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there has been an unacknowledged relationship of Manchester anthropology that Max Gluckman promoted, and in which F. G. Bailey was trained, to a small network of Melanesianists, myself included. The chapter begins with a brief account of the orientation and interests of what I shall call ‘Mancunian Realism’, Gluckman’s actor-centred methodology. I then appraise the political
The looking machine calls for the redemption of documentary cinema, exploring the potential and promise of the genre at a time when it appears under increasing threat from reality television, historical re-enactments, designer packaging and corporate authorship. The book consists of a set of essays, each focused on a particular theme derived from the author’s own experience as a filmmaker. It provides a practice-based, critical perspective on the history of documentary, how films evoke space, time and physical sensations, questions of aesthetics, and the intellectual and emotional relationships between filmmakers and their subjects. It is especially concerned with the potential of film to broaden the base of human knowledge, distinct from its expression in written texts. Among its underlying concerns are the political and ethical implications of how films are actually made, and the constraints that may prevent filmmakers from honestly showing what they have seen. While defending the importance of the documentary idea, MacDougall urges us to consider how the form can become a ‘cinema of consciousness’ that more accurately represents the sensory and everyday aspects of human life. Building on his experience bridging anthropology and cinema, he argues that this means resisting the inherent ethnocentrism of both our own society and the societies we film.
she deplored was in fact the very limited and impoverished art of mere aestheticism, while the truthfulness that she advocated was limited to the truth of what the eye could see, what André Bazin, in his essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, called the pseudorealism of appearances: The quarrel over realism in art stems from a misunderstanding, from a confusion between the aesthetic and the psychological: between true realism, the need that is to give
proximate ‘reality’. The problem of the elusive and variable interweaving of scales was to become one of the major challenges of my later work. It is also important to note that ‘scale’ refers as much to time – to history – as it does to space. I have come to refer to my own approach in anthropology as historical realism (Smith 2014 ). If we are to speak of social
(Harley, 1988 ; Knorr-Cetina and Amann, 1990 ) and as objects that invoke the users’ attention in their everyday practices (Vertesi, 2008 ). In particular, concerning the problem of representation in science, Sergio Sismondo and Nicholas Chrisman's analysis on realism (2001) provides us with necessary guidance. Using a map as both a metaphor and a means of interpretation, they established a metaphysical frame for approaching reality based on deflationary philosophy, arguing that scientific representations are maps embedded in a particular kind of practice and for a
ambience of sights and sounds, since this is often well captured, but the sense of their own presence, the memory of physically being there. This chiefly applies to documentary films, but the artificiality of many fiction films shows they are not immune to it, despite their strivings for realism. 84 LookingMachine.indb 84 12/11/2018 12:54:09 Sensational cinema In practice, most of a documentary filmmaker’s attention is focused on making sense of the events taking place before the camera and giving them cinematic shape. This means finding a position from which to see
, culminating in Berenson’s description of it in Renaissance aesthetics as ‘giving tactile values to retinal impressions’ (1896: 4).3 But to speak only of cinema’s sensory potential would be to underestimate the broader implications of this shift, or, one might say, its destination. Although evoking physical sensation imparts greater realism to films, the ultimate aim of this kind of cinema would seem to be to create 68 LookingMachine.indb 68 12/11/2018 12:54:06 T h e t h i rd t e n d e n c y i n c i n e m a a more profound relationship with the physical world itself
and brown peoples as subject (Ruby 1996 ). It makes more sense, then, to consider what constitutes photographing as an anthropologist rather than an anthropological photograph. A focus on the approach also has the benefit of avoiding scholasticism and keeping open a multitude of genres and styles that each situation and research question might call for, including those outside of realism and even outside documentary photography. Patrick Sutherland expresses himself along similar lines when considering the key aspect of photo-ethnography to be the
spirit possession cult. Perhaps Umm Omar was also, like Henley, asserting the value of cinematic realism and photographic documentation as sometimes being a more powerful standpoint for resistance to oppression than the fragmented and fragmentary techniques of montage. Ethnographic filmmaking and montage is an almost impossible yet necessary balancing act that occurs along this stretch between the visible and the invisible, the expressible and inexpressible; between witnessing those things that should be seen, disrupting the ways in which we have been taught to see
York: Berghahn Books, 2008), pp. 162–80. Ibid., p. 164. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 259. C. Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 17–122. Q. Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008 – original French edition 2006); for discussion of Meillassoux see L. Bryant, N. Srnicek & G. Harman (eds), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: Re-Press, 2011); G. Harman, Quentin Meillassoux