September 2008
Cultural Farming and Anthropological Film
By: Holland Wilde
Video Research Examples:
With anthropological film, still more ‘lenses’ of theory and methodology are drawn into my research composite. While much has already been said of anthropological film elsewhere, this section provides wider guidance for media research situated within an established field with established practice; albeit a visual practice that carries with it its own internal controversy in today’s camera-screen world.
Cultural Farming remains firmly committed to a brand of dialogic and didactic 'show and see' for encouraging citizens to reinvigorate -- if not critically recuperate -- ethical media (journalistic) production and presentation through emancipating -- yet re-limiting -- constructs of 'civic' media. As visual scholar W.J.T. Mitchell (2005:355356) writes:
“Merleau-Ponty's abstruse discussions of the dialectics of seeing, the “chiasmus” of the eye and the gaze, and the entangling of vision with the “flesh of the world” become much more down to earth when the spectator/spectacle has been visibly embodied and performed in the classroom. A more ambitious aim of Showing Seeing is its potential as a reflection on theory and method in themselves. As should be evident, the approach is informed by a kind of pragmatism, but not (one hopes) of a kind that is closed off to speculation, experiment, and even metaphysics. At the most fundamental level, it is an invitation to rethink what theorizing is, to “picture theory” and “perform theory” as a visible, embodied, communal practice, not as the solitary introspection of disembodied intelligence. …The Showing and Seeing exercise is one way to accomplish the first step in the formation of any new field, and that is to rend the veil of familiarity and awaken the senses of wonder, so that many of the things that are taken for granted about the visual arts and media (and perhaps verbal ones as well) are put into question.”
As with so much academic writing like Mitchell’s above, the concepts while reminiscent of anthropology’s provocative and seductive call to visual discovery carry no mention of how to critically “do” these things. Thus, with Cultural Farming I want to elevate, widen, deepen, and materialize these discussions (dialogically) as a way to investigate the culturally troublesome aspects of media (TV).
And luckily there is a bright spot: Tools for critical ethnographic video are widely available to most any citizen in the Western world. Indeed, within the ostensible greed of unbridled capitalism there are occasional moments in history, like ours today, when technological hegemonic fluctuations err on the side of citizens. In a lust to fulfill increasingly ‘manufactured’ consumer demand for more media, new emancipating technologies are introduced almost daily. Video cameras are now cheap enough to slack-jaw any Sol Worth Navajo (Worth 1981). Non-linear editing tools that cost tens of thousands of dollars only a decade ago are now free. User-friendly distribution venues for global dissemination abound with the advent of broadband that now penetrates over 50% of North American homes. Every person (in essence, however not yet in theory or practice) can be his or her own 'TV station' at the drop of a hat. Indeed, many people are attempting to do something like this to the tune of about 175,000 new blogs created every day -- and, of course, most involve informational visualization with much of that being appropriated content. The breathtaking speed of introduction of these new media technological tools makes Cultural Farming research possible, particularly from a visual, socio-anthropological perspective.
Thus, these technologies leverage new citizen methods of possibility/responsibility for not only openly ‘talking-back’ to each other, but to our media (makers) as well; at least while we can before counter-hegemonic forces slam these doorways closed to most citizens through pending industry pressured legislation like al la carte pricing, anti net-neutrality, and rulings against fair use-dealings. However, a question remains which is central to my research premise: What will we do -- what should we do -- with today’s unique media opportunity; and how should we do it?
To point, if citizen users need not recreate their civic media efforts in mirror-image to big media production practices, what will be made, and from what principles? Here again, anthropological film adds resonance and purpose to Cultural Farming, for my theoretical methodology falls within the shadow of many visual anthropologists like Richard Leacock, David MacDougall, Marcus Banks, Jay Ruby, and particularly Jean Rouch -- ethnographic filmmakers all -- for purposefully capturing, constructing and employing moving images as observational scholarship.
This visual/filmic approach both extends and expands longstanding notions of academic logocentric observation/writing -- to an art of looking sideways -- by reciprocally exploring (provoking) all aspects of media without stunting translation (Coover 2003; Fletcher 2001; Harper 2003, Glasgow University Media Group (2005), Goodall 2000; Virillio 2003, Wilde 2005, 2007). Thus, I suggest with Cultural Farming: Why not simply re-employ everyday TV-media to critically examine TV-media? Indeed, this premise to method extends the overarching, yet unfulfilled, promise of three generations of visual anthropology scholars. That is, media ethnography is anathema to constructing research entirely of words (as Cultural Farming clearly illustrates). However, while this continues to be a point of controversy both within the discipline of anthropology and the practice of ethnography; to ignore camera/screen tools for observing camera/screen worlds should seem absurdly cross-purposed since undoubtedly all images conjure words and words inevitably invoke images. As George Marcus and Michael Fisher emphasize in Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986:75):
“… contemporary practitioners of ethnographic film are well aware that it (film) is as much a constructed text as are written books. Ethnographic film making thus poses challenges similar to that of ethnographic writing: problems of narrative and focus, of editing and reflexivity. Perhaps the ethnographic film cannot replace the ethnographic text, but it may indeed have certain advantages over it in a society where visual media are strongly competing with written forms for attention of mass users, including intellectuals and scholars.”
Curiously, as far back as 1996, I found myself publicly calling for exactly this kind of reflexive application directly to my professional TV cohort: the producers of production in cultural industry. It signifies my ‘germination’ for uniting the illogical ‘familiarity’ in television with its logical ‘strangeness’ to better understand my world, my medium, my profession practice, and myself (Broadcast Designers Association, conference presentation):
“...so recently, I found myself in this situation - it was 6:45pm - I was setting up a rendering on one computer, transferring files to another server computer for printing and typing a response to an e-mail letter on still another, while talking on the phone to an Gulf Coast coast client, when call waiting buzzed. The new call was my client from San Francisco faxing back approval of an updated document I had just scanned moments before which now needed to be quickly photo-copied into individual over-night packages for my construction shops in North Carolina and Indiana, all before FedEX closed for the evening.
My assistant, meanwhile, was on the mobile phone discussing hi-res output quality with an in-town service bureau, while dumping a graphic from Beta onto the array hard drive, for insertion into a new 3-D model that was being textured mapped for an animated fly-through, so it could be dubbed onto my portable HI-8 player for presentation during my meeting in Detroit the very next morning. (Ha... you've all been there, right?) ...But then...I had a hideous revelation - an epiphany of grotesque proportions.
It had nothing to do with the dramatic technological changes in my business, or the fact I am completely using new and exotic tools to fashion my designs... It came, instead when, in the midst of all of this studio commotion, I happened to glance up at the TV on my desk to see a short video clip on the CBS Evening News of a wounded young man writhing in pain on ground in a riot-torn, burned out village in Burundi, Africa.
In this ten second clip, as the man moaned in the street, another gunman secretly crept up to inspect the fallen man. The gunman looked down and gently pointed his semi-automatic into the wounded man's chest and - with the TV camera following closely - squeezed off a burst of bullets splattering red flesh up into the air - forever recording this enemy's agony through video tape onto the permanence of my memory. I sat there in stunned silence. What in God's name did I just see? What was that? Why was that? That wasn't a news story. That was an execution. Worse. It was a voyeuristic snuff film, actually recorded and edited by someone, and then transmitted into my home.
This wasn't the typical, slo-motion footage, of piles of dead and bloated bodies we've become accustomed to on TV. No, this had gone the final last step. Now, we could witness.... we could...participate. All the while, the reporter's voice-over droned, about how hopeless the situation was - then, it cut back to Dan Rather’s face. He was smiling, saying something about 48 Hours, and then a cut to a denture cream commercial. ...Did anybody see what I just saw? Did anybody notice? I wanted to vomit.
In one horrific instant I was painfully reminded again of the awful, often vulgar direction the medium I've chosen for my profession has evolved. I know the old argument... “who can argue news content is worse than anything else?” But what's going on out there? Who's in charge? Are we thinking about what we’re doing?
It hit home that in the course of four or five short years virtually everything - how I work, who I work for, the industry I work in, the results of my work, even the reason I work - have been completely transformed.
I'm struggling to understand it. Am I coping well? Do I even have time to consider that question? What control, if any, do I have anymore? Am I an artist, a designer, or, just a hired wrist? To what extreme expression will my work to be associated? What kind of future am I helping to build?” (Wilde 1996)
Indeed, it has been the accumulation of innumerable personal moments like these that led me to anthropological film. But is anthropologic/ethnographic film’s significance for Cultural Farming simply the use of video; can that alone be instructional? Initial answers to these questions might be elicited from Lucian Taylor’s (Feld 2003:141) fleeting exchange with arguably the most influential and surreal filmmaker in anthropology. “All your films in a sense provoke, rather than 'record;” to which renowned anthropological filmmaker Jean Rouch replied, “Yes. I prefer not to be the scientist but to participate.”
And here, Sarah Pink (2006:19) provides necessary specificity to the practice of anthropological filmmaking as guidance to Cultural Farming:
“The future… should be a two-way process through which mainstream anthropology comes to accommodate visual knowledge and ethnographic film comes to accommodate anthropological concerns. …I suggest we need to create a visual anthropology that no longer simply defends itself against the mainstream… One way this is already achieved is by accommodating theoretical developments in anthropology within visual projects… Another is to develop new forms of visual representation that can communicate theoretically… This might involve producing not only new forms of ethnographic film, but hypemedia texts that combine word and image. …This may provide important directions for a future in which visual anthropology has a more prominent public profile and engages with what some have argued is our responsibility to promote a public anthropology that comments on and intervenes in issues of public concern.”
Cultural Farming is calling for exactly this kind of usage of specific experimental anthropologic video (TV) for examining the production of media production. As Concordia University film scholar, Catherine Russell (1999:22-23) writes:
“One of the things that experimental film brings to ethnography is what (Bill) Nichols describes as the ability to see film as cultural representation - as opposed to seeing through film. It is a difference between discourse analysis and content analysis, and it requires a selection of texts that are exemplary of particular configurations of culture and representation. …If we can understand film and video as a means by which 'culture' is translated into technologies of representation, we can potentially see, in Rey Chow's words, how a culture is 'originally' put together, in all its cruelty.”
As I outline in fulsome detail throughout this research website, anthropology too is reciprocally in need of Cultural Farming, for even its members often demonstrate profound misunderstandings of theory/methodology during camera/screen production… and equally odd, how their camera/screen tools in anthropology are often fetishized.
In these brief papers I attempt to build a composite argument for Cultural Farming’s unique value across existing bodies of knowledge; that is, from where Cultural Farming’s argument is developed (critical theory); how this can be put into civic practice (personal interpretation/reflexivity); and where one might find methodologies of visual technique for cultural explication (anthropological film). Elsewhere I also attempt to clarify which non-fictional journalistic TV-media is targeted for study and why by tracing TV’s historical evolution as framed through Cultural Farming’s appropriation and remix research interests.