

perspective (Acciaioli 2004:141; Nichols 2004).

First we are presented with 11 minutes of unedited obser-

vational film footage, which covers the fight from its outbreak

to the end. Shouts and screams increase in volume as the

crowd of fighting men and women grows larger. At its peak,

the fight has moved into the shadow of a pent roof. Machetes

and axes glimpse in the darkness. Suddenly, the camera pansquickly to the left, following a movement within the crowd.

We hear the sound of a severe punch, but the camera moves

too fast, and it is impossible to see what happens. A moment

later, we are back with the agitated crowd. The camera has

moved closer. The fight has paused. A young man kneels on

the ground, showing great signs of pain. We are left in be-

wilderment.

In the next section of the film, we hear the filmmakers

immediate reactions on the sound reel. Chagnon attempts to

make sense of the apparent chaos. He reckons that the fight



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Figure 2. The Ax Fight (Asch and Chagnon 1975). A color version of this figure is available in the online edition of CurrentAnthropology.

erupted because of the discovery of an incestuous relationship

between a woman and her son. However, as the next title

states, First impressions can be mistaken. Now the filmic

material is replayed in slow motion and with stills. In voice-

over, Chagnon explains who is who and what strategies thecombatants employ. We learn that the fight evolved because

a woman had been beaten in her garden after having denied

giving food to a visiting relative.

The fourth section of the film attempts to make sense of

the fight in terms of kinship and alliance theory under the

heading Simplified structure of the conflict in terms of mar-

riage and descent. The violent event can, according to Chag-

non, be viewed as an expression of old hostilities between

three lineages. The fight comes to a standstill exactly at the

point where one of the lineages would otherwise have been

forced to split and choose sides between the other two, re-

sulting in a cleavage of the village. As Bill Nichols (2004:231)

has pointed out, this abstract explanation probably representsthe furthest point one can get from the indexical profilmic

event as it actually happened. It is an account of underlying

social structures, which are invisible to the eye of the camera

and possibly also to the eyes of the actors themselves.

In the last section, the film presents yet another perspective

through which to understand the fight. The film material is

replayed for the third time, but now edited unchronologically

to emphasize a narrative structure quite different from that

of the kinship chart and the first unedited observational take

(Nichols 2004:231). Here one starts to wonder about features

in the footage that have not been addressed in the anthro-

pological explanation. Seeing the steel axes yet a third time,

one is pushed to question where these axes might have come

from and what impact the surrounding world has on the

violent event. Furthermore, what leaps to the eye is how dis-ruption of the chronological development of the event

through montage brings together two women in an argument.

While the critical role of women as initiators and participants

in the fight is entirely absent in Chagnons explanation, the

manipulation of the footage in the last part of the film strongly

emphasizes it. Linda Connor and Patsy Asch (2004:176) ap-

preciate this manipulation, as it makes clear the inadequacy

of the anthropological explanation. As the filmic compression

of time unfolds hitherto unseen layers of the social interaction,

the in-depth thick ethnographic description of kinship and

alliance structures is rendered thin. Contrary to Hastrups

argument about the hierarchy between writing and film, the

filmic in this instance grows thick and comes to encompassand transcend the anthropological explanation.

Seen in relation to one another, the five sequences add up

to a mosaic image, a phantom-like whole, which enables us

to experience and compare each perspective in relation to the

others. The inconsistencies, dissonances, and gaps between

the various contradicting viewpoints force us to consider what

yet other perspectives could reveal, thus making us create new

imaginary viewpoints that expand into infinity. Indeed, the

extensive and persistent debate (Martinez 2004; Nichols 2004;

Ruby 2000:129) about the film is itself a testimony to how



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Figure 3. Gandhis Children(MacDougall 2008). A color version of this figure is available in the online edition ofCurrent Anthropology.

difficult it is to settle in any single interpretational perspective.

In the end, there is no longer a camera to stand in for our

seeing, and so the viewpoints provoked are not the familiar

subjective regime of ordinary perception, but beyond human

vision. Indeed, through the absence of visibility, a sense of

the event as seen from everywhere is evoked as an impossible

phantom ideal (Derrida 1995:244). In this sense, The Ax

Fight emerges as an excess of vision that can only be ap-

proached through the lack of visibility, emerging through the

juxtaposition of conflicting perspectives. As Merleau-Pontyhimself expresses it: Since the total invisible is always behind,

or after, or between the aspects we see of it, there is access

to it only through an experience which like it, is wholly outside

of it itself (Merleau-Ponty 2000:136).

Both The Ax Fight andThe Man with the Movie Camera

use a wide range of cinematic devices to force the viewer out

of the familiar regime of subject-centered vision. Most eth-

nographic filmmakers of the observational school are certainly

more cautious about using such extensive cinematic manip-

ulation. Yet also within this tradition, we find powerful ap-

plications of montage. MacDougalls film Gandhis Children

(2008) provides an illuminating example. As already pointed

out, the film clearly inscribes itself within the tradition of

observational cinema. Nonetheless, in a few highly powerful

sequences, the use of the humanized camera hailed by ob-

servational filmmakers is thoroughly subverted. From the out-

set, the film twists our perspective through a series of shots

from the outside of the childrens shelter to its interior: from

the hallway of the house to the rooftop, through a window

to the balconies of the houses on the other side of the streetand out again at the street, before finally settling at the eye-

level perspective of the children, wrapped in blankets in their

bunk beds, slowly awakening (fig. 3). MacDougalls montage

creates suggestive ambiguities between interior and exterior,

presence and absence, finite and infinite space. These same

ambiguities continue throughout the film. First, however, it

moves on to explore the childrens lives through series of

observational camera takes in which the eye-level perspective

of the boys takes on an almost natural feel. The relationship

between image and world becomes virtually transparent: we



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look through the eyes of a child, as it were, to the actuality

they point to. Yet at certain subtle moments the illusion of

experiencing life from the perspective of a child becomes

acutely clear.

This happens most forcefully in a scene featuring a boy

crying and asking to come home to his family. As the boy

continues to weep, the act of watching him through the pas-

sive viewpoint of a camera becomes increasingly unbearable

not only for the viewer, but also for MacDougall, whose cam-

era faintly starts to shake before his assistant finally steps into

the scene and comforts the child. Over several jump-cuts of

the same camera shot, our viewpoint is inescapably split apart

in collision with the filmmakers perspective, the eye-level

perspective of the camera and the perspective of the boy,

whose demeanor demands that the filmmaker take action.

After this scene, each proceeding observational eye-level take

is forced upon us as a montage of our double and impossible

perspective as children engaged in perceiving other children

and as adults engaged in a strange form of self-deception. Nolonger can we rely solely on one single situated perspective.

We are thrown back and forth between the various actual and

virtual viewpoints provoked by the film. This wandering of

perspectives, each of which modifies and objectifies the others,

results in a conglomerate or excess of visionwhat Merleau-

Ponty denotes as the view from everywherewhich belongs

to no one in particular, but pushes us to see through the

actuality of all particular viewpoints offered. The long take

the hallmark of observational cinemais transformed into

the most disruptive and disconcerting of montage effects.

Before going further, it is worth making some preliminary

conclusions on the basis of the montage at work in The Ax

FightandGandhis Children. On the one hand, it is clear thateffective film montage does not necessarily have to involve

fast-pace editing or use of extradiegetic material. Neither does

film montage necessarily need to include a large range of film

angles. On the other hand, it is also clear that the long ob-

servational take of the humanized camera by no means au-

tomatically allies us with the social reality of film subjects.

Quite to the contrary, in fact: it is only when observational

cinema betrays its own realist commitment that the invisible

dimensions of reality are evoked. These rupturing leaps

emerge in peculiar instances where the humanized camera

fails to sustain the world it depicts, thus revealing that the

reality presented is much larger than what is seen. As already

argued, the work of montage appears less effective in filmsrelying solely on postmodern deconstruction (see Minh-ha

1982). Disruption cannot, so to speak, work as disruption of

itself. It must be a disruption of something rather than noth-

ing. It is exactly in the paradoxical tension between the in-

sistence on a reality out there and the inevitable failures of

recording this reality through a subject-centered perspective

that the most powerful ruptures of montage emerge. This also

implies that the effects of montage may not easily be con-

structed beforehand through acts of conscious thinking, as

in, for example, the feature films of Griffith and Eisenstein,

but rather seem to erupt unexpectedly in contradictions that

arise in the tension between the profilmic, the shooting and

the putting together of shots during editing.

Clearly, there is a strong sense of ethics involved in the

montage of both The Ax Fight and Gandhis Children. Or-

dinary human perception, which tells us that vision is located

where our eyes are, is so deeply shattered by the multiplication

of perspectives in these films that we find ourselves decentered

in an infinite totality of views that no longer affords us the

illusion of ourselves as the unique center of the world. In

what follows, we move on to explore how this approach to

ethnographic filmmaking resonates with Levinass ethics of

otherness.

The Invisible Face of the Other

An often reported crisis in the careers of many anthropologists

is the point where they feel that the analyses they write are

widening rather than reducing the gap between themselves

and the people they seek to understand. As Marilyn Strathern

(1988:67) points out:

Analytical language appears to create itself as increasingly

more complex and increasingly removed from the realities

of the worlds it attempts to delineate, and not least from

the languages in which people themselves describe them.

. . . There is thus an inbuilt sense of artificiality to the whole

anthropological exercisewhich prompts the apparent so-

lution that what one should be doing is aiming to simplify,

to restore the clarity of direct comprehension.

Because of its presumed capacity for evoking the immediacy

of social interaction and its incapacity for abstract theoretical

language, ethnographic filmmaking has often been identified

as the answer to this crisis. As previously described, the ethical

potential of film in anthropology is often understood to rest

in the way it returns our gaze to the commonalities of being

human (Grimshaw 2001:133; MacDougall 1998:259). Film, it

is argued, can show us an unsurpassed richness of detail of

subtle bodily gestures, small nonlinguistic signs, and shifting

facial expressions that transcend the cultural explanations

evoked in written anthropology. With such qualities in mind,

MacDougall (2006:4) describes what he calls the autonomy

of being:

In fiction films as well as non-fiction films, we use found

materials from this world. We fashion them into webs ofsignification, but within these webs are caught glimpses of

being more unexpected and powerful than anything we

could create. . . . A good film reflects the interplay of mean-

ing and being, and its meanings take into account the au-

tonomy of being. Meaning can easily overpower being.

Reading the literature on observational cinema, one could be

let to think that such glimpses of being most likely occur

when the integrity of the events portrayed in film rushes is

not subjected to meanings imposed by filmmakers. In general,

Henley (2004:115) argues, filmmakers should resist the



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temptation . . . to play either the teacher or the artist, i.e.

subjecting the rushes to such an imposing intellectual or aes-

thetic agenda that members of the audience can no longer

draw their own conclusions about the significance of what

they are seeing. But is it really true that film has such a

privileged access to autonomous being? MacDougall (2006:

4) also points to this problem when stating that filmmakers

and film viewers are always already enmeshed in preconceived

meanings. Consequently, there is no such thing as a direct

and innocent access to being. Rather than trying to protect

glimpses of being from webs of signification, the primary

commitment of ethnographic filmmaking must, therefore, be

to unsettle and dislodge those preconceived meanings. As we

have just argued, the marvelous thing about The Ax Fightis

exactly the way it combines modernist empiricism with post-

modern forms of deconstruction (Ruby 2000:130) and, in the

clash between otherwise incompatible perspectives, creates a

space for further imagination about the reality of the Yano-

mamo and the production of the film itself. Disruption ofour commonsense vision is, in other words, a precondition

for getting a feel for the being of others.

Here we take support from Emmanuel Levinas for whom

ethics and otherness go in tandem. According to him, the

self can neither appear nor sustain itself outside of its differ-

entiation from other, which is why it is always and indispen-

sably obliged to preserve the alterity of the other (Levinas

1969, 1987). To the anthropologist, there is, of course, nothing

new about this insight of the selfs relational dependency on

the ethical other, but it is nevertheless important to un-

derscore, since the dictum of letting viewers see for them-

selves, advocated by much observational cinema, carries a

danger of disregarding all that which cannot be seen in theparticular instance of filming (Loizos 1992:54; Weiner 1997).

For Levinas, however, the encounter with the other is not

reducible to that which is visible alone. Beneath the expres-

sions on the visible face is the invisible face, which cannot be

directly perceived, visually depicted, or represented in writing.

This invisible face conveys, according to Levinas, an excess

of othernessthat which cannot be reduced to the same

(Wyschogrod 2002:191).

All films by way of their contextualization of images add

meaning, define, and determine the otherness of others, thus

making visible what by definition cannot be visible, reducing

what is irreducible and bending it to fit its own needs and

ends. This, we may add, appears to be especially true for theobservational approach, which by way of its ontological pri-

ority to a shared humanity (Grimshaw 2001:133; MacDougall

1998:258) easily precludes the possibility of something being

infinitely other. This is not to suggest that observational cin-

ema never considers the otherness of others, but that it does

so in terms of a subject-centered perspective, which only al-

lows for an otherness that the filmmaker and the audience

are already prepared for. Grimshaw and Ravetz (2009:539)

describe how observational cinema was explicitly developed

as an aesthetics that respected things for what they were, for

their irreducibility and singularity. Nevertheless, this ethical

codex is based on the unprivileged subjective filming ex-

perience of a normal human participant (Henley 2004:114).

It is this subject-centered epistemology that we find problem-

atic. For Levinas (1987:55), it is exactly the claim of a shared

humanity and a generic human perception, which succumbs

to the imperialism of the same. If indeed the other is in-

finitely other, then we cannot access the other as such. This

would, in Levinasian terms, be essentially unethical since we

cannot assume that there is a primordial sameness behind

difference. Like Merleau-Pontys normative ideal, Levinass

invisible other is a surplus, a plenitude of perspectives that

we can never actually take up. Hence, unlike the observational

claim to transcultural sameness, the argument advanced here

is that alterity itself is primary. Alterity is behind all human

relationships, and behind alterity there is nothing.

Whereas the ethics of observational cinema demands of the

filmmaker to be cautious with manipulative effects that dis-

turb the ontological primacy of a shared human identity(Grimshaw 2001:131), Levinass notion of the invisible other

requires the necessity of such disturbances, since the camera

from the outset has already reduced the others infinite oth-

erness. In the words of T. M. S. Evens (2008:xiv), We must

. . . be prepared to offer ourselves up . . . to othernessnot

to resist but instead to enhance the way in which we are

always already open to the other in spite of ourselves. What

does this imply? It must imply the sacrifice of the most pre-

cious sacred cow of observational cinema: the subject. To be

ethical in this sense is not at all to maintain a distinctive

identity or perspective. On the contrary, it involves finding

the unstable zone of continuous becoming, where perspectives

are allowed to travel and cross the threshold of perspectivalseeing. This only happens when the illusion of the camera as

an extension of human vision is broken.

Previously, we discussed MacDougalls most recent film,

Gandhis Children. Despite the fact that MacDougall as a

writer is clearly adhering to observational cinema, his film

work seems to take us in a different direction. Thus, the

ensemble of film shots in Gandhis Childrenthoroughly de-

stabilizes perceptions of what is home, not-home, security,

insecurity, joy, despair, childhood, and adulthood. By contin-

uously twisting the partial totalities offered in each camera

shot, any form of subject-centered view on the life of the boys

at the childrens shelter is left indeterminate. If we experience

a sense of commonalities of being human, the dissonancecreated through MacDougalls montage underscores that this

experience is little more than a surface phenomenon. What

we share with the children is what we think are common-

alities. Thus, the films montage counters the ever-latent dan-

ger in realist representation of attributing sameness to the

irreducible otherness of others. In our view, MacDougall as

a filmmaker here counters the transcultural ethics, proposed

in his written work, with an ethics of infinite alterity.

The ethnographic film tradition offers a number of other

examples where the mimetic disposition of the camera is



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splintered in this way by montage. One prime example is Jean

Rouchs widely debated film Les Matres Fous(1955), which

shows a haukaspirit-possession cult in Accra during British

colonial rule. Like The Ax Fight, the film emerges as a jux-

taposition of several perspectives and commentaries that do

not at all correspond in a one-to-one concordance. A wide-

spreadbut in Paul Henleys (2006:737) viewmisguided

reading of the film is that thehaukacult is a parodic resistance

and subversion of imperial power. This interpretation is

mainly evoked by Rouchs juxtaposition of a shot featuring

haukaperformers cracking an egg on the head of a statue,

presumably representing the British governor, with a shot of

the real governor wearing a white plumed helmet (Russell

1999:224; Taussig 1993: 242). Henley (2006:754), however,

finds sufficient evidence in the film footage and in ethno-

graphic descriptions on spirit possession in West Africa to

argue that, rather than an example of counterhegemonic re-

sistance, the cultic event is in fact a fertility ritual, modeled

on the North African zar cult, where ritual participants at-tempt to assimilate the power of influential figures for reli-

gious purposes. Thus, Henley (2006:743) closely evaluates the

film footage on the basis of its assumed correspondence with

historical reality along with the ethnographic literature.

But can and should a film be judged according to how

faithfully it corresponds to things and events in the actual

world? Here we have pursued an alternative view on ethno-

graphic filmmakinga view in which its task is not to mimic

social reality but rather to transcend our perception of it. A

faithful correspondence or fidelity between representation and

our human perception of actuality is not only impossible but

also unwanted. Film can express social reality only by making

it alive again through tampering with its source material.Rouch understood this, which is why he orchestrated his shots

and commentaries so as to provoke multiple, contradictory,

and dissonant readings, neither of which was allowed fully to

dominate. Thus, Les Matres Fousallows us access to the ex-

cessive mysteries of the hauka cult, exactly by rejecting any

single perspective as its interpretative framework. Indeed, this

is also the reason why Henley (2006:757) must acknowledge

that the marvelous thing about Les Matres Fous is the im-

possibility of fixating and consuming the event in any uniform

perspective.

The Place for Film and the Invisible inAnthropology

According to Hastrup (1992:21), the general purpose of an-

thropology is to expand the sociocultural worlds we live in.

The means to this end is the creation of analytical categories.

Only through such abstractions is it possible to transcend the

limitations of established forms. Marilyn Strathern suggests

that this can be done in the conjunction between deconstruc-

tive feminism and an anthropology aimed at creating ade-

quate description. She writes: If my aims are the synthetic

aims of an adequate description, my analysis must deploy

deliberate fictions to that end. . . . The question is how to

displace [our metaphors] most effectively (Strathern 1988:

10, 12).

Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (2007:

710) have recently summarized how Stratherns analytical

framework amounts to a quiet revolution against the an-

thropological axiom that people may have different world-

views but ultimately inhabit the same world. What anthro-

pology should be about, they suggest, is to upturn our own

assumptions so as to make room for imagining the possibility

of people inhabiting a multiplicity of worlds. This echoes the

Levinasian claim that respect for the others alterity should

not be equated with the mistaken view that all alterity is

derived from a shared existential ground. If informants tell

us that there is such a thing as a powerpowder, the an-

thropological exercise must be not about translating the idea

of a powerpowder into concepts we already know, but rather,

as Holbraad (2007:204) asserts, about upturning our as-

sumptions so as to make it possible for us to imagine howpowder in this world actuallyispower.

Our argument is in line with this understanding of the role

of anthropology. While these writers conceive of anthropology

mainly as a linguistic enterprise, the montage of ethnographic

films provides us with a complementary and resourceful

means of making us imagine other peoples worlds. Although

the stance of the above-mentioned authors is grounded in

the humble . . . admission that our concepts . . . must, by

definition, be inadequate to translatedifferentones (Henare,

Holbraad, and Wastell 2007:12), the work of montage that

we have advocated is based on the admission that our ordinary

vision must by definition be inadequate as a tool for under-

standing others. Although Holbraad (2007) effectively ex-plains the importance of conceptualization for experience and

that experience cannot be conceived of as separate or prior

to conceptualization, we may note that, despite his high-

pitched theoretical reasoning, the reality of powerpowder is

still hard for us to imagine. This, we argue, may in part be

caused by the fact that his analysis remains a linguistic en-

terprise and as such addresses only a narrow spectrum of our

imaginative faculties.

Indeed, as the celebrated fMRI scans of the human brain

indicate, the greater part of abstract thinking is not confined

to linguistic conceptualization, but appears to be concerned

with multiple forms of sensory abstractionparticularly, vi-

sual abstraction (Nijland 2006:3839; Roepstorff 2008:2052).Film is a medium in which we can play with and develop

such forms of abstraction. A world where powder is power

is for many an invisible world. Rather than visualizing such

a world through theoretical reasoning or by reducing it to its

visible manifestations, the work of montage that we have

argued for here is a technique for evoking that world by

maintaining its lining of invisibility. It is only in the gaps

between its visual manifestations that its magico-religious re-

ality can appear. We contend that this entails rejecting the

notion of imitating the human eye as films duty. As we have



14/21


seen, it is exactly when the mimetic dogma of the camera is

violated, when the mechanical eye detaches from our subject-

centered vision, that we intuit the invisible in its own right.

Ethnographic filmmaking provides knowledge of social reality

not by reflecting its details photographically, but by disrupting

the taking at face value of its visible facade through montage.

But although ethnographic filmmaking discovers reality

only by transcending it through cinematic manipulations, it

should not fight against its affinity to realism so hard as to

become totally abstract. This, as we have argued, leads to

nothing but obscure haze. Construction should be a means

of enhancing our understanding of social life. What is im-

portant is to strike the right balance between realism and

constructivism, simplicity and complexity, resonance and dis-

sonance. The effective image must hold these factors poised

in tension with each other, rather than subscribing single-

mindedly to any one of them. Only then can ethnographic

films push us beyond the frontiers of the visible world into

the uncharted regions of the invisible.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank David MacDougall, Peter Crawford,

Keir Martin, Ton Otto, Jakob Hgel, and the five anonymous

reviewers ofCurrent Anthropologyfor providing much-needed

criticisms. Previous drafts of the article were presented at the

European Association of Social Anthropologists Biennial

Meeting in Ljubljana, August 2008, and at the Transcultural

Montage conference at Moesgard Museum, August 2009.

Comments

Rebecca EmpsonDepartment of Anthropology, University College London, 14 Tavi-ton Street, London WC1H 0BW, United Kingdom([email protected]). 31 X 11

This fascinating article puts forward a new method for eth-

nographic filmmaking. By incorporating disruptive mo-

ments of montage (both the juxtaposition of frames, and the

arrangements of things in a single shot), filmmakers will be

able to present multiple perspectives on a single event and

guide the audience to different ways of seeing the world. Thesepossibilities are not afforded in written anthropology, which

address only a narrow spectrum of our imaginative faculties,

nor are they possible in observational filmmaking with its

emphasis on long shots that risk dulling the subtleties of the

lived world.

Clearly, what is shown in film and writing is not all there

is to an event, and Suhr and Willerslev are keen to find a

method by which to reveal what they call the invisible that

is known but is not always visible to us. A camera is certainly

not a person, but the mechanical nature of the medium, they

suggest, can be used to our advantage. Here, the intervention

of montage enables an enhanced perception of social realities.

Note the word intervention. Pure montage leads to nothing

but an obscure haze, something which Suhr and Willerslev

warn against. Instead, we need to strike the right balance

between realism and constructivism (similarity/difference,

single/multiple, linearity/disruption). An excellent review of

Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnons film The Axe Fight

(1975) illustrates the productive use of different interpreta-

tions of a single event, challenging the viewers received in-

terpretation of a film and presenting several points of view.

Two questions immediately come to mind. First, it is not

at all clear what the invisible is that the authors argue can be

revealed through this technique. Is it simply another per-

spective of an event, or is it something that is part of what

we are seeing, something we may perceive, but is not visible?

Second, how exactly can montage, as a method, reveal this

in a way that observational film cannot? If it simply amounts

to showing different perspectives of a single lamp in quicksuccession as an interlude to a story about a lamp, this is not

the same as perceiving the reason for a certain lamp existing

in a certain room at a particular moment in time. Much of

this confusion comes from a slippage between the terms per-

ception and vision. Perception is not only based on vision.

For example, I may perceive that there is some seriousness

to the situation, but this is not something visible to the human

eye. This comes from a host of other ways of knowing. And

maybe knowing is what the authors mean when they talk

of perceiving, apprehending, or anticipating the back side of

an object? Perception in this sense is about views funda-

mentally different from those given to us in ordinary per-

ception.What exactly can be revealed through this medium is not

always clear. Indeed it sometimes seems as if it is confusion

that the authors wish to highlight, so that it is through con-

fusion that a different perception in itself is achieved. Note

that they do not stress a different perception ofsomething

(that something is never clearly defined), but a different per-

ception, or way of seeing in itself. It is clear that this different

way of seeing amounts to more than the depth perception

[created by] the distance between the two eyes over the

cameras one. Maybe what they mean here is that film, as a

medium, can dislodge and unhinge our commonsense vision,

allowing for different kinds of perceptions. Yet it is not certain

how they differentiate this from postmodern forms of dis-ruption in writing.

Any kind of film is a political statement, a version and a

statement. But rather than emphasize the shared humanity

and commonality of ways of seeing (as emphasized in ob-

servational cinema), they stress the need for difference and

otherness in order to challenge our sense of vision. This is to

emphasize alterity and difference over similarity and same-

ness. Montage, they argue, can question receivedassumptions,

along the lines argued by Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell

(2007). The problem as I see it is that the means by which

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they propose this can be achieved is not in itself based on

any ethnographic underpinning. Montage is not a local mode

of displacing, disrupting, and revealing a different way of

viewing the world. In this sense, if we are to follow their

argument concerning the potential of montage for multiplic-

ity, they are proposing a single method for multiple forms of

vision, something observational cinema already achieves.

Martin HolbraadDepartment of Anthropology, University College London, 14 Tavi-ton Street, London WC1H 0BW, United Kingdom([email protected]). 31 X 11

As something of an unreconstructed iconophobe myself, I

find great merit in the way Suhr and Willerslevs ambitious

article relates sometimes rather parochial debates about the

pros and cons of ethnographic film as an anthropologicalmedium to concerns that go to the heart of anthropology as

an intellectual project. Their core argument is elegant and

clever: wedded to the ideals of observational cinema, they

show that traditional defenses of ethnographic film highlight

its ability to reveal the detail of social life as ethnographers

and ethnographic subjects alike experience it, which is so often

missed in the processes of abstraction that text-based an-

thropological analysis involves. The assumption here is that

the cameras role is to enhance the work of the human eye

so as to reveal aspects of ethnographic experience that go

unnoticed. But what if the real anthropological challenge were

that of revealing, not unnoticed aspects of lived experience,

but rather aspects of that experience that remain constitutivelyinvisible? Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, the authors identify the

ideal view from everywhere, comprising all possible per-

ceptual perspectives, as the condition of possibility for any

actual perception. Montage, which explores the tension be-

tween possible and impossible vantage points of perception,

is then proposed as a prime means for approximating this

virtual ideal. So, it is precisely because it isunlikethe human

eye that the camera can reveal the constitutively invisible

realms of human experience, by creatively disrupting ordinary

perceptions through montage.

Attractive as one may find such a paradoxical defense of

the cinematic eye as a gauge of the invisible, there are also

difficulties in the logic of this complex argument. In partic-ular, it is unclear how Merleau-Pontys thesis about the con-

ditions of possibility of vision (perception) can be transposed

onto an argument that, as it seems to me, is really about the

conditions of possibility of anthropological understanding

(conception). In fact, one may wonder whether part of the

difficulty here lies with the notion of perspective, which

seems to provide the bridge from perception to conception

in the authors syllogism. For example, are the various per-

spectives that one may (or may not) take upon a Danish lamp

in order visually to perceive it equivalent to the various per-

spectives Chagnon did (or, through montage, did not) take

upon a Yanomamo axe fight in order anthropologically to

understand it? If so, in what sense? Indeed, are questions

regarding the alterity involved in cases such as the latter,

as the authors suggest, also relevant to the conundrums of

perception such as the former? Again, how so?

Without a clearer account on this score, one is tempted to

suggest that Merleau-Pontys philosophy of perception may

not provide the best point of departure for a defense of filmic

montage as an aid to anthropological understanding. Indeed,

mainly by way of facilitating thinking on this front, I would

ask whether Merleau-Pontys friend and admirer Levi-Strauss

might not, anthropologically speaking, provide a more ob-

vious point of reference here. For it strikes me that the ways

in which the authors sing the virtues of montage as a modality

of comprehension (as opposed to mere apprehension, or, bet-

ter, as a peculiar mode of fusing the two) is remarkably similar

to Levi-Strausss famous argument about the science of the

concrete (Levi-Strauss 1966). Signs, argued Levi-Strauss, aspeculiar intermediaries between perceptions and conceptions,

are the currency of a savage thought that proceeds by endlessly

rearranging its raw materials by way of the novel juxtaposi-

tions of bricolage, exploiting the differences between them,

so as to arrive at novel possibilities of meaning. In a rather

literal sense, within the economy of filmic footage, montage

would appear to be also a form of bricolage in just this way

simply substituting image or shot for sign would appear

to take us straight back to this familiar anthropological ter-

ritory. Such a transposition, arguably, would speak directly to

Willreslev and Suhrs abiding concern with comparing the

analyticalindeed conceptualpossibilities of ethnographic

film with those of anthropological texts. Certainly, in Levi-Strausss concern with rehabilitating savage thought from ha-

bitual charges of irrationality, and the authors desire to see

film as a medium for sophisticated anthropological thinking,

there may be parallels worth exploring. Film, myth, and ritual,

then, would emerge as the most pertinent triptych for an-

thropological comparison in this context (cf. Levi-Strauss

1978, 1981).

Andrew Irving

Department of Anthropology and Granada Centre for Visual An-thropology, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, ManchesterM13 9PL, United Kingdom([email protected]). 8XI 11

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances,

declared Oscar Wilde. The true mystery of the world is the

visible, not the invisible: confirming how the study of surface

appearances is not to be concerned with the shallow, super-

ficial, and trivial. However, Wilde then cautioned, Those who

go beneath the surface do so at their peril (1992:3). In asking

if film can show the invisible or remains tied to the visible,

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Willerslev and Suhr challenge anthropology to put itself in

peril by venturing beneath the surface to elicit the invisible

dimensions of social life.

So what might such an anthropology look like? What epis-

temological and ontological adjustments are required to en-

gage with the invisible, and what counts as evidence? The

persistent relationship between vision and evidence is sug-

gested by the etymology of evidence in videre(to see). But

whenever we get under the surface, like a farmer digging in

the field, all that is revealed are further surfaces: the unseen

and the hidden rather than invisible. To what extent, therefore,

is the invisible being used in this article as a metaphor for

the unseen and unknown? Or for tacit, inchoate, or nonprop-

ositional realms of experience?

Drawing on Levinas, Willerslev and Suhr suggest any at-

tempt to understand or represent otherness, whether in text

or film, relies upon translating the Others world

Can Film Show the Invisble

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