"The Forest of Bliss" (1986) by Robert Gardner 

a holy city
a passage
a pyre

stunning visual work (or is it the world depicted that is beautiful, how its aesthetic reception is constructed, how an awe is possible if what I see is dirt and death (but also celebration, adoration, passage of time, social relations and routines))

offering a possibility to look without "reading" (which is a relief until I engage with the critical gazing) - is such way of looking even possible? I am thinking about film about people posing for a photograph we watched in the class, the bliss is on the side of the viewer, it (possibly) absolves me from reasoning or work of interpretation, it allows me to drift, as if the world was passing in front of my eyes (trying to forget how curated this experience is)

but it also generates longing for bodily engagement
vicerality of footage and proximity of the camera to it create a paradoxical distance (in part, at least)

presence without engagement contemplation disembodied (?) observation of the world of flesh

immersion without obligation
or... is the lack of contextualization, description, subtitle engendering space of confrontation with limits of one's understanding, an open visual text (possible?)
or... is such a lack reinforcing ways of seeing grounded in racial, civilizational, cultural bias

Is the role of filmmaker to give words to images so their reception doesn't slip off the intended meaning/mode of representation? do words (always) fixate meaning, do they "humanize" what we see?

How is filmmaking rendering the fragments of the world intelligible?

Gardner's approach produces (to me) an ambiguity: it seems to transgress a boundary of conventional ethnographic documentation (by its reduction to image? wasn't it in fact always there to some extent - an image/a photograph/ a video showing the world in more truthful and complete way than human eye alone can perceive, a visual representation "speaking for itself" - with the circumstances and ideologies invested in its production obscured)

​but it also is "1920s movie in the 1986" (Moore) - which leads me to "Leviathan"..

"Leviathan" (2012) by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel

another stunning visual work but it produced some questions (also in line with Faye Ginsburg's "mild polemic")- possible answers in progress:

- how visual immersion can produce an estrangement and mask the positionally of the filmmakers (when the camera blends with the viewer's eye in such intense way, it made me think of Mosley brothers and camera as an extension of a body)
- how more-than-human perspective is constructed - f.ex. diving into the water (is it a modern version of camera under the train in the early cinema?), how such perspective is always an approximation, a sensorial fantasy (still very appealing)

​- what is constituted as subject, a terrain of encounter and ethnographic learning when any dialogical component is erased, filmmaker becomes a ghost (a dizzying range of perspectives and angles of looking) but emerges as an "author" 

- how an anthropological inquiry merges with an aesthetic concern and construction - this is particularly relevant to me thinking of my own practice and possible methodologies at the intersection of disciplines - how does such documentary filmmaking enter a contemporary art market, how does it exist within its infrastructure, how (if) it negotiates values and principles with the ideologies of art-making and art-viewing? how (if) the responsibility of the researcher/filmmaker and their objectives are transformed?

​- what does it mean for anthropology/ethnography to reclaim seeing (multi sensorial immersion, a form of "writing" which produces a feeling of "really being there"?), what's new, what's old (including the self-positioning of a researcher as virtuous and with special insights and access - to technology and ways of engagement and reality-framing)

- what do we learn from sensorial engagement with the world of others, what is there to "sense"?

What all this work neglects to stress, however, is any sense of accountability for the ethical/political relationships that ethnographic and other documentary filmmakers co-construct with the subjects whose lives are central to their films. I think of this relational documentary practice as the fundamental act for visual/audio nonfiction media makers who take seriously the accountability that, ideally, accompanies the privilege of making films about other people’s lives; this includes the  often unanticipated consequences that the photographic and/ or film image can carry for documentary subjects. (Ginsburg, 42-3)


shared anthropology as proposed by Jean Rouch
how to decolonize documentary filmmaking? what are the traditions/methods of indigenous cinema? what form can indiginous-ness take today?

 Grimshaw and Ravez SOCIAL OBSERVERS

observation and documentary film making
cinema vérité (what is "truth-full"?)

​score of/for direct cinema

"Primary" (1960) by Robert Drew

a revolution
(imagining) being there (for real)

what was observed and how the role of the observer is understood by the filmmakers

politics as performance, process, ritual

handheld camera, being able to finally "see"
moments
the imponderabilia of everyday life? (Malinowski)
everydayness as it happens

shift in presence, attentiveness of the observer (with a camera) - framing reality, how?

new "insights"
reading small cues

but: selective observers
when to film and to stop, when not to stop filming

filmmakers close to people, part of the ritual process of politics

consistent sense of openness towards the subjects (camera work)

abandonment of single narrator, ability to "hear voices"

US-America postwar new social contract ------ journalism focused on pictures not text, "crafted performances rather an occasion of formal rhetoric

fleeting encounter between filmmakers and their subjects

authored by whom?
​
"Salesman" by Maysles Brothers

​"drama" doesn't involve action or crisis
descaling (of what is observed)
suburbs
people and their jobs (door-to-door Bibles selling) ---- glimpse of the housewives lives (salesman's prey)

failure
desolation
awkward camaraderie

EVOKING EMOTIONAL TEXTURE

narrow focus - broad questions
"affective landscape of modern America"

durational and close engagement of the filmmakers with each other and their subjects
their presence woven into the film's fabric
alongside the salesmen

camera as a "physical extension of a body"
locating oneself in the existential space of one's subject
refraction through filmmakers own body

human scale 
synchronous sound
revealing of mis-communication(s)
emphatetic connection
persuasive incompleteness 

BUT: the editing done by someone unrelated to the filming process
"norms of the dramatic narrative" + non-synchronous sound (imputing thoughts and feelings on a "protagonist")
montage creates (basis of) meaning

​I take an advantage of this being a sort of diary and confess that I have been procrastinating with this post. Exhaustion and task overload aside, it is the allure of fascism, as described by Susan Sontag, that produces a rejection and paralysis (in me). Lately, I am accompanied by fear. It (fascism) is also all around, the return of it, it is the Zeitgeist and the leitmotif of my Instagram feed (I looked too long at the post about Alex Pretti being shot by ICE officer, now I am fed with images of violence on repeat). It is the REALITY and something I have discussed last Saturday over dinner table with some newly met people - the emergence of the undead (in Germany). It is both ominous, apocalyptic and unspectacular. Abstract. And streamed daily. I am thinking about those that were taken in the morning and those for whom they will come for at night (Baldwin).

Leni Riefenstahl re-wrote Leni Riefenstahl, she could not out herself as one (of many, but most prominently so) who immortalized the Reich as something. to look at, appropriate and aesthetically digest. Susan Sontag seems to be disgusted, I can relate, though it is a surprising reaction to have, a contagion. It makes me think of Erich Fromm's diagnostics of Hitler as "necrophiliac" - he points to the grimace of his face suggesting that he smells something bad (his own rot?), as well as his general disposition to render all that is alive dead. Homicidal, suicidal, necropolitical mania. 


I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is living. I seek harmony. 
Leni Riefenstahl as quoted in "Fascinating Fascism" by Susan Sontag (1975)

Sontag proposes to see "The Last Of The Nuba" as a part of Riefenstahl's triptych of "fascist visuals," it is also a "lament for vanishing primitives." 
​
​In the third panel, The Last of the Nuba, the stripped-down primitives, awaiting the final ordeal of their proud heroic community, their imminent extinction, frolic and pose in the hot clean desert. (Sontag)

The important events in Nuba society are wrestling matches and funerals: vivid encounters of beautiful male bodies and death. Such form of representation reduces the complexity of social life and broader environment of political and cultural transformations of Sudan to an image of oiled, ripped and naked fetish-people for the Western gaze. (according to Sontag, the aesthetic imagination as manifested in the fascist art glorifies surrender; it exalts mindlessness: it glamorizes death.) 

THE MYTH is constructed (politics of representation) 

What is distinctive about the fascist version of the old idea of the Noble Savage is its contempt for all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic. In Riefenstahl’s casebook of primitive virtue, it is hardly the intricacy and subtlety of primitive myth, social organization, or thinking that are being extolled. She is especially enthusiastic about the ways the Nuba are exalted and unified by the physical ordeals of their wrestling matches, in which the “heaving and straining” Nuba men, “huge muscles bulging,” throw one another to the ground—fighting not for material prizes but “for the renewal of sacred vitality of the tribe.”


*there is something off with the visual and textual narrative of this post, I note this for now, will need to come back to it, perhaps the visual and narrative binding of a black body with violence that I certainly don't aim to reproduce..but also I disagree with Sontag in some parts, Riefenstahl seems to exhibit the Nuba as both "passing" and out of time, pure (!), the deconstructive movement here (turned towards Riefenstahl's visual proposition) exposes the strange dynamics of elevation and erasure.. Binding of eroticism and death (what kind of disposition towards life is fundamental to modernity and colonial laboratory), fetishization of vitality as represented by a black body (tbc)*

Roberto Strongman in "Queering Black Atlantic Religions" presents the subject of Pierre Verger's photographs as looking back, reversing the desire, escaping ethnographic fixation. 

​ANGLES AND PERSPECTIVES (OF SEEING AND IMAGE-MAKING)

In another course, we have discussed drone imaging and status of visual evidence. There are two images that haunt me in that context. Seeing from above (from how big of a distance, what are the scales at work), documentation of a crime, what processes unfold between image capture/construction, interpretation (determination of truth), intervention and remembrance? (I might come back to it) 

Are violence, savagery still features of representation of (only) the Other? Why is anthropology (still) so involved in description of suffering? What forms of repair, justice, visibility are produced in such accounts?

1. Aerial photo of Auschwitz-Birkenau II complex taken by the South African Air Force on 23 August 1944.
2. "Blood Sands" seen from space near el-Fasher, western Sudan (November 2025), indicating mass killings.

​THE FRAGMENTED IMAGING/ PARTIALITY / RECOMPOSITION OF SUBJECT

Some notes on Trinh Minh-ha "Woman, Native, Other" (1989)

“woman is the Other”  (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949)

“He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.”

inescapability of white mind's categories and domination? what are the spaces of other reasoning and not-unreason

Reassemblage// fragmentation, exposure of montage, looping, cuts as expository tools - critique of ethnographic filmmaking 

self-reflexivity and speaking near-by

why is an anthropologist always desiring an encounter with the otherness (it is a part of the job, a core of it even, estrangement of various degrees, always produced even when seemingly already existing prior to an encounter) - as a critical gesture they/we try to position themselves/ourselves differently, dilute authority, co-author, listen, "give voice" (oh-oh)

BUT for whom is the depiction, visual representation produced and for what purpose

who speaks about the work that the film becomes 
​
how is the near-by a continuous relation against commodification (films as fluid, interactive movements) - between (non)documentation and (non)fiction, beyond fixation of identity and cultural category

hybrids and borderlines, how reality can be "seized" (maybe not at all), restructuring of postcolonial and male gaze

​"The Nanook of the North" by Robert Flaherty (1922)

I want to start from saying that, to me, this film is about hunger (not only but in many ways predominantly so). Or perhaps such theme has been haunting me through the seance due to the textual introduction in which, somehow without much pause or gravity given to it, Flaherty informs the viewers that some time after completing the film he learnt of Nanook's death from starvation during the hunting expedition.  It then became something I continued to see - in the repeated and strenuous food search, killing of animals, cutting meat chunks, chewing them raw, exposure of teeth, in a certain rush and urgency of consummation (I here disagree with Rothman's analysis of the eating scene when Nanook is compared by him to a cat devouring a bird, his look into the camera "threatening,"  what I saw rather was hunger turned into a form of spectacle enhanced by the savage-fantasy equipped with animal bone blade and with blood on his face, I think Rothman here gets deceived by Flaherty's own deminishing gaze..). In the dire environment presented by Flaherty both animals and humans are hungry. I wonder then what does the filmmaker eat? Is he invited to commune with his film's subjects or can he access food and share it as the "white man" did in one of the scenes (feeding the children, a gesture of both. hospitality (in a land colonized) and colonial benevolence reminiscent of many other representations of the "hungry/malnourished Other")?  I will not dwell more on that, I might be (certainly am) biased, my seeing is affected by plethora of images, of associations from elsewhere, revealing that, even though I am learning to look otherwise (as contemporary anthropologist), I can't escape seeing what I already know. 

***
There is mystique to such (newly) emerging filmmaking and ethnography, and mystification of the process, of positionality. Flaherty doesn't really disclose sources of his financing (he starts his rapport with Inuits through mining-related expedition) nor does Malinowski provide a full account of his ethnographic adventure (exposed later) but rather sets his "mission" by going into the real world of the natives, away from white men settlements. In such way they acquire an ability to grasp a "native POV," to see what they see. I want to come back to this. 

Flaherty cannot resolve the contradictions established by his own presence in the pre-industrial worlds he seeks to evoke through his films (...) his profoundly nostalgic vision is built upon a diminishment rather than an interpretation of reality. (Grimshaw 2001, 50)



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Some notes in regards to the paradigm of Malinowskian ethnography (after Grimshaw):

-first-hand experience, priority given to experiential knowledge
-seeing with one's own eyes: distrust in e.g. missionaries accounts but also the emergence of the ethnographer-explorer/visonary/ a special kind of individual moving between worlds
-authority and allure of having "truly been there" - to the outer edges of human world, the heart of darkness, to the childhood of mankind (but ethnographer also returning to childhood condition to re-orient themselves in the new cultural reality, to re-learn to see)
-subjectivity as a distinct feature/component of the resulting ethnographic writing (?)
-(but still) a vision is pure, cultivated to reveal (what?)
-an important distinction is made between exploration and revelation (a missionary turned into globetrotter mystic? there not to teach but to learn)

I believe all these apply to Flaherty's documentary project, which leads me to

the timeless present and the affordances of film as medium (of representation and repetition?)

The virtual lack of montage (which he apparently rejected for the sake of purity of cinematic transmission) and stillness of the camera gives the viewer (or myself at least) a sense of contemplation of the everyday life of people, whose reality, on the one hand, unfolds in front my very eyes in the now, yet who are, at the same time locked in the past as noble savages observed with the innocent eye of the visitor from the European civilization (situated here, according to Grimshaw, as corrupted, decaying in the aftermath of the First World War). But also, I emphatize with the protagonists (power of cinema! and also a result of Flaherty's methodologies), but unavoidably assume the viewing position of the filmmaker - the only one available in this case, I become a witness/observer (difference?) to their existence but (at least apparently) the documentarian, and myself, are free of struggles and urgencies of the film's subjects.

The native POV is a construction of the ethnographer's mind. The reality of the Other is his field that can be exited. I am here a bit of a sceptic though the contemporary echoes of that paradox I see as a productive puzzle. Something I think about in regards to forms of looking and seeing - taken as visual perception and cognitive apprehension, an embrace of meaning, embodiment of the fragments of others lives. How this can be mediated, translated, recorded? 

And what is this film a document of - a life (staged/represented/approximated) of the Other but also a Western gaze, romanticizing and capturing, honoring and destroying, participating in and dominating the narrative? 

deception and mystification, ethnography and documentary filmmaking as art (vocational type):

the worlds evoked in Flaherty's cinema and Malinowski's monographs appear to have been 'found' rather than made. For the Malinowskian ethnographers share with Flaherty the paradox of presenting ideas as if they emerge from life. (Grimshaw 2001, 55)

Flaherty "comes back to civilization" but certainly transformed, gifted with that eye-opening experience. The status of Nanook remains ambiguous to me. In some ways he is immortalized, maybe even cherished, admired, yet is it, as Grimshaw remarked, a taxidermy only? 

​
Transportation of a place & depicting/imagining the Other

A short peak into Edward S. Curtis's legacy (TBC)

Ambivalent reception of his photographic portraits of the Native Americans - precious documentation, creating of fictions (the shirt!) and misrepresentations - who has the power to capture an image of a person? How is the representation becoming a costume and/or a (genuine?) identity? What if the depiction comes alive?

1. The North American Indian by Edward S. Curtis (1907-30)
2. German Indians by Andrea Robbins and Max Becher (1997/8)
3. The Maori portraits by Gottfried Lindauer (1874)