Hide and Seek

Ethnographic films’ is likely the most problematic of canons, and I probably would not have arrived at heavy hitters like Flaherty, Gardner and The Ax Fight were it not for a course I took on the subject last autumn. Without wishing to diminish the richly developed critique of the ethnographic gaze, I would nonetheless suggest it has more cinematic currency than is commonly acknowledged (the exception being Herzog’s journeys to the deep). Besides being a zone where documentary and fiction are bound to overlap, where staging is intrinsically related to recreation, these films are all, in some way, about the problem of recording disappearance: theirs is a poetics of absence. This is typically effaced by the ethnographer’s hierarchy of knowledge, but not always and not forever. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (playing as part of JP-Gorin’s essay film series at the PFA on April 5^th) demonstrates the through lines of ethnography in at least two respects: (1) it is an early cinematic exemplar of auto-ethnography, and hence expressly deals with memory in addition to ritual and (2) it was shot by Michel Brault and the great New Wave cinematographer Raoul Coutard in the same year he did Breathless, another spoke of the elusive “documentary style” associated with neorealism. As an aside, James Clifford’s suggestive essay, “Ethnographic Surrealism,” from The Predicament of Culture, is an invaluable guide to the French interplay of ethnography and modernism — and does much to help explain a filmmaker like Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Three variations on this theme, drawn from my last couple of weeks of moviegoing:

1. 24 City, screened at the PFA as part of SFIAAFF. Jia’s complex, yet plain intermingling of portraiture, interview, recreation, architecture and quotation certainly shares much with the idea of auto-ethnographic surrealism. His ongoing development of digital form to adequately realize the migratory, volatile social realities in China is one of the indisputably great contributions to film culture today. Not to harp on the French, but I couldn’t help but connect the film’s periodic frontal framings of the munitions factory front gate — a kind of watermark for the area’s rapid restructuring — to the famous one-shot of the Lumières’ Workers Leaving the Factory. In that crucial moving image, the solidity of the building and the fixed camera position frame the flowing mass of individuals; here, Jia’s precocious digital lensing models structural instability. Jia’s version could be called Factory Leaving the Workers.

2. Chris Chong’s Block B, screened as part of Chi-hui Yang’s program of shorts, “The Secret Lives of Urban Space” at SFIAFF. Quite simply one of the most breathtaking, satisfying interpretations of structuralist form I’ve yet encountered. The 20-minute short consists of a single camera position — a standby of ethnographic film — surveying eleven floors of a Malaysian apartment building housing migrant workers from India. Each story hosts its own stories and — as long as we’re being meta — visually resembles a strip of film. An Empire view with a case of Rear Window, the scene from night to morning to evening to night is drawn together by the wandering sound design’s fictive presence. This is the rare case of the ear leading the eye. We dart around the distant composition to spot the source of a small exchange: a romance, a photo opportunity, children at play and so forth. There is a tremendous wellspring of simultaneity which, when drawn to the consolidated view, positions the audience with contradictory, parallel lines of access more evocative of modern life than most cosseted films “about” globalization.

3. The short horror and portraits of British filmmaker Ben Rivers. I will not prattle on about his inspired work here, as I’ve written about these delicate wonders elsewhere, but Bay Area cinephiles should by all means try to make the weekend programs hosted by Other Cinema and Cinematheque. Besides being beautiful to look at and listen to, the films blur the lines of ethnography and expressionism, field recording and collage, explorative and domestic. Their sounds and images are harvested and pruned with evident care, but the ephemeral abandon with which they flit through the projector resembles sunlight or fire.

(This is My Land as projected in a hut)

~ by maxgoldb on March 25, 2009.