Visual Potential: On Ethnographic Film

Clio Barnard, The Arbor, 2010, still. Courtesy Screenplay, Inc

One of the highlights of last year’s London Film Festival was Artangel’s commission, The Arbor by artist-filmmaker Clio Barnard. This film tells the true story of playwright Andrea Dunbar and her daughter Lorraine re-enacting strong accounts of housing, love, family, child and memory in late 20th century society. What is noticeably admirable in Barnard’s storytelling is her revelation of a fresh look at hands-on archive usage in filmmaking.

Interview recordings are here particularly exceptional and handled excellently. Aside from TV documentary footage of Dunbar in the 1980s, the entirety of the film is based on the actors’ flawless lip-synch of interviews Barnard recorded of 29 year old Lorraine and other members of the Dunbar family. This idea incites a broader experimental use of sound recordings in contrast to the more popular use of archive film in recent years.

The Arbor won the Best British Newcomer & Most Original Debut Feature awards at the London Film Festival 2010 and Best New Documentary Film-maker award at the Tribeca Film Festival 2010.  This is of particular importance, above all for the acknowledgement of the film’s originality. It also adds a keystone in the history of documentary and more specifically of ethnographic film under the warning light of disturbing social exoticism.

It is a benefit that documentary is currently central to cinema culture. Restaging of events, as in The Arbor, employs experimental approaches to understanding social and political issues. This status was briefly enjoyed in the 1930s at the heyday of the ‘documentary film movement’. It is worth noting that the recent first edition of the Athens Ethnographic Film Festival (25-26 November 2010) served as testament to the renewed interest in social films with a retrospective of the 1930s British Documentary Movement.

The retrospective attempted to explore not only how the movement’s pioneers advanced documentary as an art form, but also that their films occupy an important position in social reform and awareness. Following the festival’s notable attendance and positive response to the retrospective, the question of ethnographic documentary film is very much dated today, though looking at how the approaches evolved is necessary.

Despite the term ethnographic film appearing in the 1960s, fascinating records of native societies and their everyday activities were released in the early days of film production. Notably Nionga (watch here) (1925), released by Stoll Picture Productions, is one fine example of popular ethnographic film representing the so-called primitive people.

However, ethnographic film is to be found and studied not just as a means of documenting remote societies. It is instead the medium to carefully explore any society’s darkness, the places we hide and let slip the dogs of war. Amidst debates on cinema’s elaborate exploration, Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Bread Day (1998) should be taken as a fine contribution for its originality and capacity of breaking reality into almost unedited long takes.

Sergei Dvortsevoy, Bread Day, 1998, clip.

Sergei Dvortsevoy, Bread Day, 1998.

Early 1900s Britain saw a number of radical film productions made by the companies of producer Charles Urban but it was the British Documentary Film Movement which emerged in the 1930s that had a significant influence in film culture. In the late 1920s John Grierson was commissioned to direct his first film, Drifters (1929), which was received with significant success.

Initially a film critic who had coined the term ‘documentary’, Grierson had developed his attraction to mass communications and prompted the necessity of socially involved documentary filmmaking. He eventually accomplished this interest with support from the state and became the Films Officer at the Empire Marketing Board where he created the EMB Film Unit, the first production unit of the documentary film movement.

In 1933 the unit was transferred to the newly emerged General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit, the UK’s largest employer and sponsor of scientific and technical research, hailed by historians as the media infrastructure of modern Britain. It influenced a talented team of international filmmakers and paved the way for a collaborative approach to production. Alberto Cavalcanti, Harry Watt, Basil Wright, and Humphrey Jennings were some of the young filmmakers who came together under John Grierson and involved poets, composers and writers such as W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, and J. B. Priestley in their work.

Among the films selected for the Athens Ethnographic Film Festival, Watt’s and Wright’s dramatic Night Mail (1936) is perhaps the most well known for its wide distribution and reference to many  publications. Both Housing Problems (1935) and Granton Trawler (1934) also selected for this retrospective are truly concerned with ‘neo realist’ filmmaking, a term suggested by Alberto Cavalcanti in place of ‘documentary’.

The voices and stories of working-class men and women in Elton’s Housing Problems are a straightforward account of social reform not seen in any pre EMB productions. Others falling in this category of journalistic approach are Children at School (1937), Wright’s first film for his own company Realist Film Unit, and Shipyard (1935), one of Rotha’s substantial films for its use of Soviet-style editing technique that excited Le Corbusier.

John Grierson, Granton Trawler, 1934.

Granton Trawler takes us on board of the small fishing vessel, Isabella Greig, along the stormy Viking Bank off the Norwegian coast of the North Sea. Filmed entirely with the use of tripod, as Grierson insisted all camera men do in EMB, the film brilliantly captures the group’s experimentation with formal techniques initially noted in Robert Flaherty’sIndustrial Britain (1931). Sound was integral into the unit’s whole output and despite the deliberate oversight of credits in its films, it is widely known that Cavalcanti’s technical knowledge had an astounding input, most notably in The Song of Ceylon (1934).

Basil Wright, Song of Ceylon, 1934. Courtesy of Sri Lanka Tea Board.

Three decades later, the 1960s saw the emergence of the term ethnographic film with Dead Birds (Robert Gardner, 1962) and The Feast (Napoleon Chagnon and Timothy Asch, 1968) being the most talked about examples. Exoticism in these last two films is easily recognized and controversy either in their production and editing techniques or topic they focus on is inevitable for they deal with specific fragile cultures and their history; the Dani people in Baliem Valley, West New Guinea and the Yanomamo Indians respectively.

More recently we’ve seen works where exoticism is perhaps also recognized as our first impression but it is unequal to the exotic in Dead Birds, The Feast and The Song of Ceylon. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) has raised the attention of critics for its bewildering sensation. The audience’s response however, has been mixed. Amidst jungle sounds and soul reincarnations, Uncle Boonmee is part of Primitive – a cross-platform art project that focuses the region Isan in the northeast of Thailand. The kind of magic the film is charged with bears a number of alluring, almost dreamy, echoes more than just a pure anthropological remark.

Also Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Parc Central (2006) is a set of fragments from her international travels that formulate a crossing between architecture and memory. Interested in the sculptural and cinematic deconstruction, her work is an integration of sign and awareness. This is significant because it enhances cinema’s possibilities beyond the more exclusive discourse of anthropological study in ethnographic film.

Gonzalez-Foerster’s fragments are not a collection of mere travelogues. They are a deviation pointing towards a new translation of the sign systems. This is explained more successfully, as is strongly evident, in Godard’s Film Socialisme (2010), offering mere keywords with its economic English subtitles. Today ethnographic film adjoins home movies, documentaries by non-anthropologists, youtube and Hollywood movies. Most significantly it is seen in many directors’ drive for painstaking research or simply focus on reality per se.

Andrei Ujica’s magnificent The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (2010), also shown at last year’s London Film Festival, is another example of the revolution in the property of sign systems told entirely with a collage of archive footage originated as state propaganda. Nevertheless, the film is a fascinating record that illustrates nationalism and deterioration in recent Romanian history.

Archive footage has played an important role in film production and it has been used to respond to its own exoticism in many ways. Here it’s been referred to as the singular force in Ujica’s film, also as a system of signs in Godard’s Film Socialisme and Gonzalez-Foerster’s Parc Central. It greatly contributes to the methods of ethnographic film, as filmmakers use it in combination of home movies and documentary.

But what is exciting about this film genre, is not just the possibility of found footage incorporated into ethnological exploitation. Rather it is the ideas that are bound to be unveiled. Ideas that attempt to explore both the technological aspects of ethnographic film shot on digital media and animation, as is the case with The Arbor, and its absolute and observational subject like in Dvortsevoy’s Bread Day and Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1921).


Georgia Korossi is a curator and writer based in London and Athens. She is a PhD researcher of Cultural History and Visual Arts at Goldsmiths College, contributor to KAPUT art magazine and since 2006 she has been a coordinator to BFI Screenonline and Mediatheque projects that draw public access gateways to the BFI National Archive.

 

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