The idea of my film is to transform anthropology,
the eldest daughter of colonialism,
a discipline reserved for those with
the power to interrogate people without it.
I want to replace that discipline with a
“shared anthropology.” This is to say,
anthropological dialogue between people
from different cultures, which for me is the social
sciences discipline of the future.
Jean Rouche, 1973

Although the “ways of seeing”, as Anna Grimshaw1 calls it, has been a central element in the transformation of the questioned and criticized anthropology from the sixties. And although scientists and artists like the great film – ethnographer Jean Rouch have experimented for decades through the image to generate new ways of approaching the knowledge of the social reality, visual anthropology in Mexico keeps on being considered scarcely a way to illustrate the work of this discipline, or is intended only as a sub-area within the academic field.

In this article, I raise the need to reconsider the visual anthropology as a completely different and experimental way of working with the cultural representation. One method that embodies a profound transformation of the destination and the anthropological perspective of practice, as no part of the distance, but the alleged dubious scientific objectivity, but the closeness and dialogue led by the ethnographer through the camera. To work from this perspective supposes comprising the representation not as illusion of reality, but as performative process of interaction between two opposite worlds, from the inscription of an interpersonal experience across the video or the celluloid.

The problematic of anthropology and visuals

On crossing to a new millennium with the impetus of a woman -at the same time so young and so old-, “the discipline of the man” questions itself from the most diverse perspectives to find what Chris Wright has described as: “The symptom of a structural weakness inside this science, an originated fragmentation, a founding division on which the entire building was originally built”2.

In the post-colonial context, anthropology has been questioned inside and outside its own academic field. Nevertheless, behind almost all of these critics seem to envision a different kind of anxiety about the unknown, perhaps close to that anxiety of the vision of the surreal, a kind of yearning for something lost in the middle of the road, something seen as inaccessible to the cultural analysis. Perhaps will it be a species of anchoring to the reality what remained missed? Or rather the opposite: perhaps an anchor to what it is beyond the reality but is a fundamental part of the same one, something for that the philosophers – artists of the European avant-garde of interwar looked for so fervently?

From my perspective, it seems modern anthropology deficiency is a fundamental connection between the “observed” subject and the “observer” subject, through the physical and emotional link of the ethnographer in his analysis of the reality. This issue has proved elusive and problematic for modern anthropology throughout the twentieth century, where perhaps lays the “fundamental division” to which Chris Wright refers. Moreover, perhaps from where the genius of Jean Rouch comes, the recently deceased film French ethnographer and visionary whose work exploited the subjective, emotional and body links of the “Fieldwork”.

On having compared the proposals of theoretical as Chris Wright, Faye Ginsburg, Jay Ruby, Fatimah Tobing Rony, among others, I have gone so far as to know by intuition a series of problems that seem to me central for the anthropological theory on the visuals today. It is a question of the relation of the image to the text, of the camera as scientific tool to the provocative artistic interpretations, the anthropological relevancy in opposition to the aesthetic qualities, the art and the science. All these ideas, to some extent contradictory, are the central themes of contemporary theorists and anthropologists to question the positivist epistemology on which is founded their discipline, and reflect on the problems encountered in recent decades because of this “bipolar” conceived Visuality within anthropology.

Is this dichotomy a result of certain type of connection lost between the diverse areas of the anthropological theory or some essential difference between the nature of the image and the text? I think we could consider a tension between the image and the methodological assumptions of an anthropology emerged since the time of Malinowsky. Who transformed the discipline to base it on the “observation”, but also broke the image of the text to give primacy to the oral work and use the picture as a tool of “record” for illustrative purposes or scientific claims. I start from the idea that even today, the “crisis of representation” is supposed to overcome and new forms of theorizing the image in the Western epistemology, anthropologists are still unable to define a unified theory for the study of the visuals within their discipline. In addition, it seems to me fundamental the facts that in the anthropological and cinematographic fields there still the pretension to generate representations “objective” or “scientific” of the social reality.

My interest focuses on the problem of ethnographic representation, specifically within the field of documentary and not on defining the borders of the key thematic of the visual anthropology as a derived discipline. However, I agree with Professor Chris Wright of the University of London that the visual anthropology can and should address a broader field of interest, on conceiving cultural relations and communication as the axis. Like this author, I think that answers must be sought within the same discipline, and without borrowing models of realistic films or documentaries as others have suggested3.

Wright, Ginsburg and Ruby propose to do of the study of the visual phenomena, and of its social production and exchange, the center of the visual anthropology. Like Wright, I believe that the visual is a central part of anthropology and therefore should not be considered only a sub-area or secondary discipline within the field of anthropology as mainstream4. Nevertheless, theoretical as Jay Ruby they still conceive an academic “ideal” field as an intellectual self-styled and restricted elite, where the “real ethnographic films” are realized only by “professional anthropologists “, who use the way to transmit the results of their studies and ethnological knowledge5.

This means first that the visuals are still regarded as a separate text or ethnological knowledge, only as a way to capture and present the knowledge and insights of the ethnographer. In this sense, I agree with Wright when he says that this type of document production could more appropriately be called “illustrated anthropology”6. Ultimately Ruby’s proposal is too ingenuousness, since in the current context of the globalization of the massive means of communication, and in particular the equipment to produce and edit digital video, it is not even possible to think about the possibility that only the professional anthropologists should realize ethnographic documentaries. Anthropologically or not, the subjects that were represented in the past are today representing themselves, without requiring the permission of school authorities. In addition, this “Media Transfer” has soared more the need for anthropology to rethink their perspectives to the representation and reflect deeply on the use of audiovisual media in the pursuit of knowledge.

As proposed by Faye Ginsburg and Chris Wright, it is necessary to devise ways and means of communication, i.e. as intermediate factors in social communication and, therefore, constantly transforming the relationship between anthropology and the study subjects. I conceive anthropological video production or ethnographic documentary, and processes of cultural representation and mediation, as processes of transformation. For Jay Ruby an ethnographic film or video would be a way to convey the knowledge that the ethnographer has obtained during his fieldwork and subsequent analysis7. However, from my perspective this project is dominated by a colonialist dynamics, even though the author speaks about producing ethnographic documentary of “participatory” type. The ideas of Ruby start from a one-way gaze of the ethnographer considering him as observer only and allowing the translation of his analysis of reality in a “scientific truth”, even if it recognizes the “socially constructed nature of reality and the nature attempt to understand any culture”8.

From my point of view, we must stop understanding the representation in a one-way perspective. We must alter the essence of this relationship between the scientist and the studied subject from a gaze that objectifies reality and therefore reduces the enormous potential of human knowledge, to start producing and interpreting reality, as Alfred Gell proposed for the analysis of art9. This approach focuses not only on produce or interprets meanings, although it may involve this level. Gell believes that it is about conceiving the relation that produces the art as a process of mediation and not just conceiving the product and analyzing it “as text”.

Since one of the central problems of visual anthropology is this kind of tension between the original text and image, I would draw on Gell’s position and extend its scheme to the analysis of reality and human behavior from the perspective of performance or action. This means, designing the process of representation as a relationship between two or more subjects, and in many directions in an emotional and therapeutic level. So the powerful element in the camera lens is transformed into its opposite, a kind of third eye or a catalyst that brings together the ethnographer with the subjects and the environment as a whole, in a formal and performative level. Perhaps this way could exceed the fragmentary condition of anthropological thought and analytical polarities that divide our discipline. However, for this we must begin to replace a dormant scientific objectivity by participating fully aware of the subjectivity of the ethnographer and his team. I mean subjectivity of the emotional and of the body kind.

The third eye or the third gaze

Fatimah Rony spoke of the third eye as a window or filter that can alter the power relationship within the anthropological practice10. However, I do not refer here to using, as her it implies, “the perspective of the savage” and seeing across his eyes as if they were a window of other who observes me. We cannot leave our bodies and voluntarily observe reality from another dimension, at least not most of us. My proposal relates more closely to the idea expressed by Barbara Myerhoff and expounded by Marc Kaminsky.

Myerhoff suggested that the researcher or documentary maker should locate a third voice as amalgam of his own voice and the voice of the subject, combined in a way that was impossible to know which of them dominated the work. In other words, to make movies where the visions from abroad (the subject) and interior (ethnologist) join to create a new perspective. Ruby notes that this would be a variation of the concept of cooperation, in which the creative authority remains in the hands of the observer11. However, from my perspective it is not just a question of authority (in terms of who edits or record the material), but how the relationship is conceived in the process of creating an ethnographic film. However, from my perspective it is not just a question of authority (in terms of who edits or records the material), but how the relation is conceived in the process of creating an ethnographic film.

For aesthetic and ethical issues I need to consider that the voices are clearly distinguishable, but the third voice or gaze can result from the interaction between two or more points of view. The third gaze is a then a kind of vision outside and inside at the same time, the result of the magic created by the dialogue that is generated by the infinite possibilities of digital video technology. Of course, the final link is in the hands of editors, rather than the subject, but if you understand the creative process through the participation and feedback from all participants, -such as Jean Rouch always worked from the method that Robert Flaherty invented in the 1920s – the unidirectional gaze becomes a scientific anthropological dialogue embodied in the image.

The idea of filmmaker Robert Flaherty to portray in the “field” what he was filming day after day with the Eskimo Nanook, and that he revealed in his laboratory at Hudson Bay, went beyond any anthropologist of his time. No matter, he “mounted” scenes and showed as well many techniques no longer used by the Innuit, or that he has developed a script with a narrative that emerged from the cinematographic world and changed the name of the main “actor”. Flaherty’s experience collaborating with Nanook, and the master’s own emotions in that movie relation, can be seen, I think, in the beautiful and genuine laughter from almost all the participants. Flaherty’s camera among the Innuit, as that of Jean Rouch among the spirits of the Hauka, is intimate, subjective and deep. Is a catalyst camera that goes beyond the representation to produce a transformative experience and ritual: the Cine Trance.

Ethnographic film as a ritual process

Chris Wright says that there is a sort of envy of anthropologists to today’s artists, and although some European and American artists have appropriated the aura, and even some methods of anthropology, the opposite has not happened very often12. At the same time, receives a constant effort in the anthropological field by separating the ethnographic and aesthetic value of any film, as if such a separation was possible from the production process itself, which is not so.

I think that to overcome the “crisis of representation” should start from a totally different idea: Do not try to split the image and text, or the scientific relevance of the aesthetic qualities, but these pairs design elements intertwined in a complex reality as the instruments that compose a melody or the various agencies of nature that produce life. From the perspective of the new physics and chaos theory, this is much more logical, because if an electron in its path is affected by the observer leading scientific experiment, more so the ethnographer that “registers” it necessarily affects a human process13. The recognition of the subjective ethnographer conducting an audiovisual document should not be considered a problem without solution, but a catalyst or provocative reality of being registered.

My interest lies in clarifying an idea outlined in the field of visual anthropology for some time, though not very defined. This idea seems to be the need to redo or rethink the visual anthropology to extend not only to analyze the styles and techniques of visual research, but the study of human interactions in its broadest sense. Based on the ideas of Gell, Wright, Ginsburg, Artaud and Rouch I anchor the idea of the need to transform the anthropological perspective to theorize representation as action. i.e. from the perspective of the performance, as a relationship between different cultures or body and as a process of cultural mediation, which serves as a bridge to unite different worlds or conceptual universes, or to connect concepts previously considered as pairs of opposites within fragmented Western epistemology. In this case, I understand the representation as a cultural process where the ethnographer and the subjects participate to intertwine their diverse perspectives and cultural practices. To exchange or share their visions of the world such as Jean Rouch says and that it may or may not be (often is the case, given the difficulties of the post) in an ethnographic documentary.

The concept of representation as a performance takes from Antonin Artaud the need to leave to some extent, the very idea of representation to develop anthropological practice as a ritual process of transformation. Abandon the idea of representation as an illustration or “illusion” of reality to conceive it as reality itself and not as product, but as process. I start from the idea of performance as a cultural process and not solely as an artistic action. That is, do not take into account the concept of performance from the perspective of art history, but from the so-called performance studies, a discipline that examines the cultural processes (from folk dances to the football or policy) from the anthropological perspective and whose leading exponents are Victor Turner and Richard Schechner14. This means that I do not mean the ethnographer as a “performer” running a fine art, but the performance of the ethnographer as the very process of production of the film.

This means not conceive of texts as descriptions of pictures, but imagine a documentary process where the image, sound and other aspects of life play a crucial role. For a process in which Western thought is dominated by rational logic, it could be processed through the third eye, the look resulting from the intertwine of two or more visions: that of the ethnographer and his team and the subjects and their communities. I propose to conceive the process of representation as performance related to the idea of Antonin Artaud of total art, where the body or the bodies involved are related to each other and transform into different levels, but all of them intimate and profound15.

Towards a corporeal knowledge

As Fatimah Rony would say, we need to understand the images in a new way, “a form that can bring the people who live outside their captivity and silence so far, one that recognizes its performance rather than the empirical representation of primitive lost in a picturesque timelessness”16. In this sense, we need to design our work in the production of anthropological representations from a very different perspective to that presented in films such as The Daily motorcycle of Walter Salles. This author although tries to show a revolutionary and socially committed point of view with the marginalized people in Latin America, does not exceed the level of representation quaint and timeless indicated by Fatimah Rony, as symbolically gives, to the indigenous that represents, the character of passive victims lost in an immemorial past.

To overcome this colonial aspect of the process of ethnographic representation is necessary to not only give voice and authority to the subjects, but also primarily affect the direction of unilateral practices of representation for the design process as a mutual transformation of bifocal relation. A conscious process of social transformation as proposed by Ginsburg17, where there is a risk to the ethnographer and not only for the represented subject: the risk of being touched by the experience.

It is not a question of being paternalistic, but more positivist positions like that of Jay Ruby still assume that only the scientists, particularly anthropologists, have the capacity to analyze and understand other cultures. I do not think to affirm that the natives could realize ethnographic movies, unless they are prepared like ethnographers, but undoubtedly, they can produce real and reflective approaches on their own cultures. And if they are prepared with the basic skills of video production, undoubtedly they can present their point of view of the world and of their communities in the mass media; as demonstrated the works of Terence Turner with the kayapo of Brazil or of Luis Lupone between the women of the community of San Mateo del Mar, Oaxaca.

Today, despite the fact that the cultural authorities assume that many Indians still live in the lost ancient and primitive past that Fatimah Rony refers. And Walter Salles shows as a current Latin American reality, young otomi people in the Mezquital del Valle in Hidalgo, as surely in many others, operate by themselves digital video cameras to document the performance of various ceremonies within their communities (fieldwork carried out in collaboration with Dr. Fernando Lopez Aguilar, in process).

I think we should realize that, we miss something very important in our outlook on the world and different cultures with which we interact. The fragmentation of western epistemology, in particular the social sciences, as well as our global reality of conflict, have to do with a division or separation from our perspective to relate to all that surrounds us. ¿Are we really so different and are we really separated from other human beings, animals, plants and from the cosmic conscience?

There is much to learn from indigenous communities in the world, but we must first try to experience again the connection between our bodies and emotions with reality (both material and non-material) that surrounds us. I think that in the search of this re-connection with everything that surrounds us, the new exact sciences have glimpsed in the theory of the chaos, we can find something of the magic lost in the XIX^th century with the advent of the “natural magic” of the photography. The paradox is that such magic can be restored from the same photograph.

The pale moon: avant-garde, anthropology and vision

The ethnographic truth was for
Marcel Mauss subversive, without
rest of the superficial Realities.
His principal target was to discover,
in his famous phrase, many “dead moons”
in the firmament of the reason.
(James Cliffors, On Ethnographic
Surrealism)

According to Marcus and Myers, “the art and anthropology are rooted in a common tradition, at a critical distance of modernity from which both are part”18. However, if the relation between these disciplines has been intense during the last twentieth century, since the above-mentioned authors’ show, at the same time they admit that the borders between both have never been clear. The idea of a certain tension or contradictory relation of the anthropologists with the art -in particular with regard to the poetry and his relation with the image in the ethnographic cinema-. This idea made me think that in the definition of new paradigms of representation for the twenty-first century it would be necessary to consider the possibility of recognizing not anthropology of the art but an art of the anthropology.

Throughout the last century, the western world has recognized the existence and validity of different scopic regimes or ways to see and interpret the “other”. And the idea of reality as a cultural construction, which owes much to the work of the Surrealists and other avant-garde artists in the interwar period in France, and the study of art from diverse cultures in ways that they promoted in a passionate and poetic way. Indeed, if in recent decades the social disciplines crossed the so-called “crisis of representation”, which Martin Jay calls “ocular centric crisis of the western world”, aroused by the horrors of wars that confronted Western civilization with its most intimate contradictions. To some extent can be seen that the same crisis was extended until the last decades of the twentieth century and today continues to affect the “visual anthropology”.

According to Anna Grimshaw, a basic paradox or an underlying ambivalence exists in the relationship between anthropology and modern visuals. This discipline that Anna Grimshaw calls visual via has a direct tie with certain visual skills of observation. At the same time, the anthropology has shown throughout the twentieth century the features of an ocularfobic twist, with the marginalization of visual technologies in the practice field and the relegation of the visual material to an illustrative or peripheral role in the generation of ethnographic knowledge. “What she conceives of as a rejection of the explicit recognition of the role of vision in the practice field, involved in the Malinowsky revolution, was also inseparable from the cultivation of a distinctive “ethnographic eye”19.

The observation was central to this revolution in the fieldwork started by Malinowsky, but at the same time, British anthropology has transmitted to the young students a deep skepticism towards the photography and visual anthropology, art and material culture”20. According to Grimshaw, for the anthropology the images appear as “the tangible links towards a Victorian past of which the modern ethnographers were so eager to get rid off”. She argues that the images were designed and conceived as “seductive, dazzling, deceptive, fallacious or illusory”. This exaggerated response, which Lucien Taylor called “iconofobia”, represents for Grimshaw the declaration of a puritanical spirit that runs at the bottom of the anthropology as modern project21.

The ambivalence surrounding vision within modern anthropology may be considered to be a reflection of a broader intellectual climate, what Martin Jay called the “crisis of the ocularcentrism”. He suggests that until the twentieth century vision within Western culture enjoyed a privileged status as a source of knowledge about the world. Sight was elevated as the most noble of the senses. Over the course of the last hundred years, however Jay traces the systematic denigration of vision by European intellectuals22.

In this process, the work of surrealist Ethnographers, (as Clifford calls them), as Marcel Mauss and Michel Leiris, and avant-garde artists such as Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud, had a central role in questioning the absolute authority of the Western vision and rationality in its relation with (and interpretation of) other cultures. This question was developed during the decades of 1920 and 1930 in France, based on a deep relationship between anthropology and art avant-garde. Their influence can be traced to the filmmakers of “new wave”, which produced several exercises of experimental ethnography through the film image until very recent times, as for example Jean Rouch in the ethnographic field and Chris Marker in the cinematographic area.

Even if the emerging fields of modern anthropology and ethnology were further differentiated into 1937, as Clifford explains23, postmodernism finally topple the authority of intellectual practices in various human sciences, primarily to generate various forms of skepticism towards rhetoric and practices of representation24. For anthropology in particular, postmodernism has meant the discrediting of the term “primitive” as an appropriate category for building and interpreting cultural differences. For Anna Grimshaw the key to this disruption was a destabilization of the categories that showed the difference or cultural “otherness” as something immutable, systematic and interpretable. This provoked the need to rethink the discourse or rhetoric to interpret and represent other cultures and the need to renegotiate the institutional authority of the Western anthropology to represent others.

This illegitimate has absorbed some of the aesthetic practices of modernist avant-garde, as the techniques of collage and concern for the topic of performance25. Therefore, what Marcus and Myers o Nichols call the “ethnographic avant-garde”, constantly labeled as “postmodernist” by anthropologists, seems to be an extension of the work developed by the surrealists in the Thirties. In addition, even if today it remains as a minority inside the practices of anthropological research, at the same time this type of work has influenced clearly a fundamental point of the problems that the anthropology faces up to in the contemporary world26.

This “science” faces today the interpretation of “cultures of border, hybrids, fragments and the inability to move the cultural differences” through “objective” interpretation or of indisputable authority. Therefore, the discipline cannot work more in terms of “whole cultures of extreme difference, which codes and structures may be subject to a perfect translation”27. Even if the observer, who performs a scientific experiment, as demonstrated by quantum physics, affects the movement of a subatomic particle in its trajectory, the incidence of human subjectivity is inevitable in any representation.

In this sense, the experimental work conducted by avant-garde ethnographers as Jean Rouch can be sees as a response to the postmodern crisis of representation within anthropology. While the recent festivals, conferences and tributes made on his behalf show a belated recognition of his importance as a precursor to a new way of approaching the representation and cultural interpretation. The work of the deceased French ethnographer has a strong connection with that of surrealistic ethnographers mentioned by Clifford. Among them Marcel Mauss tried to establish forms different from approximation and comprehension of the world that were not based on rhetorical rational structures, styles and realistic narratives or on constructions of closed schemes. However, this was founded on juxtapositions and poetical revelations that were constructing random interactions, any more in the style of the themes generated by the new theories of complexity.

Now then, the current ambivalent relation of the anthropology with the visuals, as well as in relation with the poetics and the style or perspective of the author, has much to see with an internal problem of the discipline: Since Malinowski’s time, however, anthropology has become more and more scientific. Vivid descriptions of the sensorial of ethnographic situations have been largely overshadowed by a dry, analytical prose28. In words of Chris Wright, “to admit the alternative of visual methods can threaten the form in which a lot of work is legitimized inside the contemporary anthropology”29. According to Bill Nichols, would have to do with the inclusion or exclusion of ethnographic film within the “discourse of sobriety” that is, authorize interpretations of the rational gaze and sound supposedly “objective” of the social science.30.

Grimshaw affirms that the visual anthropology is still considered as a marginalized sub discipline, this also has granted it a place for the experimentation31. The experimentation threatens the established rules of the fieldwork, based on an “impartial” or “unattached” observation, and therefore it relegates the emotional side of the ethnographer experience to what Nichols calls “anthropological unconscious”32.

This may be the reason that so many ethnographic films are so criticized by the anthropologists of the mainstream, as the contemporary documentary is increasingly committed to the issues of performance, and therefore with the self-representation or action itself, where the experience and identity of the filmmaker is part of their own representation33. Also struggles to open the borders between the various styles, disciplines and multiple voices that interact with the filmmaker or ethnographer34. But if the “ethnographic documentary is being attacked, it is only because it is in good shape and is finding its place between the men”, as said Jean Rouch in 1973.35

Nowadays young anthropologists are attracted to experimenting with visual techniques because they offer a completely different way to communicate and get closer to others. If surrealistic ethnographers of the thirties used the poetry, the visual arts and the ethnography to criticize and to transform their own culture, -on juxtapose and compare it well with others and try to find the lost magic connection that could link the loose ends of the understanding between the Occident and the “others”-, ethnographic film and video may well become an important means to humanize the discipline and engage people in a concrete manner, as suggested by Grimshaw36.

On the following pages, I will analyze the relationship between anthropology, video art and avant-garde art, to find that magical connection that could have been lost in the early twentieth century with the positivist use of the photography as a creator of illusions for the science. We will see how the artists and ethnographers in France fought to find the way that was leading them to recovering the lost connection with the sacred in their relations with the diverse cultures. It is to say, the form in which these surrealistic ethnographers looked for a way that was leading them to “to sharing the anthropology”, as Rouch proposed in the seventies.

The origin of a romance: the photography and the taxidermist gaze in the modern vision

For Fatimah Rony, a women theorist of the image, the photographs taken by Felix-Louis Regnault in the Ethnographic Exhibition in Paris (1895) are the paradigm of the anthropological representation of the “other” like a body without an identity, a colonized body, depersonalized. Rony considers those images of the French ethnologist among the first ethnographic representations with racially charged glanze; it generated a kind of internal division or break in the “other”, the represented subject37. To this author, the photographic camera or the screen act as a veil or filter that allowed the “other” to be a different person, to have certain conscience on the violently and objective character of this “otherness” “mechanical” gaze. Rony says, “The veil allows for clarity of vision, even as it marks the site of socially mediated self-alienation”38.

In Regnault sequences, called chronophotographies, this “pioneer” of visual anthropology “captured” the African performers while doing their everyday activities. In these images are exposed for the first time the construction of the “other” as an European cultural and colonial representation: in them the African “beings” were “exhibited” and conceived only as “bodies”, without identity or cultural structure that was supporting them. As in other “native village” displays at world’s fairs, these West African performers who danced, and conducted animal sacrifices and other rituals for coin-throwing French spectators, were inscribed in film in order to study the language of gesture, the language of race39. This article was based on the analysis of an extract of the proto-cinema, in which an African woman walks next to a French man to compare their different ways of moving.

The racial gaze to which Rony refers becomes evident in a Regnault’s photography in which an African man transports an European sitting on his back. This way, in these first series of the precursor photographies of the ethnographic cinema, not only register in the movie a racial construction of the “otherness”, but at the same time there was registered the scientific “evidence” of a political relation of colonial control.

Felix-Louis Regnault was one of these “scientists” who were considering first the “documentary” value of the camera and its potential to generate “evidence” or scientific “proofs” which possibility of being analyzed repeatedly was considered essential for its legitimacy “as representation of the real thing”. Through this kind of ethnographic exhibits and other museum collections, in France as well as in England, the perspective of evolutionary anthropology was developed or induced within the population of the time, to tilt towards the feelings of an imperial type of national identity.40

To reduce the Africans to pieces of museum and to expose them with their cultural objects in Europe, out of their proper context original and enclosed in abstract spaces, aseptic and foreign to their “world”, it was a way of appropriating of their lives and material culture to sell it in Europe as “commodities”. It was also a way of defining social roles and responsibilities in the colonial world, among Europeans, develop a sense of “racial” superiority, while the consciousness of the colonized was the feeling of inferiority. It was a form of cultural appropriation developing in the colonist the idea to possess this “another” subordinated humanity. Thus, they were “exposed as ‘the other’, different, monstrous beings, with no history, frozen in an ancient and primitive past, and yes, why not? Wild”41.

In this positivist world, culture was conceived as a spectacle and ethnography worked to produce the necessary “conceptual framework” to justify both the “colonial entertainment” and the spirit of ownership and European collections, as the means to educate civilized men with “scientific” representations of “exotic” and subordinate cultures. This was a materialistic way of conceiving objects and knowledge. Positivism moves knowledge, by way of critique, into the realm of the practical, of knowing what objects do, and through experimentation and technology, of manipulating them to control their behavior in relation to human ends42 [European course].

A western discourse of knowledge is then organized based on an apparent binary opposition between “savagery” and “civilization”, “disease” vs. “normal” and so on43. In the eyes of the nineteenth century taxidermy representation of the “other” was a fragmented illusion, exposed by the museum curators in a positivist manner totally alienated or out of their original context, giving it a monstrous character that was essential to its marketing as an “exotic piece.”

This “taxidermy” process, as applied to an eagle dissected into a museum of natural history, killed the “magic” or energy of the original objects and subjects exposed, destroying their ritual power and its “wonderful presence” by reorganizing and exposing them in empty, controlled and aseptic spaces. These people considered only as involuntary social performers, were transformed into European illusions of their own original worlds. Photography, like most illusionism is a demonstration of a technical power to transform the material of the world into representation. It is an experience of command and control, in which rational modern organization (technique, management, design, calculation) can muster the world into the most effective illusions.44 The modern vision, the disillusionment of Western ethnography as a “spectacle of the races”45, transformed the images of Africans through the “natural magic of photography”46 in the flat representation where the identity of these people and I would say their dignity, disappeared or was “trapped” within the veil produced by the “taxidermic eyes” of science. The art of science and anthropological lens collaborate in this process of ownership and control of the image of the other.

In photography, science and art come together in a rather different technical accomplishment- artistry, technique deployed both to transform material, but also to signify the power to transform material, knowledge of appearances (positive science) used to transform appearances into realities. (…) A use of realism to transcend the real, and efface its boundaries with the unreal; to produce magic, yet a magic which is known to be the accomplishment of science; to transform science into the cultural form of magic47.

The appropriation of objects and bodies of those “other people” on the part of ethnographers and corridors of art and in its reorganization and new significance ethnographic exhibits or samples, extracted the magic power of those original beings, and through the power the “diorama” or film delivered to the European public a new and different “colonial reality”. In this sense, the representation was in fact, -not only by an unfounded fear of the primitive” – was the kidnapping of its magic or original power, their identity killed and transformed into a domestic and commercial experience of the exotic “otherness”. The colonial system justified its business as “positive science” and art exhibitions at the service of education. A process that Martin Jay explains how the disenchantment of the Western views, and against which the Surrealists would react after the First World War. Jean Rouch was affirming that

… but from the beginning the camera has shown itself to be a thief of reflections. The workers leaving Lumières´ factories scarcely paid attention to the small crank-box camera, but a few days later when they attended the presentation of these brief films, they suddenly became conscious of an unknown magic ritual. They experienced that ancient fear of fatal contact with ones double48.

The only difference between those European workers “captured” by the Lumiere and the “ethnographic specimens,” “captured” by scientists as Regnault or Haddon, was that the African or aboriginal “models” could never return to see the images stolen from them.

The surrealistic rupture: the search of the third eye

“In the twenties and thirties ethnography and surrealism in France were in close proximity”49. The traumatic experience of the war left the Europeans of 1920 with a feeling of having lost the major certainties in life. The belief in rational thinking and modern technologies of vision was profoundly destabilized. The war broke up with the idea of reality as something given, natural and familiar, and “being European” was violently separated from their rational bonds, free to discover new meanings and resonances in all things.

When all that the soldier could see was the sky above and the mud below, the traditional reliance on visual evidence for survival could no longer be easily maintained. The constriction of vision eliminated most of those signs that allow individuals to collectively order their experience in terms of problems to be solved in some kinds of rational sequence. Naturally, this chaotic world was judged entirely on the basis of the individuals own perspective, a perspective that mobilized deeply layered anxieties, animistic images and surprising and unbidden associations; the return of all of the demons seemingly repressed by the “civilizing process”, which was grounded to a significant extent in the domination of the dispassionate gaze50.

As the French intellectuals’ reason:

Postwar reconstruction would require the restoration of a unified scopic regime, which would be compatible with the disciplined collectivist society they saw emerging from the ashes of the conflagration. This reconstruction would contain the more explosive and disintegrative implications of their work51.

For the transformation of the basic beliefs of his contemporaries regarding the rationality and objectivity of the Cartesian perspective, the surrealists refused the direct relationship between reality and vision; organize their search for a new vision in the darkness, irrationality and dreams. Defining reality in terms of material reality, as in the eyes of the disenchanted positivist picture, it was no longer possible52. The work of the Surrealists drew on the most bizarre juxtapositions of images and associations with transgressor sexual symbolic messages, trying to break the idea of Western thought as a building attached to the reason and proceeding from the powers of light of the Greek Apollonian tradition53. Given this reaction against the rational, in particular Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud tried to contact a different source to find their own vision and interpretation of a reality that was not related to the rationality or the light, but to the shades and the darkness.

As Susan Sontag says, “Artaud believed that the modern conscience suffered from lack of shadows. The remedy was to stay in the cave of Plato but doing better performances”54. This reference to Plato’s cave as a metaphor for the human mind and the ideas and images projected on one of its walls, as in a film; makes direct reference to the idea of Artaud on art as a revolutionary therapy or weapon that should go beyond the representation of reality to criticize and transform it, like his contemporaries’ conceptions about it. This search linked Artaud with Georges Bataille, as both sought inspiration in a philosophy opposed to thinking of the Apollonian Greek world: the Gnostic tradition.

This secret society has developed at the dawn of Christianity ritual performances that started looking for the transforming capacity of dark and unknown forces within ourselves, as the divinity and knowledge could be found within the principles of darkness. The transformer power of Gnostic thinking was recovered by Bataille and Artaud, who conceived the art -perhaps because they needed to use it like that- as a catalyst, therapeutic form, and as a tool to transform themselves and to revolutionize the decadent Western society, to build a new man from the conscious destruction of the previous one.

For Bataille this man was one who had escaped from the prison of the rational mind and had met with a burst of death and rebirth. It was not a man, nor was a god. His stomach was the maze that he had been lost in, and lost himself in it. Bataille said of this new man: “I discover myself being him, in other words, a monster”55.

These ideas inspired the surrealists in the mythological stories of the African tribes investigated by their contemporaries, ethnologists as Michel Leiris and Marcel Mauss, who undoubtedly influenced each other. In their search for answers and alternatives to the cultural debacle of the West, the surrealists sought to find in other cultures their own lost identities, precisely in the “colonized,” “the other”, the “primitive.”

They looked for the magic of “other” that their modern world had caught in the ethnographic images. If they recognized themselves as monsters, they could now relate to “others” dominated and photographed in a very different way. In their search for a new dimension of the visual that could lead to a revolutionary and transgressor art to the West, the Surrealists – particularly Bataille- returned to a concept common to several cultures: the third eye, also called the pineal eye.

The third eye had a main role in the philosophy of Descartes. For this, the eye in the middle of the forehead was a gland, not a vestige of ocular previous evolutionary stages, which would be well understood only by the science of the nineteenth century. However, significantly, he had given it a key role in transforming the visual experience of the two physical eyes, to the unified and coherent vision of the human mind and soul together. The pineal gland was then the seat of the rational intellect. In contrast, Bataille invented a phantasmagorical anthropology that was facing the pineal gland against the two eyes of the daily sight and the rational vision of the eye of the mind56.

For this surrealist poet “opening” of the third eye was not easy, as all paths to enlightenment, could be a dangerous and perhaps painful experience. The artist, like the child in an African ritual, was initiated in Gnostic pre-theatrical rites in which he should remain transformed forever. Artaud proposed something similar in his theater of cruelty, and this cruelty would throw Artaud to the labyrinths of his own folly.

In 1930, André Breton57 expelled Bataille from the surrealist movement, while a few years before Artaud separated from the movement58. Although in both cases was due to political differences, the breakdown is related to an attitude of both artists to society and the possibilities of its transformation. Bataille and Artaud were criticized for being subversive extremely negative, especially in the case of Bataille, for being “interested in the vilest and corrupt” and “indifferent to anything useful”59.

Starting from the idea of the Gnostics that only a complete loss or destruction of “being” could create the potential for a later revival of the society, Bataille and Artaud opposed to the surrealists and their eyes that combined Marxist and romantic ideas to revolutionize the West. In their quest for a truly revolutionary art, they merged the concept of the third eye with the prophetic traditions of the East to adopt the image of the “seer”60. But in contrast to Bataille — who would keep on developing the ” theory of another group “from references to the work of ethnologists as Marcel Mauss and Lèvi-Straus-, Artaud was deeply Gnostic and self-educated and worked on multiple fronts. As a painter, poet, critic and politicized writer, playwright and theorist of theater and film, great actor, and screenwriter of arguments impossible, Artaud would be very frustrated by the development of sound movies, for he had conceived the silent movies as a form of radically alter the relation between image and text. Artraud proclaimed in a 1933 essay called “The Premature Senility of the Film”, “The world of the cinema is a dead world, illusory and truncated. We must not expect of the cinema to restore to us the Myths of the man and the life of today”61.

Antonin Artaud: Drama of Life

The modern authors can be recognized for
their efforts to destabilize, their
will not to be morally useful to the
community, by their inclination to present
themselves not as social critics,
but as visionaries, adventurers and
spiritual outcasts of society.
Susan Sontag, 1988.

Antonin Artaud (1896-1947) was not interested, like the Surrealists, in the modernist attempt to rescue a new visual order of the collapse and destruction of the old Cartesian Perspectivalism62. He himself was a protagonist of a play alive, the epic tragedy of the sinking of the western thought. His theater and cinematographic theory were constructed, as all his work, as a collection of fragments that were auto-cancelled and contradicted to themselves, in a constant struggle. The life and work of Artaud is a metaphor for the possibilities and contradictions of the modern society. It is a deliberate attempt of a “self-cancellation”63 thought or a self-destructive logic and inexhaustible that can never be transcended64.

It was for a misunderstanding that Artaud subscribed fervently to the surrealistic challenge of destroying the limits imposed by the reason on the conscience and on the surrealistic faith in the access on a major conscience provided by the dreams, the drugs, the “insolent” art and the antisocial behavior. For him, Surrealism was the “revolution” applied to all types of thoughts, but soon found the formula of surrealism as other type of confinement”.65

Artaud derived from the surrealism the perspective that was linking his own and perennial psychological crisis with what Breton was calling “the general crisis of the conscience”. But while the surrealists were aware of the joy, freedom and pleasure, Artaud was “aware of the hopelessness and moral battle”66. Artaud conceived in Western society as a castrating and decadent world, a world stupefied by the illusions of the cinema. Movies, he argued, are murdering us with second-hand reproductions which, filtered through machines, cannot unite with our sensibility, have maintained us for ten years in an ineffectual torpor, in which all our faculties appear to be foundering.67

Conceive of representation “as an abyss (…) inextricably and maliciously linked to social and religious institutions”68. For Artaud, the representation as virtual reality or not-reality was a way to kill the “real world” of things, was a “dead zone”, a “space trash”.69 For this reason his work focused on the reconnection of art with life and magic, a connection that had been lost in the modern world by the use of colonial representation in science and film, but could be recovered in the rituals and myths traditions of “primitive” and the Eastern cultures. Artaud combined the Gnostic ideas of a necessary ritual-theater experience -that could hit Europe and turn the sensitivity as a plague-, with the rituals of Balinese dance-drama and Tarahumara dances through the “peyote”, to find magical connection with the conscience of the “other” that the West had lost through the “positive science”.

He believed in art as a weapon capable of releasing the vital power of man in the repressed unconscious. But his conception of art, which “took borrowed ideas” and concepts of ritual drama of Greece (probably derived from the rituals of possession of so-called Corybantes)70, was a violent and cruel design, in which none of the actors or the audience could leave unharmed. For Artaud, the theater of cruelty was the solution to the social suffocation of the West, as he opened a space of transformation in which people could be reinstated to their own life and the poetry that is beyond the poetic text.71

The other surrealist ethnography: Bataille-Mauss

As Artaud sought in the rituals and ancient traditions of performance the key to discovering a new way to cause chaos in Europe and change their cultural preconceptions, Georges Bataille inspired his work by the ethnologist Marcel Mauss, founder of the Institute of Ethnology in Paris (1925). However, in a sense both Artaud and Bataille developed at the same time art and ethnography as cultural critique. In a magazine edited by Bataille as a forum for dissenting views (he had finished with the surrealists), ethnography and art collided in a semiotic conception of culture, composed of artificial codes, ideological identities and objects susceptible to inventive recombination and juxtaposition.72

Documents was called this collection of radically different visual collages in radical combinations: “Educated art” combined with enormous photography of big toes, folk crafts in opposition to covers of Fantômas (a famous French comic), sets of Hollywood against African masks of carnival, melanesias, pre-Columbian and French, chronic of concerts against descriptions of the Parisian trace, etc..

Documents note the use of ethnographic juxtaposition with the purpose of disrupting the common symbols […] His intent was to break all conventional bodies -of objects or identities- that produce what Roland Barthes called “the effect of reality”. In this strange magazine of visual anthropology, archaic and exotic possibilities were seen as something never ready to confirm any of the gaps opened in the Western order of things.73

Later, Bataille and other artists and ethnographers created an alternative forum to the work in the newly opened Museum of Man, where according to Clifford:

[…] the disruptive and creative game of the categories and human differences, articulated by the surrealistic artists, was getting lost in the consolidation and exhibition of an ethnographic stable knowledge. The College of Sociology was intended to integrate the scientific rigor with personal experience in the study of cultural processes[…] The founders of the School were concerned with those ritual moments where personal experience may find collective expression, moments when the cultural order is broken and rejuvenated.74 Leiris, a member and founder of the newspaper L’Afrique Fantôme (1934), sharply questioned certain distinctions between scientific practices “subjective” and “objective”. Why, he wondered, are my own reactions, my dreams, my body reactions and everything else parts of little importance “data” or “evidence” results of the work process? In the School of Sociology he foresaw the possibility of a type of ethnography analytically rigorous but poetic, focused not on the “other” but in one, with its unique system of symbols, rituals and social topography.75

Contemporary surrealist ethnography: Jean Rouch and cine-trance

Paul Stoller has pointed out the relationship between the ideas of Artaud and the French ethnographer Jean Rouch, as both tried to transform their viewers and vie for their cultural preconceptions to face European ethnocentrism, their repressed racism and latent primitivism.

Artaud wanted to transform its viewers uncovering their unconscious through the presence of visceral sound and image, of their flesh and blood. He wanted to revert the theater to what André Schaeffner (1965) called the “pre-theater, a ritualized arena of personal transformation, the ritual of a theater.76

As the life project of Artaud, Jean Rouch focused his work on the idea of changing the political dimensions of representation, particularly in transforming the cultural preconceptions of the West on the “other” through the ethnographic film. Focused like surrealist Ethnographers in the magic of rituals as arenas for social transformation and exchange, Rouch developed a tradition of visual anthropology that linked the influence of idiosyncratic “social scientists” as Leiris and Marcel Mauss, with the work of experimental filmmakers such as Vertov and Flaherty. Artaud and Rouch tried to establish a different relationship with the “other” with the “subject” and the audience, avoiding the role of passive observers to try to create an action where all participants were processed through the experience, as in a path of initiation. Les Maitre Fous (Mad Masters), the famous film of Rouch, is the perfect example of ritualistic and surrealistic ethnographic film, which Clifford called the ethnographic avant-garde.

This author argues that the surrealistic elements of the modern ethnography tend to go unnoticed by science, which sees it committed to the reduction of inconsistency instead of — simultaneously — in his production. Clifford wonders if not every ethnographer is a kind of surrealistic, a re-inventor and prestidigitator of realities.77 In fact the work of Jean Rouch and Chris Marker today might be called surrealist ethnography, or a “shuffle reality”, particularly the documentary of Marker Sans Soleil (1983), comparing a very personal style of a travel journal between Africa and Japan.

At the same time, Rouch’s ideas regarding the experience of an ethnographic film, as a bizarre state of transformation in the filmmaker (together with his camera as an extension of his body) or what he called “cine-trance” , “by analogy with the phenomena of possession”78. Reminds me of the desires of Artaud to live experiences that could beat and transform the own consciousness, and through it the fragmented consciousness of his contemporaries by connecting with the “other”; the ever dominated and forgotten in a kind of ritual and enlightening experience.

For Rouch, the response to the postmodern crisis of representation is that the ethnographer: “is finally coming down from his ivory tower; his camera, his tape recorder, and his projector have led him — by way of a strange initiation path- to the very heart of knowledge and, for the first time his work is not being judged by a thesis committee but by the very people he came to observe”.79 In this way, for him the media were a remarkable technical feedback between the observer and the observed, so the process conceived as an audiovisual counter-gift.

Through this relationship, – based on the work of the pioneer on participant observation, Robert Flaherty,- where the recording process is accompanied by feedback generated by the projection in the field of recorded material. The anthropologist no longer works as an entomologist who observes his subject as if he is an insect, but rather as if this was a challenging process of mutual understanding and dignity.

Because we are people who believe in that tomorrow’s world, this world that we are in the process of building, will only be viable if it recognizes the differences between various cultures and if we do not deny their dignity by trying to convert them into images of ourselves. To accomplish this we must learn to know these cultures, and to acquire this knowledge there is no greater tool for ethnographic film.80

Conclusions

Marcus and Myers argue that in the last decades of the twentieth century the tradition of cultural criticism in France -represented by philosophers like Derrida, who can connect with ethnographers and artists from the mid-thirties, as Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille- developed the main criticism of the anthropological concepts of representation, and demonstrated that ideas such as “primitive” are cultural constructions of the Western imagination. According to them, this kind of construction or discursive practices “to construct a difference” were destabilized in the postmodern world, where “the others” are flooded with products and cultural uses of the West.81

But this tradition of cultural criticism and the undermining of Western categories, generated by the positive emotion of transgression proposed by philosophers such as Bataille, have been central in discussions on the representation and the image that threaten contemporary anthropology as undesirable spirits. The elements of surrealist collage, the juxtaposition and the emotional side of the ethnographic work as a personal experience debated and rethought in the field of visual anthropology as a form of ethnographic approach to knowledge. I agree with Anna Grimshaw that the media may well be an important element to “humanize our human discipline”. And as emphasized Rouch: “As long as an anthropologist-filmmaker , out of scientism or ideological shame, hides himself behind a comfortable sort of incognito, he will ruin his films irreparably and they will join the documents in archives which only the specialists see”.82

Of course, there are still anthropologists who insist on the production of “ethnographic” documents specifically designed as documents aimed at “social science”, in the tradition of Margaret Mead. However, more to “share” the anthropology and reconstitute visual anthropology as a field of creative experimentation, free from unnecessary tension between science and the image. We must begin by recognizing the power and validity of the various voices that are overlooked by the “other side” and use the camera as a bridge that connects us with the “other” and not a weapon of power to dominate their identity. Perhaps it is possible to imagine the video camera as this “pale moon” or that “third eye”, “lost in the firmament of the reason” that the surrealist ethnographers aspired to open. That poetic mirror that could help us regains the connection to the lost magic of “others.”

The Neo-Zapatista movement in the southeast of Mexico has been in the last years a kind of “smoky mirror”, like the third eye of the surrealistic ethnographers, which was not looking for the authorized look of the science to know and to dominate the “other”, but part of a poetical look that resides in the heart of the indigenous memory. The “sup” Marcos has built over the past ten years a media representation full of surreal reminiscences, which has made possible not the “authorized” translation of an Indian gaze to the ignorant Western world and “post-colonialist”, but the evocation, by performing multiple strategies, one of “another possible world”. A world of “open structures where many worlds fit”, represented by the “others”, so far stubbornly ignored by the “political class” of the country.

Marcos and the contemporary Zapatistas as the work of Jean Rouch and his African friends that “invested” or “perverted” anthropology in the streets of Paris during the sixties, today represent a sui-generis group that performs in everyday practice, through the “indigenous autonomy”, a surrealist anthropology “subverted” by means of self-representation, in the defense and affirmation of their “cultural identity and dignity”. The Zapatistas are the surreal anthropologists who have shown us that the bullets of the word and image are as strong as or stronger than real bullets.

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Author: Elisa Lipkau, London University, Goldsmiths College

1. Anna Grimshaw, The Ethnographer’s Eye, Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology, 2001. [↩]
2. Chris Wright, The Third Subject: Perspectives on Visual Anthropology, in Anthropology Today, vol. 14, nbr. 4, 1998. [↩]
3. Jay Ruby, Picturing Culture, Explorations of Film and Anthropology, 2000, 3. [↩]
4. Chris Wright, op. Cit, 21. [↩]
5. Jay Ruby, op. Cit.., 1. [↩]
6. Chris Wright, op. Cit., 17. [↩]
7. Jay Ruby, op. Cit., 234. [↩]
8. Ibidem, IX. [↩]
9. “I place the emphasis in the agency, the intention, cause, result and transformation. I conceive the art as system of action, orientated to transforming the world more than to codifying symbolic propositions on the same one. This approximation centred on the action is inherently more anthropologic than the semiotics approximation, because it worries about the practical role as mediators of the artistic objects, more than with the interpretation of objects ‘as if they were texts'”; Alfred Gell, Art and Agency, 1999, 8. [↩]
10. Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle, 1996, 4. [↩]
11. Jay Ruby, op. cit. 212. [↩]
12. Chris Wright, op. Cit. 20. [↩]
13. See Larrey Dossey, Tiempo, espacio y medicina, 1982; Dahar Zohar, El yo cuántico. ¿Qué hay de nuevo respecto a la nueva física?, 1977; Jorge Wagensberg, “Seguir la corriente”, in ideas sobre la complejidad del mundo, 1998. [↩]
14. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2006 [↩]
15. Susan Sontag, “Introduction”, in Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, 1976; Stephen Barber, Artaud: The Screaming Body, 1999. [↩]
16. Fatimah Trobing Rony, op. Cit. 13. [↩]
17. Faye Ginsburg, “Culture/Media. A (Mild) Polemic”, in Anthropology Today, vol. 10, nbr. 2, April 1994. [↩]
18. George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers, The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, 1995, 6. [↩]
19. Anna Grimshaw, op. Cit., 2001, 6. [↩]
20. Ibidem, 4. [↩]
21. Ibidem, 6. [↩]
22. Ibidem, 5. [↩]
23. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, 1988, 134. [↩]
24. George E. Marcus y Fred R. Myers, op. Cit., 20. [↩]
25. Idem. [↩]
26. Ibidem, 21. [↩]
27. Ibidem, 20. [↩]
28. Anna Grimshaw, op. Cit., 7. [↩]
29. Chris Wright, op. Cit., 20. [↩]
30. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, 1991. [↩]
31. Anna Grimshaw, op. Cit., 3. [↩]
32. Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: Question of Meaning in Contemporary Culture, 1994, 76. [↩]
33. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, 2001. [↩]
34. Bill Nichols, op. Cit., 1994. [↩]
35. Jean Rouch, “Our Totemic Ancestors and Crazed Masters”, in Paul Hockings (ed.), Principles of Visual Anthropologies, 2003, 80. [↩]
36. Anna Grimshaw, op. Cit. [↩]
37. Fatimah Tobing, op. Cit., 24. [↩]
38. Ibidem, 4. [↩]
39. Idem. [↩]
40. “The evolutionary paradigm served as a direct way of promoting the concept of class unity that was so essential to the social ideology of Impressionism”; see Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, 1994, 109-108. [↩]
41. Fatimah Tobing Rony, op. Cit., 5. [↩]
42. Don Slater, “Photography and Modern Vision”, in Chris Jenks (ed.), Visual Culture, 1995, 221. [↩]
43. Fatimah Tobing Rony, op. Cit., 24. [↩]
44. Don Slater, op. Cit., 219. [↩]
45. Martin Jay, “The Disenchantment of the Eye, Surrealism and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism”, in Lucien Taylor (ed.), Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from VAR, 1990-1994, 1994; Lilia M. Schwarcs, The Spectacle of the Races: Scientists, Institions and the Race Question in Brazil 1870-1890, 1999. [↩]
46. Don Slater, op. Cit., 227. [↩]
47. Ibidem, 220. [↩]
48. Jean Rouch, op. Cit., 81. [↩]
49. James Clifford, op. Cit., 118. [↩]
50. Martin Jay, op. Cit., 175. [↩]
51. Ibidem, 179. [↩]
52. Don Slater, op. Cit., 221. [↩]
53. Martin Jay, op. Cit., 180. [↩]
54. Susan Sontag, op. Cit., XXXV. [↩]
55. Georges Bataille, quoted by Martin Jay, op. Cit., 196. [↩]
56. Ibidem, 179. [↩]
57. Ibidem, 182. [↩]
58. Paul Stoller, “Artaud, Rouch and the Cinema of Cruelty”, in Lucien Taylor (ed.), Visualizing Theory. Selected Essays from VAR, 1990-1994, 1994, 88. [↩]
59. Martin Jay, op. Cit., 182. [↩]
60. Ibidem, 184. [↩]
61. Ibidem, 190. [↩]
62. Martin Jay, op. Cit., 188. [↩]
63. Susan Sontag, op. Cit., XIX. [↩]
64. Stephen Barber, op.cit., 29. [↩]
65. Susan Sontag, op. Cit, XXVI. [↩]
66. Ibidem, XXVIII. [↩]
67. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double, 1974. [↩]
68. Stephen Barber, op. Cit., 26. It should be remembered that at the time of Artaud, John Grierson established in England and later in Canada, a way of making didactic documentary (a term coined by Grierson) social topic supported by the government, and which strives to give a solution to the most urgent problems of their time in social care. Since it was created a film tradition that represents its subject as passive victims of an unjust society, but that does not question the injustice of the social norms themselves. [↩]
69. Idem. [↩]
70. Paul Stoller, op. Cit., 89. [↩]
71. Ibidem, 88. [↩]
72. James Clifford, op. Cit., 132. [↩]
73. Ibidem, 129-132. [↩]
74. Ibidem, 141. [↩]
75. Ibidem, 142. [↩]
76. Paul Stoller, op. Cit., 90. [↩]
77. James Clifford, op. Cit., 147. [↩]
78. Jean Rouche, “The Camera and Man”, in Paul Hockings (ed.), Principles of Visual Anthropology, 2003, 86. [↩]
79. Ibidem, 96. [↩]
80. Ibidem, 97. [↩]
81. George E. Marcus y Fred R. Myers, op. Cit., 19-20. [↩]
82. Jean Rouche, “The Camera and Men”, op. Cit., 96. [↩]