Lecture 3: Romantic Ethnography

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Lecture 3Romantic Ethnography
Nanook of the North (1922) Directed by Robert
Flaherty

• Professor Michael Green

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Previous Lecture

• The Meaning of Whiteness
• The Voice of Whiteness in Griffiths Biograph
  Films
• The Artful racism of Broken Blossoms
• Writing about Film Lesson 1

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This Lecture

• The Imperial Imaginary
• Nanook of the North and Romantic Ethnography
• Writing about Film Lesson 2

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The Imperial Imaginary
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) Directed by Steven
Spielberg

• Lecture 3 Part I

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Imperialist Ordering of the Globe

• The colonial domination of indigenous peoples,
  the scientific and esthetic disciplining of
  nature through classificatory schemas, the
  capitalist appropriation of resources, and the
  imperialist ordering of the globe under a
  panoptical regime, all formed part of a massive
  world historical movement that reached its apogee
  at the beginning of the twentieth century.
• Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, The Imperial
  Imaginary

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Historical Context

• Cinema was born during the height of the imperial
  project, when Europe held sway over vast
  territories and subjugated peoples.
• Kipling's "White Man's Burden" and the US
  acquisition of Cuba and the Philippines.
• The first Lumière and Edison screenings in the
  1890s closely followed the Scramble for Africa.
• The British occupation of Egypt in 1882.
• The Berlin Conference of 1884 carved up Africa
  into European "spheres of influence.
• The 1890 massacre of Sioux at Wounded Knee.

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The Leading Imperialists

• The countries yielding the most silent film
  Britain, France, the US, Germany were among the
  leading imperialists.
• It was in the interest of these countries to laud
  the colonial enterprise.
• The audiences for popular film not just the
  elite took to colonial entertainments thanks
  to popular fictions and exhibitions.

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Neutralizing Class Struggle

• For the working classes of Europe and
  Euro-America, photogenic wars in remote parts of
  the empire became diverting entertainments,
  serving to neutralize the class struggle and
  transform class solidarity into national and
  racial solidarity.
• Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, The Imperial
  Imaginary

Henry Morton Stanley
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Adopting Colonial Stories

• The early cinema adopted popular works and
  attitudes of colonialist writers
• Rudyard Kipling Gunga Din, The Man who Would be
  King, The Jungle Book
• Rider Haggard King Solomon's Mines
• Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan
• David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, and
  other adventurers.
• The "conquest fiction" of the American southwest.
  

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Colonial Adventure Movies
Gunga Din (1939) Directed by George Stevens
Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) Directed by W.S. Van
Dyke
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The Adventure of Film

• Adventure films, and the adventure of going to
  the cinema, provided a vicarious experience of
  passionate fraternity, a playing field for the
  self-realization of European masculinity. Just as
  colonized space was available to empire, and
  colonial landscapes were available to imperial
  cinema, so was this psychic space available for
  the play of the virile spectatorial imagination
  as a kind of mental Lebensraum.
• Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, The Imperial
  Imaginary

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Shaping National Identity

• Stories often carry our beliefs about the
  evolution and origin of nations.
• Cinema, as the world's foremost storyteller, has
  adeptly projected narratives of nations and
  empires to large audiences.
• It built on the novel as a way to fashion
  imagined communities, and shape thinking about
  historical time and national history.
• This usually benefits some national and racial
  imaginaries and harms others.

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Distribution Hegemony

• The dominant European/American form of cinema
  not only inherited and disseminated a hegemonic
  colonial discourse, it also created a powerful
  hegemony of its own through monopolistic control
  of film distribution and exhibition in much of
  Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Euro-colonial
  cinema thus mapped history not only for domestic
  audiences but also for the world.
• Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, The Imperial
  Imaginary

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What is Hegemony?

• Hegemony refers to the way that the political and
  social domination of the power class in
  capitalist society is expressed not only in
  ideologies but in all realms of culture and
  social organization.
• This kind of power takes the form of influence
  rather than domination, as well as an appearance
  of naturalness and inevitability that removes it
  from examination, criticism and challenge.

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The Camera and Empire

• If the culture of empire authorized the
  pleasure of seizing ephemeral glimpses of its
  margins through travel and tourism, the
  nineteenth-century invention of the photographic
  and later the cinematographic camera made it
  possible to record such glimpses.
• Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, The Imperial
  Imaginary

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The Camera Explorer

• These early cinematographic explorers rarely
  considered the power relations between observer
  and observed.
• Their interpretations were subjective and
  informed by imperialism.
• These cinematographers then popularized imperial
  imagery for those back home, turning the
  recording of images into a participatory
  activity.

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Expanding Science

• Expanding the frontiers of science and empire
  became a linked ambition.
• Cinema, a result of Western science, was put to
  the tasks of exhibiting Western triumphs and
  prolonged the museum project, which gathered
  archeological, ethnographic, botanical, and
  zoological objects in the imperial metropolis.
• Science in cinema appealed to a popular audience,
  and not just the elite.

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The Looting Camera

• The camera penetrated a foreign and familiar
  zone like a predator, seizing its loot of
  images as raw material to be reworked in the
  motherland and sold to sensation-hungry
  spectators and consumers, a process later
  fictionalized in King Kong (1933).
• Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, The Imperial
  Imaginary

King Kong (1933) Directed by Merian C. Cooper and
Ernest Schoedsack
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The Impact

• Racism and entertainment, . . .became closely
  intertwined.
• Such expositions gave utopian form to White
  supremacist ideology, legitimizing racial
  hierarchies abroad and muting class and gender
  divisions among Whites at home by stressing
  national agency in a global project of
  domination.
• Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, The Imperial
  Imaginary

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Variations on Colonial Narratives

• Early Cinema
• Edison, Méliès, American one-reelers
• U.S. and British Adventure films
• Rhodes of Africa (1936), Beau Geste (1939), The
  Four Feathers (1939)
• The Western
• How the West was Won (1936), Oklahoma Kid (1939),
  The Last Frontier (1956), El Dorado (1967), The
  Last of the Mohicans (various)
• Science fiction
• Return of the Jedi (1983), Stargate (1994)

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The Late Imperial Film

• The colonial/imperial paradigm did not die with
  the formal end of colonialism, nor is the western
  paradigm limited to the wild west.
• Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
• The Man Who Knew to Much (1954)
• Gilligans Island (1960s, TV)
• Dr. No (1962)
• The Man Who Would be King (1975)
• A Passage to India (1984)
• The Indiana Jones movies (1981 2008)
• Coverage of The Gulf War

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Examples

Pause the lecture and watch the Clips from
Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom.
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Summary of Points

• The height of Imperialism coincided with the
  birth of cinema the two collaborated in
  expanding the Imperial project.
• The cinema combined narrative and spectacle to
  tell the story of colonialism from the
  colonizer's perspective.
• The power of cinema was and is very
  influential in shaping national identity and in
  ordering power relations between colonizer and
  colonized and within imperial nations.

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Nanook of the North and Romantic Ethnography
Nanook of the North (1922) Directed by Robert
Flaherty

• Lecture 3 Part II

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Definitions

• Romantic
• imbued with or dominated by idealism, a desire
  for adventure, chivalry, etc.
• fanciful impractical unrealistic
• of, pertaining to, or characteristic of a style
  of literature and art that subordinates form to
  content, emphasizes imagination, emotion, and
  introspection
• Ethnography
•  The branch of anthropology that deals with the
  scientific description of specific human cultures

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The Movie

• Directed by Robert J. Flaherty.
• Nanook of the North focuses on the daily
  activities of a family of Itivimuit, a group of
  Quebec Inuit.
• Considered by many to be a great work of
  independent cinema.
• It is been called the first documentary, the
  first art film and the first ethnographic film.
• Had immediate worldwide success.
• Canonized by the National Film Registry of the
  Library of Congress

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Authenticity Debate

• The academic discourse on the movie centers on
  questions of authenticity.
• Some argue that it cannot be objective or true
  science.
• Some feel that the film captures the human
  essence and that its characters are symbols for
  all of civilization.

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Ronys Arguments

• The way in which the film represents indigenous
  peoples parallels the romantic primitivism of
  modern anthropology which
• Focuses on the indigenous body, which is seen as
  unsophisticated.
• Situates the filmed subject in a displaced
  temporal realm, i.e. outside of history, so that
  it seems to represent an early evolutionary
  epoch.
• Propagates the myth of vanishing races.
• All of this is in the service of asserting
  authenticity.

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Nanooks Construction

• Rony shows that rather the movie has clearly been
  staged.
• Evidence proved that Flaherty used Inuit labor
  they were his assistants during the production
  and post-production and acted scenes for the
  film and introduced them to new technology.
• He used artifice to create a Western idea of
  truth partially based on a construction of
  himself as an explorer/artist.

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Examples

• Nanook often hunted with a gun, but Flaherty
  encouraged him to hunt as his ancestors had
  before European influence.
• Nanooks wife in the film was not his wife.
• His real name was Allakariallak.
• The danger in which Nanook and his family were
  in at the films climax was greatly exaggerated.
  
• Consider where the cameras are in this sequence.
• Pause the lecture and watch clip 1 from Nanook
  of the North.

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Examining the Rhetoric

• A close examination of the rhetoric in the
  movies interstitial cards supports the idea that
  Flahtery based Nanook on many, personal,
  preconceived and historical ideas.
• Some examples of this rhetoric include happy-go
  lucky Eskimo, Expedition, half-breed,
  maps, civilization, mysterious, post of
  the white man, chaotic wastes
• A story of life and love in the actual Artic

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More Rhetorical Examples

• Nanook, the kindly, brave, simple Eskimo
• Gone into most of the odd corners of the world
• Wind-swept illimitable spaces which top the
  world
• The sterility of the soil and the rigor of the
  climate no other race would survive.
• The melancholy sprit of the North.
• Pause the lecture and watch clip 2 from Nanook
  of the North.

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The Primitive Man

• The desire of Euro-American audiences and
  critics to perceive Nanook as authentic primitive
  man, as an unmediated referent, is evident in the
  fact that until the 1970s, no one bothered to ask
  members of the Inuit community in which the film
  was made for their opinions on the film. Only
  then was it learned that the name of the actor
  who played Nanook was Allakariallak.
• Fatimah Tobing Rony, Robert Flahertys Nanook of
  the North The Politics of Taxidermy and Romantic
  Ethnography
• Pause the lecture and watch clip 3 from Nanook
  of the North.

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The Eskimo as Model

• The way in which Flaherty treats his subjects is
  consistent with the way in which native peoples
  were often treated in the West as specimens and
  objects of curiosity.
• The Inuit were popular subjects for museum models
  in dioramas.
• The Eskimo was seen as an uncorrupt example of
  all the values of the West independence,
  perseverance, patriarchy though never seen as
  an equal to Whites.

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The Inuit Reception

• Many contemporary Inuit find Nanook of the North
  unrealistic and even laughable.
• They argue it was constructed by Flaherty to for
  white audiences.
• Contemporary Inuit have embraced their own media
  to counter white media.

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Romys Final Point

• This is why Nanook of the North is seen as a
  point of origin for art film, documentary film,
  and ethnographic film it represents the Garden
  of Eden, the perfect relationship between
  filmmaker and subject, the innocent eye, a
  search for realism that was not just inscription,
  but which made the dead look alive and the living
  look dead.
• Fatimah Tobing Rony, Robert Flahertys Nanook of
  the North The Politics of Taxidermy and Romantic
  Ethnography

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Nanooks Legacy

• Like Birth of a Nation, Nanook of the North is a
  technical milestone that employed filmmaking
  techniques to express historical opinions about
  racial hierarchies.
• As the first feature length documentary, Nanook
  has been very influential.
• It set the precedent for staging in
  documentaries.
• The film also documented and inscribed colonial
  and imperial attitudes and approaches to
  ethnography.

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Writing About Film Lesson 2
Beau Geste (1939) Directed by William A. Wellman
Lecture 3 Part III
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Three Types of Film Writing

• Remember, there are three major types of film
  writing
• Descriptive a neutral account of the basic
  characteristics of the film.
• Evaluative which presents a judgment or opinion
  about a films value.
• Interpretive which presents an argument about a
  films meaning and significance.

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Summary of Descriptive Writing

• As it suggests, descriptive writing describes a
  film, without evaluation or judgment.
• Most descriptions of narrative films relay plot
  events, while a description of a documentary
  might describe not only the topic of the film,
  but also the approach.
• While descriptions do not offer judgments, they
  may go beyond plot summary to describe genre.

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Evaluative Writing

• An evaluative claim presents a judgment,
  expressing the authors belief that the film is
  bad, good, mediocre, flawed, etc.
• Reviewers grades A, B or C, two thumbs up,
  number of stars, etc. often summarize the
  critics judgment, while a longer review lays out
  the specific reasons.
• The Birth of a Nation is a great film is an
  example of an evaluative claim.

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Stronger Evaluative Claims

• A stronger evaluative claim includes the reasons
  why the evaluation is positive or negative.
• The Birth of a Nation is a great film because it
  includes exciting and well-staged scenes of
  combat.
• This statement is more convincing than the first
  assertion because it provides a basis for the
  judgment.

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Evaluative Criteria

• Evaluative claims are always based on the
  evaluators criteria, even if they remain
  unstated.
• Here, the unstated but implicit criterion is that
  exciting, well-crafted action scenes make a film
  great. Given the tremendous diversity of viewer
  preferences, its important to be clear about the
  evaluative criteria so the reader can compare the
  criteria to his or her own.

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Evaluative vs. Interpretive

• Evaluative criteria is most often seen in the
  movie review, which takes a number of forms in
  print, on TV and on the Internet.
• Though some critics bring a sophisticated level
  of film discourse to the culture, their
  discussion of a film generally comes down to
  whether they think it is good or bad, i.e worth
  your time and money.
• These evaluations are often ahistorical and not
  very analytical.

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Bordwells Take

• Film studies, it seems to me, is an effort to
  understand films and the processes through which
  theyre made and consumed. Film scholars mount
  explanations for why films are the way they are,
  why they were made the way they were, why they
  are consumed the way they are. Most ordinary talk
  about movies, and most film journalism, doesnt
  ask Why? questions, or pursue them very far.
• David Bordwell, Studying Cinema

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Interpretation

• When film scholars talk about movies, they
  usually also offer interpretations claims about
  the non-obvious meanings that we can find in
  films. Interpretations can be thought of as
  particular sorts of functional explanations. An
  interpretation presupposes that aspects of the
  film (style, structure, dialogue, plot)
  contribute to its overall significance.
• David Bordwell, Studying Cinema

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Importance

• It is important to be able to clearly, concisely
  and efficiently articulate your evaluation of
  something as you often will be asked to do so in
  both your student and your professional work.
• In any society, it is important to be able to
  trade informed opinions and have an intelligent
  dialogue about art and culture.

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Final Point

• However, it is crucial to understand and
  recognize the difference between evaluative and
  interpretive film writing - the difference
  between pure opinion and a claim supported by
  analysis and evidence.

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End of Lecture 3

• Next Lecture Hollywood Hegemony