Archive

The intentions of the Athens Ethnographic Film Festival’s initiative to introduce a thematic section into its line-up are twofold: on the one hand, open up the Festival to a wider audience, highlighting the particular kind of knowledge provided by the ethnographic film on social issues and, on the other hand, provide a platform for a dialogue on the limitations and capacities of the ethnographic film to address those issues.
The theme of this first section is xenophobia and racism. As we consider issues like racist violence, aggressive expressions of nationalism, social exclusion and the rise of fascism to be of the highest significance for the Athenian society, we decided to inaugurate Ethnofest’s themed section with a selection of ethnographic films addressing such issues.

Visual anthropology scholars have noted film’s potential in approaching facets of social matters which differ from those usually touched upon by the written word, as well as its potential as an anthropological tool to approach and intrinsically understand the other*. We believe that this knowledge that the ethnographic film might provide may reach beyond an audience of specialists, and to explore this idea we choose to screen films that deal with racism and xenophobia as social expressions of managing otherness. In this context, we ponder as to what films made by ethnographers can teach us, or lead us to think on these issues – which one should have expected to be substantial for this particular scientific field, and are surely central to contemporary societies. Our goal, therefore, through this film selection is to showcase cinematic anthropological approaches and analyses of these phenomena in a diachronic and global framework. Thomas Kaske’s film “Document: Hoyerswerda | Frontex” embodies several of the section’s points via its idiosyncratic editing, which presents the juxtaposition between narratives by Mozambican refugees –racist violence victims- in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1991 and footage from Frontex cameras which depict pursuits of immigrants attempting to cross the Greek-Turkish borders. In this way, Kaske notes the diachronic and insistingly problematic European immigration policies, providing us with space to reflect on deeply rooted xenophobia in Europe.
Stefania Giannikou’s “Stationed” presents an example of how these European immigration policies are ruthlessly experienced. Her film is a violent snapshot of the daily reality faced by immigrants trapped in Greece, in a vague and precarious transitional space, victims of the Dublin II regulations.
“Descending with the Angels” examines another facet of immigrant life in Europe. The film, which charts with disarming immediacy the two-way remedial treatment of a Palestinian refugee in Denmark, who is possessed by a ‘Jinn’ spirit: through the traditional Islamic exorcism and psychotropic medication. The man does not see the point in psychiatric treatment, since he believes his illness has been dealt with through the exorcisms from the Koran, his physicians, however, insist on the treatment, as well as pointing out that the drugs administered by them are responsible for any improvements on his condition. This juxtaposition of two belief systems presented in the film exposes the superficialities of cultural co-existence, the limits of tolerance and the harsh reality of the rational management of non-normality.

Sara Hall’s film, “Ghosts’ Stories” presents stories from the harsh reality of Albino life in Tanzania. Via narrations, and attempts to approach the educational, professional, family, and social life of Albinos in the country, she charts a complex and violent web of racist convictions. Analyzing the complexity of this phenomenon, Hall highlights the way in which religious prejudices, racist views and speculative plans frame the violence and exclusion experience by Albinos in Tanzania.

Mihai Leaha, in his film, “Valley of Sighs”, aims to shed light on the history of the Roma Holocaust during World War II through the stories of the handful of Transnistria (Moldova) concentration camps survivors. Leaha masterfully films and juxtaposes the landscape with the interview, succeeding in cinematically highlighting the existential complexity of the land which tragically haunts the narrations of the survivors.

In “Fantome Island”, Adrian Strong recounts an unknown side of racist colonial Australia’s history. Reconstructing the story of a leper colony/place of exile for Aboriginals, through the narration of Joe Eggmolese, who spent his childhood on the island, Strong penetrates what he calls the “fringes of the marginalized”. With this personal narration as his vehicle, the director analyses the strategies of bio-political exclusion and control of the colonial state, achieving an in-depth criticism of official Australian historiographies.
Many of the films discuss bio-political practices of fear, as the basis and results of the propagation of xenophobic and racist phenomena. The ethnographic film, beyond the abstract and generalizing journalistic discourse about these issues, can offer piercing insight into the violently experienced reality of the cast-out, the corporeal resonance of legal regulations and racist beliefs. One such cinematic moment and a particularly biting, in our eyes, commentary on the European Union immigration policies lies in a scene of Rossella Schillaci’s “Other Europe”**, wherein, during a heated discussion, immigrants talk about the ways through which you can escape your country of arrival and emigrate elsewhere in Europe. It is not enough, they say, to burn your fingers, as your fingerprints will resurface after a certain period – and, according to Dublin II, you will be sent back to the country of arrival. It is better to cut them off.

Dafni Sofianopoulou,
Christos Varvantakis

**. See David MacDougal (1998) Transcultural Cinema, Paul Stoller (1992) The Cinematic Griot Alan Grossman & Aine Obrien (2008) Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice; Sarah Pink (2001) Doing Visual Ethnography.

**. The film was screened at the Athens Ethnographic Film Festival Ethnofest in 2012 and will feature in this year’s line-up as a special screening of the themed section.

The curators wish to
thank Peter Ian Crawford, Beate Engelbrecht, Allan Grossman and Stephen Nuggent, for their ideas and commentary during the planning stages of this tribute.

Jean Rouch, the griot filmmaker

Jean Rouch, anthropologist, documentary filmmaker and pioneer director was distinguished for his advancement of cinema as a medium for ethnology, his stylistic ingenuity, his radical views on documentaries and his political stance on colonialism
issues. He shot more than 100 films and published studies on Songhay, immigration and urban life.
In contrast with directors who filmed action and events as detached observers, thinking that they thus would not greatly influence what was being observed and at the same time hesitating to interact with their subjects, Rouch never tried to be an invisible witness or a neutral narrator. On the contrary, he chose to trade the “objective” gaze for a “shared anthropology” (Colleyn, 2005:114). It is a method first presented by Flaherty which addresses subjects equally, builds mutual respect and exceeds mere observation, as the subjects offer representations of themselves to the films. With this as his guide, Rouch develops a new type of ethnographic practice and documentary, which blurs the lines between producer and subject, “fiction” and “reality”, Europe and Africa, practical and poetic, casual and magical, beholder and social world of the film (Ginsburg, 2005: 111).

Rouch viewed the film as part of ethnography (Stoller, 1992: 40) and used the camera as a scientific tool (Stoller, 1992: 191). He insisted that its presence, as well as the ethnographer’s presence, incites, converts, accelerates, acts as a catalyst (Feld, 2003:16). He followed the approach of the provocateur, provoking what we see on screen, since, if the director had not posed certain questions, brought people along, asked them to work together or shown them footage before filming their reactions, it would not have happened (Eaton, 1979: 40-53). Thus, he created the reality he was describing, confusing the limits between cinematic genres and creating, along with his indigenous friends, a series of films called “ethnofictions”

Rouch’s first films about the Dogon and the Songhay stand out for the immediacy of the cinematic recording, the intimacy of the documentation and the poetic commentary, a combination that creates the feeling we are there. In the Intiation into Possession Dance (Initiation à la Danse des Possédés, 1948), he films a woman’s initiation into ritual dances of possession at the Songhay of Firgoun, Niger, while in The Magicians of Wanzerbé (Les Magiciens de Wanzerbé, 1949), one of his least seen films, he focuses on the Songhay magic and its rituals, and tells the story of Wanzerbé, in Niger, a village with a great tradition in magicians. In Yenendi, the Men who Make the Rain (Yenendi, less Hommes qui Font la Pluie, 1951), he presents a rain ritual of the Songhay and the Zerma of Simiri, Zermaganda, Niger, in the first attempt of showing phenomena of demon-possession and the trance state.
In Cemetery in the Cliff (Cimetière dans la Falaise, 1951), he films the funerary rituals of the Dogon, at the Bandiadara cliffs in Mali, which he also addresses in Moro-Naba, where he observes, perhaps for the last time, a ritual that’s dying out, in honour of the Mossi chief in Ouagadougou, in Burkina
Faso.
In Battle on the Great River (Bataille sur le Grand Fleuve, 1952),
he describes the process of hippopotamus hunting by the Sorkoon the Niger river. The film has been linked with the birth of “participatory cinema” in Africa since 1954 Rouch screened it to the film’s hunters from Ayorou, following Flaherty’s example with the Eskimos in the ‘20s. On seeing their image on the screen, they understood Rouch’s work as that of a cinematic griot and contributed to it with their feedback. The high priest of the Hauka mediums, Monkaiba, was so moved by the Hauka scenes at the end of the film that he invited Rouch to film the annual ritual at the Gold Coast, which was depicted in “The Mad Masters”.

The Mad Masters (Les Maîtres Fous, 1955) concerns the emigration of the Songhay and the Zerma from Niger to the colonial Gold Coast (today’s Ghana), exclusively focusing on the socio-cultural adjustments of the Zabrama (Songhay and Zeria) community there. It is about – as shown in the introductory note – the traditional meeting of the modern, which births a new religion, the Hauka cult. In the film, Rouch films the Hauka believers being possessed by spirits of colonial commanders and act out a drama-reflection on the principles of colonialism (Rouch, Marshall & Adams, 2003:188).
Rouch interprets the Hauka ritual in psychological terms, as a cathartic experience that releases the animosity against the colonial government, allowing them, as evidenced in the end, to mock the Europeans on Sunday, before returning to their daily,
submissive activities (Heider, 1976: 40).
With The Mad Masters, Rouch began to distance himself from purely descriptive cinema and turn towards a more complex approach to the structure of events. The film, thus, clearly expresses the anthropological view of the ritual as dramaturgy, as well as the concept of the
anthropological film as narrative diegesis.

Shot on the Niger-Mali border, between 1957 and 1965, The Lion Hunters (La Chasse au Lion à l’Arc) chronicles the entire process of lion hunting: the construction of bows, poison and traps, the hunt itself and its rituals. The film refers to the Songhay magic and the relationship between hunter and prey while aiming at the participatory cinema, at shared anthropology.
In this personal ethnographic exhibit, Rouch safeguards the past with his camera
and transforms into a gatekeeper of tradition, in the shape of a contemporary, cinematic griot. The story of the film is turned into legend over which Rouch’s narration looms, with his commentary addressed to children who will never be hunters.

The eight films of this tribute, some of which are very rarely screened, present us the early Jean Rouch work and give us the opportunity to see the first samples of the anthropological perception and the cinematic approach of a director who was
influential to both anthropology and cinema.

Dimitris Kerkinos

Bibliography
—Colleyn, Jean Paul, 2005. ‘Jean Rouch: an anthropologist ahead of his time’. American Anthropologist, Vol. 107, No. 1, March 2005.
—Ginsburg, Faye. 2005. ‘Dans le bain avec Rouch: A reminscence’. American Anthropologist, Vol. 107, No. 1, March 2005.
—Heider, Karl G., 1976. Ethnographic Film. Austin: University of Texas Press. #
—Eaton, Mick (επιμ.), 1979. Anthropology, realty, cinema. The films of Jean Rouch. London: BFI.
—Feld, Steven (επιμ.), 2003. Ciné ethnography. Jean Rouch. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
—Stoller, Paul, 1992. The cinematic griot. The ethnography of Jean Rouch. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
—Rouch, Jean, Marshall John & Adams, John W., 2003 [1978]. ‘Les maitres fous, The lion hunters, and Jaguar’. At Steven Feld (ed.), Ciné ethnography. Jean Rouch.