WAYS OF SEEING: DOCUMENTARY FILM AND THE SURREAL OF REALITY

In this paper I explore the connections between the anthropology of Marcel Mauss and the anthropological cinema of Jean Rouch. In the process, I identify elements in the work of the filmmaker and anthropologist that amount to a critique of any simplistic opposition between prose and poetry, science and art, rational and irrational, material and immaterial, the thought world and the lived world, ethnographic description and creative interpretation, sound and word, ethnographic film and documentary, anthropology and cinema. ruben caixeta de queiroz vibrant v.9 n.2 The connections between the thought of Marcel Mauss and that of Jean Rouch are not easily discernible and indeed often appear ambiguous and multifaceted. Trained under the direct influence of Marcel Mauss were authors as diverse and sometimes antagonistic as Leiris. In the mid twentieth century, these and other intellectuals working from the Musée de l'Homme in Paris discussed and produced some of the most interesting and heterodox questions of the period in relation to the fields of anthropology, ethnography, surrealism and ethnographic film. At the Musée de l'Homme, Jean Rouch attended the anthropology seminars run by Marcel Mauss and the ethnography seminars of Marcel Griaule. The latter was the person who persuaded Rouch to travel down the Niger river in Africa, armed with a 16mm camera to capture and record the everyday life and thought systems of the populations inhabiting the region. 3 While Marcel Griaule could be said to have taught Jean Rouch the rigours of ethnographic description, Michel Leiris passed on the value of lived experience. A multifaceted figure, Jean Rouch, precisely because he had absorbed these polyphonic voices into his own thought and filmmaking, knew how to combine apparently opposing elements over the course of his life's work or even simultaneously in the same film: reason and irrationalism, the intelligible and sensible, thought and matter, ethnographic description and the art of cinematographic narrative. Later in the article,

Cultural Anthropology , 2011

American Anthropologist, 2011

Ethnos, 2011

2015

Screening the Past, 2004

Looking back at it, I think that we had a crazy chance to live through a crazy time. Everything that my generation learned during the previous twenty years was revealed to be an illusion in just one month in May 1940. The army, Verdun, France, honor, dignity, money, church, work, society, family, economic man, libido, historical materialism – everything had been taken away by the winds of one of the brightest springs the world has known. And by a strange paradox I had started my life as an engineer of bridges and roads by blowing up the most prestigious bridges in France. Among them was Chateau-Thierry, so well known to us in the fables of Jean de la Fontaine, and the bridge of the Briare Canal, a stream of steel and water running above the Loire, frozen and still and out of this world like a Magritte painting. Never had a generation of youth been so rich: because we had nothing left, and absolutely nothing left to lose (103). Some years ago, when the proponents of the so-called crisis of representation in ethnographic writing were at the peak of their influence, ethnographic film-makers and visual anthropologists couldn't resist smiling at their proposed "solutions" – collaboratively authored texts, polyphony, pastiche, reflexivity and fictional accounts. These were all advocated in print, with little recognition of the fact that ethnographic film had been achieving these ends for decades. Only in the past decade, as academic anthropology has rediscovered the ethnographic museum, the world of goods and sensory experience and the bodies in which the knowledge of society is ingrained, has ethnographic and folkloristic film come to be seen as an ideal medium not merely to document but to explore and to engage with the process of living (Marcus Banks, 1998).[1] ... it's in a bar in Treichville, a Sunday night; a friend and I have wandered in, in pursuit of the splendid festivities only the people of these parts know how to put on, in the middle of the sordid streets, in the middle of the slums. The contrast between the ephemeral Sunday gaiety and the daily misfortune is so strong that I know it will haunt me until the very moment when I am able to express it. How? Go out of this bar and shout in the streets? Write a general book for the public on this investigation we are now doing on the migrations in the Ivory Coast, which, otherwise, if it ever sees the light of day, will interest only a few specialists? The only solution was to make a film about it, where it would not be me crying out my joy or my revolt, but one of these people for whom Treichville was both heaven and hell. So in this bar ambience on a lugubrious evening in 1957, Moi, un noir appeared to me a necessity (266-7).

2017

The article explores three consecutive periods in which the disciplines of anthropology and film ethnography collide. The first moment examines the common practice of Bronislaw Malinowski and Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. I argue that Flaherty’s film illustrates the general fieldwork schema proposed by Malinowski to document the world of the Other-native. The second period connects the writings of Marcel Mauss and his influence in Jean Rouch’s cinéma-vérité. I state that Mauss’ radical sense of doubt about scientific pretentions of objectivity sustained Rouch’s cinematography with the general principle that reality is accessible only in partial form. Finally, the third period compares the anthropology of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro with the Sensory Ethnographic Lab’s film Leviathan. I argue that it is in both cases where bodily practices are being supported to account for more sensorial perceptions of the environment.