Film Review Essay
Reframing Ethnographic Film:
A "Conversationyywith David MacDougall and Judith MacDougall
ILISABARBASH
Universite' des Antilles et de la Guyane
LUCIENTAYLOR
Universite' des Antilles et de la Guyane
DAVID AND JUDITH MacDougall are the most prolific
and important ethnographic filmmakers in the anglo-
phone world today. They trained in filmmaking at
UCLA in the late 1960s, married soon after, and have
devoted the years since to making more than 20 ethno-
graphic documentaries. More often than not they co-
direct their films, with Judith recording the sound and
David the picture.
Most of their early films were shot in East Africa
during the late 1960s and the 1970s among Jie and
Turkana pastoralists in Uganda and Kenya (e.g., To
Live w i t h Herds (19721, Under the Men's Tree [1974],
and Lorang's Way [1979]). Aided by the inherent in-
dexicality and concreteness of photographic images,
their films took leave of the dominant style of ethnog-
raphy of the time. Neither generalizing about a dis-
crete culture or society, conceived as an organic
whole, nor restricting themselves to the impersonal
abstractions of structural-functionalism-and yet in
no way sacrificing attention to larger theoretical is-
sues such as the intergenerational transmission of cul-
ture, very much a theme in all their work-their early
films were distinguished by their perceptive and subtle
depiction of moments of social interaction and per-
sonal reflection: the fleeting fragments of human life
that James Agee called "the small casual scraps of ex-
istence." Quite a while before written Africanist an-
thropology was to follow suit, the MacDougalls were
using film to evoke individual embodied experience.
Almost all of their films have focused in one way
or another on forces of social change, and many of
their African films highlight changes wrought by colo-
nialism and neocolonial "development" policies. While
they do anything but give us an eagle-eyed view of the
political terrain or plot its structural coordinates, they
nonetheless succeed in showing how exogenous politi-
cal-economic forces manifest themselves in the lives
of particular people-not only in their changing world-
American Anthropologist98(2):371-387. Copyright 0 1996. American Anthropological Association
views, but also in their personalities, in their disposi-
tions, in idiosyncratic nuances of behavior. We see-
and feel-the weight of world-historical processes
pressing on the limited (which is simply to say "situ-
ated") phenomenological experience of human sub-
jects as they go about their daily lives.
The MacDougalls' films have also departed from
the dominant documentary film style in various ways.
Standard documentaries, to get their message, moral,
or argument across, tend to resort either to scripted
voice-over narration or else to set-up interviews in
which people report on their experience after the fact.
By contrast, in the MacDougalls' films, as in observa-
tional cinema more broadly, we see people actually
living their lives, rather than simply telling us about
them, with all the attenuation and affectation that in-
volves. It is not that their subjects pretend that the
camera is not there; it is just that for much of the time
they're not very interested in it. Additionally, the Mac-
Dougalls were among the first documentarians to sub-
title indigenous speech, allowing foreign viewers to
hear subjects speaking an alien language and under-
stand what they were saying in (as far as possible)
their own terms. The technology of subtitling is so
much taken for granted nowadays that it is easy to
overlook the extent to which it has been instrumental
in bringing ethnographic subjects alive on the screen
as real, reflective, flesh-and-blood human beings; but
when the spectators at the 1972 Venice Film Festival
watched To Live w i t h Herds, they were absolutely
astonished to be able to understand what the Jie were
saying.
Most documentaries-even today-are edited in a
manner akin to fiction films: the original footage is cut
and pasted in the editing room and reassembled into
sequences in which shots taken from quite diverse
camera angles are adjoined. This has the effect of plac-
ing the spectator more in the position of a superhuman
observer than in a position that actually reflects the
optical (or even subjective) perspective of the film-
maker at the time of filming. As David has insisted,
"Implicit in a camera style is a theory of knowledge."
The MacDougalls have consistently fought against
372 A M E R I C A NA N T H R O P O L O G I S T V O L . 9 8 , N o . 2
such mainstream cinematic conventions and have
sought instead to develop an unprivileged camera
style, one that preserves long takes and retains within
the finished films traces of the original encounters
that gave rise t o them.
Yet this does not mean that the MacDougalls
films have disregarded the editorial and critical poten-
tial of montage. Their films juxtapose shots to a vari-
ety of ends-whether to contrast adjacent sequences,
t o bring out underlying relationships that would other-
wise go unremarked, or to hint at the films relation-
ship t o the reality they claim in some way t o represent.
For all their long observational takes, their films pre-
sent themselves as anything but transparent to the
world they depict. In fact, at least within the context
of anthropology, the MacDougalls films have been
pioneering examples of reflexivity avant la lettre.
They typically acknowledge, or indicate, the filmmak-
ers determining presence in a variety of ways-not
only with rhetorical textual intertitles, first-person
commentary, and still and moving shots of themselves
and their paraphernalia, but also by letting us hear
their own laconic questions as well as their subjects
responses, or with an occasional shot of someones
surprised face as they catch a glimpse of the camera,
having forgotten that it was running-in short, in
pretty much any way except for a heavy-handed Brecht-
ian baring of the device that is the stock-in-trade of an
increasingly moribund avant-garde. Thus their films
lack both the presumption of omniscience of much
voice-over-driven documentary and the presumption
of objectivity of much observational cinema. In their
own terms, their style is as participatory as it is ob-
servational. Their later films about political resistance
and cultural regeneration among Aboriginal Austra-
lians (including Familiar Places [ 19801, The House-
Opening [ 19801, and Takeover [ 1980]), made partly at
the initiative of the communities themselves, were to
be more hybrid still-complexly (and at times ambigu-
ously) authored blends of the voices of the filmmakers
and their subjects. These Australian films are as much
works of testament on the subjects part and advocacy
on the filmmakers part as they are works of documen-
tation pure and simple.
Based since 1975 in Canberra, Australia, David
and Judith have recently made a film about photogra-
phy in Mussoorie, an Indian hill station (Photo Wallahs
[ 1991]), and David has directed a film about three Sar-
dinian shepherds facing an uncertain future (Tempus
de Baristas [1993]). With further projects in the
works-in the immediate future, both in Sardinia and
India-their output continues apace. However, while
visual anthropology seems lately to have been attract-
ing increasing academic interest, the MacDougalls
work remains in many ways a countercurrent to to-
J U N E1 9 9 6
days trends. Far from ethnographic film simply filling
one niche among others in anthropologys expanding
attention to the visual, and far too from conceiving of
ethnographic films as merely illustrative of or in any
simple way analogous to written ethnography, the
MacDougalls believe that ethnography itself can be
conducted filmically-not in opposition to writing but
neither then as an afterthought to it nor for mere re-
cord-making purposes; rather, in such a way that the
films themselves embody all the interpretive complex-
ity that ideally lies at the heart of anthropology. More
importantly, the MacDougalls body of films already
exemplifies what they propose.
The following conversation was to have taken
place in 1994. In fact, building on recorded face-to-
face conversations in 1994 and 1995, it was finally con-
ducted by correspondence in August and September
1995. David and Judith responded to our questions
separately, and then grouped their replies together.
*****
Lucien: There would seem to be quite a broad consensus
across the humanities and human sciences that while
the earlier linguistic turn,as represented by structural-
ism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction, is not alto-
gether exhausted, it is at least partially giving way to a
visual moment. In a variety of disciplines, images are
being either embraced or reviled for qualities that are
distinct from those of prosaic textuality. In this new
climate, what do you think might be the role and future
of ethnographic film?
David: I think one has to begin thinking of ethnographic
film not simply in a potentially complementary role to
written anthropology, a useful handmaiden, but in con-
tradistinction to it, even in opposition to conventional
anthropology. There are fundamental contradictions
between the word and the image in anthropology, and
anthropology has had a long and uneasy relation to the
visual that has never been resolved. How do you begin
to make the shft from a word-and-sentence-based an-
thropological thought to an image-and-sequence-based
anthropological thought? I think you need to begin by
looking at the varied forms of anthropologcal knowl-
edge. There are domains of knowledge that have been
of fundamental importance to anthropology, particu-
larly in fieldwork, but that tend to get suppressed in
anthropological writing. For example, in addition to
descriptive, structural, and explanatory knowledge-
which I consider to belong to the factual, relational, and
theoretical domains-there is also affective knowl-
edge, which belongs to the experiential domain. Much
that is learned in fieldwork in this domain seems to be
eliminated when it is passed through the mesh of an-
thropological writing, not perhaps because of writing

itself, but because of particular, consecrated forms of
writing. Films by Jean Rouch and others have shown us
that there are cinematic ways of articulating some of
the more elusive aspects of social experience that con-
cern anthropologists. I think film may therefore not
only enhance the kinds of knowledge that we already
have but make possible new kinds of knowledge.
Whether these become acceptable aspart of the knowl-
edge of anthropologyis what in labor relations is called
a "demarcation m u t e . "
Lucien: I often find that anthropologistsare unsettled by
films, as if they're unsure how to talk about them. Why
do you think this is? Do you think there's anythingfilmic
that resists reduction into anthropological writing?
More specifically, might photographic and especially
filmic images have a different relationship to lived ex-
perience from text? [See Figure 1.] Might ethnographic
films have afhities with other literary forms and gen-
res? What anthropologicaltraditions would you want to
relate ethnographic film to?
Judith: When I was a graduate student in film at UCLA, I
tried for a while to devise a system of writing, a sym-
bolic system similar to a musical score or dance nota-
tion, which could be used for making notes about the
films I saw and help me analyze them later. It became
apparent that thiswas a rather silly idea because mean-
ing in cinema is achieved not by identifymg the sum of
identifiable parts at any particular moment but via a
gestalt which operates in another way altogether. Per-
haps such a system might be useful if one were planning
how big crews would shoot fiction films, but later Josef
von Sternberg told me that he too had tried to devise
such a system and also decided it was a bad idea. At any
rate, the critical decisions determininghow a documen-
tary film should be photographed and edited are not
contingent upon any written system. Nomenclature and
syntactical considerationsare learned as a part of film-
making, but they are internalized much as musical no-
tation is for jazz musicians. Over time, experience
allows certain aspects of the craft to become almost
automatic, as it does in writing. Some anthropologists
don't understand the craft of filmmaking and seem
relatively incapable of "reading" film, but anthropology
always has been and always will be a product of print
literacy, and film "literacy" will continue to be at the
discretion of those who choose to take it up. The modes
in which people understand themselves and the world
differ greatly from one individual to another, and no
doubt some of the differences are the result of physical
limitations,such as dyslexia or color blindness or deaf-
ness. Perhaps those who are most frustrated by the
filmic experience are those who demand from it the
unrealizable, either because they don't recognize the
inherent limitations of film as a method of communica-
tion or possibly because they suffer from asort ofvisual
FILM' R E V I E W E S S A Y 373
dyslexia But most anthropologists are probably per-
plexed by visual media simply because they have never
"studied" it and there is little opportunity to do so as a
part of the discipline.
David: If films are distrusted or considered irrelevant by
anthropologists, it's perhaps because they have too
much meaning and yet not enough meaning. Not
enough, since they appear to go only partway toward
the distillation that anthropology requires. Too much,
because they leave open too many possible interpreta-
tions. They leave too much to the viewer-too much to
come to conclusions about. Writing on a page is, after
all, a close cousin to speaking, but images on a screen
are nothing like that. If films were somehow translated
into anthropological writing, the density of material
they contained would make them seem exhaustingly
descriptive. We'd be overloaded, unable to grasp an
overall structure, whereas in images description is im-
plicit. If film has any resemblance to writing, it's to
narrative and poetic forms rather than to academic
prose. When a film creates ideas, it's through recurring
variations on a set of themes, or juxtapositions of ma-
terial, or what Eisenstein called "collision."We begin to
see things in terms of other things, which is to say that
we see them metaphorically.Anthropological writing is
often concerned with such meanings-in discussionsof
symbolism, for example-but I have a feeling that if it
used poetic devices to arrive at them, we might feel
coerced, whereas film is so firmly grounded in the
concrete that, whatever the suggestionsbeing made, we
can always fall back on the stubborn literalness of the
images. The lesson to be learned, I think, is that we just
can't expect to get the same things from ethnographic
films that we get from anthropological writing.
Figure 1
Arwoto in A Wife among Wives (1974/1981), directed by David Mac-
Dougall and Judith MacDougall. Photo courtesy of Fieldwork Films,
Canberra, Australia.
374 A M E R I C A NA N T H R O P O L O G I S T V O L . 9 8 , N o . 2
If visual anthropology is still viewed with some
condescension by the anthropolo@cal profession, I
thmk it is also because of the contexts in which most
ethnographic films have been made and used. Particu-
larly in America, the funding for visual anthropology
has come largely from educationalrather than research
organizations. Most anthropo1ogm.lfilms talk down to
their audiences, especially films made for public televi-
sion audiences. The emphasis on making films to teach
introductory anthropology has meant that few ethno-
graphic films address original and difficult problems in
anthropological research or are produced at the doc-
toral or postdoctoral level. Its largely through the insis-
tence of Ph.D. studentsthemselvesthat some universities
are now regarding film as having more than a didactic
role.
Lucien: There does all of a sudden seem to be quite a lot
of excitement about an emerging visual anthropology,
even if people are frequently at a loss as to what that
might involve. I sometimes feel that discontinuities be-
tween images and texts, while themselves never abso-
lute, are downplayed in the process. As longstandmg
ethnographicfilmmakerswho have seen waves of inter-
est come and go, how do you feel about the contempo-
rary curiosity for the subject?
Judith: There may be a burgeoning interest in visual
anthropology, but there is very little actually being
done. Part of the problem is probably a result of aca-
demic institutions finding it difficult to accommodate
disciplines that seem to upset so many of the classical
dlchotomies that organize academic life (&science,
visudwritten, technicdacademic). Economic factors
certainly enter into it, but researchers could produce
films or multimedia for relatively little cost-using a
tape recorder, still camera, and a Hi-8 video camera-if
proper training were available to them. On the other
hand, the expense of producing 16mm films for televi-
sion discouragesinnovation,especiallyby younger,less
established filmmakers. But the basic problem lies in
how best to transpose our experience of beingthere
back to here, and what we want to communicate about
it. I am not sure what anthropologists want to do with
perceptual knowledge, or how they actually see. I sus-
pect that certain anthropologistsmight see very differ-
ently from filmmakers, and differences increase as a
result of practicing their respective disciplines. How
one exists in space and time not only affects ones
production but transforms and privileges certain
modes of perception. But it is difficult to know how this
functions.
When an anthropologist goes somewhere else, it is
fieldwork.The comparable period for a filmmaker is
called production.The terms reflect quite accurately
the differences in methodology. The physical act of
exposing silver halide (or magnetic tape) to light in
JUNE 1996
order to create images is closer to gathering exactly the
right wood for making a canoe than it is to note-taking,
which represents process rather than production.
Notes are a resource to be drawn upon but they repre-
sent a fluid resource, one that can be called upon or
discarded, changed, revised-a mnemonic rather than
an artifact. Once a filmmaker has returned home, the
neglected or forgotten shot can never be realized, and
the completed shots will always remain what they are;
they can be altered and reflected upon but not remade.
If one puts ones foot into it, it remains there.
David: It would be a pity if the enthusiasm for visual
anthropology encouraged young anthropologiststo as-
sume that images dont require an articulation fully as
rigorous as anthropological writing. On the other hand,
there are fundamental discontinuities between what
one can do in writing and in film or video. However
much a film tries to generalizeby holdmg up the specific
as typical or representative, it is always founded on the
concrete historical image. Susan Sontag once said pho-
tographs dont explain, they simply acknowledge the
existence of something. Films, I believe, can in fact
explain-through chains of narrative, for example-
but they still tend to explain only the immedlate in-
stance. They lack a mode of more general abstraction.
This is a significant obstacle to conventional scientific
and academic discourse, which is built upon assertions,
presented either as descriptive statements or hypothe-
ses or conclusions. In contrast to the kinds of state-
ments found in scientific writing, films create meaning
through implication, often by doing nothing more than
placing one element next to another and asking us to
see the connection between them. The more the rest of
the film contextualizes that juxtaposition, the more
clearly we will be directed toward particular kinds of
meanings. However, film meaning is never of the sort
that will satisfy those desiring definitive statements.
There is always an ambiguity about the way a film
implies something. It suggests, it draws possible con-
nections, it creates reverberations and harmonics. But
this is also one of its strengths, because that sort of
complexity is also characteristic of much of our social
experience. Something with a meaning in one context
will have a different meaning in another, but it will
nevertheless drag overtones of its other meaning into
the new context, whether anyone acknowledgesthat or
not.
Because of t h , I think anthropologists should be-
ware of thinking of visual anthropology primarily as a
means of illustrating preexisting anthropological
knowledge. If you do that, it means knowing what
youre going to say before you make the film, so that
the film is inevitably a repetition, an illustration. The
French, in contrast with the Anglo-Americanview, seem
to regard film more as a research method, through

which one explores a particular situation or problem.
One learns something through the making of the film.
The assumption is that one begins a film from a position
of uncertainty, and one must take risks. That, of course,
is anathema to funding organizations and television
executives, who always want to know what you are
going to end up with before they give you the money to
do it. But in this kind of filmmaking, you simply can't
know. To some social scientists as well, such an ap-
proach smacks of a lack of discipline,perhaps contrib-
uting to the view that visual anthropology is a less
serious pursuit than conventional anthropology. It's
part of the problem of confusing original research with
publication. After all, when you begin to write a book,
you're expected to know what it's about. But when you
finally edit a film, you're constrained to "write" it with
the shots produced at the very moments of discovery.
IZisa: What is the role of style in ethnographic film? Are
there stylistic problems that are specific to cross-cul-
turd film?
Judith: Style in ethnographicfilm functions as in any film,
fictional or documentary. Style reflects the process of
the making of a film. I don't think we actually set out to
make a film in a certain "style," but there are some
stylistic devices-for example, narration-that we
might decide to reject from the very beginning. Then
other strategies must be used in the shooting that can
compensate for the lack of narration. It sounds very
negative, but often style is just that which one rejects,
and then of course something new must be found
during the course of production. Every new film de-
mands a constant reassessment of how to approach the
making of it.
Ilisa: In crosscultural films, are there specific problems
that revolve around the issue of translation? Are they
different in kind from those inherent in written ethnog-
raphy and from those involving all documentary films?
What is the fit between film style and film subject?
Judith: I think the major challenge in making observa-
tional films in unfamiliar cultures is not so much one of
"translation" but one of creating an environment that
allowsviewers room to interpret the behavior of people
operating within a very different social system. Yes, the
problems are different in kind from those in written
anthropology, and one must counter the expectations
of those who expect a didactic essay. The hardest thing
in the filmmaking process is to determine exactly how
much manipulation and intervention is needed to en-
sure a reasonably accurate interpretation and yet never
to "tell" too much. Constructing the beginning of a film
is especially tricky because one must set up the themes,
characters, and style clearly, and yet they should never
be too clear, otherwise the viewers won't bring their
own interpretation to it and they'll expect always to be
"told" what is happening and become angry and resent-
FILM R E V I E W E S S A Y 375
ful if they can't immediately comprehend the present
tense action. Some academics find it distressingto feel
lost even temporarily-either physically ("Where's the
map?") or intellectually ("Is he the mother's brother?")-
and they dislike finding themselves in the position of
tourist rather than of authoritative participant-ob-
server. Nonacademics sometimes understand more
quickly because they don't expect to know everything
immediately and are more content to watch and wait.
Perhaps part of the problem for anthropologists lies in
their expectation that films will follow the form of a
written ethnographic essay, laid out in the scientific
format that presents the conclusions first.
I think that it's somewhat futile to ask about the fit
between the film style and film subject because one gets
thrown into the form and content debate, which is never
very useful unless it's tied to specific examples. Film
form is always difficult to talk about in the abstract,
partly because when any one component of a film is
isolated from the whole, it becomes something else
altogether. It's also difficult to remember specifically
how one came to certain decisions regarding style be-
cause if the film succeeds, its style is worn effortlessly,
like skin, and there seems to be no possibility of any
other.
David: On the more general question of the fit between
film style and the subject, I think we're alwaysbound to
some extent by the conventions and technology of our
time. The forms and rhetoric of filmmaking convey
some aspects of social experience much better than
others. For example, I don't think we know very well
how to deal with the passage of time in films. There's a
tendency to impose a heightened pace, to distrust one's
subject matter. It's often shortening that takes the
meaning out of things that would otherwise be mean-
ingful. It became clear, for example, that the scene of
Miminu making cheese in Tempus de Baristas would
work only if it were kept long; otherwise it would be
merely a technological process. But kept long, it begins
to communicate a sense of Miminu's solitary life and his
internalization of the details of his work. For me, when
the cheese appears it's like a moment of creation, the
beginning of a new world.
Ilisa: Conversely, what is the relation between film style
and filmmaker? Rouch's films have that unmistakable
"Rouchian" style, one that reflects his own buffoonery
and personal ebullience. It is difficult not to see in Tim
Asch's films his own character: searching, always won-
dering what's going on. Many of your filmsseem laconic
and relaxed. Are you conscious of any fit between your
film style and your ownpersonalities?If so, do you work
for or against that tendency? If we admit the role of the
author in ethnographicfilms, where does this leave the
subjects? [See Figure 2.1 Does it even make sense to
imagine synchronizingfilm form with cultural style?
376 A N T H R O P O L O G I S TV O L . 9 8 , N o . 2
AMERICAN
David: Although our style has changed over time, I sup-
pose there is some underlying consistency. Part of it is
no doubt due to our working method, rather than to our
individual personalities. We encourage a relaxed, unde-
manding atmosphere while were filming, mingling our
filming activities as much as possible with our ongoing
interchanges with people. On the other hand, there may
be aspects of Judiths outgoing relationships with peo-
ple and my fondness for understatement apparent in
our work. We dont necessarily feel relaxed when were
filming. I am often on tenterhooks, on the alert for
particular themes and relationships, or desperately
waiting for something to emerge in front of the camera.
I constantly reexamine the analytical basis and the
structures of the film in my mind. I feel frustrated and
elated by turns. I am often irritated and angry with
myself for opportunities missed, or when I feel Ive shot
something badly. I dont really edoy the technology of
filming per se. I regard it as a necessary tool, although
my camera does become for me a very sensitive, per-
Figure 2
David MacDougall and Pietro during the filming of Tempus de Baristas (1992/1993). Photo courtesy of Fieldwork Films, Canberra, Australia.
J U N E1 9 9 6
sonal instrument. On a good day I sense an extraordl-
nary synchrony between what Im seeing and how Im
filming it, almost as if life were arranging itself artfully
for me. I often have a feeling of love and admiration for
the people Im looking at through the viewfinder, a
sense of their perfection, mixed with a certain sadness
I cant quite account for. These are all perhaps factors
in the style of the films.
I constantly feel the need to simpllfy,to get rid of a
lot of the unnecessary baggage of film.I do fight against
the easy aestheticization of film images. Its not hard to
get beautiful images-anyone can learn to do it. But its
usually irrelevant, and it shouldnt be allowed to get in
the way of the subject. Theres a fundamental difference
between conventionally beautiful images and a film-
makers sensitive response to people and places and
things-that is, the impression we get of balance and
understandmg. The framing of images should be a re-
flection of thought and feeling. I dont know how we can
create film styles more appropriate to different cultural

styles. Perhaps we should reexamine certain potentials
of film in the light of cultural practice-the use of
repetition, for example. Otherwise, I think we have to
work through an intuitive sense of what's appropriate.
Lucien: Stylistic differencesin your oeuvre seem to coin-
cide with cultural, even continental differences: the
Turkana and Jie films, the Australian films, and Photo
WaUahs in India all have markedly different styles. To
what extent was this experimentation on your part? To
what extent was it forced upon you by the cultural
differences with which you were confronted? Tempus
de Baristus seemsclosest to the African films,although
it focuses less on dialogue and perhaps more on your
subjects' affective relationship to their habitat.
Dawid: I think for us stylistic differences have been partly
forced upon us and are partly the result of exploring
new possibilities. They've been forced upon us by the
fact that the same style isn't always productive for all
subjects. There may be dissonances between a particu-
lar documentary style and a particular cultural style.
The clearest instance was in Australia, where we found
that the style we had used in pastoralist societies in East
Africa simply wasn't appropriate in Aboriginal society.
People had a wholly different way of expressing them-
selves, and if the film was to be attuned to that, it had
to be made differently. In fact, those films can be seen
as a series of attempts to find satisfactory ways of
representing Aboriginal culture. I'm not sure we were
ever really successful.
Judith: Although some of the stylistic choices must occur
at the shooting stage, the decisions made during editing
create the frame through which filming style is often
interpreted. Much of the time spent editing an observa-
tional film involvesjuggling and balancing context and
content, and we spend quite a long time in the editing
process, certainly compared to many television docu-
mentaries. Editing this sort of film is like walking on a
tightrope while juggling a dozen balls and singing, and
it all can cataclysmically crash if the balance goes just
a little bit wrong. Observational films using long takes
are especially difficult to structure because once the
rhythms of real time establish themselves as the normal
pattern, condensation often can only be achieved by
omitting content. It is difficult to ensure a preferred
reading for a complex and extended long take contain-
ing several characters and diverse subject matter, and
it is even more difficult when cultural difference ob-
scures meaning. The Turkana filmswere able to sustain
narrative by employing disjunctive intertitles and first-
person narration, but the Australian films seemed to
require a less disruptive style, provided by interior com-
mentary. Every film represents a new set of parameters
and pathways which must be articulated into a mean-
ingful narrative, and cultural differences are just one
part of the equation.
F I L M R E V I E WE S S A Y 377
Ilisa: Photo W&hs represents a radical departure from
your usual style, which tended before to be focused
around a few main characters, following their lives for
a certain amount of time. Photo WaUahs seemed to me
to be more of a montage-like argument or a musing
about photography. Why did you choose thisstyle? Why
make a film about ideas rather than people?
David: In the case of Photo WaUahs, the stylistic differ-
ence was a matter of deliberate choice. We were in-
itially interested in different human responses to
photography. Then we became interested in how those
were worked out in a particular cultural setting. The
subject of the film was a specific cultural product, but
also how that product was regarded and used. At that
time we wanted to explore a new way of making ethno-
graphic films, and this seemed an appropriate subject
with which to try to do it. We had in mind a film that
would present the audience with a complex network of
meanings out of which one could trace lines in many
directions,but also which itself stood for the extraordi-
nary complexity that we found to exist even in relation
to one small aspect of life in one small place. I think we
had in mind somethinglike Peter Wollen's idea of a film
being not a declaration about a subject but an instru-
ment for discoveries about it, a kind of rich matrix. So
we intentionally made a film that was carefully struc-
tured, but without a main central character or central
event or narrative, so that the audience would have to
look for something else in it.
In asense, each of our filmshas been an experiment.
Every film poses new problems, and every film offers
an opportunity to go a little beyond what one has been
able to do before, or to go off in a different direction. It
would be very dull to approach a new film with a set
routine, knowing exactly how you were going to do it.
And it would somehow be disparaging of the subject as
well, as though it could teach you nothing new. You
have to approach each new subject in an inquiring and
responsive frame of mind, willing to take risks and not
knowing exactly how it's going to end. It's not profes-
sionalism to be able to fit any subject to a particular
style, to promise you can deliver a certain kind of film.
It's cowardice.
Lucien:Photo W&hs stands out very much, much closer
to others' filmmaking styles, less "observational,"
shorter takes, more an aesthetic of the fragment,but it'd
still be considered "v6rit6" in the loose, TV,colloquial
sense of the word-no m a t i o n , and so on.
Judith: I don't really think Photo WaUuhsis very much like
mainstream filmmaking (especially television docu-
mentary), but it does differ markedly from our previous
films. We wanted primarily to make a film about the
practices and ideas surrounding photography, and the
"ethnographic"aspects of it came about only when we
decided to locate the film in a small town in India.A film
378 A M E R I C A NA N T H R O P O L O G I S T V O L . 9 8 , N o . 2
about ideas must necessarily rely more upon external
references, in a manner more like writing. But on the
other hand, because every image is closely tied to its
referent and cant be unhinged, so to speak, ideas can-
not be manipulated with the same ease as in written
texts. The dual nature of the images necessitates mon-
tages of shorter shots that can be held in memory. We
shot quite a lot of long takes and various observational
materials that eventually couldntbe used, perhaps be-
cause it is impossible to combine sequences of classic
montage with material that appears more unmediated.
Lucien: Do you consider yourselves observational film-
makers through and through? Would you ever make
(could you ever imagine yourselves ever making) much
use of archival footage, or reenactments, or making
more personaVautobiographiddiaristidfirst-penon
films? (I realize that in subtle and varied ways theres a
first-personvoice in all your films.)
Judith: I want to see if its possible to do more with
shifting modes within a film (for example long takes
next to quick montage), to use titles as scenes (as
Eisenstein or Ogawa do), and to incorporate still im-
ages. I would like to make some short experimental
films using video and virtual editing equipment. Such
films might be both more formal and more personal.
David: Im quite open to the possibility of doing things
differently in the future. For example, Im not opposed
to using narration, only to using it in certain shopworn
ways. In fact weve used narration in a number of our
films. And a film like Link-Up Diary uses it in a very
personal way. I think its also a mistake to jump to
conclusions about a film on the basis of certain stylistic
features. A film such as Tempus de Baristas may look
superficiallyvery much like a traditional observational
film, simply because it doesnt declare the filmmakers
presence overtly. But I believe itsfundamentally differ-
ent in approach from observational films, and that the
presence of the filmmaker can be felt in it in all sorts of
ways if one really understands the film. Similarly, the
style of the fim has been called seamlessby several
people who should know better, since its manifestly a
film built upon contrasts and juxtapositions.
Lucien: All your films seem to be about peoples intellec-
tual lives and feelings. They also seem to be about
relationships between people; and relationships,while
they are visible in certain concrete manifestations,
are not inherently visual. [See Figure 3.1 Could you
talk a little about the relationship between the visible
and invisible in your films?
David: In a sense, films are extended metaphors of the
invisible. When its said that film is an indexical me-
dium, that doesnt only mean that its signs are physi-
cally linked to the world, it also means that it evokes
the physical world through its traces, its indices. The
slightest trace is sometimes enough to recreate an ob-
J U N E1 9 9 6
ject or person or place. Fllms actually give us extraor-
dinarily little out of which to reconstruct their subjects.
Fllmsalso provide us with the same sorts of indlces that
we are used to interpreting in daily life-facial expres-
sions that stand for inner feelings, sounds that tell us of
things around us, objects associated with certain ways
of life, and so on. Thats why film is such a universally
accessible medium. Its often very hard, both in life and
in films, to distinguish between the physical and the
emotional, or the visible and invisible. Is anger simply
an emotion, or is it physical behavior? When we admire
or love or hate someone, can we separate who they are
from its physical embodiment?
In making films Im rarely conscious of evocation
per se. Rather, Im seizing upon things that are already
expressive,the world speaking itself, as it were. Before
I made Tempus de Baristus, I made some preliminary
notes, including one that said, Filmpeopleshands. By
the time I began filming I had completely forgotten that,
yet the film is full of hands. I filmed hands not as signs
or symbols, nor because they belonged to certain peo-
ple-but because literally they were those people. I
would also suggest that the anthropologist or ethno-
graphic filmmaker involved in fieldwork is not con-
scious of possessing a single, continuous personal
identity. Our sense of self is constantly ebbing and
flowing-sometimes quite apart and autonomous, at
other times mergmg with the experience of others. Our
filming can reflect this. I thmk it is often through physi-
cal objects, and through our proximity to the physi-
cality of others, that we have an intimation of a
different sense of self. Through the visual, film plays
upon this possibility, bringing us closer to the experien-
tial world of others.
Lucien: Would you be as quick as Rouch to say that there
is almost no boundary between documentary film and
films of fiction?Despite the ineluctable fictionalizing
of filming, what happens to the meaning of documen-
taryif we abandon any notion that it has, or aspires to,
a privileged relationship to reality?
David: I would not be nearly as quick as Rouch to say that.
The boundary may indeed be vague, but that doesnt
mean there is no difference on either side of it. I think
that by fiction, Rouch often means the acting out of
ones dreams, or an imaginary world, in documentary.
Are those films then fiction? After all, dreams are a real
part of ones life. Then, of course, the actors in fiction
films are real people, but does that make all fiction films
documentary? Id like to preserve the distinction, for
two reasons. I agree with Bill Nichols that there is a
fundamental difference between films about living peo-
ple, who belong to the world regardless of any film that
might be made about them, and people imagined by a
scriptwriter and played by actors. There is far more to
the person in documentary than what one films,but

Figure 3
Brendan Mangatopi in mourning for his father in Good-Bye Old Man
(1975/1977), directed by David MacDougall. Photo courtesy of Austra-
lian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
there is no more to a fictional character than what is in
the film, however richly it is evoked. Secondly, docu-
mentary filmmaking is for me importantly a way of
making contact with the world, of sensing and declaring
the existence of things, whereas fiction would seem to
be a way of adding to the world in its own image. I have
to admit, though, that Bresson is a great filmmaker for
me precisely because he reaches beyond the fictional.
He is working in Rouch's borderland.
Judith:If the descriptions in the television guides are any
indication,the terms are becoming increasingly mean-
ingless. "Documentary" seems to include the reen-
actment of historical events by actors, interview
journalism, and nature series. Most "documentaries"
seen on television are part of a series "about" some-
thing. These things are conveyed to us via a presenter.
It seems that the wfmxce to something real has be-
come more valued than the actual person or thing or
profilmic event itself, and whole events are seldom
shown. Perhaps sports and cooking shows are popular
because they are alone in depicting relatively intact
events. The real world has become quite weightless
because those who depict it don't believe in its inherent
value. I find this state of affairs distressing because
documentary does have a special relationship to the
real world. Its relationshipto its audience is also special
and the maker of a documentary film is responsible to
viewers in a fundamentallydifferent way than are jour-
nalists or fiction filmmakers.
Lucien:Your Jie and Turkana filmsare often credited with
having been among the first to individualizeand human-
ize their subjects by subtitlingtheir dialogue and allow-
ing viewers perceive their intellectual life. [See
Figure 4.1 How do you feel about subtitles today?
FILM REVIEW ESSAY 379
13uvid: Subtitles have their own dynamics. For example,
they present us with speech in segments,not in the flow
that actually characterizes speech. They also reach into
the film and pull out a particular level of meaning. When
a dog barks, the subtitles ignore it. Subtitled films exag-
gerate the importance of speech in social life. That is
part of the price we pay for them. They tend to take
over, so that even if other things are really more impor-
tant, such as how people speak rather than what they
say,you have to keep the subtitles going or the audience
will think something has gone wrong. Subtitles were
almost a logical necessity of making films in synchro-
nous sound in another language, because obviously
audiences wanted to know what people were saying.
Together with synchronous sound, they changed the
whole orientation of ethnographic film, from an empha-
sis upon ritual and technology, and general surveys of
culture, to an emphasis upon speech, whether in inter-
views or spontaneous conversations,and specific peo-
ple and events. I think this change has been worthwhile,
but I also think it is time to try to get away from the
excessively verbal. Sound in films doesn't just mean
speech. I think we need to explore sound as environ-
ment. I think we need to make films about relationships
expressed nonverbally and the many times in life when
people are alone.
Lucien:Observationaland verite films seem to have given
way, both in the mainstream (broadcast television) and
within the independent community, to interview-based
films.Some of these are obviously more sophisticated
than others and use contrasting sound bites to throw
adjacent comments into relief. Others (by no means all)
use interviews as a substitute for voice-over narration.
How do you feel about the shift? What are their respec-
tive relations to lived experience? Do interview-based
Figure 4
Scene from TO Live with Herds (1968/1972), directed by David Mac-
Dougall. Photo courtesy of Fieldwork Films, Canberra, Australia.
380 A M E R I C A NA N T H R O P O L O G I S T V O L . 9 8 , N o . 2
films really provide the context that some viewers felt
to be lacking in observational films?
Judith: I think the shift from observational material to
interview material has more to do with changes in
technology and changing economic realities than it
does with an intentional modification of filmmaking
methodology or philosophy. Shooting an interview on
video is cheap, easy, and quick, and shooting observa-
tional material, even on tape, is enormously time con-
suming and thus expensive. Observational footage has
been replaced by visuals authenticated by interview.
This footage is also comparatively inexpensive because
it usually depicts public events that fall into familiar
categories,such as political events,disasters, and so on,
and thus it can exist as a simple metonym, which re-
quires little interior contextualization. I worry that be-
cause this sort of journalistic practice has almost
completely replaced older, more open, film forms, the
expectations of viewers who have never seen a docu-
mentaryare becoming very restricted. The preconcep-
tions that bias interpretation are a crucial part of the
process of mediation. For example, a viewer perceives
a film very differently when it is seen on a television
monitor as part of an academic seminar than when its
projected in a theater. F~lmfestivals are important be-
cause audiences are increasingly composed of people
who expect to see nonfiction either as televisiodvideo
or as diminutive multimedia images on a computer
screen. Even though popular literature and television
have developed the curious inversion of nonfiction
viewed as entertainment (Cops, Americas Funniest
Home Videos) and fiction is consumed as information
(James Clavells Rising S u n or the feature film JFK),
there is a tendency, especially in academic circles, to
equate nonfiction with information.
David: I have considerable reservations about interview-
based films. But one great potentiality of television, I
think, is to allow us to watch and listen to people
talking. We can get a real insight into a persons ideas
and character through such material-for example, in
recent films on Raymond Firth, Noam Chomsky, and
Robert Crumb. Unfortunately t h approach is very rare
on television. Theres a tendency not to want us to
watch and listen, but rather to manipulate fragments of
speech.
There are many problems about the self-validation
of interview-based films, and Bill Nichols has written
about this. Certainly its an effective and tempting form
of propaganda, because filmmakers have only to in-
clude the sentiments they agree with. Also its terribly
seductive just to sit back and be told things by people
who supposedly know, and who promise a kind of
behind-the-scenes view of history. Theres incredible
confusion these days between television journalism
and documentary. People simply dont know the differ-
J U N E1 9 9 6
ence. Interview-based films are always, on one level,
retrospective and secondhand. They report on experi-
ence,they dontuse film to confront us with experience,
except as people look back upon it. Theres a definite
skill attached to making an effective interview film, and
certainly a lot of work, but somehow these films are
evasive. They dont really come to grips with film as a
medium for engaging with life as it is lived-what Edgar
Morin called the work of the cinkaste-plongeur, who
dives into life. They have a prefabricated quality, which
of course is what television executives love about
them-theyre predictable to make. You propose an
idea and then go around and collect interviews and
archival footage. But its sad to see young filmmakers
going out to make a documentary when all they can
think of is to sit people down and interview them.
ZZisa: Although your films have very clear structures, they
seem to have very open beginnings and ends. Why and
how is this? Is it a response to the lack of closure in life
and experience itself?
David: I think the openness has perhaps more to do with
the kind of engagement wed like from the audience
than with a general comment on life. But having said
that, Id also admit that I see the films very much as
excerpts out of the lives of other people, and their lives
dont begin and end with the film. We want to make that
very clear, because it has to do with acknowledging
what a film is, and the relative importance of a life and
a film.
One of the differences between academic writing
and film has to do with this question of structure. An-
thropological papers tend to start with a statement of
what theyre going to demonstrate and then proceed to
demonstrate it, often going over it even a third time in
a closing summary. Some films begin this way, but we
prefer to introduce the audience to the subject and then
gradually lead them into certain discoveries and to ask
certain questions. In this way we feel the film leaves
open a wider range of factors that may eventually bear
on the questions were interested in. In that sense, wed
like the films to reflect some of the complexities of
life-for example, not only economic processes but
personahties, not only the predictable but the acciden-
tal.Nor do we want to present the world as wholly
knowable, and some sense of mystery at the beginning
of a film helps to confirm this. Wed like viewers to
arrive at questionsfor which the film may provide some
answers, but not all people will necessarily be asking
quite the same questions. The film should have enough
range to make that possible.
At the beginning of Lorangs Way, we purposely
held off showing very much of Lorang until a number
of other people had talked about him. We hoped the
audience would thus be led to wonder about him and
what he represented. That was in part necessary be-

cause the rest of the film doesnt progress as a narrative
of connected events. Instead it has to function as a
narrative of discovery about Lorang.
Lucien: One model of ethnographic filmmalan g involves
a collaboration between an anthropological writer and
a documentary or ethnographic filmmaker-ne advo-
cated in different ways by Tim Asch and Asen Balicksi
and John Bishop. Do you think it has any merits? It is
clearly very different from your own, as well as John
Marshalls, Bob Gardners, or Jean Rouchs. What of
your relation to Paul Baxter and Philip Gulliver,and the
anthropologistsin Australia? How does your approach
to your subject-during preproductionand produc-
tion, or fieldwork- differ from that of an anthropo-
logical writer?
Judith: Being there as a filmmaker is a very different
experience than it is for an anthropologist. A large part
of the difference lies in what we do physically: where
we place our bodies in normal social situations, when
we speak and when we dont, and how mobile we can
or cant be because of our filming equipment. Much of
our behavior would seem strange and restrictive to an
anthropologist-and it is painfully restrictive for us,
too, in that we cant participate in daily activitiesnearly
as much as wed like. You cant hold a tape recorder and
a baby at the same time, at least not if you expect to
have good sound recordings. We are afraid ever to be
without our filming gear because we know that if we
ever leave it behind, probably-always-inevitably-
something incredibly marvelous will happen and we
will miss it. We sit with it and wait for days or weeks or
months. I am sure we talk very little compared to an-
thropologists, because we usually dont want to inter-
rupt the flow of events by stopping and questioning
people about whats happening. If we ask questions, it
occurs before or after the filmed event, unless we delib-
erately make the decision to incorporate our question
as part of the sequence. Successful collaboration be-
tween anthropologists and filmmakers certainly is fea-
sible, but it is difficult if filming is based on an
observational-participatory model. I think that if I
worked with an anthropologist over an extended time,
Id want to put him or her into the center of the film as
a main character.
A more basic problem with collaboration is the
perennial one of the basic differences in producing
written and filmed works. A filmmaker has certain ideas
about overall structures and about what one wants to
say in general terms, but the specific scenes that will
achieve these goals are often unpredictable, especially
in non-interview-based structures. Often the unex-
pected scene is the momentous one, and instantaneous
decisions must be made constantly, with no time for
consultation or reflection. Films rely on metaphoric
structures, and a filmmaker is always looking for the
FILM R E V I E WE S S A Y 381
metaphor that will represent the essence of an abstract
idea One of the difficulties with collaboration is that
the filmmaker feels caught wrong-footed if an anthro-
pologist asks for an explanation about why he or she is
doing something, because often one doesnt know. And
I would be uncomfortable saying, Oh, well, I justfeel
its the right thing to do, especially when my feeling
represents an intuition that a close shot of the childs
soft cheek resting against the rough texture of the dogs
back is significant, both as an important metaphor and
as a part of the narrative structure of the film. Later it
might turn out that this shot didnt in fact prove valu-
able, but one mustnt lose courage to act intuitively. An
anthropologist might find it difficult to deal with such
seemingly uncertain methodology.
David: As I said earlier, the filmmakers discoveries
become the fabric of the finished work, whereas a
writer creates a new fabric built upon notes and the
experiences of fieldwork. There is the film editing, to
be sure, but the shots used in the film must always be
those produced in the field at the moment of direct
contact with the events. These cannot be rewritten.
There is therefore a constant sense of creation in film-
making, of being on the edge, of making fateful deci-
sions.
Our experience of working directly with anthro-
pologists has been very slight. Our filming with the Jie
and Turkanaowed alot to Philip Gulliversearlier work,
but we never met him. And when he reviewed To Live
with Herds, his reaction was disappointment that it
didnt emphasize his own research interests, whereas
the film was about something else. He didnt see what
the film was about, only what it wasnt. We had hoped
to collaborate with Neville Dyson-Hudson on the
Turkana films,but unfortunately he had other commit-
ments at the time. On that project we spent nine months
doing fieldwork before we did any filming. On the
Kenya Bomn film, which I made with James Blue, Paul
Baxter was very helpful in instructing us on the Boran,
but he was away duringmost of the filming. Again,when
I shot Good-Bye Old Man,the anthropologist had to be
away except for a day or two at the beginning and a few
days at the climax of the ceremony. The only film in
which an anthropologist was more directly involved
was Familiar Places, made with Peter Sutton. Weve
generally had to be our own anthropologists.
IZisa: Most discussions of collaboration in the context of
ethnographic filmmaking concentrate on the relation-
ship between anthropologists and filmmakers, or be-
tween filmmakers and subjects. Only rarely do we
discuss the relationship between collaborating film-
makers themselves. Because David does much of the
writing, he tends to get more of the public attention. I
wonder if you could talk alittle about your own working
382 A M E R I C A NA N T H R O P O L O G I S T V O L . 9 8 , N o . 2
relationship and discuss your respective orientations to
filmmaking.
Judith: Ong suggests that writing is a technology that
exteriorizes thought, ahenates self from other, and al-
lows lists, facts, and other forms of exteriorization of
knowledge. When we work together on a film David
does the lists, letters, and written plans, and I do much
of the talking and listening to people. I find I usually
become very comfortable in what Ong calls a primary
oral culture. David tends to be a bit more reticent in
new social situations. We possibly operate in quite
different worlds much of the time; but collaboration can
be all the more effective because of these differences. I
certainly think analytically about the film as we are
making it, but perhaps I tend to be more lateral in my
thinking, and I may leave judgments more open during
the filming process. This requires holding in mind mul-
tiple interpretations of observed human behavior and
anticipating multiple outcomes, which is quite exhaust-
ing, and sometimes I thmk how lovely it would be to be
an entomologM and write about beetles. I almost never
think of writing about my experience, because to do
that would destroy it for me. While we are filming,
David and I usually are very much in sync visually, and
we seldom find it necessary to discuss when the camera
should go on or off or where to stand or sit or what to
point it at. Often we both can predict what will happen,
and position ourselves correctly in order to film it. I like
Davidsstyle of shooting very much and would not have
wanted it done differently. We share the editing.
Recently my interests have been focusing on vari-
ous forms of visual representation in popular culture,
and on the significance of certain artifacts created for
tourists or other strangers. I find some paintings on
velvet-or those tinfoil paintings that refract light dif-
ferently when seen at various angles-quite interesting
and even exhilarating, but David hates them and finds
them difficult to film. Recently I shot some Hi-8footage
in Bali about the industry that manufactures wooden
carvings for tourists. Perhaps in the future Ill do more
cinematography, and talk less.
David: The writing Ive done has been very occasional. Id
write something every few years i f 1 felt I had something
particular to say about documentary or ethnographic
film. Itsbeen a kind of minor adjunct to the filmmaking.
So it has sometimes seemed ironic to find people who
are more familiar with what Ive written than with the
films themselves. It bothers me that Judiths role in the
films is sometimes underestimated. I think theres such
an id6e fure about authorship, and its so convenient to
think of works in terms of single authors, that people
find it difficult to deal with the possibility that a film is
the result of the different strengths of two people.
Whos the author then? they ask, whereas the author
isnt one or the other or an amalgam, but particular
J U N E1 9 9 6
characteristics of each seen in various aspects of the
film. We try to arrive at a certain conception of the film
we plan to make. We develop what were going to film
as clearly as we can, each of us adding our own ideas.
Then we film, and although I do the camerawork, Judith
is always watching me and weve worked together long
enough that she has a fairly clear idea of what the
images will look like. Besides, we often discuss the
lookof the film-what qualities we want it to convey.
In the case of Photo WuUahs we were after a kind of
kaleidoscopic immersion in the photographic world of
Mussoorie, but we also wanted to frame our shots in a
certain formal way, perhaps in reference to still photog-
raphy itself. When were edlting-xcept recently,
when weve worked with the film editor Dai Vaughan-
we first look at the materials for a scene and work out
a plan for it. Then one of us goes off and does a rough
cut, and then we meet and look at it and argue over it
further. When we disagree, we quite often end up con-
vincing each other and trading positions. We try not to
rush the editing, so that in many cases, after a period of
time, the one who disagreed with a particular stand will
come back and acknowledge that the other was right
after all.We know other filmmaking couples who work
this way-the two of you, Robin Anderson and Bob
Connolly, Peter Getzels and Harriet Gordon, Curtis
Levy and Christine Olsen-and its interesting to com-
pare notes on the dynamics of this process. Ive often
thought we should get together and write a book on this
sort of collaboration. However, I think its also impor-
tant to work independently from time to time, and with
other people.
Judith and I have collaborated on most of our films,
but I think this is probably very different from an an-
thropologist collaborating with a filmmaker. We come
to a film with a common vocabulary and experience as
filmmakers, and when we disagree we tend to argue
things out on the basis of common understandings.
However, I suspect that when an anthropologist and
filmmaker disagree, its because they have very differ-
ent agendas-agendas that often reveal themselves
quite late in the production. Or they have very different
conceptions of film, which again appear only under the
pressure of crucial decisions. Perhaps its not effective
when they divide up their functions very clearly be-
cause often theres discord when they both try to do the
same things. Its very difficult for an anthropologist
to develop an approach to ethnographc filmmaking
with a filmmaker around. And anthropologists often
find themselves in an impossible position as intermedi-
aries between their long-terminformants and rapacious
film crews. Sensitive filmmakers, on the other hand,
may feel hamstrung by an anthropologist who seems
oblivious to film as a structured experience and wants
everything to be recorded in encyclopedic detail.
384 A M E R I C A NA N T H R O P O L O G I S T V O L . 9 8 , N o . 2
found such a family, but they were not particularly
interested in the film, nor did I particularly warm to
them. One evening I was taken to a deep canyon outside
Umlei by a young veterinarian who had grown up in
the village, and he introduced me to kanchiscu Soddu,
a goatherd. [SeeFigure 6.1 I was immediately struck by
this persons manner. When he spoke, he chose his
words carefully, and there was intelligence in the way
he listened, in his gestures, in the quality he radiated of
reserve and acute observation. He gave an impression
of competence and honesty. Moreover, he seemed to be
interested in the idea of the film. A little while later his
son Pietro appeared and stood quietly by his side. He
was about 16 years old. As kanchiscu talked, 1 noticed
that Pietro was listening intently to everything his fa-
ther said, and that this was r e p t e r e d with extraordi-
nary clarity on his face. I realized at that moment that
if I did nothing else, I wanted to make a film about this
father and son. That was how I found two of the three
protagonists of the film. The third, Miminu, turned out
not to be a member of the family, but rather a goatherd
who kept his herds on the slopes just above Fran-
chiscus.
Lucien: Who has made up your audiences over the years?
Has your conception of your audience changed? Do you
make films explicitly for multiple audiences? Has your
conception of your audience changed as your concep-
tion of your subjects has also changed? Do you still see
yourself only making films cross-culturally or transcul-
turally?
Judith: I always have felt very much like Edgar Morin,
who says in the last scene of Chmnique dun kte, I
assumed audiences would like the people I liked.
David: I have never been happy with the idea of making
films for a target audience. Once a film is made it may
Figure 6
Franchiscu at his goat camp in Tempus de Baristas (1992/1993),
directed by David MacDougall. Photo courtesy of Fieldwork Films,
Canberra, Australia.
J U N E1 9 9 6
have any number of audiences, and in the future many
that were never anticipated. Much of what people see
in a film is the result of what they bring to it, and each
viewer in effect sees a different film. If a film is suffi-
ciently rich and complex, I believe it will have meaning
for a variety of v i e w e w r rather, perhaps give them
the materials to make meaning. Education has little to
do with it. Ive observed several times that films of ours
that highly educated audiences found difficult made
perfect sense to less educated audiences.
Battles are often fought over how much contextu-
alization a film needs. The guardians of knowledge
sometimes feel that everything must be explained, so
that audiences dont come to the wrong conclusions.
But once one starts along that path, I think theres no
end to it. One cant expect a film to carry the whole
burden of knowledge about a subject, to be the single
source that people have available to them. One cant
demand that films be made so that no one can possibly
misunderstand them. Theres a certain amount of smug
condescension among people who feel they should pro-
tect other viewers for their own good. Almost by defi-
nition, good films are full of danger.
Recently, Ive felt increasingly that the most impor-
tant audience for a film is the people in it. A film like
Tempus de Baristas is for me a way of communicating
with them. But of course you make a film for other
people too. And you make it for itself, to bring it into
being.
Lucien: All your films are distinguished by your manifest
presence, interacting laconically but actively with the
profilmic world we see on the screen. Occasionally you
are literally in dialogue with your subjects. How has
your orientation to reflexivity changed over the course
of your work? To your mind, is reflexivity a quality that
may be inscribed within the images themselves?
David: Reflexivity at one time was at the center of our
enterprise, because we were making films that were
explicitly epistemological. Whatever their other sub-
jects, they were about how films represent knowledge,
and what sorts of knowledge were available to filmmak-
ers. It was also important to remind audiences that films
come about through the agency of filmmakers, not the
gods. There was always the danger, though, that the
self-reflexive stance would be taken as a stamp of
authenticity-that because we acknowledged the con-
straints upon our view, that view would be more com-
pletely believed. There was the parallel danger that
anthropolopts would assert one had only to declare
ones bias in order for the truth to be revealed. In effect,
self-reflexivity tended to be crudely interpreted as
erecting a structure of explanation around ones work
to legitimate it. This nurtured the naive positivist view
that science really could describe external reality accu-
rately if all the filters of subjectivity were identified and

done away with. It completely missed the point that we
know things through ourselves, and that you cant sim-
ply eliminate the self in the pursuit of knowledge.
For me, reflexivity now means something rather
different. Its something inscribed in the work at a
deeper level, To understand the relation of the film-
maker to the subject, you have to engage with the film
more imaginatively.The presence of the filmmaker,and
the quality of the filmmakers relation to the subject,
permeates a good film. It is evident in the nuances of
camera movement, in the framing, in what the film-
maker selects at any given moment, in the pace of the
film, its themes and ideas, and how people behave
before the camera. It lies in many things that the film-
maker would often be unable to identify precisely, be-
cause the filmmaker is too intimately involved. This
suggeststhat the filmmaker may not be the best person
to define for the viewer the terms in which the film
should be read. These must be read in the film itself.
Judith: The problem of how to include the author as a
solid, real presence is similar in both written and visual
media, in that an extra body requires additional space,
and generally the vehicle can hold only so many bodies.
It is in the nature of texts that space is time, and they
can go on for only so long, and usually it takes quite a
long time to deal with the complexities of exotic others
doing strange things in alien cultures. The more the
author appears as a real body, the more he or she also
needs explanation. I am often derailed when I read
some of the recent ethnographies because I am always
stopping to wonder where the author went to school or
how old she is and who her parents were, and so on.
Unni Wikan is possibly even more exotic than the Bali-
nese woman she describes, and to consider the impli-
cations of existence as lived by a female Norwegian
academic while simultaneously entertaining the world-
view of a young Balinese woman who has just lost her
lover is sometimes more than I can do. When we create
narratives with characters who are real people, and not
fictional ones, we are faced with the basic limitations
of the medium were working in; itsa difficult problem.
Deciding what and whom to leave out of the story is
always difficult, and it must be far more so with writing
than with film, because the writer has so much more
choice. Also perhaps it is more difficult to know authors
through their style of writing or from their personal and
subjective selfdescription. With film, a simple gesture
often seems to suffice. When some writers use jargon,
it mayjust represent a sincere attempt to position them-
selves, and it may be the only way they know to do it.
It has often been suggested that multimedia will
alleviate these space-time limitations, but I think well
always need freestanding texts, the product of our ana-
lytical and creative energy, however imperfect these
might be.
F IL M R E V I E W E S S A Y 385
Lucien: Ethnographic films seem sometimes to suffer
from an exclusive orientation to the visible, to what can
be seen. Perhaps this is a burden of film having been
conceptualized,within certain traditions, as principally
a record-makingdevice. But subjective experience is
not inherently visual, and from the start fiction films
have sought to evoke the nonvisual through the visual.
Could ethnographic film now be catching up?
Judith: I think its unproductive to distinguish between
the visible and nonvisibleunless youre writing a
script for a fiction film. The distinction is misleading if
one is talking about the audiences reception of a docu-
mentary film of the sort we are talking about. A film-
makers languageis not so much one of images plus
sounds, but one in which we read various kinds of
perceptual information simultaneously. We seefilms
in a way similar to the way we experience life; we are
not making complete sense of it before we move on to
the next moment. When we have a conversation with
someone, we are not separating what we see-gesture,
facial expression, and so on-from what we hear-in-
cluding the spaces between words and most impor-
tantly, what is not said-as we move through the
experience. Only later do we say, Well,John said.. .
and then we usually are reporting not what John said
literally, as in a transcript, but what we think he meant.
For this reason, as a film answers questions, it si-
multaneously raises further questions. For some view-
ers this can create a kind of paralysis, or vertigo, and
they cant proceed with the film. Perhaps the question
of distance is crucial. If one suffers from vertigo (as I
do), movement is possible only with the realization that
leaning out over the abyss allows progress, and that
attempting to cling to the rock-face makes one fall.
Seeing a film is the same; if we look too hard, we lose
it, as we also do if we attempt to hover over it as a
disembodied observer. Part of how we engage with film
involves emotions, and these cant be disassociated
from the whole any more than sight or hearing can be.
Film creates a lived sort of knowledge rather than the
abstract schematizationthat written knowledge allows,
and thats both its strength and its weakness. The quali-
ties of understanding differ in a manner similar to the
way ones knowledge of living in a village differs from
knowledge based on maps, demographic detail, and
lists of buildings. The problem lies not with any d s c i -
ence dichotomy but in deciding what types of knowl-
edge are pertinent to ones activities.
Dawid: Ive always felt that ethnographicfilm wasprinci-
p d y about the nonvisible, and that its only a very
narrow conception of ethnographic film that assumes
it stops at the visible record. But there is a significant
difference in how one proceeds from the visible to the
nonvisible. It seems to me there are two directions one
can take. One can either treat ethnographic film as a
386 A M E R I C A N A N T H R O P O L O G I S T V O L . 9 8 , No. 2
medium that registers the visible surface of life and
produces an artifact in which its then possible to see
the signs of a whole cosmos of underlying beliefs and
cultural patterns, or one can treat it as a medium that
engages with the experience and imagination of the
viewer through the evocative power of the visible. One
attitude treats the film as an object that the viewer is
able to inspect in a &interested way from a distance.
The other treats the film as an event in the life of the
viewer, a work created in time and space, acting upon
our intelligence and emotions. Its this performative
aspect of cinema that is often ignored when film asf i l m
is taken out of its viewing context. And unfortunately
many social scientists have a tendency to consider film
simply as a text. This has the effect of stripping the film
of its internal logic, of making the film no more than the
sum of its parts, whereas in fact the importance of many
films lies not in the parts but in the network of reso-
nances set up between them and the audience. But
viewing films on video, of course, encourages this. And
so does our constant exposure to television journalism.
It means we tend to view all films as simply content,
bconnected from the structures that create a different
sort of knowledge.
However, I think the new generation of anthropolo-
gists will increasingly move away from a conception of
ethnographic film simply as description, as infomuz-
tion. Theres an attitude to anthropological discourse
now thats wholly different from the narrow scientism
of 20 years ago. Theres also a great deal of interest in
aspects of culture that are much more difficult to grap-
ple with in terms of structural-functionalism, or even
psychology. I mean such things as the role of the emo-
tions in social life, the definition of gender identities, of
personal identity, the construction of time and space,
the differential role of the senses, the processes of
learning and becoming, conceptions of the stages of
life, and so on. Many aspects of these things are not in
themselves visible but have powerful visible manifesta-
tions and correlatives. Many express themselves in vi-
sual metaphors. So I think film, conceived as cinema,
can play a role in enlarging anthropological howledge
and discourse in these areas. Also, we shouldnt forget
that film is more than a visual medium. Its a medium
combining the visual, aural, and verbal.
Selected Films by David MacDougall and
Judith MacDougall
All films are codirected by David MacDougall and Judith
MacDougall unless otherwise noted. The first date indicates
the year of filming, the second the year of release. Distribu-
tors for the films are represented by the capital letters at the
end of each listing; names and addresses of distributors are
listed at the end.
0 J U N E 1996
Films in Africa
Nawi
1968/1970 David MacDougall, dir. Migration to and life at
a cattle camp of the Jie of Uganda. 20 nunutes. Distribu-
tion: C.
To Live with Herds
1968/1972 David MacDougall, dir. The impact of develop-
ment policies upon the pastoral Jie of Uganda during a
period of drought. 70 minutes. Distribution: C, G, RA.
Under the Mens Tree
1968/1974 David MacDougall, dir. Jie men make leather
items while discussing motor cars and other matters. 15
minutes. Distribution: C.
Kenya Boran
1972/1974 David MacDougall and James Blue, dirs. Two
boys and their fathers confront social and economic
change in northern Kenya. 66 minutes. Distribution: D.
The Wedding Camels
1974/1977 A wedding among the pastoral Turkana of
northwestern Kenya. 108 minutes. Distribution: C, RA,
RO.
Lorangs Way
1974/1979 A Turkana man and the forces that have made
him what he is. 70 minutes. Distribution: C, RA, RO.
A Wife among Wives
1974/1981 A disputed marriage and an enquiry into mar-
riage and polygamy among the Turkana. 75 minutes.
Distribution: C, RA, RO.
Films in Australia
Good-Bye Old Man
1975/1977 David MacDougall, dir. A pukumani cere-
mony of the Tiwi of Melville Island, northern Australia.
70 minutes. Distribution: A, RA.
To Get That Country
1977/1978 David MacDougall, dir. A film witnessing early
moments in the formation of the Northern Land Coun-
cil, the first legally sanctioned Aboriginal land claims
organization in Australia. 70 minutes. Distribution: A.
Familiar Places
1977/1980 David MacDougall, dir. A white Australian an-
thropologist accompanies Aboriginal families to map
their clan territories in northern Queensland. 53 min-
utes. Distribution: A, C, RA.
The House-Opening
1977/1980 Judith MacDougall, dir. The Aborigines of Au-
rukun in northern Queensland combine traditional Ab-
original, Torres Strait Island, and European cultural
elements in a new ceremony. 45 minutes. Distribution:
A, C, RA.
Takeover
1978/1980 The state-federal confrontation over Aborigi-
nal rights at Aurukun in March 1978. 90 minutes. Distri-
bution: A, C, RA.
Three Horsemen
1978/1982 An old Aboriginal stockman, his nephew, and
his 13-year-old grandnephew on Cape York peninsula,
northern Queensland, try t o get an old cattle station

going again in their traditional clan country. 54 minutes.
Distribution: A, C, RA.
Stoclunan's Strategy
1982/1984 An Aboriginal stockman in northern New
South Wales trains a young apprentice and discusses his
philosophy of teaching and learning. 54 minutes. Distri-
bution: A, RA.
Collum Calling Canberra
1982/1984 Two Aboriginal men steer their way through
the often frustrating processes of official decision mak-
ing as they attempt to turn Collum Collum Station into a
self-supporting enterprise. 58 minutes. Distribution: A,
RA.
Sunny and the Dark Horse
1982/1986 A family's passion for "picnic racing" in north-
ern New South Wales. 85 minutes. Distribution: A.
A Transfer of Power
19881986 Replacing an old car engine at Collum Collum
Station. 22 minutes. Distribution: A.
Link-Up Diary
1986/1987 David MacDougall, dir. A week in the work of
Link-Up, an organization that reunites Australian Ab-
original families forcibly split up under state "welfare"
policies. 86 minutes. Distribution: A, RA.
Other Films
Indians and Chiefs
1967/1972 Judith MacDougall, dir. Native Americans in
Los Angeles. 40 minutes. Distribution: C.
Photo Wallahs
1988/1991 An encounter with photography and local In-
dian photographers in Mussoorie, a hill station in the
F IL M R E V I E W E S S A Y 387
foothills of the Himalayas. 60 minutes. Distribution: C,
RA, RO.
Tempus de Baristas (Time of the Barmen)
1992/1993 David MacDougall, dir. A portrait of three
mountain shepherds of Sardinia. 100 minutes. Distribu-
tion: G, I, and forthcoming from C, RA.
Distributors
A Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, P.O. Box 553,
Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia. (61) 6 246 1111; fax: (61) 6
249 7310. Video and film sales.
C Center for Media and Independent Learning, University
of California Extension, 2000 Center Street, Fourth Floor,
Berkeley, CA 94704, USA. (510) 642-0460; fax: (510) 643-
9271. Video and film sales and rentals.
D Documentary Educational Resources, 101 Morse Street,
Watertown, MA 02172. (617) 9260491; fax: (617) 926-9519.
Video and film sales.
G Institut f i r den Wissenschaftlichen Film, Nonnenstieg
72, D37075 Gottingen, Germany. (49) 551 50 24 301; fax:
(49) 551 50 24 400. Film rentals.
I Instituto Superiore Regionale Etnografko, Via A. Mereu
56, 08100 Nuoro, Italy. Fax: (39) 784 37484. Video and film
sales.
RA Royal Anthropological Institute, 50 Fitzroy Street, Lon-
don W1P 6HS, Great Britain. (44) 171 387 0455; fax: (44) 171
383 4235. Video sales; film and video rentals.
RO Ronin Films,8 Petrie Plaza, Canberra, ACT 2600, Aus-
tralia. (61) 6 248 0851; fax: (61) 6 249 1640. Video and film
sales.