Archive

Faces of Change is comprised of 25 films that examine five cultures selected for their distinct geographic locations: starting with the China Coast and moving up to Taiwan, then to Afghanistan, Kenya and finally to the mountains of Bolivia. Each location is examined through five themes: Rural Society, Education, Rural Economy, Women, and Beliefs. This innovative collection of 16mm films and videos was funded by the National Science Foundation, produced by and directed by some of the finest ethnographic filmmakers of its time.

This year, we choose to screen the example of Afghanistan for the first time in cinemas in Greece on the one hand to commemorate this important project but also to draw attention to a culture that is once again being tested by dangerous structural changes.

“Notes on Faces of Change”

David McDougall

July 2015

The Faces of Change series of 25 films, funded by the National Science Foundation and produced by Norman Miller, was an unusual and innovative project for its time, the early 1970s. Although films had been used for decades in American education, most were of the illustrative-didactic variety, constructed as lessons in which a voice-over commentary dominated the images. Now changes in camera technology and new objectives in documentary filmmaking were beginning to challenge this approach. The 1960s saw the development of a more observational style of documentary, evident in the Direct Cinema and cinéma vérité movements pioneered by such filmmakers as Richard Leacock, Albert and David Maysles, Michel Brault, and Jean Rouch. Their films were attempts to record events from the point of view of an actual observer present at the scene. They were inevitably personal and interpretive in what they showed, but they imparted a sense of witnessing life as it is lived, seen through the sensibility of a particular filmmaker. Somewhat like fiction films, they also required the audience to make sense of what they saw, rather than giving them a set of predetermined conclusions about it.

This approach had been tried before in education, most notably in the Netsilik Eskimo project of 1963-68, directed by Asen Balikci and Guy Mary-Rousselière, and also funded in part by the National Science Foundation. The objectives of the Faces of Change project, however, were somewhat different. The Netsilik project had aimed to immerse school children in the daily life of a remote people, from which it was hoped they would derive certain general principles about human societies. The Faces of Change project was structured around a comparison of five different societies in different geographical and cultural settings and was primarily concerned with social and economic change. Moreover, it sought to examine this by focusing on the experiences of adolescents and young adults growing up in those cultures. The objective was not to communicate a set of concepts about change but rather to engage filmmakers and anthropologists in using film to explore processes of change as they were actually occurring in different circumstances.

My role in the project was to conduct one of the film studies in northern Kenya in collaboration with James Blue, a filmmaking colleague, and Paul Baxter, an anthropologist who had done his doctoral fieldwork in the area some two decades earlier. The focus was on the Boran people and, as the project evolved, specifically on two teen-age Boran boys who had very different life prospects. At this time I was also in contact with David Hancock and Herb di Gioia, who were conducting a parallel Faces of Change study in Afghanistan. We four filmmakers had all been inspired by the possibilities opened up by observational documentary and were keen to apply this approach in new ways to ethnographic filmmaking. Each of the studies benefited from the advice of an anthropologist who knew the people and area involved, but ultimately it was up to us as filmmakers to understand and convey the situation of the individuals we were filming. Each study set out to make one major film—Kenya Boran and Naim and Jabar, respectively, in the Kenya and Afghanistan projects—and to produce additional footage from which further “satellite” films could be edited. Kenya Boran was intended to be viewed as one continuous film but upon its release was split into two parts for distribution purposes. Fortunately this is no longer necessary, and the film can now be viewed in the form it was originally meant to be seen.

Our approach in Kenya, and the approach of Hancock and di Gioia in Afghanistan, was to look for situations in the lives of our protagonists that revealed some of the fundamental social and economic forces affecting their lives. In the Kenyan context, these were the introduction of agriculture, a growing money economy, modern education, the construction of a major road through the area, and the pragmatism of the Boran, who were a predominantly pastoral people traditionally dependant on cattle, camels, and goats. We felt that it was only by observing the interaction of these forces on the ground under specific conditions that one could gain a reasonable understanding of how they operated both historically and on a larger scale. This kind of filming, we also believed, provided an ideal way for students to learn about change, by witnessing the kinds of contradictions and difficult choices it threw up for our protagonists. As for our filming method, it meant identifying a set of themes we wished to explore and then spending long periods with our protagonists so that whenever these themes emerged in actions or conversations we were in a position to film them. Because our approach was based on observing and filming spontaneous events, we refrained from asking our subjects to enact any scenes for the film, although at times we did bring certain individuals together in order to film their interactions. We also filmed our conversations with our protagonists, in which we tried to find out their ideas and feelings about the problems that confronted them.

The Faces of Change project helped consolidate the development of observational cinema as a viable form of documentary for education, as did the projects of such other American filmmakers as John Marshall and Timothy Asch. Further developments occurred in Canada, France, and Britain, including British television, which actively encouraged observational approaches to documentary in the 1970s and 1980s. Today the legacy of this kind of filmmaking has passed largely to independent filmmakers, while much of television has retreated to the more conservative ground of illustrated lectures delivered by on-screen and offscreen presenters. Looked at in retrospect, the Faces of Change project represents educational filmmaking at one of its boldest and most innovative moments. It produced a body of work of both historical importance and continuing value, for the best of these films remain as fresh, intimate, and intellectually relevant as when they were made.

Original in English:

(source: http://www.der.org/resources/guides/faces-of-change-david-macdougall-note.pdf)

Films in the programme

An Afghan Village | Herbert DiGioia, 44 min, 1974

Afghan Nomads | David Hancock, 21 min, 1974

Afghan Women | Josephine Powell, Nancy Dupree, 17 min, 1974

Naim and Jabar | David Hancock, Herbert DiGioia, 50 min, 1974

Wheat Cycle | David Hancock, Herb DiGioia, Louis & Nancy Dupree, 16 min, 1975

In its daily use, romanticism is associated with emotion and sentimentality, often seen as naïve and misguided, as well as the search for purity, authenticity, and higher meaning in the mundane. At the same time, the term references a complex cultural history comprising trends that emerged mostly in the European 19th century and that encompass modalities ranging from art practice and poetry to nationalism. Elements commonly associated with romanticism include: fascination with the mystical, an interest in blood and soil, an opposition to industrialism, rationalism and bureaucratic formality, nostalgia for a lost past, fascination with death, pleasure in the grandeur of nature, an adoration of resistance and creativity, the coexistence of hope with melancholia.

Most importantly, romanticism relates to a key ingredient in transculturation and the encounter between a self and an Other, a traveler and a native, a filmmaker (or ethnographer) and their subject. At the hands of Western travelers, romanticism’s historical subject is the noble savage; a figure often represented at the juncture of admiration and rejection. Romanticism is thus kindred to terms such as exoticism, Orientalism and primitivism. In the last forty years, these notions have been the target of anthropological critiques concerning the role of representation in the power relations between centers and peripheries. Locally, romanticism also becomes highly relevant at present as official Greek institutions are preparing commemorative events for the 200-year-anniversary of the Greek War of Independence; a romantic event par excellence, foundational for Greek nationalism while represented in literature and art through tropes of heroism and rebirth. As an epistemology, romanticism may be even said to permeate the current Covid-19 context. Many commentators express a yearning for authentic, sensorial sociality as opposed to the supposedly mechanized, sterile digital interactions on the internet, while others describe the present as immersed in death and darkness.

With its unique selection of films, Ethnofest’s 8th themed section takes romanticism and its everyday uses seriously and seeks to critically unpack its underlying themes of idealization, alterity, transcendence and Othering: from the exploration of intimacy and familial emotion, to travel and the quest for pristine landscapes; from the exaltation of the resistant community to fantasies of return to natural, traditional lifestyles. From tourism as a form of romanticizing social experience to the soiled politics of cleanliness.

The films featured in the special section explore different aspects of romanticism and capture as well as trouble the relationship between idealization and the camera. All of the films think through the different potentials of visual form (from the role of music to evocative animation) and return to fundamental romantic themes, such as endurance, solitude and the mountainous landscape (Ait Atta: Nomads of the High Atlas; The Last Austrians); love, care and death (Bosco, Dorin and Dorina, Half-Elf);  politics, change and hope (Hands in Bleach, Borderlands, The Last Austrians); tourism, social transformation and the representation of tradition (Ait Atta, The Last Austrians), humans, animals and the beyond (Tears of Inge, Half-Elf), nostalgia, roots and the family (Ait Atta, Borderlands, Bosco, Dorin and Dorina). Some of the films (e.g., Ait Atta; Bosco, The Last Austrians) deal directly with the challenge of recording rural lifeworlds that are in transition or decline. They thus tease out film’s historical relationship to different kinds of salvage paradigm and find ethnographic ways to account for their subjects’ experiences of change and modernity. Tenderness, proximity to the subjects and ethnographic intimacy between observer and subjects also inform many of the films, especially as it concerns ageing, familial relationships and the experience of time (e.g., Dorin and Dorina, Half Elf, Bosco). Some films pick up traditional themes that are key to romantic representations of human experience. For instance, the negotiation of death and the after-life as well as the role of mythological belief in the everyday world are explored in The tears of Inge and in Half-Elf, whose playful hero —fixated with Elves—prepares himself and his kin for his death. Nationhood, a theme that is key to romanticism as a historical formation, is explored in Borderlands, which undermines the idea of divisive national boundaries through an emphasis on people’s future aspirations and its humanist vision of co-existence. Emancipatory politics and the lives of working classes are examined in the starkly clean interiors of Hands in Bleach (interiors that prove to be politically tainted) as well as the Alpine-landscapes-with-a-twist of The Last Austrians, whose material struggle complicates the idealized aesthetics of the pastorale. Finally, kinship, in an expanded definition, is examined through the practices of subjects in Bosco, Dorin and Dorina, Half-Elf and Ait Atta, with these films documenting the emotional and social affordances of relatedness, including those between the fimmaker and their subjects.

The films employ various styles and techniques, from observational strategies, to reflexive interactions and interviews; from quiet, uninterrupted vignettes to the juxtaposition of verbal arguments and positionalities; from analytical expositions of idealization to the narration of social life through stylistic enchantment. Devoted to the ethnographic exposition of the materiality of daily life, these films think about and utilize romantic themes and styles, but also provide us with the rich tactile worlds of their subjects and bring attention to the texture of social experience itself.

The Guest curator of the 2021 Themed Section is anthropologist Konstantinos Kalantzis, assistant professor at the department of Culture, Creative Media and Industries, University of Thessaly. www.konstantinoskalantzis.com