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Malcolm Wyer
November 2003
"Reassemblage and Post-Colonial Dilemmas in Ethnographic Cinema"
“Filming in Africa means for many of us—colorful images, naked breasts of women, exotic dances, and fearful rides. ... A professor in the Rhetoric and Women’s Studies Departments at the University of California Berkeley, Trinh’s films encompass her interests in post-colonial theory, gender, art and literary theory, African studies, and media studies. ... ethnographic documentary) shape Trinh’s audience—it shapes the manner in which her audience receives her films. ... Such a format lends itself nicely to the category of ethnographic documentary. Also, the film is quite forthright in its exploration of issues surrounding post-colonialism and its critique of the anthropological I/eye. ... But in the film’s intense (almost hypochondriacal) self-reflexivity, is it not ethnography at all, but merely a theoretical analysis of ethnography with slight ethnographic gestures? ...
The sheer range of voices and agendas in these written ethnographic texts demonstrates the instability of ethnography as a defined field of study, and that, in writing and reading about other cultures, there is as much revelation about the culture of the observer/ writer (for discussion purposes, the “West”), as there is about the culture of the observed/ subjects (the “non-West”).
Likewise, ethnographic films have a history of varied agendas, and the claims made by the films have been supported by a spectrum of ethnographic practices and philosophies. Many ethnographic filmmakers have attempted to escape subjectivity— some by minimizing their own obtrusiveness as filmmakers (the films of the cinema-vérité movement); some filmmakers believed that spending extended periods of time in the field with the subject would allow for a more objective and profound penetration into a different culture (Gardner’s Dead Birds (1963)); and as early as 1922 Robert Flaherty made Nanook of the North, in which the film’s subject (the Eskimo Nanook) collaborated with Flaherty, thus sharing creative control over the film. ...
This audio style is reminiscent of the extremely passé “voice of God” narrations in ethnographic film, in which a faceless Western narrator guides the audience into a foreign world, often with a tone that seems to say, the simplicity of their lives is simply fascinating. ... The traditional use of voice-over narration in ethnographic film elicits a voyeuristic passivity in the audience. ...
Ethnographic filmmaker and writer David MacDougall writes, “Armed with the understanding that images are always about something, we can look upon almost any image with impunity. ... Trinh’s format clearly attempts to resituate the audience with Reassemblage as an ethnographic text, but other than questioning traditional practices of ethnography, why does she find this resituation necessary? ... Trinh’s narrative points to a “new imperialism” (to use Edward Said’s term) that certainly embodies (but is not limited to) ethnographic enterprises. This new imperialism is not signaled by a physical European colonial presence, but it is equally damaging to the non-Western world, and it assumes the same practices of subjugation and dominance by the West. ... The character of Colonel Creighton in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim reveals an ethnographer who profoundly affects political and military colonial endeavors. Masked in the academic benevolence of ethnography, Creighton is in fact collecting intelligence information for Britain’s colonial operations in India, revealing, as Said argues, that the “manipulation or management of native societies (can serve) imperial purposes.”
However, ethnography/ anthropology operates as detrimentally today as it did over a century ago when it directly aided European colonial expansion. ... The ethnographic term ‘culture’, writes Abu-Lughod, “operates in anthropological discourse to enforce separations that inevitably carry a sense of hierarchy. ... ”
“The last twenty years” to which Trinh refers (1962-1982) describes a period of vast technological growth that permitted an avalanche of Western media to reach almost all corners of the world: “the principal shift in global cultural order, created by cinema, television, and VCR technology”. ... ” Hence, objectivity is impossible to attain, and one must put ethnographic texts in a context that extends outside the ethnographer’s control. ...
On the same lines, what is one to make of Reassemblage as an ethnographic text? ... I do not regard her self-reflexive filmmaking techniques as attempts at becoming transparent and therefore an unquestioned and reliable source of ethnographic information. ...
Second, and very significantly for me, is Trinh’s ability to communicate her ideas with a formal structure that is celebratory and aesthetic; her format of edited images and voice-over narration transcends her cynicism of the ethnographic process. ... The application of this story to post-colonial discourse is overt, but her language and tone make her words more colorful and complex than they first appear.
Approximate Word count = 3845
Approximate Pages = 15.4
(250 words per page double spaced)
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