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Visual Anthropology
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The cinema and social science: A survey of ethnographic and sociological
films
Luc de Heusch
a
a
Professor of Social Anthropology, Institut de Sociologie, Universit Libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles,
Belgique
Online publication date: 17 May 2010
To cite this Article de Heusch, Luc(1988) 'The cinema and social science: A survey of ethnographic and sociological films',
Visual Anthropology, 1: 2, 99 156
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08949468.1988.9966467
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08949468.1988.9966467
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Visual Anthropology, Vol. 1, pp. 99-156 1988 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH
Reprints available directly from the publisher Printed in the United States of America
Photocopying permitted by license only
The Cinema and Social Science: A Survey
of Ethnographic and Sociological Films*
Luc de Heusch
It is with great pleasure that Visual Anthropology reprints excerpts from one of the major
texts in our field, Luc de Heusch's monograph, " T h e Cinema and Social Science: A
Survey of Ethnographic and Sociological Films." First published in English in 1962 in
UNESCO's series on the social sciences, the monograph has been out of print and
difficult to locate for a number of years. It is being reprinted here so that we might
better understand the historical development of visual anthropology by again having
access to this classic.
The editor would like to thank Professor de Heusch and the rights and permissions
unit of the Unesco Press for allowing us to make this work again available. We have
omitted Chapter 5, "Brief Outline of the History of the Ethnographic and Sociological
Film," and Chapter 6, "Use of the Film in Ethno-Sociological Research and the
University Teaching of Social Sciences."
PREFACE
Edgar Morin
Does the language of the cinema raise more acute problems than written
language in attempting to describe an empirical phenomenon? A priori, it
might be thought that it does not: the screen picture seems to eliminate that
intermediary who selects, summarizes, translatesand hence distorts
the thing seen. The screen picture would appear to be a more accurate
reflection than a note jotted down in a book.
But in fact the camera lacks the mobility of the human eye even though it
registers with greater precision. That big eye mounted on a tripod is still a
cripple, and it will not be an adjunct to the cameraman's eye until it has
acquired a high degree of lightness and tractability. This latter quality,
morevoer, would not completely solve the problem since, in any case, the
*Reprinted by permission. UNESCO 1962.
Luc DE H E U S C H , Professor of S ocial Anthropology, Institut de S ociologie, U niversit Libre de
Bruxelles, Av. Jeanne, 44, 1050 Bruxelles. Belgique. Among his many publications are Sacrifice i n
Africa: A Structuralist Approach [1985] and Le roi ivre ou l'origine de l'Etat (The Drunken King
or the Origin of the S tate) [1972 and 1982]. Professor de H eusch has been a visiting professor in
E ngland, the U nited S tates, and France. In 1987 he was elected to the Belgium Royal Academy.
9 9
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100 L. de H eusch
camera's movements and the changes of focus represent human inter-
ferences with the phenomena observed. Several cameras operating simul-
taneously would be needed before there could be any hope of achieving a
complete picture of realityboth analytic and syntheticat the editing
stage. But such analytic and synthetic editing is ultimately of the same
nature as the intellectual operation required to write an article or a book. In
any case, the t rut h which the cinema may achieve cannot disregard the
observer or the seeker; in other words, it cannot avoid the abstractive
operation which the human mind applies to reality in order to understand
it. Understanding always involves linking reality to the structures of the
human mind and the structures of the human mind to reality.
This dispels the wild dream of those who hoped for a cinematographic
documentation, a cinematographic research, a cinematographic sociology
liberated from the human factorfrom the subjectivity and personality of
the filmmaker. The problem thenceforward shifts from the thing filmed to
the filmmaker himself: the objective validity of his film depends on his
honesty, his conscientiousness, his intelligence, and his flair. I would there-
fore submit this tautological definition of the scientific film: a scientific film
is a film made (shot and composed) in a spirit of scientific elucidation and
verification.
This definition has no other advantage t han to eliminate the impossible
ideal of an extrahuman cinema. But the problems remain, not only the
problems involved in any intellectual operationand every film is a prod-
uct of the intellectbut the specific problems raised by the cinemato-
graphic search for truth.
There are the technical problems: as the result of a variety of pressures,
the technique of audio-visual recording is making decisive advances; the
soundless electronic camera, the new types of microphone (portable micro-
phones such as the "lapel" microphone or the "rifle" microphone), the
recording of sound by portable tape recorder, or, better still, by microphone-
transmitter, supersensitive films which obviate the necessity for artificial
lightingall these should enable the researcher to descend like a diver into
the cloudy dept hs of reality and should open up a genuine third dimension
for him.
There are aesthetic problems at the level of the picture: the picture
contains within itself all the undifferentiated qualities of life, including its
aesthetic qualities. Take the example of a dance. The picture of a dance will
be imbued with the poetry which is inherent in the dance, whereas written
language will always end to dispel that poetry by analyzing the gestures
and movements. There is always a certain poetry in life which the picture
frequently magnifies and which the cameraman will tend to magnify by his
own methods (angle of shots, framing). It would be not merely barbarous
but absurd to seek to eliminate that poetry. The danger lies not in the poetry
but r at her i n the temptation to embellish, i.e., to stress those pictures which
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 101
are pleasing to the eye at the expense of the others. Embellishment results in
meretricious films, pictures for the sake of pictures. The picturesque natu-
rally tends to destroy the real. Such is the danger which threatens ethnolo-
gists and sociologists who have set out in quest of the t rut h and who are
lured from the right path by the sirens of the aestheticand often the most
conventionally aesthetic at that.
There are the aesthetic problems at the editing stage. Here again, the
temptation to embellish operates, but with boundless possibilities of faking
and distorting. In addition, there are the grammatical problems which
occur during editing. There is an editing "grammar" which is in fact an
elementary rhetoric produced by the commercial requirements of the ordi-
nary cinema. This rhetoric imposes a type of editing which is "intelligible"
to the spectator, and compels the filmmaker, even if he has no wish to make
a commercial film, to submit to that rhetoric, since he knows no other and
has followed the school of professional film editors. If, in addition, he quite
understandably wishes to commercialize his film, he is in danger of making
still more serious concessions: removing whatever is supposed to bore or
displease the spectator or even grafting an artificial "story" onto his film.
The conclusion to be drawn is that the problems of editing in connection
with cinematographic truth need to be thought out again from the begin-
ning.
Not, as I have already said, with a view to eliminating poetry and art;
every scientific film should acceptgladly, it should be addedpoetry and
art; but it must reject embellishments, artificial picturesqueness, the "gram-
mar" of editing in the Bethomieu manner, dictionary editing.
The problems so far mentioned also arisedifferently, it is trueat the
level of writing properly so called: there, too, are the choice of elements, the
temptation to offer a standardized or embellished reality, the confrontation
of the author with a conventional rhetoric. These problems are less apparent
because there is a sharper differentiation between scientific and literary
language, but also because they are glossed over. Let us consider what is the
cinema's really special problem, that of the disturbance occasioned in the
observed phenomenon by the camera.
It is true that an ethnographer in the field, even without a camera,
disturbs the life he wants to catch in its natural form; an industrial sociolo-
gist in a factory arouses distrust or a desire to please and, in all circum-
stances, there is a tendency to camouflage the reality vis-a-vis the outside
observer. The observer must therefore camouflage himself, and it is easier to
camouflage a man than a camera. A man can mingle with the crowd during
rites or religious ceremonies and, by doing what the others do, remain
unobserved. A camera is always noticed.
In some cases it can of course be camouflaged behind a transparent
mirror, in a mail van, and so on. A camera can lie in wait like Dziga Vertov's
camera. But there are practical and ethical limits to camouflage. There are
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202 L. de H eusch
places and situations where no camouflage is possible. There are situations
where surreptitious observation becomes intrusive and offensive and
amounts to spying.
The problem then arises: if the camera is visible, does it not transform
reality? Will not reality put on an act, less well than the imaginative cinema,
less authentically t han the acted cinema? Will not reality become stilted,
dress itself up, lose its very essencespontaneityand become mechani-
cal? Or, alternatively, will not this meeting of the camera and reality produce
a new type of t rut h consisting of a dialogue between observer and ob-
served, with the observer asking the observed to reveal something which
could not emerge without that meeting?
All that is not only possible, indeed inevitable, but will often appear
inextricably interwoven into the picture. It is therefore essential to reflect on
the type of truth which is sought and, in the case of social science films, on
the influence of the different levels of sociality on the results.
There is ritual or ceremonial sociality; in such cases, life itself is dra-
matized. The officiating priest at a religious service or a head of state making
a speech are already in a theatrical situation, and in such cases the film
causes scarcely any disturbance in what is socially staged.
There is intensive sociality: wars, riots, football matches, and so on. In
such cases, the feeling actually involved is so intense that the participants
may forget or ignore the camera. Wherever there is a pole of interest or
feeling stronger than the camera, the latter ceases to disturb the phenomenon.
There is technical sociality: movements made by people while working
with tools or machines; in this case, the hands and bodies are not disturbed
in their essential operations. But the worker's face and the social conditions
of work will not be authentic.
There is the rest, the most difficult, the most moving, the most secret:
wherever human feelings are involved, wherever the individual is directly
concerned, wherever there are interpersonal relationships of authority, sub-
ordination, comradeship, love, hatein other words, everything connected
with the emotive fabric of human existence. There lies the great terra
incognita of the sociological or ethnological cinema, of cinematographic
t rut h. There lies its promised land.
A wide range of research activities in numerous countries are today
directed toward that promised land. As has been shown by experience, it is
not only a question of discovering a t rut h but of extracting a t rut h which
hides or disguises itself or remains below the surface of appearances. Luc
de Heusch admirably helps us to appreciate these problems. When all is
said and done, the great merit of the search for t rut h is not so much to find
the t rut h as to raise the problem of what constitutes the truth.
Once we have broken through the sound barrier which reality sets up
against the camera, we discover that reality itself is largely made up of play-
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 103
acting. The sociologists who have analyzed social relations in terms of "role
taking" and "role playing" have rediscovered an ancient idea of philoso-
phers and moralists. 'AH the world's a stage," said Shakespeare. The cin-
ema, through what we might call an act of demystificatory magic, enables
us to see the many-faceted play constituted by social life. That plays reveals
the truth as much as it disguises it: our masks (in other words, our faces), the
parts we play (in other words, our utterances) enable us to express ourselves
at the same time as to disguise ourselves. Truth is not a Holy Grail to be won:
it is a shuttle which moves ceaselessly between the observer and the
observed, between science and reality. Luc de Heusch here provides us with
the best information on and the best introduction to a cinema which is both
very old (it began, after all, with Lumiere and its first masterpiece was
Nanook) and very new (since vast possibilities have remained undeveloped
and current technical advances are opening new horizons), to a new victory
for the social sciences and to the enduring problem of t rut h.
AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION
Cinema, the social sciences: these two poles of attraction pull us in two
different directions. How and when does the cinema convey the authentic
picture of social reality? What are the particular requirements of sociologi-
cal investigation? Can the cinema cover what the social sciences seek to
learn and define through complex techniques? And how? Each of these
closely interlinked questions calls for a carefully balanced reply.
But first of all, what cinema and what reality are involved? To brandish the
concept of the "sociological film," to isolate it in the huge international
production of films, is surely a chimerical and academic enterprise. The
very concept of sociology is fluid and varies according to the countries
concerned and local scientific traditions. It does not refer to precisely the
same kind of research in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in the
United States of America, and in Western Europe. Moreover, is it not a
distressing craze of our time to catalog, to cut up into arbitrary categories,
the confused mixture of ideas, ethical values, and aesthetic research on
which those complex artists who make films feed with such extraordinary
avidity? What has the scientific research worker to do with all this? Is he not
ill-advised to set off on the cinematographic adventure which is so far
removed from his traditional activities? But let us nonetheless risk that
journey. Let us set off with the scientist and the artist and try to find a
common language which will enable us to sustain a difficult conversation
for a few hours.
Let us establish the approximate limits of the voyage: we shall travel to the
borders of the imaginary world but we shall not land there, like those soon
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204 L. de H eusch
to be outdated astronauts of Jules Verne who circled the moon for a long
time but never dared set foot on its surface. This universe from which we
shall deliberately exclude ourselves except for occasional brief incursions
may be broadly defined by the term "fictional films." Here, then, is the first
approximation: we shall somewhat arbitrarily restrict ourselves to the vast
field of the "documentary film." But we forthwith come up against a fresh
difficulty: the so-called documentary film often makes use of the tech-
niques and even of the creative processes of the fictional film. Its author is
frequently an authentic artist in the same way as the "director" of the
dramatic film. Conversely, fictional film does not deal solely with the
imaginary. More t han in any other art (and this is the essential peculiarity of
the cinema) the imaginary touches the real; with few exceptions, the former
necessarily relies on the latter. All the great filmmakers, all those honest
minds that have remained uncorrupted by commercial considerations or
political servility are, in one way or another, spokesmen for their epoch.
Certain aesthetic schools have even openly claimed connection with the
sociological outlook. Such, as is well known, was the position of the Italian
neorealist school. "I want to be always and above all a contemporary," says
Zavattini, "because the cinema can only achieve artistic expression, a uni-
versal human and social language if it embodies the significance of events,
the collective dramas of our time."
1
Eisenstein and Pudovkin sought to
describe the birth of a new society. An unfinished film of Eisenstein'sQue
Viva Mexico (1931-1932)furnishes an example of the borderline cases we
have mentioned. This epic expresses with an exceptional power which few
of the later cinematographic accounts have recaptured the amazing death
wish that burns in the Indian soul. This admirable film is based on an
extremely elaborate aesthetic to which the term "realist" could scarcely be
applied. The great comic actors, tooChaplin or Tatiare witnesses of
their times as Moliere used to be. Even second-rate films, usually without
knowing it, express significant aspects of the society from which they
emerge. But if we follow this line of thought we shall find ourselves in a field
which borders on the one we are investigating and which should be
distinguished from it: that of the sociology of the cinema. This new and
fascinating branch of study exploresindirectly, we might saythe reflec-
tion of social reality to be found in cinematographic works: it brings out the
latent content, the dreams, the myths, the rejections, the cultural reflexes,
the taboos, the highly contradictory values which manifest themselves in
the background or in the foreground of the dramatic action: it therefore deals
with a certain reality in the cinematographic dream of "fiction."
Film sociology is based on the view that every film is a mirrorthe mirror
of a society whose values may be accepted or rejected by the film producer
but to which in any case he testifies. The essayist J. P. Mayer, a forerunner of
this new discipline, wrote in 1946:
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 105
Film director and script writer live in a concrete society. Their works must consequently
reflect or interpret the social life of which they are a part. To analyse where life meets art is
perhaps one of the subtlest problems the sociologist has to face. Perhaps I may illustrate this
point. Last yearthe Allies had just landed in FranceI saw in a repertoire cinema in
Cambridge Fritz Lang's film, The Testament of Doctor Mabuse, a film I had previously seen in
Berlin in 1932. It struck me now to what a surprising extent this film reflects the state of
German society in those years when the Nazi advent was imminent.
It is so true that all forms of cinema reveal, positively or negatively,
consciously or unconsciously, honestly or dishonestly, the society within
which they take shape. Artists of integrity doubtless reveal this differently
from the tricksters, the liars, the fakers and the mountebanks who are solely
concerned with the demands of commercial production. But these nonethe-
less still testify, in spite of themselves: their films will reveal to future
historians the conformist ideal, the "ethics" of a class, the perversion of
collective sensitivity, and so on. Our aim, however, lies elsewhere. We shall
confine ourselves to picking out and analyzing from the huge volume of so-
called documentary productions a certain number of sociological "docu-
ments" which deserve to be called authentic. In the course of the discussion
of truth with the artist and the scientist we shall endeavor to define this
concept, which is as basic as it is ambiguous.
Our aim is not to draw up a complete inventory. We shall first of all
indicate the broad lines of development of the sociological cinema in a
limited number of countries in Europe and North America. These national
schools have been selected on account of the exceptional importance of their
contribution to the subject with which we are dealing. At the same time, we
shall discuss certain important isolated works; we shall doubtless overlook
someand we apologize in advance to their authors. There is no guide, no
map to lead us in this enterprise which is so full of pitfalls and which
threatens at times to exasperate the scientists, the film producers, and even
the scientist-film producers. This necessarily imperfect work is no more
than a reconnaissance. It will have been worthwhile if it facilitates the
emergence of more elaborate essays.
We should like to express our sincere gratitude to all those who have
^elped us in this task, the government departments, the universities, the
specialists who have written letters and sent books, catalogs and films. Our
special thanks are due to Jacques Delcorde for his friendly and unfailing
assistance in collecting this documentation and to the Cinematheque de
Belgique, the Film Department of the Belgian Ministry of Education, and
the Belgian Television.
It should also be mentioned that a great many items of detailed informa-
tion have been furnished by the careful analyses of films carried out at the
Muse"e de 1'Homme in Paris by the Comite Francais du Film Ethnogra-
phique with a view to the publication of an international catalog. We hope
that this work will appear in the very near future, constituting as it does an
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206 L. de H eusch
important instrument for the utilization of films in the teaching of the sodal
sciences.
CHAPTER 1. DIFFICULTIES OF APPROACH
Agel has very well summed up the basic ambiguity which we must face, the
fact that the cinema is a technique for the photographic recording of reality
but also, paradoxically, an art:
. . . t h e ci nema h a s wo n i t s i nde pe nde nc e from photography, from the weight of the real world;
precisely because it has introduced the norms of narration (cutting, editing, etc.) while still
st ayi ng close t o reality. Fr om 1896 t o 1902, the cinema passed through the stage of directly recording
reality. The n, i n t he h o pe of seeing better, seeing more, seeing everything, t he film ma ke r s we n t
beyond the stage of childish copies.
2
Through the filter of poetic creation the cinema reveals not the reality but
something of the reality which escapes the naked eye, the insensitive eye.
Cinema and Painting
The prodigious adventure of contemporary art since impressionismin
other words, roughly since the appearance of photography and the cin-
emahas stripped pictorial reality of the anecdotal subject which was its
traditional justification. While there had always been modern- minded
painters, it is fair to say that it was only in our own times that painters have
clearly recognized that painting, like music, is first and foremost pure
language, autonomous language, divorced from the reality of the outside
world. It is certain that photography and the cinema have played a signifi-
cant part in this evolution. Much of what formerly belonged to painting
the psychological intensity of a look, a gesture, dramatic construction, the
secret straining toward an actionhas been taken over by the cinemato-
graphic art. In this respect, there is cinema latent in Rembrandt just as there
are pictorial preoccupations in Eisenstein. The t ri umph of abstract art in all
its various forms since the end of the last war, the total dilution of the
anecdote, is at least partly explained by the movement which drove the
subject toward the cinematographic art. The latter has continually derived
sustenance from the psychological and social reality which it seeks to
depict. Alone of its kind among the plastic arts (to which it belongs through
one of its aspects), the cinema, insofar as it is a living thing, has constantly
been a realistic art. In this sense, and even though it also constitutes an
autonomous language, the cinema lies on the outskirts of a characteristic
general evolution. To form its language, the cinema has made use of the
same objects as traditional figurative painting: its starting point is a photo-
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 107
graph of the real. Formerly, this was the starting point of painting; it is not
within the scope of the present st udy to discuss whether it was right or
wrong to abandon it. The cinema, which was confronted with virgin
territorywhich had to define its own limits and create itself out of
nothing, and which did not have to react against an academic tradition
has resolutely chosen to build itself up by exploring this reality, which it
offers to the spectator.
It is difficult to imagine that the cinema is not, among other things, a
depiction of reality (at least to the extent that it uses the photographic
technique: some of MacLaren's films of course no longer answer to this
definition). The question before us is rather to decide whether the cinema
can be nothing more than that. Can we conceive of a cinema which ceases to
be an art and is reduced toor succeeds in becomingno more t han a
pure image of human reality, a simple set of mirrors? In short, is it possible
to have a sociological cinema, from which all poetic element is excluded?
This vitally important question must be taken seriously, for on it all the
rest of our argument depends.
Picture and Reality
It is difficult to hold the scales evenly in estimating the value of the photo-
graphic picture. From the outset, in attempting to make an accurate ap-
praisal of the picture's value as testimony, we are driven to consider purely
poetic problems. This ambiguity is especially apparent when the picture
we are examining shows us man, an aspect of human society. In a penetrat-
ing study, Edgar Morin analyzes at length the concept of the photogenic,
and emotive value of photography of the human face. The photograph, says
Morin, is a "double," a "ghost picture of man" (1956:33). Perception of a
photograph sets in motion a complex psychological mechanism: "The first
and strangest quality of photography is the presence of a person or thing
which is nevertheless absent" (Morin 1956:25). Hence the genuinely "magic"
power of the photograph from which it is difficult to detach ourselves. This
emotional aura particularly surrounds photographs of those who are near
to us; when those we love die, they live on for us in their motionless
"double." But, generally speaking, "everything pictorial tends, in a sense,
to become emotive and everything emotive tends to become magical." The
cinema inherits this strange property of the picture while transforming it.
The "magic of the shadows" is here intensified by the darkness.of the
theater, and that magic calls for an aesthetic judgment more t han for an
appraisal of reality. A photograph is always beautiful before it is true, or
rather, it is true because it is beautiful. In t rut h, a strange document. Nor can
it be said that the artistic "quality" of a photograph is a new value which has
been superadded. The deliberate search for expression in photography
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208 L. de H eusch
does not introduce a specific dimension; to quote Morin, it merely "enriches
the emotive power of the picture" (Morin 1956:38); it does not create it out of
nothing. There is in fact "a latent fantastic element implied in the very
objectivity of the picture."
To what use, then, can the human picture be put by the sociologist? A
great many people have seen the admirable photographic exhibition enti-
tled "The Family of Man." These pictures, taken from everyday life, show
people of all sorts and conditions, of all civilizations, without affectation,
phot ographed unawares by an observant and sensitive photographer.
These photographs are therefore in no sense "poses" intended to be studied
piously in a family album. Yet they have the same strange power as family
photographspower to arouse emotion. Without knowing them, we recog-
nize men and women close to us . We are forcibly struck by the discovery
that throughout the world there is an authentically human way of playing,
laughing, or weeping, a way in which the heart rather than the head
recognizes the fraternal presence of man. These pictures provide something
better t han a lesson in sociologynamely, a lesson in ethics. But lesson is
not the right word. These authentic pictures arouse ethical feelings; silently
and solely through visual communication they impose a universal ethical
concept which transcends the diversity of cultures. The masks, the cos-
tumes, and settings fall into the background. We come very close by this act
of perception to what is known in phenomenology as the "primitive social
being," if indeed that has any meaning. Better t han any sociological docu-
ment these snapshots, chosen for their magical power, their indefinable
charm, reveal that man is immediately receptive and understandable to
man. "Before we become aware of it," writes Merleau-Ponty, "the social
factor exists in the state of a mute appeal. "
3
But this outstanding value will not satisfy all sociologists. The "social
sciences," indeed, seek to create an objective language from which all
emotion has been banished. They relate facts and distrust the magic quality
of words. Marcel Griaule (1957) in his Mithode de Vethnographie defines three
types of photographic "records" which he considers valid in research work:
(a) Photographs of objects having an everyday or ritual use [which he urges
should be shown in their normal setting with all "artistic effects" care-
fully avoided].
(b) Photographs of phenomena in motion [ceremonies, costumes, etc.].
Griaule recommends taking the maximum number of photographs of
"the most interesting critical moment."
(c) Aerial photographs.
Photographs of the body in motion, a prelude to cinematographic record-
ing, are the only ones which interest us here. Photography has never been
used systematically to make an exhaustive study of the phases of a ritual,
whereas it has invaded the history of art and archaeology. Ethnographers
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 109
occasionally publish albums of pictures, but this is more of an amusement
than anything else. It is invariably the text which is the source and the valid
reference, not the pictures, except possibly in the field of technology. On the
other hand, photographs are commonly used in ethnographic museums
where they have become an instrument of scientific popularization whose
value is universally recognized. No doubt we shall soon see a parallel
development of iconography in purely scientific publications: the photo-
graphic illustration will gradually tend to become a complementary lan-
guage which will make up for the sometimes insurmountable difficulties
involved in providing a precise description of technical and ritual move-
ments. In this field, of course, the cinema is a much more valuable instru-
ment, but it will not obviate the use of photographs, which have the
advantage of being attached to the text they explain. In the cinema, the
spoken language is always poor and the ear easily distracted. The cinema
dominates a universe which has nothing in common with the traditional
library. At the present time, the absence of pictures in the most important
sociographical monographs unmistakably reveals a university taboo.
Sometimes, however, an ethnographer goes so far as to publish pictures of
men he has known and liked, but he does so with considerable reluctance as
if the emotive power of the picture, being foreign to his purpose, embar-
rasses him. If he resorts to photography, it would seem to be not so much
with a view to clarifying a point as to enlivening a difficult and austere text:
such photographs are always 'margi nal " and only rarely form a part of the
development of a line of thought. The less austere authors seem on occasion
to feel confusedly the need to embody the description and provide it with
the support of a duplicate, by showing admirable and ingenuous scenes of a
"mother bathing her child" or a "drinking rite." And suddenly, thanks to the
miracle of the picture, the reader feels he is there, he is given a remarkable
ability to imagine the scenes which are being described, to participate in the
action; the text emerges from the fog.
But demands that scientific documents should possess no poetic element
are vain, since there can be no objective photograph of ourselves. Every-
thing depends on the angle, the lighting, the accident of the moment at
which we are "caught." In a sense, all photographs are caricatures since
they capture a fragment of us, a confusion, a panic or a joy, which is
conveyed by one of our innumerable possible expressions. On the other
hand, the standard photograph, the official image of ourselves required by
modern administrative bureaucracy, the file photograph, is always a lie, a
lifeless stereotype. To discover the lasting truth of a countenance calls for all
the skill, patience, and religious respect of the old Flemish or Italian
painters. They can acquaint us with the essence of a countenance beyond
the changes of our grimaces. In the same way, the modern photographer
must follow secret paths known to himself alone in order to achieve full
communication, in order to fix the image of a human face in such a way that
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110 L.deH eusch
we can say it is a "speaking" likeness. To achieve full knowledge of a
countenance, the photographer must lie in wait for the chance instant when
the totality of a human condition finds expression. Photography is art.
This preliminary remark may strike serious minds as singularly trivial.
Nevertheless, such simple observations must be made before we can at-
t empt to analyze the cinematographic image of man and of society. The
cinema makes use of artificial light in the same way as photography. Once
he moves away from the open air, the streets, the field, or the bush into
huma n dwellings, the photographer enters a zone of denser shadow which
not even the most sensitive emulsions can always penetrate. The problem of
lighting then arises in a particularly acute form. Not only is an aesthetic
problem involved but a problem of knowledge. The aspect of things, the
interpretations which they suggest, depends largely on the way in which
they are lit, on the style of lighting. The art of lighting is the art of represent-
i ng reality in a certain light. There is no such thing as a completely neutral
and objective lighting.
Similarly, the shooting angle is never unimportant: each angle gives a
different definition of the same reality. It is a commonplace to recall that an
object has not the same significance in a close-up, a long shot, a bird's-eye
view, or a worm's-eye view. The camera does not come close merely in order
to see better as would be the case with binoculars: by coming close, the eye
sees differently, the emotive power referred to by Edgar Morin changes
according to the position, the distance, and so on, as it is linked to the play
of light and shade.
Whether by means of lighting or choice of angle, the photographer
necessarily influences awareness and imposes a certain emotive coloring. It
is in relation to these special conditions that we must analyze the documen-
tary value of photographic "reproduction.* We must accustom ourselves to
the idea that it is the picture of reality and not reality itself. The surrealist
painter Magritte has already emphasized maliciously that the same ambig-
uous relationship exists between the object and its image on canvas.
Phenomenology of the Animated Picture and Cinematographic Language
Does cinematographic movement rob the photo of its magical appeal? Does
it introduce a greater objectivity, a greater fidelity to reality? In the earliest
days of the cinema, we rediscovered with delight and amazement the flight
of birds, the movement of a galloping horse or a walking man. The cinema
owes its very inception to scientific curiosity, to the desire to see better in
order to understand better. As Edgar Morin recalls, the precursors of the
cinema (Muybridge, Marey, DSmeny) intended to develop a research in-
strument "in order to st udy the phenomena of nat ure" (Morin 1956:14).
When Lumiere definitely established a technique and sent his cameramen
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 111
all over the world, the ethnographic and sociological cinema was born. The
film archives of this century begin with the first naive productions. Was the
cinema to be an objective instrument which could capture the behavior of
men from the life? The marvelous ingenuity of S ortie des U sines, Dejeuner de
Bebe, and Peche el la crevette made it seem likely. Butthe fact is in itself no
cause for dissatisfactionthe illusionists were not long in.taking this new
type of microscope away from the scientists and transforming it into a toy,
thereby reviving the tradition of the shadow play and the magic lantern.
Morin writes:
It is not surprising that the cinematograph should have been from the outset radically
diverted from its apparent purpose, whether technical or scientific, in order to be snatched
away by the entertainment industry and transformed into the cinema. We use the words
"snatched away" advisedly: the cinematograph could also have achieved immense practical
results. But the progress of the cinemathat is of the film entertainmentatrophied these
developments which would have seemed the natural ones (Morin 1956:15).
We shall see later how Dziga Vertov, on the one hand, and Flaherty, on the
other, reintroduced the concept of a "cinema truth" into the very develop-
ment of cinematographic art. But first, as we have already done in the case of
photography, we must inquire into the transposition which the animated
picture necessarily imposes on the reality which it "records." Paradoxically,
the gap is even greater between reality and its moving image. It has often
been observed that time and space in the film universe have nothing in
common with their counterparts in the real world. The pictures extracted
from the latter, whether in a documentary or a fictional film, are removed by
the act of editing from the fragments of time and space to which their
models belong; they are arranged within an autonomous structure which is
not in keeping with the reality but gives the illusion thereof. Cinemato-
graphic writing condenses reality: editing scoffs at real time and invents
another kind of time. In a word, the cinema is always visibly or invisibly
linked with the imaginary; it is a language which adheres closely to reality
but which never exactly reproduces it. In Lumiere's cinematograph, as
Morin emphasizes, time "was precisely real chronological time" whereas
the true cinema
suppresses and cuts up chronology; it harmonizes and puts together fragments of time in
accordance with a particular rhythm which is not that of action but of the images of action.
Editing unites and organizes into a continuum the discontinuous and heterogeneous succes-
sion of these shots. It is this rhythm which on the basis of small fragments of time, will form a
new and fluid time (Morin 1956:15).
It should be noted that the perfect concordance of real time and cinema
time in the early Lumiere films depends on their short duration; these small
films resemble filmed theater rather t han cinema to the extent that they
respect the chronology of the action recorded. While this may endow the
document concerned with a high degree of authenticity, the unity of time
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112 L. de H eusch
and place thereby imposed constitutes an absurd limitation from which the
so-called documentary film as well as the fictional film has finally freed
itself.
This "fake" or "metamorphosed" time lends itself as readily to expressing
t rut h as unt r ut h. The mind handles this language easily, whether in good or
bad faith. We shall have occasion to revert to this topic: there is no "scien-
tific" treatment of cinematographic language, no rules which suffice to
ensure the automatic recording of social reality: there is no way of filming
which differs radically from the "stylized" interpretation associated with
the "fictional cinema." In this connection, the present study will offer no
ready-made solution. Most of the films we shall analyze are also finished
and successful cinematographic workssometimes masterpieces of cine-
matographic art.
In the past, much was made of the "constructural" part played by editing
in the cinematographic language. In fact, that role is not of primary impor-
tance in the sociological film, where the dominant element would seem to
be ultimately the quality of the shots, the feeling of reality which emerges
from the pictures. In this regard, film analysis has been unduly attracted by
a particular aesthetic, that of the expressionist school. Most speculations on
editing are of course based on the celebrated Kuleshov experiment tending
t o prove that the emotive significance of a shot varies according to the
preceding and the following shot. The experiment was described by Pudov-
kin as follows:
Kuleshov and I took close-ups of the well-known actor Mosjukin from a certain film. We
chose close-ups which were static and expressed no sort of feelingmotionless close-ups.
We joined these close-ups, all of which were alike, to other pieces of film in three different
combinations. In the first case, the close-up of Mosjukin was immediately followed by a
close-up of a plate of soup on a table. It became unmistakably clear that Mosjukin was
looking at that plate. In the second case, Mosjukin's face was followed by a shot showing a
dead woman on a divan. In the third case, the close-up was followed by a shot of a small girl
playing with a comical toy in the form of a little bear. When we showed these three
combinations to an audience which had not been told what was going on, the result was
extraordinary. The audience went wild with enthusiasm over the actor's performance. They
were struck by the bitterness of his expression at the sight of the forgotten soup, were moved
by the profound grief he displayed on seeing the dead woman and admired the happy,
radiant smile with which he looked fondly at the little girl playing with her toy. But we knew
that the expression was identical in all three cases (Agel 1957:120-1).
It would be a mistake, however, to attach too much importance to this
idea. As Roger Leenhardt has emphasized, editing style has changed since
1920, and this alleged law is becoming less and less valid; according to Mr.
Leenhardt, editing has in fact become a secondary element in the cinemato-
graphic narrative (1959). It should also be noted that Kuleshov's experiment
was carried out with a neutral, motionless, static close-up which could
therefore be associated with the maximum number of different meanings.
This is obviously an extreme case. Filmmakers are well aware that the
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 113
meaning of a shot is rarely changed so radically by mere editing. The limits
of variation are, in fact, relatively narrow. It is nonetheless true, as Andre
Bazin says, that editing, even if it is not the key element in the cinema,
"creates relations of meaning between shots which are not implied by the
nature of those shots when taken individually" (1958:56). Bazin also notes
that Flaherty was one of the first to reject implicitly the idea of the great
Russian and German filmmakers that the expressionism of the editing and
the plastic value of the picture are the very foundations of the cinemato-
graphic art. An overriding concern with the expression of reality was the
revolutionary contribution made by Flaherty, who relegated the symbol-
izing function of editing to the background. Filmed reality is no longer the
shadow of which editing is the substance, it is both shadow and substance.
In this renewed attachment to reality which has distinguished the docu-
mentary film since Flaherty, editing, as Bazin says, has no more than a
negative function: it eliminates parasitical elements, it makes a selection
from overabundant material:
The camera cannot see everything at once; but at least it seeks to avoid losing anything of
what it does see. What matters to Flaherty in the scene of Nanook hunting the seal is the
relationship between Nanook and the animal, the real length of the wait. Editing could
suggest the length of time involved; Flaherty confines himself to showing us the wait; the
duration of the hunt is the very substance of the picture, its true object. In the film, therefore,
this incident only comprises one shot. Can it be denied that it is thereby much more moving
than editing designed to attract? (Bazin 1958:56).
The documentary cinema, therefore, recovers something of the ancient
prestige of the Lumiere cinematograph: it reintroduces real time into the
metamorphosed time created by editing, at certain key moments when the
picture tends to reidentify itself completely with reality.
CHAPTER I I . NOTES FOR A TYPOLOGY OF THE SOCIOLOGICAL FILM
The Documentary Film
We shall see in a moment how the desire to express certain aspects of social
life as authentically as possible led to the creation of an impressive series of
documentary films. Our subject calls for an analysis of the main trends in
the documentary film, since, as may be imagined, the ethnographic or
sociological cinema emerged long before ethnographers or sociologists
suspected its existence. An attempt will be made to sketch the history of
the sociological film. We shall find in this survey, which will embrance the
most important documentary works, the two types of objective approach to
human behavior which ethnography has defined. These films, in which the
sociological aim is more or less clear, deserve to be considered authentic
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224 L. de H eusch
documents. They are, therefore, as interesting to the public at large, to
whom they are mainly addressed, as to specialists in social science. These
authentic documents are works of art and reveal a clear determination to
mirror social reality. The documentary film, in a sense, replaces the investi-
gator's observationan observation which is sometimes superficial, syn-
thetic rather t han analytic, but nevertheless valuable. Paradoxically, the
camera's powers of observation are limited, but its possibilities of expres-
sion are immense. Films of this type have the great merit of being able to
establish a sensitive contact with man by revealing fragmentary aspects of
his social condition. From the discursive viewpoint, the cinema is a poor
language; but it moves with marvelous ease in concrete situations which it
can reconstitute and enlarge like a microscope.
Documentary films were not devised as scientific reports, but they none-
theless have considerable value as observations. They serve as illustrations
of or as introductions to a sociological problem. They are in the nature of
testimonies or even of pamphlets and differ radically from documentary
films of social propaganda which the sociologist must also take into ac-
count.
It is noteworthy that the great documentary films on man are often critical
works which, like many dramatic works, seek to arouse a sociological
awareness. They appeal to the emotions as much as to the intelligence.
The Social Propaganda Film
The authorities frequently use the cinema to persuade the public of the t rut h
of a particular social contention. It must be admitted that such films gener-
ally arouse a curious feeling of distrust in the experienced spectator. There is
an obscure feeling that one is being duped even if the argument itself is
valid and acceptable. This sociological phenomenon deserves analysis.
As soon as the cinema ceases to lead us into a dream world, a fictional
world, we expect it to extend our knowledge of the real; we experience a
singular revulsion from the "cinema" back to the "cinematograph," a return
to the scientific origins of the camera. We expect a "documentary" film to
provide us with the unvarnished t rut h, and as soon as the feeling of
freedom diminishes, as soon as a thesis comes between the picture and
ourselves, a vaguely hostile reaction takes place in the dept hs of our con-
sciousness. Be that as it may, films of social propaganda exist, and their
social philosophy, no less than the concrete situations they refer to, offer
more t han one lesson to sociology. For the historian they bear witness to the
ideologies of our time. In addition, their particular viewpoint often high-
lights some striking aspect of the social group concerned.
It is not easy to distinguish between honest and dishonest propaganda in
such productions. Whereas anyone can see that the Nazi films belong to the
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 115
second category, the distinction is not always so clear. When the authorities
subsidize a film designed to show national customs, it is often noteworthy
that the subject is treated in a spirit of conformity: it shows the ideals and
standard types of society but rarely the shortcomings. It is naturally rare for
such films to show anything but the bright and sunny a pects of national
social life. This law is universal. It would of course be unfair to accuse the
"official" producers of dishonesty. At all events, they reveal one aspect of
social reality which deserves the sociologist's attention. The themes se-
lected revealsometimes with great ingenuousnesshow a given society
sees itself and its reasons for self-esteem: cultural values assert themselves
or manifest themselves by implications. Obviously, works of social criticism
and revolutionary manifestos are not to be found in this type of production.
The innumerable films of all nationalities in which the authorities seek to
justify to the public their social action in various fields should be considered
a priori with considerable reserve by the sociologist, who will, however, on
occasion find in them interesting pictures of the environment. Singular
phenomena of photogenic distortion may also be observed. I remember a
film on juvenile delinquency in which the benign and worthy investigators
engaged in the paternal study of the case of a youthful miscreant all look
curiously like murderers on the screen. In a certain number of cases, these
films seek to provide the public with objective information on a social
problem, but very often they see the problem from a special angle which is
flattering to the national institutions. It is difficult to make allowance for the
element of prestige in a sociological information film. The old colonial
documentary cinema abounds in films of this type.
Certain talented film producers have been able to express a personal and
authentic vision of mankind in spite of the restrictions imposed on artistic
creation and sociological objectivity by their political sponsors. Generally
speaking, freedom of expression is much more fragile in the cinema than in
literature, since each production requires the investment of a large capital.
This involves a difficult problem of moral obligation.
Films and Sociological Research
The International Committee on Ethnographic and Sociological Films.
Along with the documents provided by the two foregoing categories, an
important place must be given to films produced by scientific research
workers or in close cooperation with them by professional film producers
during actual research. This type of production flourishes especially in the
field of traditional ethnography (or cultural anthropology). Since the cre-
ation in 1952 of the International Ethnographic Film Committee (GDFE),
known since 1959 as the International Committee on Ethnographic and
Sociological Films (CIFES), ethnographers and professional film producers
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116 L. de H eusch
have met on several occasions to discuss the problems involved in this type
of film. This organization, with headquarters at the Musee de l'Homme in
Paris, was founded on the initiative of Jean Rouch (who is still its Secretary-
General) to "establish a link between human sciences, on the one hand, and
cinematographic art, on the other, in view of developing scientific research
as well as extending the art of moving pictures." A federation of national
bodies affiliated to the CIFES was therefore formed with the following
specific aims:
To draw up an inventory of all existing films on ethnographic subjects; to
analyze, criticize, and preserve them;
To produce new ethnographic films;
To disseminate the best ethnographic films.
The International Committee, whose creation was decided in Vienna in
1952 at the Fourth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethno-
logic Sciences, was definitely constituted on the occasion of the Fifth Con-
gress, held in Philadelphia in 1956 and at present comprises the following
countries: Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Italy, Nether-
lands, Poland, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States of America
(Peabody Museum, Harvard University), and Yugoslavia. Among the inter-
national meetings organized by the committee may be mentioned the
International Ethnographic Film Weeks at the Musee de l'Homme (Paris,
May 1955) and at Cagliari University (Sardinia, May 1957); the International
Conference on Ethnographic and Sociological Films organized at Prague
(September 1957) and at the Instituto de Etnologia e Antropologia Culturale
of Perugia University (May 1959) with the cooperation of UNESCO. The
international committee also took part in the Fourth World Congress of
Sociology at Milan-Stresa (September 1959) when the committee's field of
activity was extended to all the social sciences. Lastly, the efforts of the
Centro Italiano par il Film Etnografico e Sociologico and the Centro Cultu-
rale Cinematografico Italiano have led to the organization of the Interna-
tional Ethnographic and Sociological Film Festival (Peoples' Festival), where
the works shown are judged from both the aesthetic and scientific point of
view by a jury comprising, among others, delegates of the CIFES and the
International Sociological Association.
The aim of the Peoples' Festival, which is held each year at the same time
in Florence, is to "make known on a world level the cinematographic
documentation relating to the social sciences (or inspired in any way by the
conditions of man in society), produced in various countriesdocumenta-
tion which may be scientific, aimed at popularization or, more simply,
intended for entertainment." The CIFES, whose first president was Pro-
fessor Georges Smets, has been headed since 1960 by H.R.H. Prince Peter of
Greece and Denmark.
Parallel to these activities, the Flaherty Film Seminar in the United States
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 117
annually brings together, under the great name of the author of Nanook,
students of the cinema and contemporary cinematographers inspired by
the same concern for authenticity. It is significant that the International
Comnuttee on Ethnographic and Sociological Films has always had the
greatest admiration for Flaherty's work.
Discussion on the S cientific Value and the Methods of E thnographic
and S ociological Films.
1. Birth of an ethnographic film doctrine in France.
The cinema found its way into ethnography by the back door, as it were. For
a long time research workers scarcely troubled to consider the possibilities
of this toy, which entertained their friends but was hardly to be taken
seriously. At best, the clumsy sequences which the ethnographer brought
home from some distant spot served to brighten a dry and careful lecture.
Films could merely indicate the setting of a survey; the cinema was a game, a
pastime.
But certain research workers came to realize that films might perhaps be
used systematically for scientific purposes. AndrS Leroi-Gourhan (1948)
was one of those in French ethnographic circles who contributed most to
this changed attitude. In a study published in 1948 the future occupant of
the Chair of Ethnology at the Sorbonne boldly asked the question: Does the
ethnological film exist? The views he put forward upset a great many of the
narrow concepts of ethnography prevalent at the time. Leroi-Gourhan's
theory had the great merit of including in the realm of ethnographic films
those "environmental films" which were made without any scientific intent;
he clearly saw, for example, the authenticity of the very elaborate documen-
tary which the professional film producer Georges Rouquier had recently
made on a section of the French peasant population (Farrebique) without any
attempt at systematic scientific "research." Leroi-Gourhan's article should
therefore be hailed as the study of a precursor who was determined to avoid
imprisoning the ethnographic film, whose existence had barely been recog-
nized hitherto, in a narrow definition following too closely those of other
scientific disciplines. This breadth of vision was unfortunately not shared
by all those who subsequently sought to codify ethnographic film methods.
Leroi-Gourhan distinguished between three sorts of films to which the
term "ethnological" might be applied:
(a) The research film as a method of scientific recording.
(b) The public documentary, or "exotic," film belonging to the category of
travel films.
(c) The film of environment "produced with no scientific aim but deriving
an ethnological value from its exportation; thus a sentimental film in a
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118 L. de H eusch
Chinese setting or a good New York gangster film becomes a depiction
of strange customs when seen on another continent."
The ethnologist seeks documents in all these three categories. What can he
hope to find?
(a) The research film proper comprises two types, according to Leroi-
Gourhan. A distinction must be drawn between cinematographic notes
(shot from day to day with no advance plan) and the organized film shot
without commercial considerations but capable of interesting the general
public; the organized film provides a valuable instrument of instruction.
Leroi-Gourhan considers the possibility of producing scientific films on
physical anthropology and prehistoric research as well as on ethnology.
Physical anthropology: "It is becoming possible to st udy the general attitudes
involved in work, in walking or in resting, the worker's or the swimmer's
hand movements, mimicry in conveying feelings and to make a true portrait
of a group of men, involving the type of face, the limbs and the movements
which set them in motion." Prehistory: The descriptive film of an excavation
makes it possible to reconstruct all the various stages, "to repeat it whenever
desired, to see again what the work has irrevocably destroyed." E thnogra-
phy: The film can provide a general picture of a people's culture, or, alter-
natively, describe a limited sector of that people's activity.
Leroi-Gourhan hopes that such research films will be produced by eth-
nographers themselves, who should learn to handle a camera; the organ-
izers of scientific missions should provide the scientific teams with cameras
and recognize the value of "cinema archives." An elementary course of
instruction in cinematographic technique is given to prospective research
workers at the Ethnological Research Training Center (Muse'e de 1'Homme,
Paris). Leroi-Gourhan rightly regrets that so many travelers "have turned
the handle of a film camera for the first time in the field, with only the
vaguest ideas on lighting and angles, and no serious notion of how to
construct a film."
(b) The "exotic," or travel, film, is a type, says Leroi-Gourhan, which
should disappear to the extent that it does not hesitate to falsify reality in its
narration or music as well as in its choice of shots.
(c) The film of environment, although also aimed at the general public,
"unconsciously conceals scientific values which become apparent to an-
other type of spectator. If properly constructed and generally well pro-
duced, it can be classed with the organized ethnological film." As a typical
example of this category the author mentions Rouquier's Farrebique.
Leroi-Gourhan thus very clearly raises the problem of the ethnographic
film on its proper groundthat of honest information. He is probably only
mistaken on one point: the existence of a cinema of notations which de-
serves to be classed as research cinema. Before dealing with this important
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 119
issue, we shall briefly review the development of ideas relating to sociologi-
cal films in France over the last ten or twelve years.
In the same issue of the Revue degiographie humaine et d'ethnologie in which
Leroi-Gourhan's important article appeared, Robert Lefranc (1948) dealt
with the pedagogical problem of the use of films in a related field, that of
human geography.
The author considers that this discipline affords a particularly promising
field for the employment of the cinema and regrets the almost total absence
of films in secondary education. Lefranc suggests the production of peda-
gogic films relating to this discipline. This introduces the concept of the
ideal film, specially designed for educational purposes. The author empha-
sizes that "we see differently through the intermediary of the camera" and
hopes that films will be made on the human geography of the peoples
among whom the student lives so as to induce him "to ask himself ques-
tions"; he suggests a number of subjects: man as a member of society and of
a civilization, types of work and ways of life, techniques, adjustment to
environment, material and cultural exchanges. Lefranc distrusts profes-
sional cinematographers and condemns "original angle shots, dramatic
lighting effects, striking contrasts," although elsewhere he himself pays
tribute to the pedagogic advantages of a particularly "contrasted" montage
effect: the juxtaposition, in a Canadian film on world nutrition, of two
scenes, "a street in China or India during a great faminethe destruction of
wheat stocks in some other country." We must draw attention here to an
internal contradiction before even attempting a general discussion of these
various ideas. Lefranc, who seems to reject cinematographic artifices which
are not selected "in relation to the idea governing the preparation of the
film," nonetheless emphasizes in an earlier passage the value of "a consider-
able emotive impact which enables the memory to retain the facts for a
longer time." How can one reject those elements of cinematographic lan-
guage which are most likely to produce emotive reactions, and at the same
time recognize that the child, the adolescent, and even the adult has no
lasting awareness without the presence of an emotive undercurrent? Be that
as it may, Lefranc's study, like Leroi-Gourhan's, has the great merit of
providing the initial elements of a subject which is being more and more
ardently debated by ethnographers.
In France, Jean Rouch produced hi s first films in the field at a time when
Leroi-Gourhan was drawing his colleagues' attention to the cinema. The
high quality of these documents and the liveliness of their style impressed
research workers at the various scientific congresses where they were
shown. On the initiative of Leroi-Gourhan and Rouch, one of the first
ethnographic film committees was formed in France in 1952. In 1957, this
committee submitted a detailed report, "The Cinema in Ethnographic
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120 L. de H eusch
Surveys and in the Teaching of Ethnography," at the Prague international
seminar.
What is striking in this study is the curious mixture of clear-sightedness
and illusion. The accent is first of all placed on the value of the cinema as an
observation technique, on the "objectivity" of cinematographic recording.
The report defines in a more restrictive way t han Leroi-Gourhan two levels
of "scientific" utilization of films: research and education. On the research
level, the authors of the report in a very general manner envisage the camera
as an instrument of notation without specifying the relatively limited types
of behavior to which this definition might apply. There is therefore an
overestimation of the objective powers of the camera, considered as a
perfected eye operating almost unknown to the ethnographer; the cinema is
regarded as a sort of perfected machine for recording reality in the raw: "The
camera can take notes more completely, more rapidly and more faithfully
t han an ethnographer armed solely with a pad and pencil." The report
emphasizes that it is practically impossible for a single research worker
confronted with a complex ceremony to observe everything that is taking
place. The camera, however, records everything with fidelity and at the very
speed at which it is happeni ng. Cinematographic notes taken during a
survey would, according to the same report, have the following advantages:
(a) They can be "read" direct by illiterate informants who can t hus comment
on them.
(b) Cinematographic notation is more objective t han a written description,
which is always in danger of distorting.
(c) Cinematographic notes enable the investigator to see a ceremony again
at his leisure and make a more thorough analysis of it. They are not, of
course, sufficient in themselves, but they complete previous investiga-
tions or provide the starting point for new ones.
The report rightly emphasizes that the cinema makes it possible to record
things which cannot be noted in any other way: movements made in
handicrafts, technical or artistic activity, attitudes, play of expression, be-
havior, and so on. The authors of the report regard the film as complemen-
tary to the notebook on this level also. They regard the film camera as an
impartial witness and superior to the still camera, which must be selective,
"whereas one can film everything that is going on practically without
knowing it." It sometimes happens that reactions which were completely
unnoticed at the time are discovered subsequently. The outstanding value of
the cinema in the teaching of ethnography is very rightly stressed: "It is an
inestimable advantage to see and hear living people in illustration of a given
lesson." Expanding on what we have just said wi t h regard to photography,
the report stresses the value of "the feeling of participation in other men's
lives," a participation which contrasts with mere "spectacles" of life. "The
student who has seen the film S urvivors of the S tone Age (South Africa) will
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 121
always remember the bushmen's search for water because, for a moment or
two, he will have identified himself with that tragic search." The same
report mentions a film made by the present writer (with the collaboration of
J. J. Maquet for the scenario) on the traditional relationships between castes
in Ruanda (teaching of sociology).
In his course at the University of Paris, Marcel Griaule mentioned the
cinema as one of the ethnographic techniques. This was an event of historic
importance in the traditional framework of scientific research in France.
Griaule's option, of course, remains very conservative; he attempts to find a
place for the cinema within the framework of classical ethnographic tech-
niques and does not fully appreciate the radical originality of this new
method of "recording." The clear division established between the ethno-
graphic film as a "work of art" and as a "research note" is symptomatic. In
the small book which summarizes his teaching, Methode de I'ethmgraphie,
Griaule outlines the three ideas which, in his view, should govern the use of
the cinema during an investigation:
(a) The film is of value as archives; it can be referred to like a card or an
object.
(b) The film is an extremely effective instrument for the training of special-
ists in ethnographic research.
(c) In a wider sense, it contributes to the education of the public and may, in
certain circumstances, be a work of art.
Griaule conceived of the ethnographic film as "an exact document relating
to unreconstituted original phenomena (except in certain special cases)." A
distinction must be drawn between "relatively stable phenomena occurring
within a definite area according to known methods, e.g., a particular
technique or an uncomplicated ceremony whose various stages are known"
and "phenomena involving very complex motion whose future course is
unknown or little known." The technical activities of man are the best
suited to cinematographic recording "from the viewpoint of time and
space" since the most suitable time and place can be selected. The recording
of "phenomena involving complex motion," in other words, ceremonies of
some importance, calls for careful preparation. While any sort of reconstitu-
tion is theoretically to be excluded, Griaule recognized that this prohibition
does not include what cinematographers call "continuity shots"; but Griaule
defines these very restrictively as "the taking of close ups, e.g., of costumes
and ornaments which can be introduced at a later stage, tattoo marks which
can be reproduced, and which the commotion of celebrations or religious
circumstances make it impossible to study while they are actually in use7'
Subject to the foregoing, the film generally covers a rite or a subject on
which preliminary information has been obtained, enabling the investigator
to bring out the main sequence of events. Griaule emphasizes the impor-
tance of preparatory work for the film. Far from being an advocate of laissez-
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222 L. de H eusch
faire, Griaule stresses that the cinematographer should "make as much use
as possible of the preliminary inquiry carried out by the ethnographers."
Concern with the spectacular is, in principle, foreign to ethnography, since
it may tempt the cinematographer to "neglect native complications or banal-
ities of expression which may well be central to the ceremonies." Griaule
considers that there can be no question of using unprocessed documents
(which he describes as "ethnographic demonstration" films) for public
education. Arrangements should therefore be made during the investiga-
tion for the compilation of public documentaries, which ultimately give "a
better idea of the subject treated than the film in its rough state. It is here
that art has an important part to play. It restores an exact reality. In other
words, judiciously selected and framed detail evokes the real atmosphere
better than the document pure and simple with its inevitable tedious
passages which destroy the atmosphere" (Griaule 1957:85-89).
Analyzing investigation techniques which are more specifically "sotio-
graphic"that is to say, (according to the French conception), which relate
to the rural or urban environment in industrial civilizationGeorges
Granai likewise adopts this view. He classes the cinema among "observation
techniques." He bases himself on ethnographic experience and considers
that "cinematographic preservation and reproduction of gestural or techni-
cal behaviour, of ludic or religious ceremonies, facilitates the search for mean-
ings (our italics) by restoring artifically and at leisure the natural time of
occurrence of the phenomena." Granai therefore considers that the cinema
may be a sociological research instrument; according to this author, it
enables "documents of scientific value" to be constituted (1958:141).
2. Ethnography and Cinematographic Radicalism.
The most rigid methodological concept is probably that of the German
ethnographers of the Gottingen Scientific Film Institute (Institut fur den
Wissenschaftlichen Film). Dr. G. Spannaus (1956), for example, considers
the ethnographic film from the viewpoint of strict research and limits the
part played by the scientist in the realm of pictures to the field of technology.
The author concludes that cinematographic recording makes it possible to
correct the errors or shortcoming? of visual observation. In addition, films
provide valuable material for comparative ethnography by enabling a com-
parison to be made between technical characteristics typical of widely
separated cultures.
In another article, Dr. Spannaus (1957) illustrates the first of these ideas by
taking pottery techniques as an example. The films of the Ngbande tribe
(Northern Liberia) brought back by Dr. Germann made it possible to correct
inaccurate information obtained from written documentation. The latter
indicated that the technique used by this people consisted of modeling by
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 123
gradual thinning down of the cavity hollowed out of the lump of clay
(Treibtechnik), but the film clearly revealed that this process is used only in
making the lower half of the pot; it is completed by modeling the colombine
(S piralwulsttechnik). A third study by the same author (Spannaus 1955) and
an anonymous article in the Bulletin of the Research Film S ection of the Interna-
tional S cientific Film Association (Anon. 1959) give the Gottingen Institute's
views on ethnographic film methodology. Films offering the possibility of
scientific analysis are those dealing with technical processes, certain as-
pects of economic activity and dances. It will be observed that this list is
deliberately restrictive although offered merely as an example. The institute
considers that representative sequences should be filmed; in other words, it
is sufficient, for each technical operation, to show similar movements a
limited number of times, though in reality they continue for several hours.
The introduction of the film should indicate the geographical, cultural, and
social environment and the anthropological type to which the population
belongs. Where necessary, rites, ceremonies, and various social manifesta-
tions linked to the technical activity which is the main subject of the film
should also be shown, as well as the use made of the article concerned in
everyday life. Arrangements must be made for the synchronization of
musical recordings, particularly in films dealing with dances. An important
problem to be considered is the extent to which the behavior of people being
filmed is affected by the presence of the camera. Scientific methodology
requires therefore that a detailed report should be attached to the film. The
ethnologist may sometimes legitimately intervene as regards behavior. Par-
ticularly with a view to lighting, he may arrange for manual work to be done
in the sun, although in tropical regions such work is generally carried out in
the shade. Among the concessions somewhat reluctantly made by the
Gottingen Institute, mention may be made of the organization of a "perfor-
mance" specially for the purpose of filming. But while a hunting expedition
may be arranged by the ethnologist-cinematographer in this way, the fic-
tional representation of the ceremonies linked to the seasons of the year or to
events in human existence (death, marriage, etc.) would be a transgression
of the limitations imposed on the "scientific film."
The position taken up by Professor Tullio Seppilli of Perugia University at
the Prague Seminar is similar to the above, though the Italian expert neither
advocates nor opposes any particular method. He draws a sharp distinction
between scientific films and other types of documentary film (populariza-
tion, spectacular, etc.). Professor Seppilli likewise holds that cinemato-
graphic technique is in itself objective; but the filmmaker chooses certain
aspects of reality in accordance with his own ideology; films designed as
works of art should therefore be carefully distiguished from films designed
solely as scientific documents. The author maintains that the style of these
two types is necessarily different.
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224 L. de H eusch
3. From Magic Eye to Blind Eye.
The very notion of a research cinema as developed by our authors implies
that the research worker expects a revelation from the cinematographic
experience; he knows little or nothing about the phenomenon which he is
recording and replaces his own observation by an improved eye. This type
of research cinema excludes any staging; it amounts to straight reporting, or
"recording from life." This is what French research workers have in mind
when they allude to "cinematographic notes." But this does not mean that
the reporting technique alone makes it possible to record an "authentic
document." This essential distinction will be developed at length later. The
realm of the sociological film is infinitely richer t han that of the research
film, which is after all only one aspect, not unimportant but nonetheless
secondary. The social phenomena which the camera can capture "from life"
by revealing new facts to research workers, facts of which they were un-
aware or which they had not properly observed, are limited to two types:
technical motions and ritual motions. It is the realm of technology and of
ceremony.
It is noteworthy that the purists of the ethnographic film only allow a
truly scientific value to these two types of recording stereotyped phenom-
ena. That is the position taken among others by the Gottingen Scientific
Film Institute, which condemns any intervention by the dnematographer
in the progress of the phenomenon observed (apart from a few minor
concessions). The rigidity of this approach is obvious. Be that as it may, it is
in keeping with the strict, ideal definition of the "objective" camera from
which a faithful recording of the crude fact is expected. But if this theory
were carried to extremes, there would be no films deserving to be termed
"research films" except a few devoted to pottery, wicker-work, and so on.
As a matter of fact, the cdnematographer's intervention is already apparent
in the filming of ceremonies in the form of choices of angles, place, and time.
Strictly speaking, the research factor disappears, since the cinematographer
must be familiar in advance with the ritual scenario from which he chooses
those elements he considers significant. It is difficult to follow those who
expect enlightenment from chance recording and the unordered accumula-
tion of rough "cinematographic notes"; the cinematographer's attention
must already have been attracted to particular points. It would seem highly
unlikely that completely indiscriminate filming would enable the dnema-
tographer to discover afterward (during screening) things which had es-
caped his direct observation (during shooting).
Let us look more closely into the meaning of ritual motions and imagine
the recording of a complex ceremony involving a large number of individ-
uals in different places over a period of several days. To analyze such a sodal
phenomenon, to describe it correctly, the ethnographer (like any sociogra-
pher whatever the environment in which he is working) uses a succession of
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 125
approaches. He does not perceive the significant details from the outset; it
may even happen that the chief centers of interest escape him at first sight.
The point at issue may sometimes, indeed, be situated in mythical space.
The ethnographer is in the forest watching women having their faces
painted while men in the village are holding an extremely interesting
discussion on an important question of birthright, the principles of which
emerge in the course of the dispute. The ethnographer thereupon leaves the
women and listens to the conversations in the village. But at the same time
he should be in three other places where things are happening which may
be trifling but which may be of the greatest importance. He will obtain an
overall view of all these seemingly disconnected ceremonial activities only
after he has made a large number of fragmentary observations. Endless
questions will still be necessary to ascertain the meaning of the actions
observed. The observer thus starts with a rough plan which is continually
being corrected and amplified. It is only after a very long and often very
wearisome inquiry that the ethnographer can hope to obtain a description
which, if not complete, is at least adequate. Even when he has this typcial,
ideal description, based on several series of observations made at quite
different times, he has not finished his work. The sociological analysis must
then be made in order to bring out the inner coherence of the facts, their
latent structure; this reveals a certain concept of the world, human relations,
and culture. As Gaston Bachelard has said, all science is concerned with
bringing to light what is hidden.
We therefore see no validity in the cinematographic recording of these
complex facts by the "roving camera" method, which consists in blindly
filming a mass of incomprehensible movement in the very dubious hope
that the truth will be, in both senses of the word, revealed by the so-called
sensitive film. In fact, such recording can only give an inaccurate and
falsebecause incompletepicture of that invisible sociological reality
which forms the warp onto which the tangled skein of motions is woven.
It is therefore clear that the cinematographer should have at least some
idea of what is going to happen before he begins: he should be familiar with
the cultural scenario of the ceremony; he should have found out where the
most significant incidents will take place. He should be informed in advance
even if his information is incomplete. It is amusing to observe that ethnogra-
phers, who are so slow to draw any conclusion (though they display great
cunning in their investigations), and who are so cautious in accepting the
validity of information, lose all control over themselves when they handle a
camera. Curiously enough, they seem to revert to the magic stage of
knowledge as soon as they put down their fountain pens and notebooks and
set off with a camera; they feel as if they were on holiday, and it is almost as
though they had no other thought t han to record a few travel reminiscences
involving the minimum of preparation. Such an attitude is certainly a very
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126 L. de H eusch
legitimate one, but why insist on confusing it with a scientific method of
objective notation?
This confusion implies a hasty identification of the social sciences with
the exact sciences. Clearly the very notion of research, like the methods of
observation, differs greatly between the two. Hence the fundamental con-
cepts of science and the cinema cannot coincide; to superimpose one on the
other involves a danger of distorting the very spirit of the social sciences and
in any case leads to a considerable limitation of their field. The extreme of
absurdity is reached with the statement that the observer should be as good
as absent, invisible, that the camera should be concealed so as not to disturb
the phenomenon which is being recorded.
This method has no doubt been successfully applied to a certain number
of psychological and sociological observations, and various cases will be
analyzed in the next chapter. Nevertheless it must again be pointed out that
the concealed camera restricts cinematographic recording to a very limited
number of situations. It is impossible for the cameraman to become an
absolute phantom, and the disturbance which the camera causes in ethno-
graphic investigations should not be exaggerated. The ethnographer who
has been allowed to share the everyday existence of a Bantu village, no
matter how discreet and friendly he may be, is far from being an unseen
shadow. Whatever he does, he causes a great deal of awkwardness; he dis-
turbs and upsets. Even if he has been found likable in certain respects, he is
not accepted as the incorporeal image of scientific objectivity but as a
stranger having strange ways, neither wholly European nor wholly black
African. His queerness, sometimes even his complete craziness, lead him to
inspect the pots which the women are baking, to wander from house to
house in search of heaven knows what ancient object which has not been
used by anyone for ages, to utter obscenities in order to test family taboos,
to interrupt the mourning of those whom custom compels to weep bitterly
in order to make them recite their ancestry or find out what gifts they are
bringing. He scribbles. He scribbles away about everything and nothing. He
is initiated into the mysteries of male society: within the sacred precincts he
scribbles still more furiously, harassing the ancients with stupid questions
until they regret ever having allowed him into their company. In short, he is
regarded as completely abnormal. Sometimesand this is more serious
he commits sacrileges: he accidently shifts the immovable seat of the ritual
dancers because he is ignorant of the custom. He would not have caused
greater offense if he had displaced the pontifical throne. But all these errors
are made good. The profaner apologizes, spares no pains, takes up his
notebook again and records some interesting new observations concerning
the seat of the ritual dancers. All in all, therefore, it is no more surprising to
see the ethnographer going about the village with a camera than with a
fountain pen.
My own cinematographic experience in Africa and Europe confirms that
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 127
of Jean Rouch: the active and conscious participation of individuals in the
making of a film is desirable and completely in line with traditional ethno-
graphic techniques. The use of the camera in the field does not cause any
specific disturbance. On the contrary, the element of play which it implies
may sometimes give rise to spontaneous psychological reactions that would
escape any other method of investigation. At this leveland only at this
level, which is that of the sociodramait is possible to envisage the devel-
opment of a true research cinema whose methods owe nothing to those
perfected in the field of exact and natural science. But this revolutionary
movement is very recent. Here again, Jean Rouch was a precursor with Moi,
un rvoir (I, a Negro) and C hronique d'un ete (Story of a Summer) made in
collaboration with the sociologist Edgar Morin. In this new manifestation of
the research film Rouch and Morin boldly transgress all the premature rules
laid down by the early theories of the ethnographic film. They seek to
explore the inner reality, and even the imaginary, and have thereby inaugu-
rated a new type of cinematic t rut h.
If we investigate more thoroughly the restrictive definitions suggested for
the research film, we find that these purist doctrines are based on a myth,
that of the camera's objectivityin other words, and paradoxically, on a
belief in its magic powers.
This myth grew up among ethnographers as a result of the wonderful
achievements of very special cinematographic procedures (the use of slow
motion and speeded-up sequences) in the field of natural science. These
techniques unquestionably made it possible to see things which were
imperceptible to the naked eye because the phenomena were too slow or too
fast. In medicine, the camera can explore the invisible: the extraordinary
reality of internal organic life can be filmed by means of an illuminated
probe. But one paradoxical fact has perhaps not received sufficient atten-
tion: social life, the life that takes place before our eyes, is largely invisible. It
is made up of rhythms, passions, various disordered or ritualized gesticula-
tions, but those rhythms, passions, and gesticulations are never fully appre-
hended by the eye in their secret relationships. Where and how, without
using symbolic transposition, can the cinema capture "from life" the ob-
scure relationships which men form between themselves to help one an-
other, to exploit one another, or to destroy one another? True, the camera can
suggest these relationships by symbols drawn from reality (blows with a
club, smiles, handshakes, etc.)this was the method used by Eisenstein to
describe the October Revolutionor by linguistic devices designed to
evoke social reality through a personal vision which is also that of the social
group with which the filmmaker seeks to identify himself. The scientist is
inclined a priori to reject such a method for his own purposes. But it must be
recognized that the complex field of relationships established between
groups (between social classes, for example) completely escapes the "objec-
tive" camera; whatever the strength of its lens or the speed of its action, the
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128 L. de H eusch
camera's eye is truly blind. The fact is that the social sciences tend toward an
increasingly high degree of abstraction (both in the description of actual
phenomena and at the level of structural explanation).
The roving camera, the camera moving freely through the streets, the
bush, or the fields, scarcely captures anything but scraps of realitytragic
or moving actions or expressions; the camera can never by its own mechani-
cal qualities reveal the meaning of the grief, the emotion it has caught by
surprise. These observations do not imply any denial of the value of cine-
matographic documentation in the field of social sciences; on the contrary,
they extend the field of utilization to a very large number of films which do
not meet the austere criteria we have discussed above.
With few exceptions, therefore, it is all but impossible to allow the
"sociographic" camera (whatever the environment to be filmed) to function
at random with no plan, without at least a rough scenario. Like a sports
reporter, the cinematographer in search of sociological t rut h, cannot afford
to be caught nappi ng by the event which he is filming (and which he will
not, incidentally, succeed in filming at all unless he knows more or less
where and how it will take place, unless he is familiar with the rules of the
social game). It is up to him to capture the event at the right moment, from
the right angle, from the most significant angle. He will expand or contract
the field of observation according to the radius of the zones of interest which
he has already marked down. All framing implies a selection from reality, a
qualitative appraisal of the importance of the event, some idea of the
development of facts and the relations between themin a word, of their
structure. This is what will have to be reflected in the subsequent editing of
the film, in a specifically cinematographic space time. Suffice it to say that
we find it difficult to understand how the cinema can be a generalized
research instrument, an instrument of discovery in the field of social phe-
nomena: the camera is certainly a witness, but it is an external and stupid
witness until it is skillfully and flexibly guided in the recording of its
testimony by an experienced eye, a human eye which has already seen and
which is ready to recognize.
It is necessary at this point to dwell on the question of editing. It is in fact
at the editing stage that most shots acquire their meaning and coherence.
But editing is a deliberate intervention on the part of the film producer; it
does not emerge spontaneously from the "machine for recording reality."
Like framing, but even more so, it is a view of reality. Isolated shots are in no
way comparable to the scattered index cards on which the ethnographer jots
down the various happenings of the day. From the outset, they are notes
selected with a view to specific editingin other words, a specific idea of
the whole; otherwise, the shots would have no interest: they could be
screened a thousand times and would teach nothing, and they have never
taught anything to ethnographers, who nonetheless take a childish plea-
sure in showing them to their colleagues, although no one knows whether
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 129
they are intended to instruct or amuse. Unless the cinematographer has this
general structure, this editing plan, this complex of meanings in mind as he
is filming, it is highly improbable that he will ever be able to make any
serious use of the raw, disordered, and allegedly objective documents he
has recorded. All he has done in such a case is to accumulate a series of
moving photographs, which have no place in the realm of films. He has
collected atoms with which he can never make a molecule. It may be
answered that it does not matter and that the editing of research films can
be dispensed with since it introduces an element of disturbance into the
very meaning of the raw document. Let the shots be left as they are and let
no attempt be made to construct a film: the pictures available can be
screened over and over in order to analyze the details of a piece of mimicry, a
significant gesture or an expression. Here a distinction should no doubt be
made between ritual events and the more casual events of everyday life. In
ritualized structures, many details which the preliminary verbal inquiry
failed to bring out may appear for the first time when shooting is actually
under way. This is therefore accompanied by a discovery during a process of
which the cinematographer already has a comprehensive knowledge. As
we have already emphasized, however, it is still essential to know where
and how to place the camera at different stages of the activities being filmed.
The cinematographer must know the scenario. But it is nevertheless true, as
several authors have pointed out, that the cinema, in dealing with complex
and involved ceremonies, is a marvelous corrector of impressions. The
camera may not be a magic eye, but at least it can sometimes be an attentive
eye, a witness able to improve on an incomplete or overhasty observation.
As Dr. Spannaus rightly points out, this remark also applies to the techno-
logical film. As in the case of a ritual gesture, the notation and description of
a technical gesture rightly belong to cinematographic writing. The power of
the written word is clearly adequate in such a case. It will be observed that
highly stereotyped gestures, which are repeated within a clearly defined
and relatively rigid structure and which make up a subject, are involved.
This is, par excellence, the field of true reporting which captures material
from life without any apparent intervention by the cinematographer. But the
passivity required of the camera in such circumstances is very relative. In
fact, the cinematographer selects his means of expression in this case, too;
that selection is made simply within the narrow limits imposed by the
arrangement of the technical operation of the ceremony. In such cases, the
reportage film is not properly speaking a research instrument but a lan-
guage, a method of synthesizing and narrating a coherent complex of events
within its own space time system. It is alsoand here the reportage film
fulfills a complementary scientific rolean instrument whereby observa-
tions can be checked.
However, the reportage film has only enabled genuine "discoveries" to be
made in very exceptional cases. In the ethnographic field, one interesting
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130 L. de H eusch
case might be mentioned here: Jean Rouch relates that a shot in his film
C imetiere dans lafalaise (Cemetery in the Cliff), which deals with the funeral
rites of the Dogons of the Niger, revealed that the men. carry the corpse
through the village by a circuitous route; and the spiral plays an essential
cosmogonic part in Dogon symbolism.
To sum up: the camera, generally speaking, scarcely deserves to be
considered an objective and impartial sociological observer. It is useless to
multiply arguments in favor of nonintervention, to dream of an invisible
cinema which could take the the unadorned social fact unawares in all its
original purity and spontaneity. Techniques and rituals are virtually the
only two types of social activity which are suited to the "ethnographic note"
method, because they offer structured themes to the cameraman and be-
cause the cinematographic intervention tends to be limited to the recording
of more or less stereotyped movements. (Even so, it must be added that no
ceremony is absolutely identical at each performance.) In such cases, the
participants are completely absorbed in carrying out the necessary motions;
their behavior is unlikely to be disturbed and, as experience with ethno-
graphic films shows, things very often go on as if the camera were invisible
or nonexistent once the camerman has succeeded in getting his presence
accepted. At this level of utilization, the cinema provides the observer with
extremely valuable complementary documentation. But the fact is that
ethnographers (many of whom bring back coverages of this kind from their
expeditions) are mainly concerned with giving an account of what they have
seen, with offering possible spectators a concrete vision of the society they
have studied. I do not think there are many who have genuinely studied
their own films in the hope of correcting their observations. Hence, the
ethnographer (or sociographer) does not bring back notes or index cards in
picture form from his expedition, but merely the raw materials of narratives
aimed at communicating information in the same way as an article in a
scientific review. In this sense, the film evokes what the ethnographer has
seen, understood, and interpreted, through pictures whose essential value
lies not in their having been or not having been taken from life but in their
capacity to reflect or express reality. The true problem of the sociological
film therefore occurs at the level of communication, i.e., education.
In the discussion we have outlined, the equivocal standing of the eth-
nographic film is due to the'fact that authors are reluctant to recognize this
obvious fact owing to some sort of "scientific" amour propre. After all, an
ethnographer is not expected to communicate all his notes to the public
when he publishes a book or a st udy based on his patiently collected
documentation. And it is better to write a good book than to go on
indefinitely accumulating good index cards. The difficulty is that ethno-
graphic films are often clumsily constructed, which largely explains the
ambiguous attitude of their makers in clinging to an allegedly scientific
theory of the film as a notebook. But what happens if the notes are badly
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 131
written and illegible because they are badly thought out? It is altogether too
easy to make a virtue of stylistic faults by arguing that therein resides their
authenticity. Ethnographers should make themselves familiar with contem-
porary film theories and abandon the notion that the cinema purely and
simply shows reality (Micha 1953 and Cohen-Se'at 1952).
Our views in this matter coincide with those advanced at The Hague
Seminar by its president, Professor Karel Plicka. In an inaugural report
entitled "Fundamental Questions of the Ethnographic Film," the author
notes that there are two ways of dealing with an ethnographic subject: the
cinema can either capture reality from life or it can reconstruct that reality.
Both methods are legitimate since in any case the film is only conveying
sociological information by means of a form of dramatization. Accordingly,
the distinguished Czech ethnologist considers that scientific films with
man as their main theme are designed for public screening. The cinematog-
rapher who collaborates with a scientific research worker in shooting a film
should not be regarded as the passive executor of the latter's wishes. Far
from wishing to impose rigid rules on ethnographic and sociological films,
Plicka considers that "each subject confronts the scenario writer and pro-
ducer with new tasks which can never be the same."
In the course of the same seminar, Alfred Metraux, in his paper "La
science ethnographique et le film," assumed a more eclectic viewpoint. He
places great hopes in the "truly scientific" film shot by the ethnographer
himself without any preconceived ideas, "without prematurely seeking to
decide what is most interesting." But he also considers that carefully pre-
pared films intended for the general public deserve the attention of ethnog-
raphers even when they include acted sequences. Metraux emphasizes the
present precarious state of ancient civilizations and the necessity of obtain-
ing pictures of them before they disappear. The archives we thus build up
for future generations will no doubt be consulted and studied "by methods
of which so far we have only a vague idea."
The serious and fundamental misconception of so many distinguished
scientists when they ingenuously discover the "objective" qualities of the
camera has been sharply criticized by Delvaux in a study aimed at encourag-
ing instruction in the principles of the cinematographic art in secondary
schools:
It seems astonishing that the study of cinematography, from whatever angle it is approached
(historical, sociological, ethical), is almost always concerned with the cinema as a narrative
art limited to fictional films since it is these and only these which seem to convey the
imaginary. This explains why historians and certainly moralists and sociologists believe they
are right in limiting their field of research to the types which fiction removes furthest from
living reality. It follows that the more a film rejects fiction and staging the closer it will be to
"truth," and that it will embody reality "taken from life," the evidence of documents, current
events. No more lies, we can at least believe what we see . . . . The very notion of this
graduation of types according to their relationship to reality is based on an ignorance of the
conditions of cinematographic creation; in fact, it is from this carefully preserved confusion
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232 L. de H eusch
that the cinema draws its tremendous power of persuasion. It is at this point, at which all the
various forms of propaganda converge, that we must act to place young minds on their
guard.
It would certainly seem that, this side of the documentary, there is no
"straight" cinema, no way of recording life which is not aimed at some sort
of cinematographic arrangement. The concept of a sociological research
cinema sheltered from all the impurities of language only covers a very
limited field of observation, the limits of which are not always clearly
discerned by scientists, because they suffer from a remarkable optical
illusion when they look on the cinema as an improved eye. It is, in fact, only
barely a privileged detector: more often, the camera, as a mechanical
instrument, is blind or stupid when confronted with social phenomena.
4. Sociological Information Through the Cinema; Its Scope.
Thus we see the uniqueness of the sociological film in the vast current of the
scientific cinema. This uniqueness is reflected in the existence of a spe-
cialized international body, the International Committee on Ethnographic
and Sociological Films, not to be confused with the International Scientific
Film Association with which it maintains close connections in many coun-
tries. In analyzing a certain number of Dutch ethnological films, the cul-
tural anthropology section of the Netherlands Scientific Film Association
found itself faced with the methodological problem to which we have
already referred.
4
The introduction to the document in question rightly
points out that too narrow a criterion would have led the investigators to
accept only a very limited number of films. The working party therefore
considered all those Dutch films which dealt wi t h man and his culture in
non-Western countries. An opinion is given on the value of the films as
teaching instruments. The members of this working party consider that "a
good ethnographic film requires close collaboration between ethnography
and what might be termed 'the art of the film.'" The authors are primarily
concerned with the communication of ethnographic information to the
general public by means of films; they deplore "the ignorance of the most
elementary principles of ethnology," which diminishes the value of this
documentary material. The analytical position of the Netherlands group
strikes us as eminently sound. Account must be taken of a certain number of
existing films, produced mostly by the cinematographic industry and hav-
ing human culture as their theme. The main object is to appraise the quality
of this information, not to distinguish scientific from nonscientific films.
Similarly, in making an initial inventory of ethnographic films produced in
France,
5
the French Ethnographic Film Committee was concerned with
their ethnographic purpose. The geographical field covered by this analysis
was much wider, however, since it was not limited to "exotic" culture but
also took in European civilization. A number of the films listed fall under
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77K C inema and S ocial S cience 133
the heading of sociology. In fact, the dividing line between ethnology and
sociology has never been clear-cut in France, and this liberal view seems to
be gaining ground, for the International Ethnographic Film Committee has
extended its field of investigation since 1959 to various social sciences and
has adopted the title "International Committee on Ethnological and Socio-
logical Films."
It would seem that this unitary viewpoint (more concerned with what
unites the different branches of sociological knowledge t han with what
separates them) is coming to prevail in both Western and Eastern Europe.
Thus, at the Sixth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnolog-
ical Sciences in Paris, Professor Tolstov (1960) states that, as far as Russian
science was concerned, the term ethnography signified "all those sciences
which deal with specific peculiarities of peoples' culture and way of life,
whether those peoples are European or non-European. In recent years, the
term has been increasingly used in this sense in other Eastern European
countries and especially in the Slav countries." White ethnography's special
field of observation in Western Europe was long limited to colonized peo-
ples, the ethnographic method has for some time past been applied in both
France and Italy to the study of European communities as well as to African
or Australasian peoples. The study of popular traditions or folklore in
France is an integral part of general ethnography considered as the study of
unmechanized societies. Soviet scientists take the narrower view that "the
term folklore only implies verbal literature," not solely that of the Russian,
Ukrainian or Byelorussian peoples, but also that of the Australians or
Melanesians, where the term ethnography has a very general sociological
coverage which even takes in industrial civilization. There can be no doubt,
however, that scientists of all countries are agreed on the universality of the
ethnographic method. It is also certain that, where most investigators are
concerned, the subject of ethnography may be an African tribe or a Flemish
or Breton peasant community.
Especially in Western Europe, however, there is some discussion concern-
ing the boundaries between ethnography and the other social sciences. This
academic discussion is only of secondary interest to our present subject.
While we have devoted our attention more particularly to the use, impor-
tance, and conception of the ethnographic film, all the aspects of the
problem can be transposed to other social sciences. The description of a
working-class district in a film involves no other cinematographic or scien-
tific requirements t han the description of a Chinese, French, or Nigerian
village, whether that description be termed ethnographic or sociographic.
Western scientists concerned with the social phenomena of industrial soci-
eties in process of becoming industrialized frequently regard themselves
not as ethnographers but as sociographers or sociologists. Reflecting this
cur r ent Fr ench us a ge , t he C atalogue of French E thnographical Films defines as
sociological films those in which the subject is "the study of human groups
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234 L. de H eusch
in civilizations which do not come within the province of ethnography."
6
This distinction is hazy (and does not prevent such films from being
catalogued under the general title "French ethnographical films") and
would seem pointless in the U.S.S.R., where sociology is a branch of
Marxist-Leninist philosophy and where the description of social phenom-
ena comes within the realm of ethnography considered as a historical
science. While Soviet ethnography may not seem to embrace all the social
sciences, it can nevertheless be described as an expanding science which is
covering an increasingly wide sector of social life.
Another Soviet study emphasizes the fact that the acculturation process
among the peoples of the U.S.S.R. is the dominant concern of ethnogra-
phers (Krupfianskaya et al. 1960). This report states that the new Russian
ethnographic school no longer limits its investigations to peasant life but is
also concerned with "the st udy of all social groups in the population." This
amounts to saying that, as far as Soviet investigators are concerned, eth-
nography tends to merge with the various branches of what is known in the
West as sociological research. Soviet ethnographers study both the peasants
of the kolkhozes and the workers on state farms. Since 1950, "the ethno-
graphic study of the workers' culture and way of life has been carried out in
the U.S.S.R. in a more carefully planned and systematic fashion" (Kru-
pianskaya et al. 1960:4). Such studies are generally described as sociograph-
ical in Western Europe, where they form part of rural sociology (Mendras
1958) or urban sociology.
7
However, in Europe as in America, at the level of
both the survey and theoretical speculation, academic disctinctions be-
tween ethnography and sociography, on the one hand, and ethnology and
sociology, on the other, are less and less rigid. Studies in social or cultural
anthropology in the United States are concerned with exotic societies as well
as with American towns and villages. It may be said that the social sciences
everywhere are seeking uni t y and are breaking down the old university
frontiers established on empirical bases linked to the existence of a "colonial
situation" in a large part of the world.
As far as surveys are concerned, the principal characteristic of the ethno-
graphic approach is no doubt the communion between the investigator and
the culture which he is studying, the close huma n relationship formed
between him and the men whose existence he shares. This face-to-face
relationship implies a direct and continuing contact with the informants,
interrogation being combined with direct observation. A typical socio-
graphic survey in an urban environment, for example, calls for a larger
statistical apparatus; the human groups in an industrial civilization are
more widespread, denser, and more complex t han the rural communities
with which the ethnographer of the old school has usually had to deal.
Hence systematic questionnaires which are processed statistically are im-
portant in sociology, whereas the questionnaire used in ethnography is
never a rigid instrument but rather an aid to memory. This is also the reason
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 135
why the former type of survey often suffers from a loss of contact with the
individual; the language used by sociology is frequently abstract, even
enigmatic, and sometimes positively incomprehensible, whereas the eth-
nographer displays a marked preference for concrete experiences which are
always unique. This type of approach no doubt explains why it is tradi-
tionalor exoticethnographic research which in recent years has pro-
vided the greater number of documents on man's social condition.
But strangely enough, the human approach of ethnography has from the
first been that of the documentary cinema, even before sociologists took
any notice of the employment of cameras or the existence of films. This
immediate contact with man which the camera restores is clearly destined
to become one of the important elements in sociological communication. In
this connection, the film can already be seen as a necessary counterweight
to the disordered and sometimes frenzied extension of current sociological
jargon. A smile or a frown on the screen restores the living presence of man
buried beneath the arid treatises which we are all guilty of writing.
CHAPTER III. TRENDS IN SOCIOLOGICAL FILMS (I)
Contemporary Cinema Archives
1. The Dziga Vertov Tradition. It was not an ethnologist but a Soviet
dnematographer, Dziga Vertov, who first formulated the extremist theory of
the sodological film, the theory which holds that the cinema should rid
itself, in the words of Georges Sadoul (1949:172) of "everything which has
not been taken from life." Vertov was a newsreel cameraman who, after the
October Revolution, was in charge of the newsreel Kino Pravda (Cinema
Truth) and who sought to raise the standing of cinema reportage. It is
interesting to note his theory is similar to that nowadays upheld by a certain
number of ethnographers who maintain that the nonpartidpation, the
absolute effacement, of the filmmaker is a fundamental condition of sodo-
logical authentidty. The illusory imperatives of the radical doctrine of cine-
matographic realism have never perhaps been so firmly systematized as by
Vertov's school: the camera is an eye, every aspect of staging (lighting,
actors, makeup, studios, etc.) must be rejected, the filmmaker has no
creative task to perform prior to the editing stage. Sadoul shrewdly notes
the failures of this method:
Vertov and his cameraman Kaufmann were able to record without too much difficulty the
usual newsreel subjectsceremonies, speakers, meetings, demonstrations, sports, etc., or
such spedal subjects as children too absorbed in an entertainment to notice the cameraman.
But when they wanted to study feelings or even work, the camera proved incapable of
playing its part as an eye. It became necessary to hide in a bush and use the telephoto lens
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136 L. de H eusch
employed in filming wild animals in order to film, for example, a family weeping at a grave.
The application of this technique was necessarily restricted. The achievement of the true
"Cinema Eye" is dependent on the invention of a camera as sensitive, mobile and uncumber-
some as a human eye; and this invention is still remote twenty-five years after the mani-
festoes of the Kinoks.
8
The latter part of this opinion needs qualification. The 16mm camera and
portable sound equipment, used especially by television reporters, has
made it possible, at least in part, to overcome the technical obstacles to a
cinema eye. The new ethnographic cinema, of which Rouch may be consid-
ered the initiator, has been able to rid itself of a certain number of traditional
handicaps by adopting this ultra light material. The 16mm camera, though
not exactly invisible, is very unobtrusive. So Morin (1960) is right to empha-
size that "Jean Rouch's great merit is to have defined a new type of film-
maker, the diver filmmaker who dives down into a genuine environment." It
must be stressed that this renewal of cinema t rut h, this dive taken by the
camera into the deep waters of social life, in no way results from the
application of VertoVs theories but from a new approach which we shall
attempt to define later on. While the method is still that of reportage,
Rouch's camera tries to define personalities, takes part in a continuing action
and makes no effort to conceal itself: it merely seeks to avoid causing
disturbance. The great handicaps of traditional reportage are superficiality
of analysis and the fragmentary vision which it involves.
2. Jean Vigo. One of the greatest poets of the French cinema, Jean Vigo
claims kinship with a theory similar to that of the cinema eye, since in
presenting his first film, A propos de Nice (1929), at the Vieux-Colombier
theater in Paris, he urged, like Vertov, that characters be filmed "from life,"
as otherwise the "documentary value" of the film would be lost. But with A
propos de Nice, Vigo had in fact produced a satirical pamphlet, and his film,
to quote his own words, was "a documented viewpoint."
9
It is just that
element of subjectivity which distinguishes what Vigo calls the "social
documentary" from the "documentary pure and simple and the news of the
week." It will be appreciated what a fine distinction this position involves:
initially it claims that authentic situations must be captured in accordance
with a strict method resembling that recommended by Dziga Vertov; for
this reason "conscious acting cannot be allowed [and] the character must be
taken unawares by the camera." But at the same time Vigo has something to
say i n connection with that reality. He wants to commit himself, to protest
against the incredible spectacle of a carnival in which stupidity, eroticism,
money, and death combine in a fantastic ballet. He wishes, as he says
himself, "to put a certain section of the world on trial." The "point of view"
of this reportage is not altogether that of the organizers of the carnival, still
less that of the participants. But does not the sociological act consist of
becoming aware, of discovering what is hi dden behind appearances, be-
hind social masks and postures? It must be recognized that the numerous
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 137
sociologies which confront each other in the university world represent so
many more or less well-documented "viewpoints," so many different ways
of capturing reality.
3. Newsreels. As we have seen, the theory of cinema t rut h is based on the
experience of newsreels. This direct capturing of reality without participa-
tion or staging is also the principle underlying the reportage film, which is
often no more t han an expanded newsreel. Are we really confronted here
with authentic sociological documents? What is the historical value of this
visual information which, in Clausse's words, takes its place "in this en-
cyclopaedia of human experience, in this vast memory external to mankind
which literature has constituted in the past and is still constituting daily for
the enrichment of mankind?" (1960:138).
Newsreels as a rule give us a very imperfect vision of an epoch, since all
over the world their favorite theme seems to be the highly conventional
social phenomena of ceremonial life (military parades, commemorative
ceremonies, etc.). It is less concerned with historic events than with quasi-
religious rites, which vary little over long periods in a given civilization. As
to the actual events with which the newsreels are concerned, these are of
two kinds: fashionable futilities, on the one hand, and major catastrophes,
on the other. Sometimes, but only rarely, they capture some extraordinary
historical event as it actually occursa political assassination, for instance.
Generally speaking, sociological events of the first magnitude are missed,
and I feel personally that the historical interest of newsreels lies less in the
crude facts with which they deal t han in the secondary elements of social
life which they incidentally record: for example, fashions, types of gestures,
and the relationship between the crowd and authority. They miss the slow
rhythms of social and everyday life just as they capture only the superficial
and ceremonial aspect of political life, the official stage show, things which
are done in order to be seen, thrown out for the eye to feed on. Nonetheless,
this world of masks and masquerades reveals in a certain way (which future
historians will have to evaluate) the style of an epoch and a civilization, the
atmosphere of a time.
It will also be noted that the very brevity of the various sequences which
make up a newsreel preclude any circumstantial narration. If, as Clausse
believes, news is the "pure and simple relation of facts captured in their
environment, with, if possible, due allowance for their background, their
developments and their consequences" (1960:137), it is doubtful the news-
reels belong properly to journalism. Is not visual information rather a
vehicle of values? Does it not evoke approval or disapproval, laughter
(sometimes) or enthusiasm, identification or rejection? Communication
through pictures is never purely intellectual. Clausse does not deny this
and concedes that "on the screen the classical concept of objectivity has lost
its meaning"; but he considers that the cinema nonetheless remains a
medium of information, in the strict sense of the term, to the extent that the
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138 L. de H eusch
commentary keeps the picture in the realm of rationality. This theory cannot
be accepted without reservation. It is worth mentioning the curious experi-
ment performed by the French cinematographer Chris Marker in a report-
age entitled Lettres de S iberie. This experiment brings out the tremendous
changes which different commentaries can cause in the perception of the
same picture, and it deserves to become a classic in the same, way as
Kuleshov's famous visual experiment. Using on three separate occasions the
same commonplace picture (with no innate sociological significance) show-
ing a workman crossing the street, the author amuses himself by demon-
strating the decisive part played by the commentary in giving these abso-
lutely identical pictures a different emotive content. On the first occasion,
the commentary is completely neutral and arouses no interest whatever; on
the second, the commentator adopt s an aggressively anti-Communist tone;
on the third, he adopts a tone (sympathetic to) Communist philosophy. It is
found that this "authentic document," shot in a small Siberian town, is
perceived by the eye in a different fashion on each occasion. To such an
extent it is true that the sound film is an audiovisual structure in which all
the component elements are indissolubly connected.
Thus it will be seen that both reportage films and newsreels should be
analyzed from the sociological viewpoint with the greatest care; the sociolo-
gist should submit these valuable documents to historical criticism. Theo-
retically, of course, newsreels may be defined as "descriptive, noninterpre-
tative or didactic commentaries" (Clausse 1960:137), but it must be
recognized that this is an ideal objectivity which is very rarely attained.
The historian who studies the film archives of our time a century hence
will have to bear in mind that these authentic documents are generally
partial testimonies but testimonies that must be related to their own socio-
logical environment, of which they reflect certain values and certain cultural
characteristics.
4. E diting of Newsreels and Film Magazines. On e t y pe of film i s of par t i cu-
lar interest to our study since it takes the form of historical monographs
made up of authentic documents; they consist of old newsreels edited in
such a way as to provide associations and contrasts which were not origi-
nally intended. It would seem that the first montages of newsreels were
made in the U.S.S.R. Under Vertov's influence, Esther Choub used film
ar chi ves to ma ke The Russia of Nicolas II and Tolstoy, The Fall of the Romanovs,
and so on. More recently, in France, Nicole V6dres used the same method to
produce an ironic restoration of atmosphere in Paris 1900. In England, Paul
Rotha made ample use of film archives t o illustrate the paradox of hunger in
a world which is glutted with wasted resourcesWorld of Plenty (1943) and
77K World is Rich (1946). In this latter film, he brings out particularly the
economic consequences of war and the projected reconstruction plans. In
England again, film archives were used to make a historical synthesis of the
1919-1939 period, The Peaceful Years, produced by Peter Baylis. In Belgium,
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 139
purely for his own pleasure, Henri Storck put together newsreels of 1928
(Briand-Kellogg Pact) to produce a brilliant satire in the best style of Vigo
H istoire du soldat inconnu (produced in 1932; provided with a sound track in
1959).
In the same category, mention must also be made of the long war report-
age using authentic documents filmed in action, particularly Desert Victory
(1943), shot by the cameraman of the Army Film Unit (Great Britain). This
famous film is, so to speak, a counterpart of the reportage on The Battle of the
S omtne (1916), shown to the British public during the First World War
(produced by J. B. MacDowall and Geoffrey Malin). In the U.S.S.R., Reis-
mann used sequences shot during the fighting by Soviet and German
cameramen to produce a noteworthy film, The Fall of Berlin (1946).
The U.S.S.R. has also sought to use the cinema in order to write the
history of a day in the life of the whole country at war: June 13,1942. On that
day, according to Ren6 Jeanne and Charles Ford, "150 cameramen filmed
scenes designed to form a comprehensive view of an immense country at
war and to bring out the effort which it was making in all fields."
10
This film
resembles a second type of historical monograph, the film magazine, which
was introduced in the United States between 1934 and 1943 by the producer
Louis de Rochemont. Under the general title The March of Time, he produced
a series of reportages comprising both archives documents and original
shots. The same formula was used in England for several years after the
Second World War (from 1946 to 1949) by the Monthly Film Magazine to
produce the series This Modern Age.
The cinematographic magazine is not entirely free from the limitations of
the newsreel: such films only can provide scant information in comparison
to written reporting. One of the best films in the series This Modern Age was
devoted to Japan. It contains excellent pictures of traditional social life (the
tea ceremony, etc.), which survives on the fringe of a Western-style public
life. This journalistic introduction to knowledge of a great nation provides
the spectator with fragmentary glimpses that arouse sociological curiosity.
These pictures do not so much describe contemporary Japan as suggest
atmospheres in an admirable way, thus providing the memory with a
concrete frame of reference for more detailed information.
5. The Technique of Reportage: In many cases, reportage is only an ex-
panded and developed newsreel. It comprises a group of pictures "taken
from life" in accordance with newsreel technique with no intervention by
the filmmaker in the course of the events being filmed. Two main series of
themes are covered by sociological reportage: ceremonial and crowd move-
ments, and work motions.
(a) Ceremonial and crowd movements. The vast field of ceremonial is
ideal for the use of cinematographic reportage. Here the camera can really
describe in depth; it proves itself a marvelously faithful recorder of collec-
tive emotions or stereotyped ritual gestures which take place in accordance
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140 L. de H eusch
with a definite plan in the presence and for the benefit of the watching
crowd. While the participants may not be unaware of the camera, at least
one can be sure that it does not influence their behavior, which is more or
less rigidly ordained by a ritual code almost always endowed with a hal-
lowed significance. As in the case of newsreels, the subjects are often of a
religious or quasi-religious nature. Especially noteworthy are the various
reportages on the coronation of the Queen of England, and particularly
E ngland H as a Queen, produced by Pathe. Again in England, Trooping the
C olour faithfully records an extraordinary traditional military parade,
which is as much a ballet as a parade. There are two films of this ceremony,
both having the same title. The first, produced by Terry Bishop, shows King
George VI taking the salute in 1949; the second shows the ceremony in
which Queen Elizabeth II took part on May 31,1956. The camera has also
recorded the birth of new states in the twentieth century, in particular the
Ghana independence ceremonies, Freedom for Ghana, produced in 1957 by
the Ghana Film Unit. The historical interest of this latter film is consider-
able; apart from the official ceremonial, which was based on British parlia-
mentary tradition, the camera records the spontaneous social life of the
country; it describes better than words could the colorful parades, the
dancing, Nkrumah's emotion as he emerges from the wildly excited crowd.
In recording "from life" the great popular movements which are often
linked to ceremonials, it is as though the camera is drowned in the impas-
sioned crowd; the very tension of the participants and the general confusion
facilitate recording, since everything happens as though the camera were
concealed.
Reportages which describe authentically religious rites fall into a special
category. In these cases, the fervor, the contemplation, or the mystic frenzy
of the participants enables the camera to insinuate itself into the heart of the
religious phenomenon without affecting it. Two important films stand out.
Both were produced by French filmmakers, one in France itself, the other in
Africa. The second part of Georges Rouquier's Lourdes et ses miracles (1954)
provides a direct account of the pilgrimage and the ritual immersions which
take place in this shrine of contemporary Christianity. Here, confronted
with man laid bare, we can appreciate the amazing power of the picture:
this quasi-scientific report, presented with absolute honesty, impartial even
though, it is important to note, supervised by a religious adviser, arouses a
sort of savage pity at this incredible concentration of suffering. A singular
phenomenon takes place as we watch this unquestionably objective film: a
l ump arises in the throat and emotion colors the perception of the pictures,
which are invariably moving and sometimes horrible. On the same level
may be placed an admirable and strictly scientific reportage produced by
the ethnographer-dnematographer Jean Rouch duri ng a mission to Ghana
in 1954 under the title Maitres fous. On the outskirts of Accra, men and
women join periodically in the tragicomic performance of a new possession
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 141
cult. There is more t han one point in common in this film and Rouquier's.
One shows the Western concept of psycho-sociological therapy; the other
reveals the African concept. A comparison between the two provides more
than one lesson; it markedly attenuates the brutal element of the African
religion by disclosing a tragic, almost unbearable aspect of the European
religion. The comparison plunges the spectator into the very heart of the
religion, while emphasizing the fundamental differences between two reli-
gious styles. The dionysiac African frenzy contrasts violently with the con-
templativeness, introspection, and masochism of Christianity. No written
description could so completely reveal these fundamental structural contrasts.
The output of the National Film Board of Canada includes a reportage,
Pilgrimage (1958), by Terence McCartney-Filgate on the pilgrimage to St.
Joseph's Oratory, one of the shrines of Christianity in North America. The
camera mingles with the crowd, often invisible and indiscreet, and notes
the manifestations of popular faith.
The list of reportages on religious activity is already a long one, and we
shall not attempt to provide a full inventory. The so-called ethnographic
films abound in liturgical sequences, which, whether well or badly filmed,
constitute important sociological documents. The science of religions
would have much to gain from assembling in a specialized film library all
these heterogeneous documents, the comparative study of which would
undoubtedly be of the greatest interest, since nothing is so difficult to
interpret as the written description of a ritual. A number of erroneous
notions derived from reading could be corrected by seeing the relevant
films.
(b) Work motionsfrom the birth of the documentary in England to the
trade union films: The second field in which the technique of sociological
reportage may most easily be used (excluding, in principle, any intervention
by the dnematographer) is supplied by the world of labor, by the complex of
technical and vocational motions. This approach was illustrated from 1930
onwards by the British documentary school in particular, under the inspira-
tions of the producer-theorist John Grierson. But the deliberate aesthetic
planning of the film is generally much more important in this case t han in
the recording of ceremonials, where the shots must obviously conform to a
preexisting scenario, that is to say, the actual pattern of the ceremony. In the
case with which we are concerned, we are far removed from reportage pure
and simple: the dnematographer introduces pictures drawn from social
reality into a highly personal cinematic structure. In many cases, too, he
seeks and obtains the active cooperation of the workers being filmed and
thereby gives up any attempt to "catch them unawares." This type of film
t hus lies midway between the two methods of approach: reportage and the
partidpating camera. It should also be noted that films devoted to activity in
factories and workshops involve considerable technical difficultiesfor
example, there are often very complex lighting problems. The worker,
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142 L. de H eusch
therefore, becomes an actor and is subject to a certain amount of direction.
But, however that may be, the cinematographer's intervention is limited to
providing a framework for reality. Grierson effected a sort of revolution in
the cinema by a public screening in 1929, during the silent film era, of
Drifters, the first European documentary. The theme of Drifters was the
herring fishing industry. It is a subject which has by now lost its initial
freshness, but at that time it was a daring innovation. To quote Georges
Sadoul (1949), it brought a "sort of social exoticism" to the screen.
Paul Rotha emphasizes the importance of this cinematographic event.
Flaherty's Nanook and Drifters were the first to endow sociological films with
a definite standing. Drifters, according to Rotha,
humbly brought to the screen the labour of the North Sea herring catch, from such an
ordinary approach that the ordinary person was made to realize, probably for the first time,
that a herring on his plate was no mere accepted thing but the result of other men's physical
toil and possibly courage."
A galaxy of talent formed around Grierson, and a highly characteristic
school and documentary style came into being. The social documentary
took its place i n the history of the cinema as a specific t ype. Deriving from
the observation pure and simple of the motions of men at work, and from the
desire to magnify those motions, this type of film is responsible for several
works of importance in film history. But the vein was soon exhausted. The
world of industrial toil served as an excuse for formalized performances
from which all true understanding of men was excluded. In France and
Belgium, Georges Rouquier and Henri Storck revived the social documen-
tary approach shortly after 1940. They both turned, at more or less the same
period, toward the peasant world, with a wish to penetrate beyond the
motions of men at work into the personal life of human beings. In addition,
Rouquier was to describe the work of craftsmen with clarity and honesty in
two exemplary technological monographsLe tonnelier (The Cooper, 1942)
and Le charron (The Wheelwright, 1943). These very elaborate works contain
only fragments of reportage: they primarily and deliberately rely on the
cooperation of the worker, whom the camera converts into an actor repre-
senting his own daily life. It must be noted that the movements involved in
work readily lend themselves to the "actor's" conscious participation in the
film narrative. These films, therefore, are on the borders of reportage and
are mostly the outcome of an infinitely richer conception of the sociological
film, which we shall define when we come to examine the new possibilities
offered by the participating camera.
The cinematographic exploration of the movements involved in industrial
work has nowadays lost its initial aesthetic appeal. The realm of the "labor
film" has greatly expanded in recent years; film producers are less inter-
ested in the poetry of labor than in the social problems involved. Some idea
of this expansion can be obtained by consulting the catalog published by the
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 143
International Labour Film Institute.
12
These films, which can in no way be
classified as reportage, and which sometimes are very near to fiction, are
intended for specialized labor audiences. We refer to them here because of
their clarity of exposition. There are a great many films which aim at
acquainting their audiences with the various aspects of trade union or
cooperative activity. "Films are a weapon in the struggle for bread, peace
and liberty" (Introduction to the catalog, p. vii). These films are generally
produced by trade union organizations, and the following examples may be
mentioned: S ie bewegt die Welt (Labor Maintains the World) produced by the
Wiener Arbeiterkammer, Austria, 1954 (the story of labor's conquests in
Austria); S trike in Town, Canada, 1955 (a labor dispute in the lumber indus-
try); Local 100, Canada, 1950, produced by the National Film Board of
Canada in cooperation with the Canadian trade union movement (the
setting up of a trade union local branch;
13
Du Kannst nicht abseits stehen (You
Cannot Remain Aloof), Federal Republic of Germany, 1952, produced by the
Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (two young artists discover the meaning of
trade union activity); Kameradschaft (Brotherhood), Federal Republic of Ger-
many (life and work in the mines and trade union action in the Ruhr),
produced for the I-G Bergbau (Miners' Union); E in ganz gewohnlicher Tag
(Quite an Ordinary Day), Federal Republic of Germany, 1954 (the coopera-
tive movement in Germany), produced for the GEG (German Cooperatives
Association); Gryr I Norden (Dawn in the North), Norway, produced by the
Arbeidernes Faglige Landsorganisasjon (Union of Norwegian Trade
Unions)this film tells in semidocumentary style the story of one of the
most famous strikes in Norwegian social history, which broke out in 1889 in
a match factory; and Vi Var Nagra Man (We Were a Handful of Men),
produced for the Svenska Metallindustriareforbundet (Metal Workers'
Union), Sweden, 1954 (trade unions on the regional and national level).
Since 1921, the Swedish cooperatives have produced 250 films through
Nordisk Tonefilm. The Belgian film Passion des hommes (Men's Passion, 1959)
by Jean Brism6e, produced by the Emile Vandervelde Institute, is a histori-
cal documentary on the Belgian working class. Mention may also be made
of a humorous French film on social security, U n petit coin de parapluie (A
Little Bit of Umbrella), and Visage de la cooperation ouvriere (Aspects of
Workers' Cooperation), which deals with the history of the cooperative
movement in France. Trade union films are particularly numerous in the
United States. One of the most remarkable is Wth These H ands, produced in
1950 by the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union; the story of this
union is seen through the eyes of an old militant meditating on the great
trade union struggle of 1909. American at Work (Musicians), produced by the
American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organiza-
tions, depicts a musicians' union in the United States.
A certain number of films deal with human-labor problems, among them
the admirable Canadian series, S tudy in S ix C hapters of Man and Labour in
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144 L. de H eusch
Modern Industry, or t he Da ni s h film Men Burde Tage sig afdet (Probl ems t o Be
Solved, 1952), which deals with the frequent disputes between workers and
foremen. Among the so-called labor films must also be included educa-
tional films aimed at increasing productivity or reducing industrial acci-
dents, but these subjects are rather outside the scope of the present study.
Displays of films devoted to labor subjects have increased in number over
recent years. The First International Labour Film Festival was held in Ham-
bur g in 1954, the second in Vienna in 1957, and the third in Oslo in I960.
14
International "days" devoted to industrial and labor films are periodically
held in Antwerp. In addition, the European Council of Industrial Federa-
tions organized the First International Industrial Film Festival in Rouen in
1960.
6. S pecial U ses of the C oncealed C amera. Onc e we leave t he r eal m of
ceremonials and collective mass emotions, on the one hand and of the
motions of men at work, on the other, the possibilities of directly capturing
social phenomena with the camera greatly diminish. When it ceases to deal
with ceremonies or labori.e., a complex of stereotyped gesturesthe
camera is at a loss and wanders off in pursui t of a subject which continually
evades it: scraps of life, fleeting superficial impressions. In such a disjointed
world, man is no longer anything but a hurryi ng passerby and to learn
anything about him it becomes necessary to initiate a dialogue and deliber-
ately accept the participation of the camera. It is, however, worthwhile to
make a close st udy of a special case of cinematographic observation by
means of a nonparticipating camera: the use of the concealed camera, the
"robber camera."
This technique involves an extremely serious ethical problem which the
jury at the First International Ethnographic and Sociological Film Festival
emphasized in awarding special distinction to a Czech film in this category,
Dimitri Plichta's C o si o nds fhysli (As Children See Us, 1959). The camera
observes the reactions of a group of children (who are unaware that they are
being filmed) during a sort of psychodrama conducted by a monitor. This
filmed test seeks to discover how children taking part in the experiment see
the adult world. (Shooting took place in a specially arranged studio.) The
ethical aspect of such films must be rigorously defined. The concealed
camera deliberately violates the moral personality of those whom it catches
unawares. This method, however, has often been applied harmlessly to the
observation of groups of children. Examples are the English films, Learning
by E xperience (1947) a nd Growing U p with Other People b y Mar gar et Thomp-
son. The scientific films in the United States include Activity Group Therapy,
produced in 1950 by the Jewish Board of Guardians under the supervision of
S. R. Slavson. This film is the result of two years of patient observation by
means of concealed cameras and microphones; it reveals the spontaneous
behavior of maladjusted boys, suffering from emotional disturbances, dur-
ing collective therapy sessions. The spectator can t hus follow the character
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 145
development of the boys and the group over a two-year period. In virtue of
the agreement reached between the makers and the parents of the children
concerned, the film can be shown only to audiences of specialists. In the
neighboring field of psychiatry, mention may also be made of Out of Dark-
ness, produced by C.B.S. Public Affairs, which shows the slow cure of a
woman suffering from mental disturbance and undergoing treatment at
California's Metropolitan Hospital (produced by Jack Glenn).
The invisible camera technique has sometimes been applied in the United
States to the observation of clients' behavior in a large commercial firm with
a view to studying the problem of huma n relationships at first hand. These
films have no scientific aim, but they nonetheless provide sociologists with
interesting documents. Thus, Chase Manhattan used a concealed camera to
record social relationships in a large bank (For Greater U sefulness). This kind
of thing is certainly open to criticism, since it is difficult to decide at what
moment the camera becomes a spy, and it is easy to see how this method of
investigation could be used for dubious police purposes.
CHAPTER IV. TRENDS IN SOCIOLOGICAL FILMS (II)
The Flaherty Tradition and the Participating Camera
It has been recognized for thirty years that a much more fruitful method
than that used by Vertov to apprehend social reality consists in obtaining
the effective cooperation of the men whose passions, toil, and worries the
film producer wishes to convey. This method, rejecting the fallacious pres-
tige of the objective camera and reportage "from the life," requires that men
should act their own authentic condition. There is no longer any attempt to
capture "raw" reality in all its pure ideal spontaneity, but the active partici-
pation of the worker or peasant in the construction of the film is sought. The
film therefore takes shape more at the shooting and cutting stage than at the
editing stage. From this viewpoint, the film is both a description and an
attempt at communication; it seeks communion, dialogue with the camera.
This type is more than ever a language rather than a pure reflection of
reality. But no language (whether in the form of pictures or words) carries
an absolute guarantee of the t rut h. The film language is made up of a series
of affirmative propositions whose power of carrying conviction depends on
the art of the producer. The authenticity of this sort of documentary ulti-
mately depends entirely on the honesty of the director who, through his
work, asserts "This is what I saw." In fact, he has not seen exactly this or that
aspect of what he shows, he has not always seen these things in the way he
shows them, since that way is a language he invents in cooperation with
actors whose roles are authentic. The documentary is a work of art imbued
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146 L. de H eusch
with rationality and truth. As soon as this idea is brought up, however, the
happy relationship between sociologist and film producer unfortunately
begins to deteriorate. The fact is that sociologists are reluctant to see the
cinema as anything but an instrument of research, and, as we have already
noted, it is as a rule a blind eye or at least an instrument which is not well
adapted to the automatic discovery of human t r ut h. It is, rather, as if one
were to look at a geometrical problem through a telescope in the hope of
seeing a theorem emerge. Once it quits the category of reportage pure and
simple, which, as we have tried to show, is a relatively limited field, the
documentary film resembles the carefully worked out dissertations which
sociologist writers offer us, with varying degrees of skill, at the end of their
researches. There is an accent of truth in these great documentaries, a note
bearing no resemblance to that of propaganda speeches: neither moralistic
nor accusatory but imbued with a quiet fervor which expresses an indepen-
dent spirit desirous above all of portraying the huma n condition.
Robert J. Flaherty remains the unrivaled master of this art, the method of
which he invented. He simplified the language by giving more importance
to reality than to the expressive qualities of editing, while at the same time
taking over the technique of the fictional film.
1. Flaherty's Work and the E thnographic Method. In 1920 a n d 1921, a n
American trapper-prospector of Irish origin named Flaherty spent fifteen
months (the average duration of an ethnographic survey) making a public-
ity film in Hudson's Bay for the French fur firm Revillon. The hero of this
film, Nanook, was an Eskimo like many others, a man with an unforgetta-
ble smile. In Sadoul's words, this man became "the hero of a true epic"
(1949:28), he was also the first voluntary actor expressing his own condition
without trickery or artifice. Flaherty does not follow Nanook about in order
to take pictures; he enters into conversation wi t h him, he asks him to
cooperate closely in the sociological portrait which he is undertaking, a
portrait in which the Eskimo ceases to be anonymous and becomes a man.
Flaherty minutely observes Nanook and hi s family after having been
adopt ed by them. This attitude sums up all the ethics of ethnological
research. Flaherty then goes on to create a scenario as an ethnographer
might write a monograph or a novelist might invent a story. In making his
film he secures the conscious participation of Nanook, his wife Nyla, and
their children. In radical opposition to VertoVs cinema truth, he invents a
new method and a new documentary style, based only to a very limited
extent on the restricted resources of reportage. As an artist of integrity,
Flaherty aimed first and foremost at providing an authentic account. No
ethnographer has ever challenged this masterpiece of honesty. But is it not
always dearly realized that Nanook is constructed like a fictional film.
Nanook acts the part of Nanook; he expresses himself within the framework
of a prepared story, which he conveys artificially piece by piece, in other
words in accordance with a plan and with the demands of a director.
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 147
This is the paradoxical situation of the ethnographic and sociological film
as soon as it makes an effort at penetration and seeks to establish a deep
relationship with men. But, if one thinks the matter out, that is a paradox
which attends any sociological survey. The ethnographer or the sociogra-
pher observes a great many things silently, even secretly, but that is not the
essence of his work. No purist of direct observation would deny his right to
indulge in conversations (otherwise why urge him to learn the language of
the people he is studying?). The investigator, then, takes part in the life of
the group and even attempts to identify himself with it. This is the method
which Granai (1958:142) calls participating observation, based on communi-
cation between the observer and the observed. Griaule (1957) in his ethno-
graphic lectures, emphasized the necessity of talking, questioning and
interviewing in order to round out, clarify, extend, or introduce direct
observation. These two basic methods, the one passive and the other active,
have their counterpart in cinematographic recording, t hus providing the
basis for the two approaches to the human phenomenon: in the first, the
camera is unobtrusive, barely visible and causes little disturbance; in the
second, it takes part in social life, even provokes reactions, converses, put s
questions to which an informant, transformed into an actor, replies. The
participating camera, used in the style created by Flaherty, deserves to be
compared with the technique of the sociodrama in which the observer
becomes in fact the "director." Granai (1958:142), who cites this type of
investigation as an example of participating observation, notes that the
sociologist takes part in the collective situations of the people observed and
seeks to create or stimulate situations. In the dramatic techniques used
more especially by Moreno's disciples, "the subject does not describe his
situation, he acts it and, with the help of assistants, he revives the relation-
ships which link him to those around him" (Granai 1958:148). I have myself
used a similar play-acting technique in Africa during ethnographic surveys
in order to establish as rapidly as possible the whole complex of family
relationships. I suggested to my volunteer "actors" that they should play a
series of arbitrarily chosen parts: they were to behave as a maternal uncle, a
son-in-law, an elder brother, and so on. I found that this technique of
investigation, which I had borrowed from cinematographic production,
greatly amused my informants. This is a case in which cinematographic
technique has a counterreaction on the technique of the investigation itself.
The comparison should not of course be carried too far, since the two types
of cinematographic recording (reportage and "staging" linked to the partici-
pating camera) are not exactly methods of investigation on the same footing
as direct observation and the verbal or experimental inquiry. In neither case
does the camera actually ask questions; it gives an account of a known
situation which has already been analyzed by other means. (Only the
recent work of Jean Rouch provides an exception to this rule.) The cinema is
a method of reporting what has been seen, what is known; it is, as we have
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248 L. de H eusch
seen, only very rarely an actual element of such knowledge. The film is a
synthetic account. Many ethnographers, however, refuse to consider as
ethnographic films the very elaborate works in which scenes have been
reconstructed, as it is often called. This term covers anything which does
not arise from reporting pur e and simple. But the problem of authenticity
cannot be settled on this basis. Moreover, the ethnographers themselves are
not always quite sure which films include reconstructed scenes and which
do not. Marcel Griaule (1958:148) admitted that reconstruction could be
tolerated from the scientific viewpoint "in particular cases." The present
writer believes that this relationship should be radically changed. We must
firmly accept the element of reconstruction involved in Flaherty's method
or rather, the element of play-acting (since the term reconstruction is only
applicable to historical phenomena which have ceased to exist). Paradox-
ically, such play-acting can alone provide a thorough cinematographic treat-
ment, whereas the possibilities of reportage pure and simplethat is to say,
of a technique which allows for no intervention, no direction of the actors
are relatively limited. The ceremonies, actions performed at work and crowd
movements which constitute its field, are t he special cases of cine-
matographic recording. Need one add that Flaherty utilizes the method
and not the spiritof fictional films? The aim of the play is to separate
movements so that they can be better recorded as part of a coherent struc-
t ure and thereby to show the most significant aspects of everyday life, that
life whose fluidity and emotional richness contrasts with the rigidity and
conformity of the rites which are mere masks of social life.
Flaherty's art also consists in making his ethnographic description a part
of great natural and vital rhyt hms: truth and poetry are the two poles of his
work.
It may seem strange that spontaneous social life should require a partic-
ularly laborious technique of cinematographic recording whereas rigid
social events (ritual and ceremonial life) can be recorded as they occur,
without any cumbersome staging. We have already discussed the dialectic
of this paradox: the reason is that ritual already represents a rigid piece of
staging, a significant whole which the camera reproduces. Alternatively,
when reportage is applied to fluid, uncrystallized social life, it only cap-
b ires incoherent scraps which are of little significance. How is it, then, that
the cumbersome machinery of the cinema manages t o avoid smothering the
very spontaneity it is supposed to reveal? This is a complex problem which
is wholly in the realm of artistic creation and which it is hazardous to claim
can be solved scientifically. We are concerned here with an art, the art of
restoring life by means of the human dialogue which takes place between
the film producer and his improvised actors. There is no scientific recipe for
initiating this dialogue and putting the interlocutor at his ease.
In our own civilization, the film producer comes up against that peculiar
embarrassment of the actor to which Edgar Morin alludes:
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 149
We frequently react as if the all-seeing camera could tear off our socialized mask and reveal to
ourselves as well as to others our inmost soul. This is proved by the fact that as soon as we
find ourselves in front of a camera, we "pose," in other words we put on a mask, our most
hypocritical mask smiling or dignified (1956:46).
Contrariwise, the same defensive mechanism may engender exhibition-
ism and histrionics, and it is here that the film producer intervenes to
regulate the performance. His whole psychological influence tends toward
the suppression of this artificial tension produced by the very presence of
the camera. He makes his choice from among the various shots of a given
scene, rejecting those which are falsified by the errors of the players. But he
may also seek to capture the initial reaction to a question or an appeal. This
new line of approach (unknown to the exact and natural sciences) was
opened up by Rouch and Morin, and its principle is to be found in embryo in
the interview. In all events, the psychological methods to be used are not
fundamentally different from those required for the traditional ethno-
graphic investigation based on mutual confidence.
2. S ome Flaherty Films.
(a) Nanook of the North: There are two versions of this film, one silent and
lasting 38 minutes, and another, slightly longer, which was provided with a
sound track later.
This film is a family portrait: we see Nanook, with the most extraordinary
smile in the history of the cinema, his wife Nyla, their children, and their
d o g s . . . . The film is the epic of a man, of a society frantically struggling to
survive, displaying marvelous intelligence in navigation, fishing, and
walrus and seal hunting. The capture of the seal is an astonishing scene.
Hunting consists of a struggle with the invisible, and the epic alternates
with the farcical. Nothing but a tiny hole indicates the animal's presence
below the ice. Nanook plunges his harpoon into this hole and pulls fran-
tically on the rope, which the wounded and still hidden animal unreels as it
races off. Nanook is dragged over the ice as if he were going to be pulled into
the hole. He recovers, resists, falls again, and finally triumphs with the help
of his family who have rushed to his assistance. Nanook is also a builder.
Life consists of interminable wanderings, and at each momentary resting
place he builds an igloo, a house of snow, his shelter for the night. The
technical descriptions and the harsh scenes of the struggle for existence
alternate with tender scenes or scenes of family life: Nanook teaches his
young son how to throw a dart at a snow animal, the family eats, undresses,
and slips beneath the pelt, Nyla washes her baby by spitting onto a skin,
Nanook listens for the first time to a gramophone with extraordinary
jubilationhe wants to eat the record. The huskies share the rough life of
the man who stops their fights. The epic progress of the film concludes with
a storm which compels Nanook and his family to take shelter in an aban-
doned igloo while the dogs spend the night in the open, buried in the snow.
Family life, the human condition, are conquests from which animals are
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150 L. de H eusch
excluded. Such, in essence, is the theme of the film. Nanook, the hero of the
first ethnographic film, is also the symbol of all civilization.
(b) Moana of the S outh S eas (1923-1924): 1 hour, 45 minutes, silent, black-
and- white, 35mm.
Flaherty leaves the Far North and spends two years (1923-1924) in the
Pacific. He chooses the islands of Samoa, the village of Safune, in the
Navigators' Archipelago. Moana is a long ethnographic description of the
everyday life of the Samoans, using the happy betrothal of Moana to the
young and beautiful Fa'angase as a central theme. It is also a wonderful
pastoral poem which succeeds the harsh Arctic epic. As tasks are per-
formed and the days go by, we witness the cultivation of taro, the trapping
of a wild boar, the use made of the breadfruit tree, harpoon fishing, the
preparation of vegetable fibers to make garments of tapa. A small boy picks
coconuts. The presence of the sea dominates the second half of the film: a
storm on the coral reefs, the catching of a palm crab smoked out of its hiding
place, of a sea turtle, the eating of raw fish. This last incident introduces the
third part of the film, which deals with the islanders' diet: the preparation of
coconut flour, of fish fritters, the cooking of taro tubers on hot stones, and so
on. Beauty and pain furnish the themes of the fourth part: Fa'angase decks
Moana with flowers and anoints him with palm oil. The betrothed dance
together. Moana is tattooed by three men/and we see the preparation of the
dyes which must penetrate into the flesh. After the painful tattooing, which
the hero endures bravely, the ceremonial drink, kava, is served. Fa'angase in
t ur n is bedecked in preparation for her marriage. Moana and Fa'angase
dance again. Nothing could be more effortless t han this exemplary et hno-
graphic scenario in which the poetry derives from simplicity. Here, in the
tattooing scene, Flaherty exalts the moral victory of man over physical pain.
(c) Tabu (1928-1931): 1 hour, 28 minutes, English version, 35mm, black-
and- white, produced in cooperation with F. W. Murnau.
It is difficult to say what contribution was made to this film by Murnau,
who completed the production on his own; it is a film in which Flaherty
makes a greater concession to fiction. Nonetheless, the dramatic story of the
crossed loves of Matahi and his fiancee Reri unfolds in a rigorously authen-
tic ethnographic framework. We are again in that happy Polynesian world
which was so thoroughly in keeping with Flaherty's Rousseauist tempera-
ment, on the islands of Tuamotou and Bora Bora. We are not concerned here
with the love story: the claims of religion destroy the happiness of this
uni t ed couple; a priest declares Reri forbidden, "tabu." Matahi abducts her.
The couple take refuge on a strange island where they come into innocent
contact with the corrupt civilization of bars and pearl merchants. But the
priest has set off in search of Reri, who finally agrees to go back to hi m.
Heartbroken, Matahi swims after her and drowns in the wake of the boat
which is taking his betrothed away.
This film is the product of two conflicting cinematographic conceptions
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 151
and contains incidental documentary aspects of great beauty: scenes of
fishing, bathing, traditional navigation, and traditional dances. Flaherty's
characteristic attitude toward modern civilization, the source of corruption
for ancient societies, should be noted.
(d) Man ofAran (1934): 1 hour, 15 minutes, English version, 35mm, black-
and- white. Directed by Robert Flaherty, edited by John Goldman and
Frances Flaherty.
This film is perhaps Flaherty's masterpiece, and the present writer is far
from sharing Sadoul's opinion that the author has been unduly concerned
with aesthetic values in this "monumental" work. Notwithstanding Sadoul,
there is no lack of warmth in this hymn to the unremitting toil of a handful
of men and women clinging to a small, isolated rocky island, threatened by
the angry sea, off the coast of western Ireland. The physical struggle
against nature, the evocation of the great primitive triumph of man un-
armed or poorly armed, is one of the main themes of Flaherty's art. It would
be unfair, therefore, to see it as no more t han an extension of Rousseau's
vision. The authentic characters are Michelene, a young fisherman; his
father, a fisherman and shark hunter; and his mother. At home Michelene
plays while his mother goes about her work. The father and hi s companions
return from their fishing. Mother and son help them land and drag the net
from the tempestuous sea. This introduction, which from the outset gives
the film a bitter tone, is followed by a sequence showing the desperate
struggle against the rocky soila struggle which can barely be described
by the commonplace term "agriculture." We see the preparation of a potato
field: the father breaks up the stones, his wife gathers seaweed with the help
of the little boy and an old man, she looks for arable soil in the cracks of the
rocks, soil which they then carry in baskets to that extraordinary "field"
made up of stone patches covered wi t h seaweed. After agriculture, fishing.
The father prepares the dory, which had been damaged by the storm, while
the little boy casts his line from the top of a cliff. He sees a shark out at sea.
During the hunt , the creature is harpooned but bends the point and es-
capes. A four-oared boat approaches a second shark; this time the harpoon
fight lasts two days. From the top of the cliff, the mother and the little boy
watch the course of the struggle. At last the shark is landed and cut up.
Schools of sharks are sighted off the coast and the fishermen again put to
sea. The mother and son prepare the oil extracted from the liver. That night
they are alone in the house while a storm rages outside. Next morning they
both scan the horizon. The boat, tossed by the huge waves, struggles to
return to shore. It is thrown onto the beach and shattered; the little boy and
his mother recover the harpoons and the oars. Beaten this time by the sea,
the father returns home with his family.
In the epic tradition of Nanook, this extraordinary document on the
elementary relationships between man and nature contains both acted
scenes and scenes of reportage, shot while the fishermen are actually
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252 L. de H eusch
battling with the storm. The producer's intervention in no way detracts from
the authentic behavior of the men of Aran who recount in all simplicity the
epic that they live. The faithful description of a social environment and the
producer's devotion to his purpose have rarely attained such a pitch of
perfection. Flaherty spent two years in Aran; it is interesting to observe this
feature of his working method, which is truly that of an ethnographer
seeking to identify himself with the community whose work, joys, sorrows,
and purpose of life he is determined to describe from genuine knowledge
wi t h utter disregard for the picturesque.
These four films, which are far from representing all of Flaherty's work,
are the classics of the ethnographic and sociological film. Their direct or
indirect effects on the English documentary school, and in France, Bel-
gium, the Netherlands and the United States, is one of the most remarkable
phenomena in the history of the documentary cinema.
Conclusions
The present attempt to clear the ground is certainly far from complete, but it
is our hope that it will at least help to draw attention to the considerable
value of the cinema to the sociological knowledge of our time. In one respect
or another, the films we have reviewed form the living part of the innumer-
able records accumulated by contemporary societies.
All societies and culture are necessarily in a constant state of rapid
transformation. Societies without literature or machinery enter world civili-
zation in the t urn; a few of them, unable to survive this great ordeal, are
unfortunately doomed to disappear. For a few more years, the camera can
record the last manifestation of an "archaic" way of life which will soon
vanish from our ken. But traditional ethnography is by no means the only
field in which audiovisual observations can be used. The present upheavals
in our own industrial civilization, the sudden mutations among the new
nations, and the most varied aspects of our social, economic, and political
life have been the subject of cinematic studies which deserve to find a place
in our ideal university film library. Social problems have consistently fasci-
nated cinematographers and have been a source of cinematographic crea-
tiveness for the past forty years.
Scientific discussion on the methodology of ethnographic and sociologi-
cal films would be making a false start if it were limited to a debate between
the supporters of the noninterventionist technique (reportage from "life")
and those of the participating camera. In reality, each method has its own
aim, its own special field of application. Reportage is more particularly
concerned with the relatively restricted field of stereotyped motions
ceremonial movements (political and religious rituals) and, to a certain
extent, motions involved in work. Only rarely will the passive reportage
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 153
technique throw light on reasons and ways of living or despairing. On the
face of it, reportage provides the cinema with its only objective approach to
social phenomena and deserves the attention of sociologists seeking au-
thentic documents. But this is no more than an optical illusion. In whatever
way the images are recorded, documentary cinema is always a language
applied to the description of reality, not a pure reflection of that reality.
Strictly speaking, the pur e theory of scientific recording should only accept
documents obtained by means of a concealed camera, a spying or thieving
camera. But the cost of obtaining any serious result must be considered. To
make a valid observation of behavior in a family, for instance, it would be
necessary to conceal several cameras for a long period in the home and to
shoot continuously for several days, unselectively, desperately accumulat-
ing miles of film. This amounts to saying that no scientific institute in the
world is capable of undertaking a film survey of such scopenot to men-
tion the fact that so questionable and intrusive an operation would be too
gross a violation of privacy.
It is pointless, therefore, to dream about the fallacious advantages of the
invisible camera; we must rather look boldly into the possibilities which the
participating camera opens up for sociological description. In this tech-
nique, introduced nearly forty years ago by Flaherty, men become the
voluntary actors of their own condition: they express themselves in the form
of a serious "play," spontaneous or controlled. At this level, sociological
reality is not captured by a magic eye; it is the subject of a coherent
utterance; it expresses itself in an autonomous language. This means that,
from the point of view of the social sciences, the cinema is rarely a research
instrument; it is rather an original method of expounding a problem or
concrete situation through the informants themselves, while simultane-
ously making demands on the spectators' intelligence and sensibility. The
cinema is a privileged instrument of sociological communication which
gives body and soul to the abstract language of scientific sociography; on
this level, the cinema is both an illustration and a correctiveeven an
antidote. The cinema is, therefore, essentially a particular technique for the
expression and conveyance of the results of research. But it is also a part of
that research: films are made during investigations and retain the freshness
of the dialogue. They firmly establish the sense of reality; they establish
direct contact between a community and all those outside itthe vast
international moviegoing public. The cinema is the only universal sociologi-
cal language; it is above verbal disputes. True, the sociological cinema is
rarely free from all compromises; like scientific treatises, it reflects doctrinal
positions, conformist or nonconformist, revolutionary or anarchistic. Like
any language, it is an effective weapon for better or worse.
But this is only the primary justification, the ideological pretext. What-
ever may be their didactic or political aim (conscious or unconscious), the
great social documentary works contain an accent of truth which cannot be
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154 L. de H eusch
mistaken and which is the sign of free minds, concerned above all with
giving an honest account of man's condition.
The university needs these witnesses, whether friendly or hostile. Our
reconnaissance expedition has often taken us beyond the history of the
cinema into the realm of poetry, into a world where the image is man's
double and clings to him like a shadow to the soles of his feet. There are
many roads to knowledge, and the ambiguity of the documentary cinema,
the intense interest which it arouses among both scientists and artists, is
perhaps one of the main indications of an imminent reconciliation between
art and knowledge. The cinema imposes on the lucid, rational analyst
another kind of lucidity. From a more traditional viewpoint, university
teaching and even university research now possess a new tool which will
make it possible to compare great segments of reality by picking out
samples of civilization and bringing them into juxtaposition. The cinema
enables us to travel in a space time which can be changed at will according
to the needs of the experiment or lesson. It is therefore a matter of urgency to
set up in every university a living film library which will provide a novel
way of making a comparative study of civilizations through montages
which will vary according to the subject concerned. Each film should be
recorded on a perforated card which will enable all the sequences on file to
be immediately identified. The mechanographical analysis of films will
open up new possibilities of comparative analysis.
But sociological film archives are still inadequate. Careful descriptions
are rare and experiments still timid. The sociological cinema is seeking a
new language: the free cinema movement in England, like Jean Rouch's
efforts in France or the new American cinema, reveal a new curiosity, a
desire to intensify the dialogue between the camera and society. Moreover,
television, the first achievements of which we have not been able to touch
upon here, is creating a new style of audiovisual sociological survey, a new
form of contact between man and camera. The importance of the part played
by the sociological documentary as a precursor in this field cannot be
overemphasized. Men of a given nation speak to other men in the same
nation who were unaware of their existence. Everywhere the field of vision
is widening, and man is emerging from his age-long solitude.
NOTES
1. Quoted in Henri Agel (1957:49). In this volume quotations from works in both French and
other languages are given directly in quotation marks. Those from non-English works
are ad hoc translations. The original language of the publication can be ascertained from
the title which is given in that language.
2. Agel (1957:52) quoting Albert Laffay, Barthlrny Amengual, and Ren Micha.
3. Phnomnologie de la perception, 4 15 , quot ed b y Jean-E Lyot ard, La phnomnologie, Paris,
1954, p. 80.
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The C inema and S ocial S cience 155
4. Voorlopige lijst van Nederlandse cultureel-anthropoligische films (Provisional List of Dutch
Ethnological Films), Nederlandse Vereniging voor de Wetenschappelijke film, Utrecht,
1957.
5. Catalogue of French Ethnographical Films, Reports and Papers on Mass C ommunication, No.
15, UNESCO, 1955.
6. Catalogue of French Ethnographical Films, Reports and Papers on Mass C ommunication, No.
15, UNESCO, 1955.
7. e.g., the studies of Chombart de Lauwe.
8. Kinoks means "cinema fanatics," the name bestowed on Vertov's school.
9. Quoted by Henri Agel (1957:47). See the complete text in Positif, May 1953, No. 7 (special
number devoted to Vigo).
10. H istoire encyclopdique du cinma, IV, Paris, 1958, p. 470.
11. Quoted by Roger Manvell, Film, p. 98; reproduced by Agel (1957:45).
12. International Labour Film, A World S urvey of Films for Labour Audiences. International Labour
Film Institute, Brussels, 1956.
13. Other Canadian films dealing with the same problems will be mentioned later in the
present study.
14. See the Report of the Third International Labour Film Festival, May 22-27, 1960, Stock-
holm. International Labour Film Institute, 27 rue du Lombard, Brussels.
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r
y

2
0
1
1