9
Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Sensory Ethnography
Harnessing perspectives drawn from the human sciences, the arts, and the humanities, the aim of SEL is to support innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography, with original nonfiction media practices that explore the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human existence. As such, it encourages attention to the many dimensions of social experience and subjectivity that may only with difficulty be rendered with words alone.
From the website of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab1
If, at first, intelligent people could imagine that, when representing Other cultures, a picture is worth a thousand words, it was not long before those with a serious interest in anthropology and ethnographic filmmaking saw that, whereas written ethnography generally condensed months or years of study into a more or less accessible verbal form, whatever film imagery of preindustrial cultures was recorded and then edited into “complete” films—by men and women finding their way not merely into anthropology, but filmmaking—was little to be trusted. If even a written text compiled on the basis of long periods of research was limited in what it could reveal about Others, film, often recorded on the fly and/or quickly dramatized, tended to be not just limited, but superficial and prone to obvious distortions. This problem was quickly evident in the films of Lorna and John Marshall, Robert Gardner, and Timothy Asch, even to the filmmakers themselves: John Marshall was increasingly embarrassed by The Hunters, Bitter Melons, and his other early films about San peoples; and Asch’s The Ax Fight directly addresses dimensions of this issue.
The problem, of course, was that from the beginning too much was expected of cinema. The fact that film could combine image, sound, and even visual and spoken text suggested to some that film could tell us more about the world than could just the written word or the written word plus still photography. A generation of filmmaking and anthropological critique was necessary before it became clear that what cinema can do is reveal something different from what gets revealed in even the most intelligent and engaging prose. A written text on a culture or cultural practice can tell us what the writer has come to understand about that group or activity, can even help us imagine what it might like to be in a certain place and live a certain way, but a carefully made film can offer its audience a sensory experience that reflects and reflects on the actual experiences of others (including the filmmakers themselves) as they occurred in a specific place during a specific time.
As is suggested by the description on the Sensory Ethnography Lab’s (SEL) website, “sensory ethnography” does not assume that the process of filmmaking or the work that results from it need be limited by the conventions of the theatrical history of cinema, or even that SEL productions need involve images. “Original nonfiction media practices” are to be encouraged as long as they offer hope of providing more interesting and revealing experiences of “the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human existence.” One of the distinctive qualities of the films produced in conjunction with the lab has been a commitment to sound. It is typical of SEL films that we hear before we see (and after we see), and that sound is conceived not as an adjunct to image, an accompaniment, but as a complex, often intense auditory surround within which the imagery unfolds. The sound designs for SEL films are often created in collaboration with Ernst Karel, whose contributions to this body of work would be difficult to overestimate, and whose own sound works—CDs include Heard Laboratories (and/OAR, 2010) and Swiss Mountain Transport Systems (Gruenrekorder, 2011)—have opened new documentary territory and have been an important influence on SEL filmmakers.
By the end of the first decade of the new millennium, the Sensory Ethnography Lab had revived interest in ethnographic cinema in Cambridge by instigating the production of engaging, revealing, immersive sync-sound films, video installations, and sound works by young anthropologists-artists committed to using media as a means of communicating the broadest range of human experience.
ILISA BARBASH, LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR, AND SWEETGRASS
More than any other medium or art form, film uses experience to express experience.
ILISA BARBASH AND LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR2
By the time they arrived at Harvard in 2003, Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor had established themselves as important contributors to current thinking about ethnographic filmmaking. Both had earned master’s degrees in visual anthropology at the University of Southern California (USC), where they studied with Timothy (and Patsy) Asch, among others (while Castaing-Taylor was earning his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, Barbash taught anthropology at Berkeley and San Francisco State). Castaing-Taylor had been founding editor of Visual Anthropology Review; and he had edited Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994 (New York: Routledge, 1994). He and Barbash had collaborated on Cross Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)—like Pincus and Ascher’s The Filmmakers’ Handbook, a basic reference, in this case specifically for nonfiction filmmakers—and they had collaborated on two films: Made in USA (1990), a film about sweatshops and child labor in the Los Angeles garment industry, and In and Out of Africa (1992), a video about the transnational market for African art.
As Castaing-Taylor worked to establish what came to be called the Sensory Ethnography Lab (early on, it was called the Media Anthropology Lab), he and Barbash (who began working as assistant curator of media anthropology at the Peabody Museum in 2003) were also completing a project they had begun during their tenure at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where both had taught film and anthropology from 1998 to 2003. The project, a record of the last cowboys to lead herds of sheep into Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture, took various forms over several years and ultimately produced the feature documentary Sweetgrass (2009); nine installation pieces, each with five channels of sound; and four large photographic works.3 Sweetgrass and its satellite films represent a significant transition in Castaing-Taylor’s and Barbash’s thinking about anthropology and ethnographic cinema, and it is this thinking that became the theoretical foundation for the Sensory Ethnography Lab.
In and Out of Africa, Barbash and Castaing-Taylor’s thesis film at USC, is formally a relatively conventional documentary. It forgoes a voice-of-god narrator but relies very largely on interviews with Muslim art dealers (especially Gabai Baaré, a Hausa from Côte d’Ivoire), with artisans who produce and reproduce various forms of African art, and men and women in Europe and North America who buy and resell the work. The hour-long film intercuts between the interviews and shots of the locations where the art is made, shipped, and sold (the interviews function as narration for the location shots). African music often accompanies African scenes; classical European music is used for scenes at art galleries. In and Out of Africa is well shot and informative, both about the trade in African art and about the absurdities of art markets in general and especially those dealing in “indigenous” art. Bill Nichols has argued that, as an ethnographic film, In and Out of Africa is a breakthrough because it reveals how various cultural groups and histories are imbricated in the African art trade by means of “editing, or juxtaposition, in which situations, behavior, and comments amplify one another and prompt perceptions that may otherwise lie dormant. . . . Its mode of cinematic argumentation clearly provides the basis for an anthropology that is not a discipline of words.”4
By the time they began to explore Montana sheep ranching in 2001 for their next film project, Barbash and Castaing-Taylor had redefined the kind of film they felt was worth making. Both were well aware of the theoretically problematic aspects of even the canonical films that had pretended to document Other cultures; both were suspicious of the demonstration of expertise that ethnographic film seemed to require, and Castaing-Taylor in particular had grown increasingly disenchanted with academic writing.5 As Anna Grimshaw has suggested, the new project became an extension of, but also an escape from, typical academic life and what had become conventional academic thinking about anthropology and cinema.6 Barbash and Castaing-Taylor immersed themselves in the experiences of the sheep ranchers of Big Timber, Montana, and Castaing-Taylor accompanied the cowboys as they herded thousands of sheep into the mountains. Though the sheepherding project began before Barbash and Castaing-Taylor’s move to Harvard, the various parts of the project evolved along with the Sensory Ethnography Lab, and Sweetgrass became the first critical success related to the lab.
Throughout the shooting of the various elements of the sheep ranching and during the subsequent editing of the film and the various installation pieces, the filmmakers were less interested in recording and presenting information or demonstrating anthropological expertise than in conveying the experience of being present in a certain place and time as particular events (events with a considerable history and no apparent future) unfolded. For Castaing-Taylor in particular, who worked as a one-man crew shooting video and recording sound, Sweetgrass involved forms of labor analogous to what the cowboys were doing: carrying a heavy camera, climbing into the upper reaches of the Absaroka-Beartooth range (Castaing-Taylor largely on foot), and once there, keeping to the cowboys’ schedule. Editing the film was a question of creating a sense of the life of these cowboys as Castaing-Taylor had experienced it: that is, creating an intensified, engaging film experience based on and analogous to what seemed the essential elements of the experience of sheep ranching.
Sweetgrass is structured into a composite year-in-the-life of the sheep and sheep ranchers, beginning in winter and ending at the end of the summer pasturing, as John Ahern, one of the two cowboys who become the central focus of the film (Pat Connolly is the other), considers what he’ll be doing in the fall. The decision to begin the film during the winter, when the sheep are sheared and when ewes give birth to lambs (a process carefully manipulated by the sheep ranchers to ensure maximum productivity of lambs), and then to present the cowboys herding the sheep into the mountains at the beginning of summer came relatively late during the editing of the film. Shifting the shearing and the birthing of lambs to the beginning of Sweetgrass seems an attempt to resist seeing sheep ranching simply as an entrepreneurial activity, a process that produces saleable commodities. Barbash and Castaing-Taylor were committed to foregrounding the experiences of the people and animals involved in this process, or more specifically, to creating a sense of the ways in which humans and animals interrelated within the activity of sheep ranching as it had been practiced on the Raisland-Allestad Ranch for a century.
Castaing-Taylor shot the film insofar as possible in the classic observational documentary manner exemplified by Frederick Wiseman: that is, without intruding into the various sheep-ranching activities; and in the completed film Barbash and Castaing-Taylor rigorously avoided narration and extradiagetic music. However, while Wiseman sees himself as an essentially detached and neutral observer, both politically and in the sense that his decision to explore a particular institution is instigated by general curiosity rather than by detailed research,7 no one who has heard Barbash and Castaing-Taylor talk about Sweetgrass (or who has listened to the filmmakers’ gloss of the film on the commentary track on the Sweetgrass DVD) can be in any doubt about the extent of the historical, sociological, anthropological, and biological research that went into this project. Barbash and Castaing-Taylor educated themselves about the history of the domestication of sheep (it is thought that sheep were the first animals domesticated by humans), about the human communities across the planet that have supported sheep ranching, about the history of sheep ranching in general and this American instance of it, and about the physical environment of the area of Montana and Wyoming within which the events depicted in Sweetgrass take place. This research is not reported in Sweetgrass, but it is often subtly evident within the action of the film.
Further, as cinematographer, Castaing-Taylor sees himself as both a witness and a person sharing the experience he is recording. This is evident in the film’s fifth shot, a 45-second close-up of the head of a single bellwether ewe in a winter landscape (fig. 46): the ewe is first seen in profile, chewing (the previous shot is a close-up of several sheep jockeying for the solid feed that has been put out for them), then gradually she seems to become aware of the camera and looks generally in its direction, still chewing, and finally stops chewing and looks directly into the camera. For an extended moment Castaing-Taylor and this sheep are sharing the experience of observing each other. The moment is startling and funny, partly because the ewe seems to be looking not only at Castaing-Taylor but at us and at the entire project of documentary cinema. Often, Castaing-Taylor is literally immersed in the activities he films. For example, at the end of the “sheep wreck” passage (“sheep wreck” is the filmmakers’ name for the moment when an overgrown trail has stopped the progress of the herds into the mountains [fig. 47]), he films the sheep from sheep-butt level; throughout this 48-second shot, it is as if Castaing-Taylor is one of the sheep and we experience something of how it might look and sound to be part of the herd.
FIGURES 46 AND 47. Bellwether ewe looks at camera (top) and a moment of “sheep wreck” on the trail (bottom) in Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Sweetgrass (2009).
It is clear throughout Sweetgrass that Barbash and Castaing-Taylor were committed, insofar as was practical, to the unedited single shot. In general, the individual shots are unusually lengthy; more than a hundred of the film’s 148 shots are longer than 20 seconds; several are more than two minutes long; and many are in effect mini–motion pictures, full of subtle drama and suggestiveness. Early in the film, for example, the camera is filming from the bed of a truck that is driving through a pasture so that the roll of grass mounted on the back of the truck can unspool onto the ground for the hungry sheep; the shot lasts more than two minutes and ends soon after the last part of the bail falls off the truck. The unspooling grass seems a metaphor for the traditional cinematic apparatus of camera and projector—even perhaps for this film’s consistent use of extended takes.
Barbash and Castaing-Taylor were also committed to a highly experimental use of sound. Working with Ernst Karel, they found a way of generating an immensely complex environmental soundscape for Sweetgrass (among Cambridge filmmakers and films, the most obvious premonition of this aspect of Sweetgrass, and of other Sensory Ethnography Lab films, is Gardner’s Forest of Bliss [1985]). Since the arrival of sound-on-film at the end of the 1920s, the history of cinema, documentary as well as fiction film, has always privileged the human voice, and in particular, dialogue. Sweetgrass does include human dialogue—some of it engaging and funny—but this dialogue is but a small part of the auditory experience of the film. We hear the cowboys making a variety of sounds during the shearing and birthing sequences and during the sheep drive; and often we hear the cowboys talking or singing to themselves and to the sheep, the dogs, and the horses. The primary sound during most of Sweetgrass, however, is the bleating of the three thousand ewes and lambs, often a loud and intricate din within which indecipherable human voices can be heard yelling to one another or using walkie-talkies. Since lambs and ewes bleat in order to remain in communication with one another amid the mass of other sheep, these moments are emblematic of the complex reality of intra- and interspecies communication that has developed within the cultural activity of raising sheep. Once the herd and Ahern and Connolly have settled into the mountain pasturing, the environmental sounds of birds and other animals, and especially the sound of wind, become important. The relative quiet in the mountains—particularly in contrast to the deafening shearing sequence and after the relentless bleating of the sheep during the drive into the mountains—seems to be one of the factors that over the years has helped draw men into this demanding work.
Frequently in Sweetgrass the filmmakers (and Karel) explore what Castaing-Taylor calls the “aesthetic tension” between auditory and visual perspective (close-up sound is used in conjunction with distant action, and vice versa).8 For example, after Ahern and Connolly have been alone in the mountain pasturing area caring for the sheep for some weeks, the strenuousness and stress of their labor begins to tell, at least on Connolly. At one point, he discovers that the sheep have wandered down into an area that makes protecting them difficult, and he is furious. During a shot nearly two minutes long, recorded from a position far above the action, Connolly can be seen trying to drive the sheep back up to the pasturing area. Two developments occur simultaneously within the shot: Connolly launches into an extended barrage of obscenity, which is heard in auditory close-up; and after a moment, Castaing-Taylor begins a slow zoom back from the already distant view of the sheep and Connolly. The longer Connolly’s rant lasts, the funnier it becomes (funny in large measure because we can easily empathize);9 and the further Castaing-Taylor zooms out, the more impressive is the mountain vista the shot reveals. The combination of Connolly’s private fury and the increasingly expansive landscape demonstrates one of the ironies of this form of labor, and perhaps of labor in general: workaday stresses often blind us to the beauty that surrounds us. All in all, the sound experimentation in Sweetgrass recalls Peter Kubeka’s experiments with dialectic sound and image in Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to Africa, 1966), though often in Sweetgrass, Barbash, Castaing-Taylor, and Karel are working dialectically with synchronized sound.10
Another aspect of the unusual balance in Sweetgrass between the visual and the auditory involves the use of “long takes” of two kinds. During the longest shot in the film proper (2 minutes, 36 seconds; a final shot during the credit sequence is a few seconds longer), a woman works to entice an ewe to join her lamb in a pen separate from the rest of the flock. This process involves various actions on the part of ewe and woman, all included within the continuous shot, the length of which creates an implicit tension that reflects the considerable patience demonstrated by the woman. In other instances it is the sound that’s continuous. One of the film’s most memorable sequences takes place in the mountains: as evening sets in, Ahern prepares the sheep for the night. He is heard gently talking and singing to the sheep and to himself, working to calm the ewes and lambs. His sweet monologue—it is clear that, unlike Connolly, he loves the sheep and this work—is continuous, while we see Ahern in various contexts and from various distances in a series of shots, one of them a 36-second long-shot of Ahern on horseback crossing the horizon—a canonical image from western movies.
On the commentary track for Sweetgrass, Castaing-Taylor describes the bell around the neck of the bellwether ewe recorded in the fifth shot, as “made . . . in Switzerland by a Finnish-German American sheepherder who ended up marrying a French shepherdess and moving to the Alps. So it’s [Sweetgrass is] already culturally syncretic and hybrid.” Though this is information that most viewers would not deduce from a screening of the film, it is a clue to an important dimension of the thinking behind Sweetgrass. A certain strand in the weave of ethnographic film—originated by Flaherty in Nanook of the North and Moana and epitomized by John Marshall’s The Hunters and Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds—has proposed to offer a representation of a traditional culture “uncorrupted” by modernization. For Barbash and Castaing-Taylor the quest to represent this kind of cultural “purity” is pointless, because culture by its very nature is always in transition, and every particular cultural practice is regularly confronted by, even formed by, influences from outside itself. This is suggested in a variety of ways during Sweetgrass.
As the sheepherders move the sheep down the main street of Big Timber, on the way to the mountains, we see what looks like the traditional town in a classic western—though the Radio Shack store across the street from the camera undercuts what at first seems a romantic evocation of the past. The gorgeous mountain vistas where the sheep are grazed evoke the paintings of the Rocky Mountain School, as well as the western, and yet, even when Ahern and Connolly seem most isolated from the “impurities” of civilization, Connolly uses his cell phone to call home and whine about the difficulty of his job to his mother. As the sheepherders bring the sheep back down from the mountains near the end of the film, we see a sign on a tree indicating that these events have been recorded in Gallatin National Forest, reminding us of the long history of debates about land use and preservation that, in this particular instance, have directly affected the sheepherding depicted in the film: pressure from environmentalists to keep the Yellowstone area entirely wild (within the national park’s legal boundaries!) is one of the reasons why the history of pasturing sheep in the mountains near Big Timber is coming to an end.
Sweetgrass includes a number of reflexive moments. From time to time, the ranchers speak to Castaing-Taylor or refer to him. For example, when the Allestad family and friends leave Ahern, Connolly, Castaing-Taylor, and the sheep to return to Big Timber, two of the Allestads yell, “See ya’, Lucien!” Later on, the camera is positioned within a tent; Connolly is washing dishes in front of the tent and Ahern is sitting inside. They are chatting about this and that, when Ahern looks toward the back of the tent and says, “Kinda warm in here; Lucien went to sleep.” The sheep, too, sometimes respond directly to Castaing-Taylor’s presence; he and his camera make them nervous when he’s too close. It would have been an easy matter to eliminate these moments the way Fred Wiseman does and the way most nature films do, in order to sustain the illusion of an invisible observer; but it is precisely because such invisibility is an illusion that Barbash and Castaing-Taylor avoid it. Castaing-Taylor’s presence is in fact part of the experience he is documenting, as in a sense our seeing the film is as well: Sweetgrass is about the transformation of a way of life and about the cultural practice of memorializing it within the history of cinema.
Barbash and Castaing-Taylor’s interest is in the nuances of hybridity and transformation; they do not view change as corruption, but as an inevitable dimension of all cultural practices. Though Sweetgrass is an instance of salvage ethnography, it is not a film about “how things were,” in the sense that things had been a particular way since time immemorial. It is a record of how things were changing in a particular environment at a particular moment in history. This is emphasized by the two final shots of the film. Immediately following the herding of the sheep into the Big Timber stockyard, the film cuts to a close-up of Ahern in the passenger’s seat of a truck being driven by another man (fig. 48). The driver asks him what he has planned for the fall; Ahern responds, “I wasn’t gonna worry about it for a week or two,” and the shot continues visually for another minute, as the truck speeds down the highway, the landscape whizzing by out the driver’s window; when the screen goes dark, the sound of the truck on the road continues, accompanying the first set of closing credits. More than anyone else in the film, Ahern has come to represent the tradition of sheepherding in the American West, and seeing him sitting quietly in the truck, looking ahead, simultaneously prolongs our sense of Ahern’s serenity about the work he does and presents him as a man in motion, being carried away from the past and into a fast-approaching future that remains beyond his ken, and ours.
FIGURES 48. John Ahern (on left) moving onto the next job at the conclusion of Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Sweetgrass (2009). Courtesy Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor.
The final image of Sweetgrass is a vista of the Beartooth range in early fall. The shot is devoid of human presence, but the sounds of animal life can be heard. Over this stationary, 2-minute, 40-second shot, extensive rolling credits thank the people from the Allestad Ranch and from the Big Timber area who contributed in one way or another to the production of the film, as well as a considerable number of people with whom Barbash and Castaing-Taylor conferred during the editing. This concluding moment can be read in various ways. The mountain vista suggests perhaps that wildness remains at least part of the reality of the American West and that the demise of sheep ranching will enhance this wildness, transforming this environment once again. That this landscape is visible behind the extensive rolling credits (surprisingly extensive for a film that involved a one-person crew, two editors, and a sound designer) is a final reminder that we always see the natural world within the context of human society and its history of exploiting natural resources for what have been defined as the necessities of life—including, in our transforming moment, the “necessity” of cinema.
“SHEEPLE”: CASTAING-TAYLOR’S AUDIO-VIDEO INSTALLATIONS
Sheep and humans have existed uneasily with each other since we first domesticated them in Mesopotamia ten-thousand-odd years ago in the Neolithic Revolution; sheep were quite possibly the first domesticated livestock animal. They gave humanity our first staple proteins: milk and meat. Not to mention their skins, for shelter—and a couple of thousand years later, also their wool. They wouldn’t exist without us, and couldn’t survive without us, because of the way we’ve bred them (to maximize both birth weight and the number of live births) over the millennia. So I don’t think you can distinguish between “people” and “sheep.” It’s more that we’re so many variations of sheeple.
LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR11
In the spring of 2009, I was invited to speak at a conference sponsored by the graduate students in the Department of Comparative Literature and Film at the University of Iowa called “Avant-Doc: Intersections of Avant-Garde and Documentary Film.” The focus of this conference was what was coming to seem a liminal zone between the two film histories, evidenced by the more and more frequent production of films that fit both categories or that function somewhere between them.12 The fact that an “Avant-Doc” conference could be organized suggests that what in earlier decades may have seemed a set of intermittent and unrelated crossovers within the relatively distinct histories of documentary and avant-garde film is increasingly understood as an evolving tradition. The proliferating combination of social and environmental anxieties during recent years seems to have energized a desire on the part of some filmmakers to combine cinema’s ability to create representations of cultures and subcultures (long considered the focus of documentary) with its capacity for retraining perception and providing experiences akin to meditation (generally identified with certain forms of avant-garde film). While Sweetgrass can be said to rest more fully on the documentary side of this zone, the short installation videos that emerged from the project, and most especially, Hell Roaring Creek (2010), seem closer to the work of filmmakers generally identified with the American avant-garde (Castaing-Taylor is credited as the sole author of the installation videos).
In Hell Roaring Creek the sheep and sheep ranchers mass at Hell Roaring Creek at dawn, then cross the creek. The piece is composed of three sustained sync-sound shots (6 minutes, 42 seconds; 8 minutes, 21 seconds; 4 minutes, 11 seconds, respectively), filmed by a tripod-mounted camera set up in the middle of the creek facing the rushing water so that when the herd and herdsmen cross the creek they move into the frame from screen right and out of the frame to screen left. The first and second shot, and the second and third are separated by 10-second moments of darkness. Each successive shot involves a slight change in the composition: for the second shot, Castaing-Taylor zoomed in slightly; for shot three, he zoomed back out. As in Sweetgrass, sound is very important in Hell Roaring Creek; indeed, its importance is dramatized by the fact that we hear the creek for 42 seconds before we see it; then, at the end, we continue to hear it for 30 seconds after the screen goes dark (the sound seems continuous through the 10-second moments that separate the shots).
There are three general forms of movement within Hell Roaring Creek: the continuous motion of the water of the creek rushing toward the camera; the real-time arrival of dawn, gradually lightening the scene; and the motion of sheep, cowboys, horses, and dogs arriving at the creek, then crossing. At the beginning, the film seems to be about the creek itself. After about a minute, slight movements begin to be visible and sounds other than the creek begin to be faintly audible, and just after two minutes, we hear a dog bark and soon realize the herd is nearby. The most dramatic action in the video, of course, is the herd and herdsmen negotiating the shallow rushing water, a process that begins 4 minutes, 36 seconds into the video. As he shot footage for Sweetgrass and the shorter videos, Castaing-Taylor was careful to look at the sheep as both a collectivity and as a group of individuals, even intelligent individuals (on the commentary track for the Sweetgrass DVD, he says, “For the proverbial dumbest animal, they [sheep] have an amazing kind of intelligence”), and the double nature of sheep is dramatically evident in Hell Roaring Creek. No two sheep seem to cross the creek in the same way. The lambs often hurry across; the ewes tend to move more slowly and with more dignity. Some sheep are content to cross by themselves; some cross in small clusters; some negotiate the crossing in a series of leaps; others, at a run; still others, slowly and carefully. Some are quiet, others vocally expressive.
For anyone familiar with the full range of film history, including the developments that led to cinema itself, Hell Roaring Creek is evocative of Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies. Castaing-Taylor uses the rigorously framed, only very gradually changing image of this mountain landscape, as the “grid” against which to measure the movements of the animals—though he goes Muybridge one better by allowing us to study the sheep as they move through a natural environment (fig. 49).13
As a cinematic meditation on a particular place and moment, Hell Roaring Creek is an accomplished instance of what has become in recent decades a tradition in American avant-garde filmmaking, exemplified by Larry Gottheim’s breakthrough Fog Line (1970) and much of the work of Peter Hutton, James Benning, and Sharon Lockhart, all of whom have worked with rigorously organized, extended shots of landscape and cityscape.14 The most obvious distinction between the Sweetgrass installation videos and the work of these “avant-garde” filmmakers is the nature of Barbash and Castaing-Taylor’s commitment to the animals and people recorded. Gottheim, Hutton, and Benning often use the presence of people in their films as a generalized marker of human presence and an indication of scale rather than as their focus. This is analogous to the way in which human beings and animals are positioned within nineteenth-century American landscape painting, especially in the work of the Hudson River School, Rocky Mountain School, and Luminist painters. In Sweetgrass and in Hell Roaring Creek (and the other installation videos) human and animal activities within the landscape are the focus, and Castaing-Taylor’s extended shots allow for a deeper awareness of the particulars of the experiences of individual animals and people. Like Benning and Hutton, Barbash and Castaing-Taylor are committed to landscape, but—to return to nineteenth-century American landscape painting—more in the manner of Winslow Homer than of Thomas Cole, Thomas Moran, or Martin Johnson Heade.
FIGURE 49. Hell Roaring Creek as the “sheeple” begin to cross, in Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Hell Roaring Creek (2010). Courtesy Lucien Castaing-Taylor.
Except for Hell Roaring Creek, all the installation pieces Castaing-Taylor edited from the Sweetgrass footage are reworkings of events depicted in Sweetgrass. In some cases, the differences between what is included in Sweetgrass and the relevant gallery piece are relatively few. For example, the primary difference between Daybreak on the Bedground (2010) and the comparable sequence from Sweetgrass is the inclusion in the former of a coughing fit John Ahern has before riding down to join the herd. In other instances, the differences are considerable.
The High Trail (2010) involves the most elaborate reworking of a sequence from Sweetgrass, specifically a portion of the movement of the herd down from the high mountain pasture at the end of the summer. In Sweetgrass this portion of the descent is depicted in a single, 80-second shot that begins as a wide mountain vista; after about 20 seconds, during which we hear the distant sound of sheep, but cannot see where in the image the sheep might be, the camera begins a slow zoom into the scene, revealing that in fact the sheep are winding along what appears to be a precarious drop-off. This shot is followed by a brief shot of the moon and a bit of treetop. In The High Trail the movement of the sheep down the mountain along the drop-off involves nine shots, beginning with an expanded version of the extended shot used in Sweetgrass. Here, the shot lasts nearly 2½ minutes, and the zoom doesn’t begin for 75 seconds, extending the mystery of the location of the sheep. During the final 30 seconds of the shot, we hear the sheepherders talking on walkie-talkies and the quiet voice of Lawrence Allestad complimenting his dog on doing a good job; Allestad’s voice continues through the next seven shots, as Castaing-Taylor intercuts between often beautiful compositions of the sheep in motion, all of these shots filmed closer to the herd than the original shot, and two shots of a wild mountain goat who seems fascinated with the sheeple. The sequence concludes with the shot of the moon and treetop from Sweetgrass.
Castaing-Taylor’s sequence films (to use John Marshall’s term) offer an opportunity to consider how editing strategies vary depending on context. For Barbash and Castaing-Taylor to finish a coherent feature about sheep ranching, much detail needed to be eliminated; but for a short video about a particular moment within this process to be coherent, more detail was necessary. Of course, though the short videos certainly work as theatrical projections, their ultimate context, so far as Castaing-Taylor was concerned, was as art gallery installations. I have not, so far, had the opportunity to see any of these pieces presented as installations,15 but I imagine that within a gallery (and here I’m thinking of galleries as primarily an urban phenomenon), the subject matter of these videos would have a more powerful impact than seeing them projected. It is not unusual to see expansive imagery of the American West in a movie theater: Brokeback Mountain (2005), which also includes spectacular imagery of sheepherding, is a case in point. But to walk into an urban gallery space and find oneself immersed in the sound and imagery of any of the scenes depicted in Castaing-Taylor’s installations could be fascinating and powerful—indeed, for those familiar with nineteenth-century American landscape painting, the experience might evoke the dramatic ways in which some of the epic paintings of the American West by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran were originally presented to the public.16
THE SENSORY ETHNOGRAPHY LAB: J.P. SNIADECKI, STEPHANIE SPRAY, VÉRÉNA PARAVEL, AND LEVIATHAN
The approach to filmmaking that instigated and informed the making of Sweetgrass was institutionalized as Castaing-Taylor developed the Sensory Ethnography program, and it has been absorbed by the students in the program. As Barbash and Castaing-Taylor were struggling to find a satisfactory final form for Sweetgrass, Castaing-Taylor was showing various versions of the edited footage to students and colleagues at and beyond Harvard. Like Ed Pincus, whose early screenings of rushes and early edits of portions of Diaries helped give other filmmakers the confidence to make personal documentaries, Castaing-Taylor’s screening of early edits of Sweetgrass and its satellite installations helped open what seemed a new avenue for aspiring filmmakers interested in documenting the ways in which human beings function within their environments. The Sensory Ethnography Lab is a young program, but it has been productive of impressive films by several filmmakers, among them J.P. Sniadecki, Stephanie Spray, and Véréna Paravel.
Sniadecki’s Chaiqian (Demolition) (2008) makes clear both the continuities between the Sweetgrass project and Sniadecki’s work and several distinctions. The first shot of Chaiqian (Demolition) ends with a 360-degree panorama that reveals the contours of a particular landscape—a city block in Chengdu, China, that is being redeveloped—that most of the remaining film will explore and provides a subtle metaphor for both the film and the world it is exploring: before the extended pan begins, Sniadecki records a man, one of the managers of the demolition site, relaxing on what appears to be a broad steel surface that rests on the ground. Nearly two minutes into the shot, another man, visible far below the plane on which the relaxing man is sitting, walks into the image from the bottom left, then seems to walk under what we now realize is the top of some kind of steel structure.17 The arrival of the second man instigates the panning that subsequently follows his walk through the space, but Sniadecki’s initial revelation that what seems a simple, level space is actually multilayered prefigures the issue of social class, which becomes increasingly evident as Chaiqian proceeds.
During the 62 minutes of Chaiqian, Sniadecki documents the labors of a group of migrant workers who are combing through the rubble from whatever structure has previously been on this space for rebar.18 The process involves several backhoes that work at shaking the rebar loose from the cement that encases it; and men working with a variety of tools finish the job of cleaning the strands of rebar, piling them together, and finally loading them onto trucks. Sniadecki often films in close proximity to these events, sometimes mimicking the workers’ actions in his style. In one particularly elaborate shot (it lasts 4 minutes, 26 seconds)—as in Sweetgrass, Hell Roaring Creek, and Sniadecki’s earlier film, Songhua, the shooting pace throughout Chaiqian models patience—Sniadecki follows a man who is carrying a tank up the main pile of rubble, where a second man connects this tank to a compressed air tank, then walks to a position past a man pounding cement with a sledgehammer, lights the nozzle of his blowtorch, and goes to work, apparently dividing the rebar pieces into manageable lengths: the continuity of the several actions is reflected in Sniadecki’s continuous shot, and each new portion of the workers’ actions necessitates an obvious readjustment of Sniadecki’s position.19
As Chaiqian develops, Sniadecki’s relationship with the workers seems to evolve. For approximately the first half of the film, he is just a close observer of their labors, but soon the workers begin to wonder about him: about 15 minutes into the film, one man asks, “Where did you film these last few days?,” and Sniadecki tells him, “I was resting and taking care of things.” He is invited to eat with the workers, though he refuses, apparently preferring to continue filming, and later is the subject of a meal-time conversation among the managers that reveals some of the particulars of his filming process:
“He gave a pack of cigarettes to each worker.”
“Who?”
“The foreigner.”
“Everyone got a pack.”
At the end of the work shift, the laborers use a hose to wash their clothes and make plans for the evening (some of them joke about calling a “little sister”—a prostitute); the day ends when several of the workers and Sniadecki walk to the central square of Chengdu, where the workers pose for a portrait in front of a statue of Chairman Mao and are subsequently accosted by a young woman police officer concerned about a group of migrant workers not only being in this public place but being filmed. An 8-second moment of darkness brings the film to what is apparently the next morning. There is less activity than on the previous day, and Sniadecki learns that most of the workers have left the site: “I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye,” he complains. “It’s a little sad.”
In the implicit analogy between the laborers’ work and Sniadecki’s filmmaking, Chaiqian evokes The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), though, of course, the social transformation evident in China in July 2007, when Chaiqian was shot, was (and remains) quite different from, in some ways the inverse of, the transformation into an industrialized communist state celebrated in the Vertov film. Chaiqian (and Songhua, Sniadecki’s exploration of life along the Songhua River in northern China as it flows through the city of Harbin) can be understood as inventive contributions to the tradition of the city symphony (that form of film about urban life that depicts a composite day in the life of a city); both films are synecdoches: that is, a relatively limited portion of each city is used to represent a larger urban space.20
The fact that Sniadecki focuses on the harvesting of the rebar rather than on the destruction of the buildings that were originally in this space or the construction the demolition has made way for suggests his commitment to the labors that change involves rather than the particulars of before and after. For Sniadecki, this process is worthy of attention, primarily because of his respect for the laborers, but also because the workers’ considerable efforts are productive and make possible the conservation of an important resource. Near the end of the film, Sniadecki asks Mr. Deng, one of the managers of the operation, how much rebar has been taken from the site and Deng says he thinks it’s more than 200 tons. Sniadecki is interested in what can be saved as the past transitions into the future—both as an environmentally political person and as a filmmaker.
Ethnographic film has traditionally functioned, and in the work of the filmmakers associated with the Sensory Ethnography Lab, continues to function, as a form of salvage ethnography. Traditionally, however, the disappearing way of life has involved the arrival of modern industry within a non-urban setting. Chaiqian focuses on a dimension of urban experience that is itself transitional, ephemeral, continually disappearing, then appearing again somewhere else. The need to demolish a building requires the formation of a community of men (mostly men, but some women: near the end of Chaiqian, Sniadecki shares a moment with a woman laborer who is reminded of her own son by some bicycling boys).21 These men and women grow to know each other, but when the job is done, this community moves on or disperses, is “demolished” along with whatever physical structure was involved. Sniadecki’s sadness at not having had a chance to say good-bye to the workers he has gotten to know, and in a sense has worked with, is a modern, urban vestige of the poignant loss implicit in so many salvage ethnography projects.
Though her films have much in common stylistically with Barbash and Castaing-Taylor’s and Sniadecki’s—like them, she uses extended shots and complex soundscapes—Stephanie Spray’s decisions about what to film and how to function in relation to what she films reveal a somewhat different sensibility. Spray seems less concerned with finding a reason to film what she films—the salvage ethnography reason evident in Sweetgrass and in Chaiqian, or the environmentally political reason in Songhua (where one of the themes is the pollution of the river)—than in recording the experience of simply being present with families in rural Nepal during their day-to-day activities over long periods of time.22
Perhaps the most unusual dimension of Spray’s films is the way in which she positions herself and her camera in relation to events. In her earliest films, Kale and Kale (2007) and Monsoon-Reflections (2008) the camera is handheld by Spray, often as she sits on the ground. Even when she is following someone walking, her camera generally records from a position below waist level. In Monsoon-Reflections, a depiction of the labor of several women, Spray establishes this ground-level position within the film’s opening 2-minute shot, during which we see a young woman (Bindu Gayek) kneeling to grind peppers and garlic with a stone, recorded indoors and in-close, at the level of Gayek’s hands. In combination with the shot’s length, Spray’s physical position as cameraperson, or at least the position that seems implied by the position of her camera, seems the essence of humility, a meditation pose. Although Castaing-Taylor and Sniadecki accept their status as “foreigners” within the worlds they film, Spray attempts to achieve an unusual kind of inclusion, where she can meditate on the moment-to-moment realities of Nepalese daily life as if she were a member of this family. Indeed, in As Long as There’s Breath (2009), the Gayek women often refer to Spray as “daughter” and sometimes talk with her at length, asking questions about her family.
Like Barbash, Castaing-Taylor and Sniadecki (particularly in Songhua), Spray expands the limited space revealed by the frame of her video camera with highly complex sound environments (Ernst Karel did Spray’s and Sniadecki’s sound designs). Her films often use image and sound in a kind of dialectic, where what we are seeing is not what is most evident in the sound. Untitled (2010), a single, continuous 14-minute shot—recorded as usual, from a position close to the ground—focuses on a man and woman sitting on the steps of a small village temple. The man is quietly drunk and the woman, who has also been drinking, teases him, pulling hairs out of his face and chest, playfully slapping him; and their little daughter and son ring a bell next to the dwelling, seemingly to have fun annoying their father. The man and woman face both the camera and another road: several people who pass behind the camera are acknowledged by the couple, and the noises of motorized vehicles seem to pass close to the scene but, again, behind the camera. On one level Spray’s way of working with sound in relation to her imagery recalls the sound-image games James Benning plays with viewers in films like 11 X 14 (1976) and 13 Lakes (2004); but it is also a visual way of demonstrating that she is not a detached observer, but someone within the circle of the action, interested not so much in providing us with information as in being immersed, and immersing viewers, within another way of life.
As Long as There’s Breath, another film about the Gayek family, and in particular Bindu and Chet Kumari, is stylistically consistent with Spray’s earlier work, but it has a more dramatic structure and is more cognizant of the political realities of Nepalese life than the earlier films. The drama of As Long as There’s Breath is evident on two levels. As we watch daily activities and listen to the conversations among the Gayek family, it becomes clear that they are waiting for a visit by Kamal Gayek, the oldest son of Bindu and Bhakte Gayek, who has joined the YCL (the Youth Communist League), an illegal Maoist group. Nearly every conversation in the film at some point refers to Kamal and the family’s expectation that he will visit, and though Bindu and Chet Kumari are told that Kamal has just been seen in the village while they’ve been working in a rice paddy and Bindu leaves to find her son, Kamal never makes an appearance. In the film’s concluding shot, Bindu expresses her worry about her son’s safety. On this level, As Long as There’s Breath is reminiscent of Waiting for Godot, and though the family’s concern for Kamal seems more serious than the action in Beckett’s comic play, in fact, Spray’s film is also full of humor, which provides the film’s other dramatic level.
As Long as There’s Breath is punctuated by a series of conversations among Bindu, Bhakte, and Chet Kumari, and in other instances, among groups of women; and these conversations are often, at least for an American audience, surprising in their candidness. At one point, a group of women sitting on a porch discuss sexuality: first, Bindu talks about a wife who would “climb trees and then spread herself out for her bother-in-law”; then the women talk about dildos. One neighbor apparently has a wooden one, and Bindu remarks how smooth it is and that using it doesn’t make you itch. Apparently, this neighbor asked her husband to get it for her before he left to work in India. Then the conversation turns to a widow, who received a rubber dildo when she went to get her pension: a pump is “attached to it that makes it big and erect” and it has two “potatoes” underneath; “you lie down and put it in. Then you tell it how long you want it to run . . .”; “When you’re satisfied, it turns off and shrinks to a little wad.”
While Spray’s films and Sniadecki’s early films resulted from the filmmakers’ immersion over substantial periods of time in far-flung locations, Sensory Ethnography Lab filmmakers have also explored cultural experiences closer to home, in several instances in New York City. Indeed, these films exemplify the commitment of the SEL to a sense of culture as continuous transformation, interpenetration, and imbrication at least as obviously as any of those discussed so far. Of the New York City films, Foreign Parts (2010), the feature-length collaboration of Sniadecki and Véréna Paravel, has been the most successful, achieving a level of visibility comparable to that of Sweetgrass.23 An exploration of the automobile junkyard at Willets Point, Queens, Foreign Parts was originally Paravel’s idea, and a spin-off of an earlier film, 7 Queens (2008), during which Paravel walked through some of the neighborhoods along the Number 7 subway line in order to experience the myriad ethnic communities that are serviced by the line.
As Paravel has explained, the moment she first saw Willets Point she knew that this environment would be the subject of her next film, and also that, because Willets Point can be a dangerous environment, the project would profit from a male collaborator.24 It is easy to imagine what made the first sight of Willets Point so powerful for Paravel: its 250 shops, dealing with every aspect of automobile maintenance and repair, and its location near Citi-Field (the new home of the New York Mets) and LaGuardia Airport as well as the Number 7 subway line offer an unusually complex visual and auditory field, a phantasmagoria of image and sound (Ernst Karel would be responsible for the sound edit and mix). Sniadecki came on board in the summer of 2008, and the two shared in the filming of the junkyard, soon to be a casualty of redevelopment by the city of New York: Foreign Parts captures the routine of Willets Point during what appears to be one of its final years.
The primary focus of Foreign Parts is a set of interesting individuals: Luis and Sara Zaplain, a couple who live in a van (Luis freelances at the junkyard and is often in prison); Julia, an elderly woman who has lived in a small van much of her life and seems to be Willets Point’s resident beggar; and Joe Ardizzone, the lone legal resident of the junkyard, who has lived in Willets Point for all of his seventy-six years. And like Sweetgrass, Chaiqian (Demolition), and several of Spray’s films, Foreign Parts is much involved in depicting labor and the spaces in which labor takes place. Paravel and Sniadecki also seem particularly concerned with revealing the ethnic complexity of Willets Point. Early in the film, two men sitting in a doorway sing along with a Spanish-language song about Puerto Rico on the radio, and in the following shot, two Hassidic men maneuver around the ubiquitous puddles to a shop where a man is studying Judaism.
As is true in their earlier films, Paravel and Sniadecki do more than observe. They become part of the life of the junkyard, interviewing a range of individuals who work there and following the lives of the Zaplains, Julia, and Ardizzone across the months. At one point, Julia is recorded dancing with whoever is holding the camera or perhaps with the camera itself; when Ardizzone goes to City Hall to find out information about the city’s plans for his neighborhood, the filmmakers follow him; and when Luis Zaplain goes to jail upstate, the filmmakers remain in touch with Sara during the lonely months and are present when Luis returns—indeed, Sara finds out about Luis being released on Paravel’s cell phone, and as he and Sara are reunited, Sniadecki tells Luis, “You look good! Mind if we film?,” and Luis answers, “No, go ahead,” and greets Paravel on camera, hugging her, before he and Sara walk off together (fig. 50).
Paravel and Sniadecki shot at Willets Point off and on for two years, and the film is arranged as a seasonal cycle, beginning and ending in summer. The cyclic structure suggests the considerable history of this junkyard—the work of junking and repairing cars has been going on year-round in Willets Point for decades. Paravel and Sniadecki’s frequent wide-angle framing of the activities in the junkyard evokes Robert Gardner’s compositions in Forest of Bliss (1986): we see many layers of activity at various distances from the camera simultaneously and hear many layers of sound, all conditioned by the natural environment as it is affected by the seasons (Willets Point, next to an inlet of Flushing Bay, is often partially under water and is home to many birds). During the 80 minutes of Foreign Parts, the rhythms of the junkyard and the panorama of the many men and women who work there (a text at the conclusion of the film estimates the number of workers at two thousand) become familiar.
FIGURE 50. Luis and Sara Zaplain, reunited at Willets Point aft er Luis's release from prison, in Véréna Paravel and John Paul Sniadecki's Foreign Parts (2010). Courtesy Véréna Paravel and John Paul Sniadecki.
As depicted in Foreign Parts, Willets Point is a sensuous place. In the earliest sequence in the film, a man on a forklift shakes a car apart, revealing its innards; he cuts hoses and tubes so that fluids run out. This sequence creates a context for both the “intimacies” these workers have with automobiles and for the filmmakers’ intimate engagement with the place and the people who work there. Essentially, the junkyard becomes a metaphor for the process of filmmaking: Paravel and Sniadecki “take Willets Point apart”—recording images that represent one or another dimension of the place and warehousing the results—then, during the editing process, they put the usable parts together into a piece they hope can move those who see the results.
In this age of hysterical consumption and endless distraction, it has become commonplace for people, especially young people, to escape from sensory awareness of their daily surround by reducing their focus to the miniature screens of their smart phones. These screens offer the panoply of codifiable information that seems necessitated by the demands of social interchange and the pressures of education and work within an economically precarious society. Implicitly the phones reduce the world, or at least those aspects of the world necessary for practical life, to what seems a manageable size. The sensory world is increasingly understood as a distraction from the electronic environment within which smart phones (and all our other digital devices for accessing information and communicating with others) function. As a result, it is hardly surprising that a new generation of motion picture artists would become interested in confronting this tendency toward the miniaturization of sensual experience, that Castaing-Taylor and his SEL filmmaker colleagues would dedicate themselves to the production of motion picture experiences that evoke the power and fascinations of the sensory world.
Nevertheless, Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan (2012) is surprising—its immersion of its audience within the audio-visual surround created from the filmmakers’ experiences on fishing boats shipping out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, feels not only overwhelming, but quite new in the annals of modern theatrical cinema. While the film’s title seems to be a reference to the biblical leviathan (the film’s opening quotations from the Book of Job confirm the biblical reference), the leviathan in Leviathan is the film itself. Made to be shown on the big screen with surround sound, Leviathan swallows us—regurgitating us out of the theater at the end of 90 minutes, exhausted and happy to have lived through what is as close to a sensory trauma as any documentary in recent memory.
Of course, there are precedents for Leviathan. The nineteenth-century maritime paintings of Winslow Homer and J.M.W. Turner, for example, and on a different register, the action painting of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning: Castaing-Taylor–Paravel’s digital cameras-in-motion seem at least as close an approximation to the procedures of action painting as Stan Brakhage’s gestural 16mm filming of the late 1950s, which has often been compared with the action painters’ gestural brushwork. There are cinematic precedents as well, including Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes (The Blood of the Beasts, 1949), as well as Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), which is regularly shown to Sensory Ethnography Lab students, and Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss (1986).
What will most powerfully strike most viewers of Leviathan is the soundscape of the film, designed first by Ernst Karel, then re-engineered by Hollywood sound designer Jacob Ribicoff (The Wrestler, Revolutionary Road). In Leviathan, as in most of the films to come out of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, sound comes before image and has sensory impact at least as powerful and complex as the imagery. In this case, the near-deafening noise of the fishing boat and of the processing of the fish and shellfish creates an aural “nest” within which human speech can rarely be made out. If the film’s spectacular imagery completes the experience of the film, it does not deflect attention from the sound. Even as we sometimes struggle to see what we’re seeing and to understand how it fits within the daily round of the fishing boats, we continue to struggle, as the filmmakers must have, to become accustomed to the din of the industrial process of harvesting the ocean.
The endless motion of the boat, buffeted by waves and wind, is continually visceral: severed fish heads float toward us, then away, toward us, then away; the view out the side of the boat reveals a nearly black ocean—much of Leviathan was shot at night—that seems to move one way as boat and camera roll another and as the inevitable flock of seagulls floats above the fray, waiting for fish scraps to be washed overboard. Often, we are (literally) immersed in the film, as the camera (thanks to some modifications by Leonard Retel Helmrich) reveals what’s going on around the boat under the surface of the sea. Throughout Leviathan, the intense demands of the dangerous work being done on these boats—some of the most dangerous work on the planet—and the stamina and skill of the men who are dedicated to it are obvious. Throughout Leviathan we are experiencing not only the labor of the fishermen, but the labor of the filmmakers themselves, from inside their experience as we feel rocked to and fro, continually astonished that the theatrical experience of documentary cinema, even after more than a century, can still powerfully reinvigorate our awareness of the sensory world.
Earlier in this study, I described what I called the “occupational hazard” of personal documentary—the fact that as family dynamics change, a personal documentary filmmaker can find that what was once an admired and appreciated film has become a familial problem. Ethnographic filmmaking, too, has its occupational hazards. What may at one time have seemed obvious to ethnographic filmmakers about a cultural group, that is, what they assumed was “true” or important according to their understanding of then-current anthropological research, has often been rendered misguided and false by subsequent research. Indeed, decisions that may have been made with the best intentions—for example, John Marshall’s deciding for his first major film, The Hunters, to portray the !Kung San as an isolated communal band of hunters, noble and peaceful, a people with much to teach us—have often come to seem, even to the filmmakers themselves, a myopic romanticizing of history that ignored the broader realities of that moment. In a sense, a fictional film is freed from the need to be accurate, but a documentary, especially an ethnographic documentary (to be ethnographic) must be true to its subject—and yet this is virtually impossible because both the filmmakers and those depicted are in continual transformation (the presence of the filmmaking itself is evidence of this).
However, even if we were to agree that Marshall, Gardner, and Asch often didn’t “get it right” in anthropological terms, that they sometimes substituted their own romantic assumptions for what now seems reality, there seems little question that their initial motivations, at least those they were conscious of, were decent and humane, and that their willingness to devote themselves to observing and recording ways of life distant from their own, even if this meant putting themselves in harm’s way, and to make these ways of life familiar to others, is evidence of a deep commitment both to a broader understanding of human experience and to an expanded vision of what is possible for cinema. Further, their very failures to recognize that their envisioning of others was largely a projection of themselves allows their films to function for us in a new way—as emblems not of the Truth of other cultures, but of the complex realities of limited, fallible human beings working to understand each other. If ethnographic film has often been more about the filmmakers than their subjects, then ethnographic film becomes, if not another form of personal documentary, at least another form of personal expression. And the experiences of these films, like the experiences of any other form of personal expression, can continue to be fascinating and valuable—just in different ways within a new context.
The Sensory Ethnography Lab and the films coming out of it have built on the experiences of an earlier generation. Do the SEL filmmakers “get it right”? Inevitably, as time passes, we will learn more about the realities surrounding the experiences they document, realities that may, probably will, throw the apparent assumptions and implicit conclusions of their films into question. But this is inevitable for anyone searching for Truth or even just truth. The alternative, to not care about reality, is hardly to be preferred, and in any case, modern film history is deluged with big-budget fictional fantasies, made by men and women with little concern for anything but enhancing the financial bottom line by feeding viewers the most obvious and dangerous clichés about “us” and “them.” Whatever their failures, the SEL filmmakers working (as Marshall, Gardner, and Asch themselves did) to learn, as best they can, from their cinematic forebears’ successes and mistakes, and from their own, are at least willing to invest themselves in “getting it right” in their filmmaking, and often at considerable personal sacrifice. If they are doomed by the continuing transformations of culture and knowledge to fail, there is, as Faulkner might say, a “splendor” in their failures. And by taking account of these failures, they and we will learn from what they do achieve both as observers of human experience and as filmmakers.