Title How can structural film expand the language of experimental ethnography? Type Thesis URL http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/5454/ Date 2009 Citation Butler, Brad (2009) How can structural film expand the language of experimental ethnography? PhD thesis, University of the Arts London. Creators Butler, Brad Usage Guidelines Please refer to usage guidelines at http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/policies.html or alternatively contact [email protected]. License: Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives Unless otherwise stated, copyright owned by the author How can structural film expand the language of experimental ethnography? Brad Butler University of the Arts London Practice Based Thesis in Film December 2009 Word count: 49126 1 Instructions: Read yourself into a position of crisis Start your film from there 2 ABSTRACT This research question How can structural film expand the language of experimental ethnography? considers the potential cross-fertilisation of a structural film practice with experimental ethnography to challenge dominant assumptions about cultural representation in anthropology and to suggest ways in which anthropology can actively interrogate visual systems as a means of renewing the avant-gardism of structural film. Thus this study asks what a structural–materialist project mostly connected with the 1960s and 1970s could contribute to contemporary ethnography if issues of anthropological representation were allowed to penetrate field of vision and what new forms of representation occur where the textual embodiment of authority in fieldwork studies becomes the subject of a structural film. This includes the crossover of these terms with minimal and conceptual art, experimental aesthetic systems and/or artworks that blur fact and fiction. These theoretical parameters are then explored through practice in an installation proposal The Autonomous Object? and a single screen work The Exception and the Rule. The Autonomous Object? takes as its subject the boundary between documentary and performance, the raw realism of the photographic image and the sculptural qualities of the monochrome. The Exception and the Rule proposes that the viewer experience representational issues at stake in anthropology and structural film, a transfer of emphasis from what a film’s subject ‘is’ to how a film’s subject is seen. Both works gather geo/political urgency due to the current civil unrest in Pakistan and India, where they were primarily filmed. The resulting question as to how one makes a political film foregrounds the multi-layered and complex relationship between art, politics and language that has led to The Museum of non Participation, the future body of work that concludes this thesis. http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2008/the_museum_of_non_participation 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements.……………………………………………………………………… p 6 Research methodology………………………………………………………………… p 6 Chapter 1 outline……………………………………………………………………….. p 7 Chapter 2 outline……………………………………………………………………….. p 8 Chapter 3 outline……………………………………………………………………….. p 9 INTERMISSION outline……………………………………………………………….. p 9 Chapter 4 outline………..……………………………………………………………… p 10 Chapter 1 The historical development of visual anthropology……………………………… p 11 Collier on photography and visual anthropology………………………………... p 12 Early anthropological vision………………………………………………………… p 18 Cinéma vérité………………………………………………………………………….. p 21 The sustained influence of Dziga Vertov………………………………………….. p 21 Power, control and authority……………………………………………………….. p 24 Chapter 2 The Ethnographer’s Eye……………………………………………………………… p 28 The cinematic metaphor of montage……………………………………………….. p 31 Problematizing the spatial and the temporal:……………………………………. p 32 Problematizing perspective / voice and the dialogic appropriation of concepts and narrative devices………………………………………………….. p 34 Bifocality and critical juxtapositions and contemplation of alternative possibilities……………………………………………………………….. p 38 The war of dreams…………………………………………………………………….. p 38 The psychology of cinema………………………………………………………….… p 39 Structural film………………………………………………………………………….. p 41 Structure/apparatus/spectator: Linking visual anthropology and structural film…………………………………………………………………….. P 45 Making evident the conditions of production and defining the forms of structuration……………………………………………………………. p 46 Initiating the desire in the spectator to release their perceived role of passivity and the authority of the historical determinants acting on both filmmaker and spectator…………………………………………… P 47 Duration and temporal sequentiality………………………………………………. p 48 Practice as theory…………………………………………………………………….. p 49 4 Chapter 3: The Autonomous Object?…………………………………………… p 54 Mirror Film…………………………………………………………………………….. p 56 Power, control and authority: in practice………………………………………... p 58 Colour Aid……………………………………………………………………………… p 61 Open Systems………………………………………………………………………….. p 63 INTERMISSION…………………………………………………………………….. p 67 FIELD NOTES A………………………………………………………………………. p 68 FIELD NOTES B………………………………………………………………………. p 70 Self-critique:……………………………………………………………………………. P 71 FIELD NOTES A………………………………………………………………………. p 71 FIELD NOTES B………………………………………………………………………. p 72 FIELD NOTES A………………………………………………………………………. p 74 FIELD NOTES B………………………………………………………………………. p 75 FIELD NOTES A…………………………………………………………………….... p 76 FIELD NOTES B…………………………………………………………………….... p 77 FIELD NOTES A…………………………………………………………………….... p 79 FIELD NOTES B…………………………………………………………………….... p 80 FIELD NOTES B…………………………………………………………………….... p 82 FIELD NOTES C……………………………………………………………………... p 84 Chapter 4……………………………………………………………………………… p 89 Practice-based submission 2: The Exception and the Rule…………………… p 89 Script breakdown scene-by-scene………………………………………………….. p 89 Conclusion: The Museum of Non Participation……………………………… p 107 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………. P 120 5 PREFACE Acknowledgements I wish to express my gratitude to my supervisors, William Raban and Elizabeth Edwards, for their patience, support and invaluable insights. I thank the VASL Artists collective and Afrin Sopariwala for their help in filming The Exception and the Rule and Karen Mirza for her total support throughout this process. I gratefully acknowledge the AHRC for their financial assistance and LCC for the opportunity to undertake this dissertation. Research methodology This thesis was written over a four year period during which I visited India three times and Pakistan twice. This included a ten-week stay in Mumbai, followed six months later by a visit of similar duration in Karachi. These two visits are referred to in the following Chapters as fieldwork visits. Throughout this time my research question remained the same, but I did pursue many different strategies, approaches and experiments in order to evaluate what this question meant for my practice and what my practice meant for this question. It was always in my mind that this question was a point of departure and not a question posed in order to substantiate a definitive answer. Instead it has been my method to attempt to document the process of my ideas evolving in time in order to assess and profile the potential in this cross fertilisation. It is a developing argument within this thesis that this approach is in keeping with the multi-layered and reflexive philosophical arguments evident in both structural film and experimental ethnography. Over this period this exploration of process led to a number of different textual experiments that were finally manifested in a Chapter structure that begins with a historical overview of the evolution of the terms of my research question, followed by contemporary representational debates within structural film and visual anthropology. These debates are then reanalysed through my two practice-based artworks The Autonomous Object? and The Exception and the Rule. These Chapters are analysed in greater detail below, but the sequence of these ideas is significant: it is my argument that The Exception and the Rule developed out of The Autonomous Object? influenced by my ongoing reading that was also challenging my practice. This is recognised in a text entitled INTERMISSION, which occurs between Chapters 3 and 4 as a self- critique of my ideas drafted before, during and after my two main field trips. This personal subjective diary documentation of cul de sacs and ideas caught in time stands in contrast to the academic authoritative tone of the other Chapters in this thesis. An INTERMISSION intertitle also appears in the film The Exception and the Rule calling attention to the constant questioning throughout this thesis as to the dialogue between practice and theory. It is also important to acknowledge how conversations and collaborations helped inform this work. In particular these include conversations with my supervisors and with my long-term collaborative partner Karen Mirza. Filmmaking is inherently a collaborative process but from the beginning it was impressed on 6 me that I must be clear to differentiate my own work from that of Karen Mirza within this thesis context. It has therefore been my method to write this thesis text solely in consultation with my supervisors. Where collaboration has been a structuring principle of a work, as with The Autonomous Object? I have clearly indicated this. I would like to clearly state that The Exception and the Rule is a film that as far as possible I authored on my own. First, this work was primarily shot and conceived during a fieldtrip to India in which Karen was