September 1, 2001
Jay Ruby
Please forward
your comments, criticisms and suggestions to: ruby@ascworld.net
The paper was first
delivered as a Lecture for the Visible Evidence Conference, Oxford,
December 11 and 12, 2000 and revised for publication September
1, 2001. Please do not cite or attribute without the written
approval of the author).
Introduction
This is a paper about the relationship between filmmaking and anthropology. It is a brief critical overview of the development of ethnographic film in the United States, an argument for a theoretical position and an examination of that stance through an digital video ethnographic project that is in the beginning stages of its development. I make no claim to represent ethnographic film outside the U.S. or that my point of view is shared by others. For an extended discussion of these ideas look at my recently published book, Picturing Culture (Ruby 2000a) and Appendix 1 - An Ethnographic Film Manifesto [1].
Let me begin with a
condensed description of the theoretical position I espouse -
a fantasy in which an anthropological cinema exists - not documentaries
about "anthropological" subjects but films designed
by anthropologists to communicate anthropological insights. It
is a well-articulated genre distinct from realist documentaries
and broadcast journalism. It borrows from the whole of cinema
- fiction, documentary, animation, and experimental. A multitude
of film styles vie for prominence - equal to the number of theoretical
positions found in the field. There are general audience films
as well as sophisticated works designed for professionals. While
some are intended for a general audience and logically made collaboratively
with professional filmmakers, most are produced by anthropologists
who use the medium to convey the results of their ethnographic
studies and ethnological knowledge. University departments regularly
teach the theory, history, practice, and criticism of anthropological
communications - verbal, written, and pictorial - enabling scholars
to select the most appropriate publication mode. Canons of criticism
exist that allow for a scholarly discourse about the ways in which
anthropology is realized pictorially. There are scholarly venues
where these works are displayed and critiqued. A low-cost distribution
system is firmly established making these productions as common
as books. At present, this fantasy is science fiction but nonetheless
an ideal worth pursuing (Ruby 2000a).
Some Historical Background
Anthropologists have been making images since there has been an anthropology and the technology. From Regnault's turn-of-the-century crude images of the Wolof potter in Paris to the hesitant 1990s reflexive ponderings of Kwame Braun in passing girl: riverside - a videotape about what it means to film a child passing in the street - images of humans enacting their culture flood our imagination. And yet ethnographic film remains a most perplexing form of cinema occupying a position equally marginal to documentary film and cultural anthropology. It seems to defy easily categorization, causing interminable debates about its parameters. It remains a minor pursuit of the few, and a pedagogical device used in an uncritical manner by most teachers of culture. In the U.S., it is a genre dominated by filmmakers with no training or apparent interest in ethnography or anthropology.
Time does not permit
any lengthy discussion of the relatively brief history of these
films. Prior to World War II, a few anthropologists consulted
with professional filmmakers who produced what were then called
theatrical short subjects about exotic cultures. Works by documentary
filmmakers like Robert Flaherty who attempted humanistic portrayals
of nonwestern people were, by and large, ignored by anthropologists.
Mead and Bateson's ground-breaking Balinese work was equally
underappreciated. Beginning in the late 1960s with Robert Gardner,
John Marshall and Tim Asch, the potential of film as a teaching
tool became recognized. Films about exotic cultures became commonplace
in the classroom. For the past 25 years, public television has
been a major funding source and ideal for ethnographic films,
even though Americans were never as successful as the British
in creating a long-term series like the Disappearing World. It
is only recently that the technology of digital video has enabled
anthropologists to produce work outside the confines of pedagogical
needs or the assumed restrictions of television transmission.
A Theoretical Critique
I wish to focus on the underpinnings of these activities. Until the 1970s, ethnographic film, like the documentary, was undertheorized and underanalyzed. Because it was assumed that documentarians should strive for objectivity, there was no need for any other theoretical embellishment. The goal of the filmmaker was to objectively record the reality in front of the camera. Critical debate was additionally hampered by a number of factors. Anthropologists tend not to be very knowledgeable about film, semiotics or communication theory, as can be seen in the writings of Karl Heider (1976) and Peter Loizos (1993). These scholars are prone to naive assumptions about the nature and limits of film and uncritically accept the received wisdom of professional filmmakers. Film scholars' understanding of anthropology is equally limited, as seen in the writings of Bill Nichols (1994), Fatimah Rony (1996) and Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989). Their criticisms of anthropology apply more to the profession several decades ago than to contemporary practice. Finally, professional filmmakers are constrained by marketplace considerations and their limited knowledge of ethnography. Consequently, they are timid about exploring the parameters of the genre.
As a result, ethnographic film has been hindered by a lack of a conceptual structure sufficient to the task of theorizing about and producing films that communicate ethnographic knowledge. For a time the literature was dominated by proscriptive and programmatic admonitions and "war stories" about how a film was made. In the 1970s, a critical discussion emerged in the U.S. While a few argued for standards and critical expectations more complex than earlier assumptions, the majority were trapped in the false dichotomy of "the science of anthropology" versus "the art of cinema." Theoretical explorations are often limited to arguing about whether or not a particular film was objective, accurate, complete, or even ethnographic.
By the mid-1980s, written
anthropology's version of "the crisis of representation"
was articulated (Marcus and Clifford 1986). Critics intensified
their call for an anthropology that openly admitted to its "dishonorable"
past and positivist sins. It was argued that anthropology should
become less authoritarian, more collaborative, and reflexive
(Ruby 1982). Unfortunately these critics ignored French ethnofilmmaker,
Jean Rouch, who had been addressing these issues since the 1950s
(Stoller 1992) and those anthropologists interested in Sol Worth's
construction of an anthropology of visual communication - a framework
for the exploration of visual and pictorial culture and the pictorial
transmission of anthropological knowledge (Worth 1981). I was
a participant in the construction of that approach and continue
to be an advocate. During the past two decades a more sophisticated
dialogue has emerged. With the work of David MacDougall (2001),
Marcus Banks (Banks and Morphy 1997) and others who sought to
frame questions of film and anthropology within a larger conceptual
whole. I find myself allied with their critique.
My position in the debate is this: ethnographic filmmaking should
be the province of anthropologists interested in making pictorial
ethnographies. While this may appear to be relatively simple,
the consequences would be for anthropologists to divorce themselves
from documentary and ethnographic film practice and the traditional
supports that have evolved for the making of an ethnographic film,
that is, the idea that film must be a useful teaching aid or must
reach a large audience via television. To go against received
wisdom and to be able to make audiences understand that the choices
made were deliberate and not the result of incompetence is not
an easy task. The films will have to be explicit about the intention
of the makers to deliberately deviate from that which is expected.
The term "ethnographic" when applied to film has as
little to do with ethnographers or anthropologists as psychological
films have to do with professional psychologists or historical
films with historians. It has become the term used to describe
documentary films about exotic cultures and nothing more.
Such a radical departure is only feasible if there is a rationale to support a new practice - one that makes it possible to visualize culture and to see behavior as an embodiment of culture so that it can be filmed, and to create film styles that transmit anthropological knowledge to a desired audience while at the same time making the theoretical position of the maker clear and the methods employed explicit. To accomplish this task, it is necessary to locate an approach to culture as communication and a theory of film that allows anthropologists to create an appropriate practice of film.
If ethnographic filmmakers
were to produce films that told the story of their field research,
and a collaborative story of the people they studied, in a reflexive
manner that permitted audiences to enjoy the cinematic illusion
of verisimilitude without causing them to think they were seeing
reality, then an anthropological cinema would be born. Thus far
few seem even interested in exploring this possibility. In the
twenty-five years since I first advocated this position, I can
see little evidence that other agree with me.
Field Exploration
I now wish to discuss some preliminary findings from an ethnographic study of Oak Park, a middle-class Chicago suburb where I am testing the ideas outlined above. It is here where theory meets the sobering reality of the field. I started work in this community in June, 2000 and concluded the first phase of the fieldwork in May, 2001. I plan to return to the community for several more summers to continue the fieldwork and to show preliminary versions of the finished product to those portrayed so as to obtain their feedback. It is a multifaceted investigation permitting me to pull together a number of issues that have interested me for some time. Here is a quick overview. At the broadest level, I am intrigued with the application of ethnographic methods in the exploration of a successful middle-class suburban community. Social scientists have too often concentrated on the exotic, the oppressed and the pathological. There are few studies of a suburb that is, by its own terms, successful. Oak Park is one of the more interesting social experiments in the U.S. It is regarded internationally as a model of successful ethnic integration. It is a community convinced that it can self-consciously construct itself. How it maintains its ideals is the focus of my studies.
Oak Park is, also, my place of birth and thus provides a chance to pursue a long-term interest in reflexivity (Ruby 1982). I wish to understand what happens when the anthropologist is both native and researcher. I am studying some people I have known most of my life. I am intrigued with the advantages and disadvantages. I am also taking advantage of people's affluence and high level of education to explore how the internet might serve as an ethnographic research tool. I have established a web site (http://astro.temple.edu/~ruby/opp/ where I offer regular updates via a listserv seeking the residents' comments and criticisms. I get both on a frequent basis.
I employ very traditional methods of observation, participation and have interviewed numerous people. I will write scholarly articles and books. But, in addition, I will produce some experimental video ethnographies that exploit the potential of digital video to shoot without benefit of a crew with a minimal budget independent of the world of professional filmmaking. I will create a body of work that is not designed for public television or the classroom but rather as an expression of scholarly communication-a "video book" with an introduction, several chapters, a conclusion and appendices.
But before I explain more about this experiment, let me describe the setting for the ethnography. Since its founding in the early 1900s, Oak Park was a bastion of Republican white conservatism tempered slightly by a primarily female progressive involvement in reform and social welfare. It is known for its Frank Lloyd Wright houses and as the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway, who left at nineteen claiming it was the "middle-class capital of the world." In the late 1960s, resegregation transformed white communities into black ghettos decimating the west side of Chicago, including a neighborhood that borders Oak Park. Everyone assumed that tide would continue and engulf this suburb. It did not. In the forty years since, Oak Park has evolved into a model integrated community where blacks and whites strive to live together. Real estate values are soaring. The vacancy rate in the apartments that constitute forty percent of the housing units is less than one percent.
In order to realize their goals of integration and stability, Oak Parkers marketed their community initially to African-Americans to demonstrate that they really did intend to enforce their own fair housing ordinance and, then, to middle-class liberal whites to counterbalance the loss caused by the white flighters who fled when blacks started to purchase houses. Probably because the community gained a reputation for tolerance, a publicly active gay and lesbian community also emerged. A poll by planetout.com voted Oak Park one of the most gay friendly small towns in the U.S. The community is amazingly ambitious in its attempt to be diverse. Many of the residents who replaced those unable to accommodate these changes are employed in social services, the medical professions and are university professors. Oak Park was transformed into a haven for liberal whites - gay and straight - seeking a place to act out their political and ethical values and for middle-class blacks looking for a safe place with stable property values and good schools.
I have explored several aspects of this community in terms of how some of its core values have remained the same while others have been modified to accommodate planned diversity. One result of this examination will be a series of related visual works. Let me discuss one as an example. Its production has occupied several months of fieldwork. The work explores how this community devised a way to insure that it would be able to maintain the desired diversity. I concentrated on the Oak Park Regional Housing Center, a non-profit organization designed to prevent resegregation by affirmatively marketing apartments in such a manner as to distribute whites and blacks throughout the community and to avoid having any apartment building contain a predominance of one ethnic group. The Housing Center is part of a complex of village ordinances, other non-profits and governmental agencies striving to keep the rental housing market healthy and integrated.
I prepared for the video shoots by regularly volunteering as the receptionist for the Center, thus allowing me to watch their activities for extended periods of time. I followed clients in the process of locating an apartment. I stood at the entrance to the Center buttonholing people, asking if I could film them going through the process. Most said yes. I attempted to shoot as wide a variety of clients as possible. Sometimes, when I got lucky, a client was escorted to view some apartments instead of being given a list that they must pursue on their own. I tagged along. As I never knew in advance if the interaction between the client and a counselor giving them listings of available apartments was going to be revealing or not, I continued to shoot clients until the high season for finding apartments was over. The process is very inefficient but completely necessary. As I sat and waited for clients to arrive at the Center, I fantasized that the next one would be the "perfect" client who would say and do all the right things. I followed-up with interviews of some clients after they settled into their apartments. In addition, I interviewed the counselors who provide apartment listings, the marketing department which locates apartments suitable for the Center and staff in the organizations involved in this process. My intention is to show how the relatively straightforward task of locating an apartment becomes transformed into a symbolic act of maintaining the community's self-image. When the process works, clients get an apartment and the community maintains diversity.
I am beginning to see
a potential set of themes emerging. One is the constant need of
the Housing Center staff to convince white clients that certain
parts of Oak Park are safe. This has been a consistent problem
since the inception of the Center. The area of most concern is
the east edge of Oak Park that borders Chicago. It was the resegregation
of this area that served as a strong motivation for Oak Parkers
to develop a way of managing integration so that Oak Park would
not become ghettoized. While many white clients express a fear
of living on Austin Blvd. (the border of Chicago), none will actually
come out and say what I believe is behind their anxiety - their
fear of living in a neighborhood with blacks. The irony is that
the best apartments are located here. I have filmed several clients
being shown these apartments - some decide to rent and other do
not. In follow-up interviews they discuss their feelings and
thoughts. As Austin Blvd. is the linchpin of Oak Park's attempts
to keep the community from resegregating, I spent some time exploring
how clients and staff dealt with the apartments in that locale.
Oak Park's plan for maintaining stable integration succeeds or
fails here. In addition, I explored the difficulties that some
lower income people, primarily African-Americans, have in locating
affordable housing in affluent Oak Park. While the community
is committed to being economically diverse, the marketplace drives
the rents up and makes converting the larger apartments into condos
a profitable business. People with modest incomes and large families
simply cannot find apartments in Oak Park. Some critics suggest
that the Housing Center is steering blacks out of the community
when it is the rental market that is responsible. These two themes
present me with the main task of this work - to show how something
as matter of fact as locating an apartment can be seen as symbolic
of a community's desire to realize the difficult task of remaining
diverse. Of all of the aspects of the community I researched
the material I produced on the Housing Center has the most potential
to become a "film" that could stand on its own. In
addition this topic lends itself to being written about in a lengthy
fashion. I am currently co-authoring an article with a political
scientist who is also researching Oak Park. It is very likely
that we will end up co-authored a book length analysis of Oak
Park's approach to integration. The video work will allow me
to show how these ideas function on a day to day basis. In this
case the pictures and the words compliment each other.
Theory and Practice - Not a Pretty Picture
I now wish to conclude my discussion with some observations about the methodological implications of this approach to digital imagemaking and how the practical and the theoretical connect and confound (see MacDougall 2001 for a similar discussion).
Recently, mini-dv digital cameras and digital editing software have appeared that are within the budgets of most academics. The "prosumer" level three-chip cameras produce an image of exceptional quality and excellent sound when a mini-shotgun microphone is added. The editing systems are also relatively easy to learn and use. Scholars can now afford to experiment without the necessity of obtaining large grants that require the production of materials designed for the classroom or public television, nor must they hire professional crews whose goals are often at odds with those of a scholar. Instead of bringing a professional crew of documentary filmmakers in for a relatively brief time to make a film designed to satisfy the professional demands of the film world (a common approach in the U.S.), I was able to have the camera accessible for the entire year. Reoccurring events can be filmed repeatedly to insure in-depth coverage. Interview subjects have the luxury of being filmed a second time if they feel their initial responses were somehow inadequate. As production costs are low, the tapes can be distributed for next to nothing. As no one has a financial investment in the work nor is anyone's professional reputation as an imagemaker riding on the popular success of the work, the tapes can be designed for a specific audience of other scholars, students and the seriously interested lay person.
The Process of Engagement - Collaboration with Subjects
One of the distinct advantages of working in a community of highly educated subjects who share many of my cultural values is that I can involve them in a high degree of collaboration. I started by locating people whose lives allow me visually to explore certain aspects of the community. I'm making three works about families in the hopes that through their lives I can reveal some of Oak Park's core values and how the transformation of the community impacts on the people who live there. One family has been in the village for five generations. In some respects they are the quintessential upper middle-class WASP Oak Park family. The matriarch of the family is ninety-one and displays all of the most traditional Oak Park values. And yet her son-in-law is a bisexual retired public school teacher who is one of the founders of a politically powerful gay and lesbian organization and her daughter-in-law is one of the first African Americans to move to Oak Park. I left a mini-dv camera with the son-in-law who will film for me over the next year and in addition produce materials for a history of the gay and lesbian community. Another family is composed of two lesbians and their children. One woman is a native Oak Parker, community activist, and instrumental in the formation of the local gay and lesbian organization (Ruby 2000b). The third family is a recently arrived African American family. With these three, I hope to show some middleclass Oak Parkers cope with living in the most interesting social experiment in the U.S.
The underlying assumption is this: Culture is exemplified and personified in people's lives. One can literally see culture. Let me explain. To personify according to Oxford English Dictionary is "to figure or represent (a thing or abstraction) as a person; ... in art to symbolize by a figure in human form..." People who personify culture live their lives in a way that symbolizes some aspect of their culture in a direct manner. For example, Rebekah, one of the women I am filming, has dedicated her life to "making a difference in the world." This sense of social responsibility, I believe, is a core value of Oak Park and has been so since the founding of the village. In addition, Rebekah exemplifies her culture, that is "shows or illustrates by example...sets a good example" (Oxford English Dictionary). The people I have selected are useful because they also enact their culture, that is "to...play a part of a scene on stage or life" (Concise Oxford Dictionary) and embody it, that is, "give a concrete example or discernable form to (an idea or concept), be an expression of (an idea), express tangibly" (Concise Oxford Dictionary). People who have these attributes should make excellent subjects for ethnographic films. I believe that I have located some.
Once subjects are discovered, it is necessary to transform them into active and self-conscious participants in the process. I explain my interests and how I see their lives as revealing important community attributes. We then discuss the details of their lives - the day to dayness - to determine which activities are filmable. Those deemed too personal or involving people who might be made uncomfortable are eliminated. I made certain that people realized that they have sufficient agency to ask me to stop filming at any time they feel uncomfortable. In addition, they can look at the raw tapes and will be given an almost finished version to examine. While they have the right to correct any errors, I reserve the right to make an interpretation that may differ from the way they see themselves. If we have some fundamental difference of interpretation, I ask permission to film a discussion of the disagreement and add that to the final work. Such differences lend a useful complexity. I am struck by how hard it is to film the lives of middleclass Americans once they leave their homes. Filming in schools or at the workplace or at places of leisure like the YMCA involves a morass of legal paperwork and permissions to the point where filming a soccer game where one of the family I am filming has a son on the team becomes virtually impossible - permissions are required from each parent of each player.
Then a list of possible
activities was compiled and I began to explore how I might film
them. I asked the person to think about what they do in terms
of which activities might be usefully filmed. When I could, I
observed reoccurring events prior to filming and film them more
than once. Once I got to know the person in terms of their daily
activities, I compiled an outline of their lives and topics I
think can be profitably examined in a filmed interview. I do
at least two interviews - one chronological and biographical and
a second topical. I try to compile a life history on tape. I
ask them to share snapshots with me. The people I engage in my
exploration of this community are educated, self-conscious, and
are already reflective about their lives and their community.
The process I involve them in only heightens these characteristics.
I asked them to consider what can be seen. As a final reflexive
gesture I asked everyone to discuss how it felt to go through
this process.
Technical Considerations
There are several technical disadvantages to the methods I employ. A one-person crew that consists of an anthropologist like myself with little formal training cannot possibly produce work that has the look of a professionally made product. I am willing to give up the technical advantages that come with a professional production because I believe being a one-person crew is essential to accomplish the task I have defined for myself. Audiences will have to learn to alter their expectations. Viewing instructions must be incorporated into the work itself. I must deliberately frustrate audiences need to suspend their disbelief and to get lost in the pleasure of the narrative. If viewers cannot go beyond their normal expectations, the work will be dismissed as hopelessly amateur if not incompetent. For me this is the crux of the matter. We must train audiences to examine the quality of the ideas portrayed and to regard the intellectual contribution of a work as being primary and to stop assuming that pretty pictures are the most important element. I truly believe that we cannot produce what the film industry calls a "good film" and also produce a work that is good anthropology. It may be that to realize my goals I will have to abandon the notion of producing a film and explore other options.
This is a particularly vexing problem because my experience suggests that viewers of ethnographic films are extremely conservative in their ability to accept films that deviate from documentary conventions. They tend not to be very experienced with any films that deliberately deviate from any norm. There is a long tradition of filmmakers pushing the envelope of normative expectations that range as far and wide as Jean-Luc Godard, Henry Jaglom, Jean Rouch and the whole of experimental and avant garde filmmakers. I conceive my work as more like those films characterized as personal, reflexive and having a mini-dv digital aesthetic (e.g. Lars Van Tier and Agnes Varda) than with the traditional ethnographic film. While I would like to invoke that world in implicit ways, I am not confident that my intended audience of anthropologists has the cinematic sophistication to appreciate the reference and would be able to frame its expectations accordingly. To be on the safe side, I have chosen to find some painfully obvious ways to inform my viewers about the mind-set I wish them to adopt. I will probably have to break the flow of a narrative to remind audiences that they are looking at a construction I designed for some anthropological purpose. I may not be able to express all that I wish to express with pictures alone.
I strive to make the scenes as technically "good" as possible and rely upon the viewing instructions to open viewers' minds to the quality of the ideas as being foremost. They must concentrate on the ideas, arguments, point of view, and intention of the work and not reject what they see simply because the work does not look like those seen on television or in the movies. That is asking a lot, but hopefully those seriously interested in the topic will make the necessary adjustments. Perhaps I am being overly defensive, but my years of experience suggest to me that even scholarly audiences expect serious ethnographic films to meet their expectations of what they assume constitutes "a good film.
What follows is probably a normal case of field anxieties that researchers usually keep to themselves. I believe venting them in public will be a way of relieving the sometimes overwhelming sense of inadequacy that comes when one tries something new and might encourage others with a similar lack of professional expertise to try to make ethnographic films. I am only marginally competent with this technology and with ways to shoot material that reflects what I am learning and what I want to say. I am constantly experimenting - learning as I go. While I can see some evidence of an increasing technical competence and at times even have some assurance that I can accomplish what I intend, I remain anxious that I will not be able to shoot material I need or that I will do something technically incompetent and ruin the shot. I am always conflicted about whether I should pay attention to the event as it unfolds in front of me or the demands of obtaining a technically excellent picture. Often it seems to me I cannot do both.
Even formal interviews that should be the easiest become complicated as I am wedded to deferring technical considerations to the needs of the subject. I am determined to make people as comfortable as possible and not create the artificial environment commonly associated with a filmed interview where the technical needs of filming dominate all decisions. The subject's comfort determines the place of the interview. The result is that they are taped in less than perfect situations - sometimes the subject is backlit and often their face is in shadows with both natural and artificial light in the same scene. I will not light an interview. I believe lighting creates such an artificial atmosphere that it defeats my purpose. I allow subjects to control the setting and accept the quality that results.
In terms of the logistics of the interview itself, I simply place the camera on a tripod and attempt to maintain eye contact engaging the subject in a conversation. We talk in a manner that resembles an interaction more than an interview. I shoot no cutaways and will not create the wholly artificial action-reaction interview sequences common to the documentary. The camera is fixed with only a few minor adjustments in framing. Once it begins, I try to concentrate completely on engaging the subject in a useful dialogue. Even with these technical limits, being able to see and hear someone talk about their life remains an engaging experience providing a strong sense of the person that more than makes up for any technical limits.
Following a client through the process of locating an apartment with the assistance of the Housing Center is equally challenging. I am shooting in complex uncontrollable conditions that sometime produces technically questionable results. We visit empty apartments with no furniture and hardwood floors without rugs. The sound echoes. The lighting is terrible as most of the apartments have no blinds and the sun streams in the windows. When following a client being escorted to an apartment, I must adjust the light and sound while I am shooting from being inside the car to walking outside to the building, up the stairs and into the apartment. I have the choice of exposing for the subjects or the windows and obviously select the subject and thus overexpose the windows. While these situations are commonplace for a professional crew, the normal division of labor - soundperson, cameraperson and director - makes the necessary adjustments easier. I must juggle the technical with my need to concentrate on the quality of the interaction. I believe that while adding several more people to the scene would improve the quality of the tape it would so alter the interaction as to render it useless for my purpose. If I were a David Macdougall or John Marshall with decades of experience I could easily solve these problems. As satisfying as the images these masters produce are, I am arguing that our level of technical competence should not prevent us from making video ethnographies. Our history of deferring to professional imagemakers has impeded the development of an anthropological cinema.
As important as these technical considerations are, I have a much more important concern. There are few precedents for what I am doing. I cannot look to other people and their experiences for advice. I must break with the assumption that an ethnographic film must conform to the requirements of television and/or the classroom, that is, being 30, 60 or 90 minutes long. Anthropologists who write do not place similar restrictions on their work - that is, make the length determined by what is useable. So theses works will be as long as they need to be. I must explore ways to educate audiences so that they will take the time necessary to understand the work. A single viewing in which a viewer sits passively will not suffice. In other words, the normative way in which we view is not adequate. I agree with Peter Biella's contention that one of the inherent limits of film and videotape is that it is designed to be seen once - on television or in the classroom (Biella 19??). Audiences will have to be taught that, like any written scholarly work, these works require repeated examination.
In a year of fieldwork I shot about 120 hours of videotape. As of the writing of this article (September, 2001) I am beginning to edit and organize the material I collected. As a partially finished version of each chapter is complied, I will give it to the subjects for their review, comments, and suggestions. I am hopeful that the high degree of participation I have obtained in the shooting will continue through the making of the final product. I will then begin to explore ways in which I can educate viewers to understand the experimental nature of the work and to hold their normal expectations in abeyance.
I realize that this
is an overly ambitious project. I assume I will only partially
succeed in pushing the limits of the genre. In the end, I will
be able to make a sobering reappraisal of the grand theories I
have proposed and reach some sort of more realistic and workable
compromise between theory and practice.
A Postscript
I originally wrote this paper in November, 2000 after having been in the field for about six months - a half way point in the research. When I presented it at the Visual Evidence Conference in Oxford in December, 2000, it became abundantly clear that it was impossible to accomplish my goals by producing films or videotapes. I decided to explore the possibility of constructing DVDs that would combine the video I shot with documents and texts I will write with photographs and audiotapes into a multimedia and interactive form that could only be seen only on a computer. I am continuing that exploration as the technology is being invented to accomplish this task. In rejecting video as a vehicle, I am not suggesting the ethnographic film is dead or that there is no chance for the medium to be successfully used by anthropologists as a scholarly outlet. I encourage others to continue that pursuit and am heartened by the writing and film work of David MacDougall as it appears he is moving in that direction (2001). But for me and for this project, films or videotapes will not suffice.
I cannot find ways to overcome the position most viewers assume when they view a film. For centuries, the role of a theater audience has been a passive one. Attempts to engage audiences, to get them to interact with the actors and the scenes are few and far between and not very successful. I remember a play in the 1950s called The Connection about heroine addicts. During intermission the actors panhandled the audiences trying to take the realism of the stage one step further. Experimental theater is filled with such examples while the mainstream of theatrical productions continues as before. Movies have traditionally been seen in "theatres" - dark and silent places with little chance for spectators to do anything but watch. So viewers come to television with a several thousand year old theatrical/filmic tradition of passive attention. Television changed that a bit. It is not always seen in a darken room. Talking is commonplace. You really do not have to pay much attention to understand most television programs. It was assumed by some optimistic media critics that the advent of the VCR would create more active viewers as they could stop and start and rewind at will. I see no evidence of that sort of active viewing or an increase in the visual sophistication on the part of the "television generation." These two passive traditions (theater and film/television) make it hard to ask viewers to pay active and critical attention to anything on a screen. Sitting in front of a computer is an different experience. You are in an office chair in a room in which you work. You must pay constant attention as the computer requires you to make decisions on a regular basis. It sounds to me like a good environment for my work.
Let me explain how I am considering structuring of a "chapter" of "The Oak Park Stories." I will use the work on the Taylor family, African Americans who moved to Oak Park two years ago, as it is the most firmly conceived section. I plan to construct a family life history of the Taylors using the interviews I filmed with the husband and wife together with family snapshots they selected and discussed on camera. I will also use scenes I shot at breakfast, dinner, at the YMCA where the wife exercises (There is a nice tie-in there as someone who will figure prominently in another section exercises with her.), at a school board election rally attended by the entire family, and a birthday party for their three year old daughter. Edited together in a conventional manner it could tell "the story" of this family. However such a film would not be able to present their importance for an anthropological understanding of Oak Park. Their lives need to be contextualized. The history of African Americans in Oak Park needs to be explicated if viewers are to understand how the Taylors fit into the unique social experiment of integration in Oak Park. In addition, there is a further need to understand the Taylor family in the greater historical and cultural context of middleclass African American life in general and specifically in Chicago. The more common solution would be for me to write a study guide to accompany the film and hope that viewers will read it before viewing the film. I should be obvious that such a hope is unrealistic. I want viewers to understand the ethnographic relevance of this family as a window into comprehending Oak Park as a place where the drama of integration is being played out in a relatively unique fashion.
I must be mindful of the potential audience for this work. I will strive to construct the work assuming that some people will only need brief introduction to the issues and ideas I raise while others will wish to explore them in more depth. This interactive DVD format affords me the luxury of authoring something that can be used for a variety of purposes. For example, the history of African Americans in Oak Park can be summarized in a few paragraphs and a few photographs. When viewers accesses this section, they will first see a brief comment with a note informing them that additional information is available. If successful, the viewer will be able to navigate through the work at a level useful for their purposes and not one I completely determine.
The technology to produce
interactive, multimedia DVDs for scholarly purposes is only just
being created. I have no models to use. I am making this up
as I go along. Although a few anthropologists like Peter Biella,
Sarah Pink and Roderick Coover are preparing their own digital
ethnographies. I believe this approach to a pictorial ethnography
holds much promise. Only time will tell.
Endnotes
[1] I acknowledged that
many of the ideas expressed in the beginning of this paper have
been directly borrowed from my book Picturing Culture (Ruby 2000a).
Appendix 1 - Ethnographic Cinema (EC) - A Manifesto/A Provocation
Jay Ruby
So-called ethnographic films are, in fact, films about culture and not films that pictorially convey ethnographic knowledge. They are produced by professional filmmakers who have little or no knowledge of anthropology and by anthropologists who thoughtlessly follow the dictates of documentary realism.
For a cinema to exist that furthers the purposes of anthropology, the following must occur:
1. EC must be the work of academically educated and academically employed socio-cultural anthropologists. EC can only be a consequence of ethnographic research by trained ethnographers who professionally engage in academic discourse on a regular basis. EC must be an extension of their work as anthropologists, intellectuals and scholars.
2. EC must be avowedly anti-realist, anti-positivist, dissociated from the canons of documentary realism and free to borrow from all forms of cinema - fiction and non-fiction.
3. EC must seek to increase the agency of those imaged with techniques such as multivocality and to reflexively de-center the authority of the maker while at the same time accepting the moral burden of authorship.
4. EC must explore the limits of pictorial media as a means of anthropological expression.
5. If EC is to succeed it, will probably confuse its audience at first. It is therefore essential that its makers be painfully obvious and assist viewers.
6. EC must have modest production values, tiny budgets, low costs for production and distribution if it is to escape the restrictions of the commercial world. EC, therefore, has no economic potential. No one can make a living from its products. It is the act of the scholar seeking to communicate scholarly knowledge.
7. EC must be removed from the economic dictates of public and state television, funding agencies who except a popularly accessible product and distribution companies who must circulate work that produces income. New forms of funding and distribution must be created.
8. EC acknowledges the
inadequacy of all film festivals and other venues currently available.
It must seek to create screening and discussion environments
that emphasize scholarly debate about the contribution these works
make to an anthropological discourse.
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