In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making.

Paul Henley
Director, Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester

This paper was first presented at the international symposium, Tradução e

Percepção. Ciências sociais em diálogo, May 22-26, 2006. Universidade de São Paulo,
Brasil. It was later translated into Portuguese and published in 2009 as ‘Da negação:
autoria et realização do filme etnográfico’, in Andréa Barbosa, Edgar Teodoro da
Cunha and Rose Satiko Gitirana Hikiji, eds., Imagem-conhecimento : antropologia,
cinema e outros diálogos, pp.101-126. Campinas: Papirus Press

When looking back at the 1980s, a period when the world of text-making anthropology
was heavily engaged with questions of authorship, and when related issues such as
reflexivity, dialogical narratives and rhetoric were the subject of much anguished debate
in the anthropological literature, there is a tendency for visual anthropologists to adopt a
somewhat supercilious attitude. Had not all these concerns been anticipated decades
beforehand in that seminal 1960 documentary Chronicle of a Summer? Had not Edgar
Morin and Jean Rouch appeared as characters in their own film? Had they not
collaborated with their subjects in developing the story as they went along? Did they not
pace up and down amidst the display cases of the Musée de l’Homme ruminating on the
relationship between cinema and truth? From this perspective, some visual
anthropologists are inclined to suggest, the reflections of anthropological text-makers on
their activity as authors was distinctly old hat by the time the 1980s came around.

But whilst it is undoubtedly true that in terms of sheer chronology, Morin and Rouch
were far ahead of messrs. Marcus, Clifford, Geertz, Rabinow and others in reflecting on
the nature of authorship, within the world of ethnographic film as a whole, Chronicle was
the exception that proved the rule. More generally at that time, and particularly in
anglophone anthropology, ethnographic film-making remained firmly in the icy grip of
the most positivistic natural sciences paradigm. Within this paradigm, the very notion of
authorship was anathema since it conflicted directly with the aspiration to use the camera
to record objective ‘data’. Indeed, almost 50 years after Chronicle, a reluctance to come
to terms with the implications of authorship continues to dog ethnographic film-making,
even though the reasons for this have gone through various evolutions in the interim.

For as the natural sciences paradigm crumbled in the course of the 1980s and
anthropologists became sensitized by the Foucauldian asssociation of knowledge and
power, authorship became suspicious in ethnographic film-making for an entirely
different reason. This time, it was not the association of authorship with subjectivity as
such, but rather its association with the wrong kind of subjectivity for now the film-
maker’s authorship was deemed to obscure the authorship of the subjects. In response to
this changing climate, there was an emergence of various more dialogical modes of
ethnographic film-making in which there was still some degree of authorship on the part
of the outside film-maker but in which the subject’s voice gained greater prominence.
2 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

There was also a proliferation of indigenous media projects in which the film-making
equipment was handed over completely to indigenous, aboriginal and other
disempowered or marginal groups with the idea that they could now take full control of
the representations made about them.

By the 1990s, the limitations of dialogical film-making and indigenous media as modes
of anthropological representation were beginning to become apparent. But by then, yet
another tendency to reduce the role of the author had begun to emerge in visual
anthropology, this time based on the use of interactive multimedia technology. Instead of
displacing the responsibility of authorship onto the subjects, as in dialogical or
indigenous media projects, now it was the reader-spectators who could become the
authors as they navigated their own way through multiply interconnected warehouses of
audiovisual knowledge, unconstrained by the linear narrative of an original author.
Underpinned by the promise of even more remarkable technological developments in the
future, this vision of the future of visual anthropology continues to exercize a powerful
hold on the imagination of many scholars.

Against the grain of this tendency to deny, avoid or diminish authorship, I would contend
that the only major works of lasting value in the history of ethnographic film-making are
those in which the film-makers concerned have not been afraid to assert their authorship.
I make this argument from within the more general proposition that whilst the camera and
tape-recorder obviously can be - and often are - deployed for the prosaic purpose of
assembling stockpiles of visual or aural data, the most potentially rewarding role for film
in anthropology is as a medium for communicating an understanding of the embodied
experience of culturally diverse ways of life. To make a film that communicates such an
understanding to an audience of a cultural background different to that of the subjects
requires both technical and aesthetic film-authoring skills to a high degree. It cannot be
be done simply by pointing the camera in the right direction and turning it on, as if it
were no more than a mirror held up to nature.

Authorial processes are necessarily involved in the making of any ethnographic film, both
on location and back in the edit suite. On location, they are implicit not only in the
choices that a film-maker makes when deciding what to film but also in the relationships
that he or she chooses to develop with the subjects in order to make that film-making
possible. In the edit suite, they are implicit in the selection of the material to be included
from the totality of the material filmed and in how this material is ordered for narrative
purposes. But just because they are necessarily authored, this does not mean that all
ethnographic films are fictions. As representations that purport to represent reality,
ethnographic films can be challenged on the grounds of accuracy and reliability. But they
cannot be challenged simply because they fail to reproduce a literal copy of the world
since no film could ever completely meet this requirement. Thus the question for
anthropologists is not whether some authorial manipulation of the material filmed is
acceptable in the making of ethnographic films, but rather what degree and what kind of
manipulation is compatible with the general intellectual objectives and ethical positioning
of contemporary anthropology. This is a question that I will return to in the concluding
3 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

section of this article. But my principal agenda will be to chart the chequered history of the
attempts by anglophone anthropologist film-makers to evade the responsibilities of
authorship.

The camera as scientific instrument

For most of its history, from the invention of the cinematograph in the 1890s until the
1970s, ethnographic film-making was a practice dominated by an anthropological
paradigm based on an aspiration to mimic the natural sciences. Throughout this period,
the camera was routinely compared to the hero instruments of the natural sciences – the
telescope and the microscope – and its function was seen as being to provide an entirely
objective documentation of the world, often coupled with salvage ethnography
objectives. As late as 1975, in the introductory chapter of the landmark volume, Principles
of Visual Anthropology, Margaret Mead, who had produced a number of films with Gregory
Bateson in Indonesia and New Guinea in the 1930s, was still promoting the idea of the
camera as a scientific instrument that could provide an entirely objective registration of the
world. She envisaged a utopian future when a fully automatic, 360° camera could be set up
in a central place within a village to collect large batches of material without this affecting in
any way the behaviour of those being filmed. This filmic data-gathering, she argued, need
not be motivated by any theoretical purpose: the important thing was to get it done before
the customs disappeared for ever. Nor should it involve any sort of selection, either in
shooting or editing. What was required was ‘prosaic, controlled, systematic filming and
videotaping, which will provide us with material that can be repeatedly reanalyzed with
finer tools and developing theories’.1

These parallels between the camera and scientific instrumentation continue to be drawn even
to this day: indeed Mead’s views were republished as recently as 1995 in the second edition
of Principles of Visual Anthropology. But for all their immediate appeal, they are
fundamentally misleading. In fact, they would be better considered an example of wishful
thinking than a legitimate analogy. For the usual implication is that the camera has the
potential to transform the discipline of anthropology in just the same way as the microscope
and telescope transformed the natural sciences. The further implication, less frequently
highlighted perhaps, but which at least Mead had the merit of being quite open about, is that
given this transformative potential, large amounts of money should be invested in cameras
for anthropological research in the same way that natural scientists have invested heavily in
their equipment.

But the analogy between the camera and scientific instrumentation should be firmly resisted
because it obscures the representational function of the camera. Although it might faithfully
record what is in front of it, a camera clearly cannot determine the significance of what it
records and it is this significance, rather than the mere existence of the phenomena recorded,

1
Mead 1995:9-10.
4 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

that is surely of over-riding importance for any branch of social or cultural anthropology.
Once a film-maker seeks to ascribe significance to the material recorded, he or she is in the
realm of authorship and representation. As a recording device, the camera might provide an
impeccable, indexical account of the world, but as a means of representation it is just as
vulnerable to manipulation as the written word and its output just as subject to interpretation.

For all their limitations, Margaret Mead’s ideas influenced a number of the anglophone
ethnographic film-makers working in the 1950s, including the late and much lamented
John Marshall. Mead was an acquaintance of Marshall’s father Laurence, the leader of
their celebrated family expeditions to study the Ju’/hoansi ‘Bushmen’ of southern Africa.
John, who was only 18 at the time of the first expedition in 1951, was assigned the role of
film-maker. On the basis of Mead’s advice, Laurence told him that what he wanted was
‘a record, not a movie’.2 But after teaching himself the basic principles of film-making by
reading the camera’s instruction manual, John went on to make a truly spectacular
ethnographic ‘movie’, one that would become a major milestone in the development of the
genre.

This film was The Hunters, mostly shot in 1952-53 though not edited and released until
1956-57. In colour and 72 minutes in duration, it follows the fortunes of four Ju’/hoansi
hunters as they track a giraffe through the thorny scrub of the Kalahari desert. After five
days of hunger and thirst, and many frustrations along the way, the hunters do eventually
corner their prey and dispatch her with their spears. They then return home to their camp
and, to the delight of their families, distribute the meat and tell tales of their heroic
adventure.

Over the next 20 years, The Hunters became one of the most frequently screened films in
the anglophone anthropological world. But gradually various details about the making of the
film began to emerge and it became apparent just how constructed it had been. It transpired
that the hunt shown in the film had, in fact, been made up of many different hunts, involving
several different giraffes and even several other unidentified hunters in addition to the four
main ‘stars’ of the film. Instead of tramping through the scorching desert for five days, in
reality the hunters had travelled around with John Marshall in his Jeep with access to food
and water, and they had all gone back to the expedition camp most nights. Although the
principal giraffe had indeed been finished off by the hunters with their spears, as shown in
the film, it had already been wounded by a rifle shot some time beforehand, and it was this
wounding that had slowed her up and had allowed the hunters to catch her. Perhaps most
remarkable of all, in the sequence showing the final kill, the wide shots of the hunters
standing around the giraffe which were filmed in August 1952 had been intercut with close-
up reverse shots of them hurling their spears which had been filmed three years later,
specifically for the purposes of the edit.3

Within an academic paradigm in which an ethnographic film was supposed to provide an

2
Marshall 1993:19
3
Marshall 1993:36-37
5 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

objective record of the world, this degree of manipulation was widely regarded as
illegitimate, if not a source of shame and scandal. By the 1990s, Marshall himself was ready
to acknowledge that The Hunters was ‘energetically artistic’ but pointed out in mitigation
that it was, after all, the work of a ‘an American kid’.4 But any experienced documentary
film-maker would probably be able to surmise most of the constructions involved in making
of the film simply by looking at the filmic text itself. He or she would certainly not be either
surprised or offended since such representational strategies are commonplace amongst
documentarists. They were particularly so at the time that The Hunters was made since
technical constraints made it very difficult to film social behaviour, even in much less
demanding environments than the Kalahari desert, without some sort of intervention on the
part of the film-maker.

The problem with the film was not so much the film, but the naivety of some of its critics
about the representational nature of the medium. Did they really imagine that Marshall
would have followed the hunters on foot under such adverse conditions, filming all the
while, or that he would have refused the hunters food and drink, if he had had such supplies
himself? In terms of showing what Ju’/hoansi hunting was like, did it really matter that he
sometimes used understudies for both the giraffe and the hunters? Or that because he was
there alone with a single camera and could not therefore simultaneously film the wide shot
of the kill and a close up of the hunters hurling their spears that he mocked up the latter
some time later? Clearly the wounding of the giraffe by a rifle shot from the Jeep hastened
the end of the hunt on that particular occasion, but in other circumstances, the Ju’/hoansi
could presumably have scored a more direct hit with one of their poisoned arrows earlier on
in the proceedings which would have brought the hunt to an end earlier anyway.

When pushed to identify in what ways The Hunters misrepresented the generality of
Ju’/hoansi hunting expeditions, Marshall confessed that without the re-assurance of the
supplies in his Jeep, the Ju’/hoansi would probably not have risked pursuing the giraffe for
as long as five days since they might have died of thirst or hunger out in the middle of one
of the scorching saltpans of the Kalahari.5 But this could hardly be considered a major
betrayal of the reality of such events. The grounds on which the film might be more
significantly criticized include those that John himself would point to many years later,
namely, that it adopted an outsider’s perspective, suggesting through the over-literary
narration – inspired, it transpires, by Moby Dick - that the giraffe hunt was some kind of
struggle against nature, an attitude that was quite alien to the Ju/’hoansi themselves. Nor was
the film’s perspective that of an outsider only in a purely metaphorical sense: Marshall also
later regretted that he had often adopted an omniscient camera technique, shooting from
trees or whilst perched on the bonnet of his Jeep ‘where no Ju/’hoansi stood to share my
view’.

4
Marshall 1993:39
5
Marshall firmly rejected the allegation that the whole giraffe hunt had been mocked up entirely for the
camera. He claimed that Ju’/hoansi often still hunted giraffe in the 1950s, one particularly able hunter
claiming to have killed ‘about twenty’. However the Ju’/hoansi were reluctant to disclose this to outsiders,
including even the Marshalls, since giraffe were a protected species and they could be imprisoned for
killing them. See Marshall 1993:37
6 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

In a very different vein, Edwin Wilmsen has offered a trenchant criticism of the film for
presenting the Ju/’hoansi as if they lived in an idyllic, mythic past, practising a way of life
based purely on hunting and gathering, when in fact they were already deeply entrenched in
and dependent upon the local cattle economy as occasional, highly exploited labourers.6 But
even whilst recognizing that the contextualization of The Hunters may have been seriously
deficient and the general perspective of the film could have been more in harmony with that
of the subjects, it is still possible to argue that the film communicates a powerful
understanding of the skill that Ju’/hoansi hunters must have possessed and the difficulties
that they must have overcome in hunting large game animals with their relatively puny
technology in such a challenging natural environment. In this sense, the ethnographic quality
of the work is truly remarkable for a film made under the technological limitations of that
period and the physical conditions of the location.

Minimizing the author: the event-sequence method

Despite its acclamation around the world, Laurence Marshall had serious doubts about The
Hunters for John had clearly strayed a long way from the original, Mead-inspired injunction
to make a ‘record, not a movie’. By all accounts, Laurence exercised a powerful hold over
his son and, as if in expiation, John went on to make a number of shorter films amongst the
Ju’/hoansi in the 1950s that conformed much more closely to the original brief. In making
these films, John not only sought to shoot much more from within the physical and
experiential perspective of the subjects, but he also employed a method that allowed him to
give a narrative shape to his films whilst at the same time remaining close to the actual
chronology of the events that he was filming. This method was actually first developed by
Timothy Asch who was then working with Marshall on the editing of the Ju’/hoansi
material. Asch would later go on to become a leading ethnographic film-maker in his own
right, but at this time, he was essentially no more than John’s editorial assistant. Marshall
and Asch used various terms in their writings to describe this method, sometimes referring
to it as ‘event’ filming, or more commonly as ‘sequence’ filming and sometimes ‘sequential’
filming. In the much-cited paper they wrote with Peter Spier, they used the rather misleading
term ‘reportage’.7 Since none of these terms serves to identify the method with any
precision, I shall refer to it here as the ‘event-sequence’ method.

The principles underlying the event-sequence method were very simple. It was presumed
that on the basis of an anthropological knowledge of the cultural context, it should be
possible to identify certain events with a clear beginning and a clear end that could then be
used to define the parameters of any film made about these events. Given that an event with
an end and a beginning must also, by definition, have a ‘middle’, a film that followed such
an event would have, as it were by default, a classical ‘beginning-middle-end’ narrative
structure without any manipulations of the original chronological sequence being necessary.

6
See Wilmsen 1999, passim.
7
See Asch, Marshall & Spier 1973.
7 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

The event-sequence method did not entail making an entirely literal copy of an event since it
did allow cuts in the action to eliminate redundancies or moments of irrelevance. In actual
practice, it is evident from the filmic texts themselves that in a number of the films that
Marshall and Asch made employing the method, there are some minor chronological
inversions. But apart from this, the event-sequence method can be seen as an attempt to have
the best of both worlds, i.e. to develop a way of making films that met the requirements of
the medium for a clearly structured narrative whilst at the same time offering a minimally
authored ‘record’ of the world.

It seems likely that neither Asch nor Marshall would have explained the rationale of the
event-sequence in quite this way. For his part, Asch thought that the principal purpose of
making ethnographic films was for teaching and his primary ambition was to produce a
series of short event-based films about a given ‘culture’ that could then be used as the basis
for developing an undergraduate curriculum. Through cumulative exposure to these films,
appropriately supported by textual materials and presentations by the instructor, students
would be able to gain a direct insight into a ‘culture’ rather than one that had been filtered
through the subjective sensibility of a film-maker, as had been the case with The Hunters.8 It
has been suggested that here too one can detect the influence of Margaret Mead whom Asch
had met whilst studying at Columbia University earlier in his career. The film and
photographic material that Mead had produced in conjunction with Gregory Bateson in Bali
had also often been presented for pedagogical purposes in the form of short sequences of
action.9

Another intellectual influence on Asch appears to have been Max Gluckman’s ‘case study
method’, in which particular social events are analyzed as microcosms of wider social and
cultural realities.10 Certainly there is a clear affinity between the event-sequence method and
the case-study method as the latter was refined by Victor Turner and other members of the
Manchester School in the 1950s so as to incorporate Van Gennepian ideas about the
structured and processual nature of certain social events.11 But whatever Asch’s precise
intentions or the exact pedigree of his ideas, the outcome was the elaboration of a method
that encouraged the film-maker to exploit the intrinsic structure of an event as identified in
the field and use that as the structuring principle of his or her filmic narrative.

The event-sequence method was used in a number of Marshall’s films about the Ju’/hoansi.
An interesting early example is An Argument about a Marriage, which is a mere 18 minutes
long. Although this film was shot in 1958, only a year after the release of The Hunters, it is
very different in both content and technique. Whereas in the earlier film the protagonists
were presented as if they were living in a state of primeval innocence, in this film they are
shown to be as subject to base and violent passions as any other human group. The argument

8
See Acciaioli 2004
9
Moore 1995: 39. Both the photograph-based study Balinese Character that Mead and Bateson published
in 1942, and their films Trance and Dance in Bali and Childhood Rivalry in Bali and New Guinea, released
in 1952 were largely based on the analysis of particular, discrete and often very minor events.
10
See Harper 2004:50-52.
11
Moore 1995: 43.
8 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

in question concerns an illegitimate child and it begins when the young mother’s irate father
threatens very crudely to kill her lover: ‘You will die with an erection tonight’, he declares.
Also, far from suggesting that they lived in isolation, the relationship to the wider world is
central to the action of the film and many of the protagonists are wearing Western-style
clothes. Even the presence of the Marshalls is directly acknowledged when one of the
protagonists curses them roundly. This was reflexivity being practised two years before
Chronicle of a Summer and at least twenty years before it became fashionable in
anthropological text-making. However because the film was not edited and released until
1969, its primacy in this regard has not been widely recognised.

This film is also interesting from a technical point of view. Firstly, it is very skilfully shot
from right within the experiential space of the subjects, giving a strong sense of their
presence. Although the sound is not synchronous, it was recorded on location and has been
so well edited that it almost appears to be so. In addition to its precocious reflexivity, when it
finally came to be edited, Argument also featured a number of other innovations. After a
heavily narrated introductory section providing the general background, the argument itself
is preceded by a series of still images anticipating the principal moments of the event. These
stills are used to support a neutrally informative voice-over narration - no literary flights of
fancy here – in which the complicated social background to the dispute is explained. With
contextualization provided in this way, there is then no voice-over narration over the event
itself.12

In the 1960s, during a period when he was prevented from returning to the Ju’/hoansi by the
South African government, Marshall went on to apply the event-sequence method to the
making of a series of films about the Pittsburgh police department.13 However, it was Tim
Asch who would subsequently make the most extensive use of the method for ethnographic
purposes, deploying it in the process of shooting over 40 films about the Yanomami of
Venezuelan Amazonia. These were made in collaboration with Napoleon Chagnon in the
course of two expeditions, one in 1968, the other in 1971. Most of these films were of no
more than a few minutes’ duration and showed simple, single-cell events such as a senior
man telling a myth, children playing in the rain and a tug-o-war. But Asch also attempted to
apply the method to more complex events, which, in effect, consisted of a series of
chronologically consecutive sequences. A well-known example is the widely distributed
film, The Feast, shot in 1968 and released in1970, which deals with the celebration of an
alliance between two villages that until recently had been at war with one another.

In terms of its overall editorial structure, The Feast is reminiscent of An Argument about a
Marriage, in that it begins with a series of stills accompanied by an explanatory voice-over

12
Argument also represents a relatively early use of subtitles in an ethnographic film, though the very first
example of this appears to have been another Marshall-Asch event-sequence film, A Joking Relationship. This
was shot around the same time as Argument but was released much earlier, in 1962.
13
These showed policemen on patrol involved events such as domestic disputes, a glue-sniffing bust, and a hit-
and-run accident (cf. Marshall 1993:110-122). Marshall also employed the event-sequence method when he
acted as cameraman on Fred Wiseman’s well-known first feature documentary, Titicut Follies (1967).
Interestingly, Tim Asch acted as second cameraman on this shoot (Ruby 1995:33n).
9 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

before the event itself is rolled out without further narration. But although The Feast has
many merits and is deservedly a classic of the anthropological classroom, it testifies to the
limitations of the event-sequence method when applied to complex events. In the first place,
it is clear from the very honest account that Asch published later that he was barely able to
keep abreast of what was going on. The social complexities of the shoot were further
exacerbated by serious technical problems.14 As a result, at the simplest level, there are
certain very significant omissions. For example, the literature suggests that an important
phase of Yanomami alliance feasts takes place at night.15 But Asch did not have the
technical facilities to shoot at night and, moreover, confesses in his memoir to being too
tired to film anyway.

There are a number of other shortcomings to the film that can be attributed directly to the
application of the event-sequence method. By summarizing the event in advance, the
preliminary sequence serves to dispel any sense of the tension that is an important feature of
such events, as is signalled towards the beginning of the narration and elaborated in greater
detail in Chagnon’s written works. This tension arises from a fear amongst the visitors that
their hosts will turn upon them and murder them, as is said to have happened notoriously a
number of times in the past.16 But by revealing the outcome of the feast even before the film
begins, the preliminary sequence undermines any possibility of communicating a sense of
this tension.

However, in relation to the event-sequence method conceived as a means of producing

objective ethnographic records, perhaps the greatest shortcoming of The Feast is the
omission of any reference within the film itself to the unusual circumstances of the making
of the film. Asch’s memoir reveals that the village site where the filming took place, located
close to a navigable river, had actually been abandoned some time beforehand. Its
inhabitants, the Patanowa-teri, had taken refuge from their many enemies at a new site,
several days’ walk away in the mountains. However, for the purposes of the film, they were
persuaded to come back down to the more accessible riverside location. Here they would
also be more available for the collection of blood samples by the team headed by James
Neel, the medical geneticist whose grant from the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)
was largely funding the expedition, including Asch’s film work.17

In his controversial account of this progamme of research, the journalist Patrick Tierney
makes the plausible claim that the Patanowa-teri were only prepared to move back to their
old village site where the film was made because they knew that Chagnon and his
associates, with their fire-arms and their influence with local Venezuelan authorities, would
14
Asch 1979:45-47
15
These include formal chanting exchanges known as waiyamou and ritualized chest-pounding duels. In effect,
these nocturnal exchanges complement the exchanges of ritual performances, food and material goods that take
place during the day and which are shown in the film. See Chagnon 1997: 170-183 passim
16
See, for example, Chagnon 1997:3.
17
Asch 1979:45-46. The purpose of the Yanomami research funded by the AEC was to establish a control
group against which to measure the effects of nuclear radiation on the genetic profile of the Japanese survivors
of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. The AEC is duly acknowledged in the opening credits to the film and
is identified as one of the holders of the copyright along with Asch and Chagnon themselves..
10 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

provide them with protection from their enemies. They also knew that the researchers would
provide them with considerable quantities of trade goods.18 Tierney further alleges that
Chagnon actually brokered the alliance that is sealed in the film though this has been
vigorously contested by Chagnon.19 But even if it was the Patanowa-teri’s own idea to hold
a feast, there seems to be little doubt that Chagnon, Asch and their associates then played an
important part in enabling it. At one point, the narration over the preliminary sequence of
stills comments that in distributing meat to his visitors, the headman is embarrassed
because ‘his hunters have done so poorly that he must make the meat go further than it
should’. But according to Tierney, the hunters who had done so badly included Charles
Brewer Carías, one of Chagnon’s Venezuelan associates, equipped with a powerful hunting
rifle. Chagnon’s own ability to contribute to the meat-supply was inhibited by the fact that
he was too busy hauling in plantains from the gardens in his canoe so that the host women
could make beer for the visitors.20

However, I would argue that this evidence of the film-makers’ enablement of the event does
not destroy the value of The Feast as ethnography any more than the ethnographic value of
The Hunters is rendered nul by the emergence of details about how certain scenes in this
film were enabled by John Marshall. Certainly, the evidence of this enablement coupled
with the general circumstances of the shoot qualifies the ethnographic value of the film. But
whatever its deficiencies as an objective record may be, I would argue that The Feast, once
appropriately contextualized, can nevertheless communicate a rich experiential insight into a
certain aspect of Yanomami life. However, what the evidence of this enablement does do is
completely undermine the epistemologically naïve hope underpinning the event-sequence
method that it might somehow be possible to eliminate the principle of authorship from the
making of ethnographic films.21

Asch himself appears to have become increasingly aware of the limitations of the event-
sequence method as the 1970s progressed. In 1975, four years after The Feast, he and
Chagnon released The Ax Fight, which concerns a violent dispute between the members of a
different Yanomami village, Mishimishimaböwei-teri, and a group of visitors who had

18
It seems likely that the prospect of receiving trade goods motivates the only moment in the film when a
subject speaks directly to the camera. This is when a young woman, addressing Chagnon, says with remarkable
forwardness, ‘Shaki, are you my older brother? Tell me you are my friend’. Although it would be congenial
to think that she was just being friendly, it seems more probable, given the context, that this seemingly
charming moment of reflexivity was inspired by a more material motive.
19
See Ruby 1995:24.
20
Tierney 2000: 83-106 passim.
21
Tierney’s most serious allegation against the AEC expedition is that it brought with it various infectious
diseases against which the Yanomami had little or no immunological defence. In the months following the
filming of The Feast, he claims, that many people died amongst both the Patanowa-teri and the visiting group
from Mahekodo-teri as a result of these introduced infections. If there is any truth in this allegation, it would
not only cast The Feast in an entirely new light and make its production wholly indefensible, but it also would
render any discussion of its qualities as an ethnographic film rather trivial and irrelevant. However, the facts on
which this allegation is based are highly contestable since the aetiology of the diseases concerned are difficult to
trace, as is responsibility for their arrival in such remote areas. Without firm evidence on these matters, it is
impossible to make any secure judgement. In the absence any certainty on this matter, I sugge that it remains
acceptable to concentrate exclusively on the qualities of The Feast as an ethnographic film.
11 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

overstayed their welcome. After an initial skirmishing with long clubs involving only a few
people, a more general scuffle ensues culminating in one man striking another with the blunt
side of an axe-head, felling him to ground. But after a few moments, the victim gets up,
staggers groggily away and the mêlée disperses.

In common with previous event-sequence films, Ax Fight involves a sequence of shots

summarizing the event with an accompanying explanatory narration, followed by an
uncommented edited version. But in contrast to previous event-sequence films, the summary
sequence is more elaborate technically, involving slow-motion shots and diagrams. It is also
more complex conceptually in that Chagnon uses the narration to expound his then-current
theory that tensions in Yanomami villages could be explained in terms of structural relations
between lineage groups.22 In the final edited version, the chronology has been manipulated
to make it run more smoothly, though apart from a general abbreviation of the event, this
consists of no more than taking two redundant establishing shots from close to the end of the
event and placing them near the beginning in order to cover certain deficiencies in the
camerawork. Although much has been made by Asch and others about the ‘slickness’ of this
final version, the manipulations involved are not hugely different from those one finds in
earlier ‘event-sequence’ films.

What makes Ax Fight really distinctive as an event-sequence film is the fact that the first
part of the film consists of the original raw footage, enabling one to see what has been
excluded from the two versions of the event presented subsequently in film. These out-takes
include various shots of the researchers, but more significantly, we discover from the
soundtrack that Chagnon’s first understanding of the immediate reason for the dispute,
recorded spontaneously, was mistaken. Initially, he thought that it had arisen when one of
the visitors had forced a host woman to have incestuous sexual relations with him in a
nearby garden. Later, when Chagnon discovered that in fact the visitor had ‘only’ beaten the
woman when she refused to give him some plantains to eat, he incorporated this into the
narration.

There is a certain tendency in the visual anthropological literature to hail The Ax Fight as
some kind of innovative masterwork, but in my view, its significance has been greatly
exaggerated. Technically, it is not very impressive since most of the action is shot from very
far away on the end of a zoom lens. The contrast with Marshall’s shooting from within the
circle of action in An Argument about a Marriage could not be more marked.23 Apart from
the presentation of the rushes in the first section of the film, the structure employed in Ax
Fight had been largely anticipated by earlier event-sequence films. It is true that the device
of presenting the rushes demonstrates very neatly that first impressions during fieldwork can

22
Precisely at the moment that the film was being completed, Chagnon was on the cusp of abandoning such
structural-functional explanations of Yanomami population dynamics in favour of explanations of a more
sociobiological character.
23
I acknowledge that this may be a rather unfair comparison given that the Yanomami subjects were actually
fighting whereas the Ju/’hoansi were not, but in the rushes in the first section of The Ax Fight, we see Chagnon
in shot taking his photographs from very much closer to the action. But more generally, I would argue that
whilst Marshall was certainly a cinematographer of the first rank, Asch was not.
12 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

be mistaken whilst the informed analysis that Chagnon delivers over the summary of the
event shows that even the smallest event is imbued with significances that would otherwise
remain hidden to the naïve spectator. But these are hardly world-shattering revelations.

As I see it, the greatest value of The Ax Fight lies simply in its making plain of the processes
of authorship by the simple device of allowing one to compare the raw footage with the two
edited versions. However, significantly, these processes are not made plain in their entirety
within the film itself. It is only from the CD-Rom that was released many years later that we
discover that although the rushes presented in the film only last for approximately 11
minutes, the event actually took place over a period of about 30 minutes.24 One might ask
therefore what authorial decisions or perhaps mere contingencies led to most of the event
not being filmed. What was also revealed some time later was that since the all-important
blow that the brought the axe fight to an end was hardly audible on the field recording, Asch
later mocked it up in a sound studio by hitting a watermelon with a hammer. There may well
also be something in Tierney’s claim that one of the reasons why the unwanted guests were
hanging on was that they were hoping to get a share of the trade goods that Chagnon and
Asch had brought with them.25

But all these various evidences of authorial influence on the event itself or on the way in
which it was presented would only be particularly disturbing to those holding on to the
illusion that a film could ever deliver some entirely objective account of the world. Later,
Tim Asch would comment that as he was cutting this film, he had the feeling that the whole
field of ethnographic film was beginning to fall apart before his eyes.26 This must be
considered something of an overstatement, since there were other ethnographic film-makers
at that time, even in anglophone anthropology who had already long since abandoned any
hope that film could rescue fieldworkers from the subjectivity of their fieldnotes, as Colin
Young, the doyen of observational cinema, once put it.27 But by revealing its own internal
contradictions, what The Ax Fight certainly did do was signal the end of the road for event-
sequence film-making and with it, an end to the whole tradition of event-based
documentation film-making that stemmed not just from Margaret Mead, but from the
earliest days of ethnographic film-making at the end of the nineteenth century.

The subject as author: dialogical film and indigenous media

In 1974, at around the same time as Tim Asch was devising the structure of The Ax Fight
in the edit suite, David and Judith MacDougall were in Kenya shooting their Turkana
Conversations trilogy. Inspired by the example of Jean Rouch, their aim was to go
beyond a film-making strategy based on the attempt to observe the world from the
outside, along the lines practiced by Marshall and Asch. Rather than aspire to some
illusory objective representation of the world, they were content to allow the relationships

24
Biella et al. 1997. See also Biella 2004.
25
Tierney 2000: 115.
26
See Ruby 1995: 28
27
Young 1995:100
13 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

through which the films were being made to be revealed directly in the filmic text itself.
The ‘conversations’ in the title that they gave to their trilogy referred not just to the
conversations between the Turkana subjects, but also to the conversations between the
Turkana subjects and themselves, the film-makers. They filmed their Land Rover, their
house, their notebooks. They even encouraged a Turkana woman to film them and what
she choose to film was their material possessions also. Although they referred to this as
going ‘beyond observational cinema’, this reflexivity became an intrinsic part of the
classic formulation of ‘observational cinema’.28

When they moved to Australia the following year to work with the Australian Institute of
Aboriginal Studies, this reflexivity took on a more political aspect. Whereas the Turkana
had been happy enough to engage in these conversations with the film-makers, they had
no particular interest in the films themselves, nor in controlling them editorially in any
sense. In contrast, the Australian Aboriginal subjects were very interested in such matters.
It was not only that the control of knowledge is a matter of great concern within
Aboriginal society itself and the source of political power and prestige. The Aborigines
were also aware of the way in which any filmic representations of their world could
influence their relations with broader Australian society and they were therefore
interested in developing some control over the MacDougalls’ films for this reason also.29

Over the course of the next decade therefore, the MacDougalls developed a dialogical
mode of film-making with their Aboriginal subjects, involving them directly in the
choosing of subjects and conceptualization of their films. Again inspired by the example
of Jean Rouch, they also invited certain of their subjects into the edit suite and asked
them to assist in the editing, including in recording voice-over narrations. In these various
ways then, they could be said to have been sharing the authorship of their films with their
subjects.

They were far from alone in developing such strategies around this time. Since the early
1970s, Sarah Elder and Leonard Kamerling had been working on collaborative film-
making projects with Inupiaq and Yup’ik Inuit communities through the Alaska Native
Heritage Film Center at the University of Alaska.30 In 1976, Tim Asch also moved to
Australia to work at the Australian National University and he too came to adopt more
dialogical methods of film-making in the production of the films that he made over the
ensuing years in Indonesia. Asch took a particular interest in the reactions of the subjects
to a screening of the material that he had shot and he would even film these reactions and
make a film out of that.31

Elswhere, in Australia and in many other parts of the world in the 1980s, notably here in
Brazil, this process of releasing authorial responsibility to the subjects was taken one step
further. Taking advantage of the newly-developed lightweight VHS video technology,

28
MacDougall 1995
29
MacDougall 1992
30
Elder 1995
31
See, for example, Connor, Asch & Asch 1986, and Lewis 2004
14 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

which was cheap and easy to use, some anthropologists and film-makers began to give
their subjects the means to shoot their own films. In Brazil, one thinks particularly of the
work of the Video in the Villages project, the work of Terry Turner with the Kayapó, and
also the pioneering work of Monica Feitosa, also with the Kayapó.32

Such ‘indigenous media’ projects have been associated with a remarkable social and
political conscientization in many different parts of the world. The sheer technical quality
that has been achieved in some cases is very impressive: during the last 20 years, there
has been a marked progression of indigenous media productions from low budget factual
film-making to feature films that have enjoyed great international success both critically
and commercially.33 But however much one might welcome and applaud these
productions, I would argue that they can no more be a substitute for authored
ethnographic film-making than the transcripts of a series of oral testimonies recorded on
audiotape, or a collection of textual autobiographies could be a substitute for authored
ethnographic text-making. For, however great their merits, indigenous media productions
will remain insiders’ accounts by definition and as such are bound to be different from
those produced by outsiders. Both modes of representation may provide a valuable
perspective on the world. But, as in the case of autobiography and biography in relation
to the life of an individual, each mode of representing a particular society is both
empowered and limited in its own particular way.

There is also a more general issue, namely that there is no necessary reason why
indigenous media producers should want to address the same range of topics as
anthropologists, nor address them in ways that articulate with wider debates in the
academic discipline. As a matter of empirical fact, the range of topics covered by
indigenous media projects seem to be rather narrow. I have not conducted a
comprehensive survey but my general impression is that land-rights campaigns, ritual
events which assert the political unity and cultural coherence of the group, and social or
economic development projects which demonstrate the benefits of collective co-operation
account for a very large part of this output. This is no more than one would expect, since
these are topics of overwhelming importance to the groups who make the films. Many of
these projects have been highly successful in their own terms, empowering the subjects
who made the films and generally raising awareness of the political interests of their
communities, both internally and externally. But however valuable these effects might be
in themselves, the contribution that these projects have made to intellectual project of
anthropology as a whole, whilst undeniable, has been within a relatively narrow band.34

More dialogical modes of ethnographic film-making have also had to confront this
necessary mismatch between insider and outsider agendas. In this regard, the
MacDougalls’ experience in Australia is instructive. After a decade working for the
Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies, they resigned in the late 1980s since they felt

32
See amongst many other possible texts, Aufterheide 1995, Turner 2002.
33
See Ginsburg 2002 for a recent overview.
34
See Turner (2002) for a recent discussion of anthropological understandings to be achieved through the
study of indigenous media.
15 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

that as non-Aborigines their position there was no longer tenable. In an interview given in
1994, David commented that he felt in retrospect that the dialogical mode of film-making
that he and Judith had developed in Australia had been merely a transitional strategy,
appropriate to a particular historical moment, but no longer so once Aboriginal
indigenous media producers had begun actively producing their own material without any
need for assistance. As he explained it:

in a sense it was a kind of idealisation, perhaps, of a notion of solidarity between Aboriginal

people and sympathetic Whites. My view of it now is that it was a kind of film-making that rather
confused the issues. In those films one never really knows quite who’s speaking for whom, and
whose interests are being expressed. It is not clear what in the film is coming from us and what is
coming from them .. it’s a slightly uncomfortable marriage of interests that masks a lot of issues. 35

Since leaving the Institute, the MacDougalls have moved the main location of their film-
making to India whilst returning to a more authored form of film-making reminiscent in
certain senses of their earliest work in Africa. Although their work remains intensely
dialogical in the sense that their films clearly emerge from an intimate conversation with
the subjects – strikingly so, in the case of David’s most recently released film, The Age of
Reason, the fifth and final film in his Doon School ‘quintet’ – authorship remains clearly
and unambiguously with the film-maker.

The multimedia reader-spectator as author

The origins of the most recent example of anthropologists’ tendency to minimize the role
of authorship in their representations can be traced back to the late 1980s or early 1990s
when the technology of interactive multimedia first came on the scene. The use of this
technology has now been commonplace for at least a decade in anthropology and there
can be no doubt that it has great potential as a means whereby visual images may be
manipulated in conjunction with related sound and text files. But for all the ambitious
claims associated with it, the promise of a distinctive multimedia genre of ethnography as
important as written texts, or even as prominent as films or videos remains as yet
unfulfilled. Nor have there been any individual multimedia works that have taken the
anthropological world by storm, or achieved the widespread distribution or influence of
films such as The Hunters, The Feast or the Turkana Conversations trilogy in their
respective hey-days, let alone achieved the impact of the textual best-sellers. Radically
transformative scenarios for multimedia are often envisaged by its advocates, but they
always seem to be just out of reach, five or ten years down the line, when yet further
technological developments will make them all possible.

I should immediately acknowledge that this is not a subject on which I have any
developed expertise and I shall therefore comment on it only briefly. However, I suspect
that the reason why multimedia has not yet had any major impact as a mode of
ethnographic representation is not because the technology has not yet quite reached the

35
Grimshaw & Papastergiadis 1995:44-45
16 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

required level of sophistication. Rather I would suggest that it is because at the heart of
these futuristic visions of multimedia ethnography, there lies the optimistic assumption
that it will be created by some cadre of super-authors who will use this technology to do
more than merely aggregate all their field-notes, video images and sound recordings into
one large stockpile. Instead it is envisaged that in order to ennable future readers to
navigate between the various bodies of their ethnographic material, these super-authors
will somehow establish a series of linkages so that their materials can be used not just for
pursuing answers to questions that they themselves might think significant, but also for
pursuing answers to as yet unknown questions that future readers might wish to pose. As
Gary Seaman and Homer Williams, two early proponents of multimedia put it, ‘instead of
having to maintain a single train of thought, the ethnographer will have to establish a
structure that allows multiple points of access while still maintaining a consistent point of
view’.36

But this seems to me to be essentially a contradiction in terms, reminiscent of Jorge Luis

Borges’ fantastical notion of the novelist who sought to write a novel in which all the
possible outcomes of the events in the story were simultaneously pursued in subsequent
chapters. Even Seaman and Williams admit that the goal of organising linkages between
bodies of ethnographic material so that they can be accessed for an infinitude of future
purposes is one that is ‘easily stated’ but ‘is a frightfully time-consuming proposition to
carry out’.37 The most likely outcome then is the use of multimedia technology to create
aggregations of diverse bodies of ethnographic material between which only a limited
number of linkages have been made possible by the authors. But this is hardly
revolutionary. Essentially this is no different to the principles on which textual
encyclopaedias have been organised since at least the eighteenth century. The main
difference is only that moving images and sound recordings can also be added to the
modern multimedia encyclopaedia. In itself, this is a magnificent asset, but it is difficult
to see how this alone could have the transformative impact on ethnographic
representation that some multimedia advocates anticipate.

In any case, whatever the future may hold for interactive multimedia, it seems to me
unlikely that this technology will ever displace film-making as a mode of ethnographic
representation since essentially the two technologies deliver different things.
Ethnographic film, at least in its most sophisticated form, offers the opportunity to
communicate an experiential form of understanding of the world of the subjects, whereas
multimedia is concerned primarily with the delivery of large bodies of data or, at best,
with the making possible of conceptual provocations brought about by the
juxtapositioning of these bodies of data. In aiming to deliver experiential understandings,
an essential strategy of the accomplished ethnographic film-maker is to engage the
reader-spectator in the unfolding of a particular narrative, whilst at the same time
deploying as skillfully as he or she knows how all the cinematic rhetorical devices at his
or her command to convince the audience of the embodied reality both of the world

36
Seaman & Williams 1992:310.
37
Seaman & Williams 1992:308.
17 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

portrayed and of the characters and sentiments of the people who inhabit it. The
complexity of the inscription of a film, both aurally and visually, is such that the author
can never entirely control the readings of the reader-spectator - nor would this be
desirable. But the author’s aim is surely to enclose the reader-spectator in a world within
which he or she makes those readings. The circumstances of viewing, often in a darkened
room, further encourage this sense of enclosure.

However, it is precisely from this enclosure within the world created by the author that
the proponents of multimedia seek to free the reader-spectator. Instead, they envisage a
future in which the reader-spectator, liberated entirely from the constraints of the linear
sequential mode imposed by the author, will be free to range widely across a braod
spectrum of audiovisual texts, constructing his or her own worlds through his or her own
narratives. But I suspect that the consequence of this freedom is that the engagement of
the reader-spectator with those worlds and narratives, and with the human subjects who
inhabit them will remain purely cognitive, without the more experiential and emotional
associations that ethnographic film at its most skilfull can evoke.

The ethnographic film-maker as author

Despite a sustained effort over the course of more than a century, ethnographic film-
makers have found it impossible to find an effective way of circumventing the
implications of authorship: whether they like it or not, ethnographic film-makers, just like
ethnographic writers, are authors, though they write with images and sounds rather than
words. But if authorship is the inevitable corrollary of making an ethnographic film,
what then is the most appropriate form of authorship for film-makers working within the
frame of present-day academic anthropology? I would contend that for a conjunction of
epistemological, aesthetic and even ethical reasons, contemporary ethnographic film
authorship should be discreet, low-key and committed to producing relatively ‘open’,
realist texts in which there is a relatively restrained use of self-conscious cinematic
devices. As I have argued at greater length elsewhere, it is for these reasons that I believe
that an approach to documentary film-making rooted in the principles of ‘observational
cinema’ continues to be particularly appropriate to ethnographic film-making, though by
no means exclusively so.38

For although the natural sciences paradigm may no longer hold sway in anthropology
generally, there remains a continuing sense that ethnographic understandings should be
supported by a demonstration of empirical evidence which the reader-spectator can assess
independently. Although written ethnographic texts may now be more literary in
character and admit a much a higher degree of subjective reflection on the part of the
author than a generation ago, they continue for the most part to be written in a plain-style,
realist prose. On these grounds, I suggest that ethnographic film-makers should continue
to work in a relatively plain cinematographic style which - within the world created -

38
Henley 2004
18 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

allows considerable freedom for the reader-spectators to assess the significance of the
events and situations that are represented.

Of course, this mode of representation is bound to be selective and influenced by all

manner of subjective interests. It will also take place within a series of conventions of
realism that are – at least to a certain extent – historically variable. If films made in this
way are to be meaningful, they will necessarily be ordered in accordance with certain
narrative principles. But in terms of how the reader-spectator relates to a film, there
remains a significant, qualitative difference between the aesthetic of observational cinema
and those cinematic approaches in which the reader-spectators’ readings of the material
are mediated through such intrusive devices as imposing extra-diegetic music, virtuoso
displays of montage, multiple split screens, slow-motion or the radical rupturing of
normal temporal progressions. All these latter devices might have their place if used in
moderation or in certain distinctive situations. But when used in excess there is the
danger that they will obstruct the reader-spectators’ ability to reach an independent
assessment whilst at the same time reducing the subjects of the film and the world they
inhabit to mere hostages of the cinematic virtuosity of the film-maker.

Although surely all anthropologists would now readily recognize that there is more to
anthropology than the simple reproduction of the ‘native point of view’, the views of the
subjects continue to have great importance in anthropology when compared, for example,
to the conventional take on the world associated with journalists or artists when they
come to make documentary films. For journalists tend to be preoccupied above all with
the need to relate an engaging story to their audiences whilst artists, at least by
convention, are primarily concerned with being faithful to their own vision. 39 Certainly
in my own personal experience of working for British television, which is essentially a
journalistic medium, most documentarists and particularly those of an investigative
persuasion tend think of their role as being to interrogate their subjects, being as critical
and judgemental as necessary ‘to get at the truth’. In contrast, anthropologists prefer to
think of their films as being essentially the result of a collaborative endeavour that is
constrained, both intellectually and ethically, by the views and experiences of their
subjects.

In his description of observational cinema, with characteristic acuity, David MacDougall

has put his finger on why it is that this particular tradition of documentary film-making
continues to be appropriate to ethnographic film-makers, given the epistemological,
aesthetic and ethical postures of contemporary anthropology:

Observational film-making was founded on the assumption that things happen in the world which are worth
watching, and that their own distinctive spatial and temporal configurations are part of what is worth watching
about them. Observational films are frequently analytical, but they also make a point of being open to
categories of meaning that might transcend the film-maker's analysis. This stance of humility before the world

39
The convention of the artist faithful only to his own vision is often exemplified by John Ruskin’s
celebrated advice to a young painter, ‘Does a man die at your feet, your business is not to help him, but to
note the colour of his lips’ (quoted in Winston 2000:131).
19 In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making. Paul Henley

can of course be self-deceiving and self-serving, but it also implicitly acknowledges the subject's story is often
more important than the film-maker's. 40

In particular relationship to authorship, whilst anthropologists should not - nor cannot -

deny their authorship, they should nevertheless be self-denying, not in the interests of a
chimerical objectivity but out of respect for the world and the subjects that they take the
liberty to represent.

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