Malinowski radically opposed himself to the so-called armchair anthropologists who were trying to build their theories about culture and society on the base of the reports produced by travelers, merchants and whoever managed to spend some time in foreign countries. New understanding of anthropological knowledge resembled, as Grimshaw puts it, Impressionist move from studios to the outdoors – in order to understand society an anthropologist has to jump into the flow of the life of the society under study.
The Lumière brothers brought the camera outdoors, to the streets of their own country in order to observe their own society. In their films we can see the fascination with both technology and everyday life, when the latter was discovered as an interesting topic for shooting. Everyday life is full of meaningful actions which are however usually taken for granted by the actors of the society, and thus the actions become invisible. The camera causes the estrangement effect by creating (a technically necessary) distance to the scene and framing the action. The frame itself has a power to make sense even from what is senseless. But the Lumières were far from conceptual experiments and tried to choose meaningful actions constituting the rituals of the society.
The specific feature of the Lumière cinema is the still camera. And we see pretty the same stillness in Flahery’s and Haddon’s ethnographic films. Taking into account that the goal of ethnographic films is an observation and exploration of the society, the fixed camera constitutes an specific kind of approach. The stillness here bears connotations of observation as such, a certain kind of naivety that an anthropologist uses as his/her basic methodological tool – to study an unknown culture is to put yourself in the position of a child who needs to learn step by step everything that the adults take for granted).
Grimshaw emphasizes the cultivation of a Malinowskian ‘inocent eye’ and the naivety of Flaherty’s camera (for example his refusal to experiment with montage despite the common fashion of the time). But the centrality of innocence comes not just from methodological stance but also from ideological presuppositions. Grimshaw points out humanism and romanticism of Nanook’s story caused by the fact that for Flaherty the ethnographic project in the Canadian Arctic was an obvious attempt to escape the American society which he perceived as “industrial, urban, machine-driven, imperialist, complex, colliding and chaotic”. While what Flaherty was trying to find was whole, integrated and more authentic (Grimshaw 2001, 50). In pretty similar way Marcel Mauss published his The Gift (1925) from the context of the beginning of the 20th century Europe which he described as ‘the victory of rationalism and mercantilism’, ‘individualistic and purely self-interested economy governed by the economic rationalism’, the time of “icy, utilitarian calculation”, ‘the cold-hearted law of sale and payment for services’ the time when a person turned into ‘a calculating machine’ and ‘pure financial experts’ (Mauss, 2002). Thus, the stillness of the camera and the “naive” admiration of the flow of events can be far from naivety.
The fixed camera preserves this ambiguity. On the one hand, motionless proves to be an insightful tool to analyze the flow of events. For example, in my current ethnographic project on street musicians in Budapest I practice “motionless” in the fieldwork. When I find a musician, I just stay nearby and observe the scene for minimum quarter of an hour. To be in the flow of events would mean to pass by the musician or to stay for few seconds to give some coins and listen to music, but to stay longer means to jump out of the flow of events. And miracles immediately start to happen as I now see more than an ordinary passer-by – I see meaningful connections, interactions, communications.
On the other hand, rejection of montage and stillness of the camera can never lead to the neutrality/objectivity of representation. The frame is selective the same as our vision. And even the single-shot film reveals the filmmaker’s understanding of what is important. In this sense, the presence or absence of montage doesn’t change the very constructiveness of representation. It is just a matter of style.
Grimshaw, A. 2001. The Innocent Eye: Flaherty, Malinowski and the Romantic Quest. In The ethnographer's eye: ways of seeing in anthropology. Pp. 44-56. Cambridge: CUP.
Mauss, Marcel. 2002. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge.
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