wilma kiener

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PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE This article was downloaded by: On: 28 February 2011 Access details: Access Details: Free Access Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37- 41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Visual Anthropology Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713654067 The Absent and the Cut Wilma Kiener To cite this Article Kiener, Wilma(2008) 'The Absent and the Cut', Visual Anthropology, 21: 5, 393 — 409 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08949460802341795 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08949460802341795 Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

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Page 1: Wilma Kiener

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

This article was downloaded by:On: 28 February 2011Access details: Access Details: Free AccessPublisher RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Visual AnthropologyPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713654067

The Absent and the CutWilma Kiener

To cite this Article Kiener, Wilma(2008) 'The Absent and the Cut', Visual Anthropology, 21: 5, 393 — 409To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08949460802341795URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08949460802341795

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial orsystematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contentswill be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug dosesshould be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directlyor indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Page 2: Wilma Kiener

The Absent and the Cut

Wilma Kiener

This article examines the specific role of cuts, the spaces between the shots, inethnographic filmmaking. The thesis is that cuts have to fill up absences that canbe viewed as a typical characteristic of life in the postcolonial world. The article isillustrated with examples from the author’s documentary film, Ixok-Woman.

CUT!

Until now, the paradigm in ethnographic filmmaking has tended to reflect itsequivalent in the written word: ‘‘You are there because I was there’’ [Cliffordand Marcus 1986: 22].1 Over recent decades the language of ethnographic film-making has evolved into an elaborate fetishizing of the camera, if only for thesake of creating a natural feeling of unity within a finite time and space. Thatmight be justified when the ethnic groups that are studied live in the back ofbeyond; times have changed, however. Nowadays people from nonindustria-lized countries are literally on the run. Spending their entire life in the placewhere they were born and traveling for romantic reasons only have become aprivilege of the few. Until recently, the ‘‘traveling cultures’’ (Clifford’s term) ofour time—migration, refugees, globalization, hybridization, to mention just afew key words—have hardly had any impact on ethnographic filmmaking. Arethere alternative cinematic poetics that are capable of understanding and convey-ing the experience of living in worlds of (dis)location and of (a)synchronism?This is precisely where montage comes into play: film is not only limited to thecamera, it also embraces editing and montage. Montage cuts and reorganizesconnections in time and space. For a certain era in ethnographic filmmaking,montage was even suppressed as being expressive, and as such an antirealistmarker. My first aim here is to examine the role of cuts in ethnographic film,the spaces between the shots. Taking my own film Ixok-Woman [1990] as anexample, I will demonstrate how an editing style emerged by necessity fromthe film’s content.

Assuming that montage is the key cinematographic technique for illustratingthe complexity of cultural interactions in the postcolonial world [Marcus 1995],

WILMA KIENER graduated from the Munich Film School and received a Ph.D. in CulturalAnthropology at the University of Munich with her book, The Art of Storytelling: Narrativityin Documentary and Ethnographic Films [1999]. She is a lecturer in cultural anthropologyat the University of Munich and a mentor at the Transart Institute at the Danube University inKrems, Austria. Her numerous documentaries include Ixok-Woman [1990] and CodenameSchlier [1985]. E-mail: [email protected]

Visual Anthropology, 21: 393–409, 2008

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online

DOI: 10.1080/08949460802341795

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montage in ethnographic film has to be positioned within the realist stream offilmmaking. An early Russian montage experiment was reminiscent of Marcus’sthesis, at least in terms of its title. In his experimental film Creative Geography, LevKuleshov filmed pedestrians on Moscow streets who were miles away from oneanother, but ‘‘looking at each other’’ and at the White House in Washington inthe film [Leyda 1960: 164; Beller 1999: 21; Bordwell and Thompson 2001: 259].Today Kuleshov might well have called his experiment ‘‘montagescapes.’’ Thecuts, as made by Kuleshov, deceive the viewers’ visual perception and so mockthe audience as well as the actors. Yet it is precisely this successful deception thatgives the power to join together images to build new contexts. Marcus’s andKuleshov’s works bear as yet unfulfilled promises for ethnographic filmmaking.

The question is: how can cuts, these joins between two images, ‘‘speak’’ aboutour world, or vice versa? Which experiences of today’s life lend themselves to thecinematic language of editing? Just as the rediscovery of montage will reshapeethnographic filmmaking, the rather unusual context of, and the urge for realismin nonfiction filmmaking will inevitably affect the technique of editing. One hasto assume that filming cultural geographies, like ethnoscapes [Appadurai 1996],will bring different dimensions of the cut to the fore. At the end of this article thequestion arises about which differences from Observational Cinema arise froman ethnographic cinema of montage?

AN ETHNOGRAPHIC CINEMA OF MONTAGE

There are indeed some examples in the history of ethnographic filmmaking inwhich montage plays a significant role. First of all, one thinks of the trance scenein Jean Rouch’s classic Les Maıtres fous [1954], in which archive material of aBritish colonial military parade is juxtaposed with participants in a trance ritualembodying British colonial figures. Furthermore, The Ax Fight [1971] by TimothyAsch and Napoleon Chagnon, as well as Dead Birds [1964] by Robert Gardner, aretwo more prestigious films in the ethnographic tradition that are known for theirediting style. Yet strictly speaking, not all of these films use montage—in The AxFight, the event is presented four times, each time with a different narrationalpriority [Ruby 2000: 130]—and not all of the above montage scenes show culturalgeographies; in Dead Birds montage is a cross-cutting between village scenes andfighting in the mountains [Ruby 2000: 99].

Of these three films, Les Maıtres fous is an early example of what I would like tocall, for a start, an ‘‘ethnographic cinema of montage,’’ since it is a very successfulattempt at filming cultural geographies; in the trance sequence, editing solves theproblem of showing what—while being absent—is a necessary part of the whole.The images of the military parade, inserted in what started off as a conventionaldocumentary scene, come as a complete surprise. No wonder that the editing styleof the trance sequence has been labeled ‘‘Vertovian’’ [Stoller 1992: 152] or ‘‘Eisen-steinian’’ [Russell 1999: 224], an illustration of the influence of psychoanalysis onethnography [Russell 1999: 225], and of primitivism on modernism [Taussig 1993:242], a view I actually agree with. Yet I would like to point out the most obviouspeculiarity of this montage sequence: film footage of what was absent at the

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moment of the actual shooting was included later, in the editing room. Rouchcompleted the sequence with missing images, editing cuts into the scene as thoughinto a curtain. Behind the curtain reality goes on. By putting in the missing images,Rouch simultaneously breaks and completes the illusion of the scene.

In Les Maıtres fous, the past is the significant absence in the overall picture.Space would be another category of absence.

Absences seem to be a crucial concept in filming ethnoscapes, because their reality isdefined by something that is absent; for example the family living in another country,or political protest that is only possible in a foreign country. ‘‘Ethnoscapes’’ are an analyti-cal construct and montage is the cinematic means of their representation—thus montagecan also shift our focus to ethnoscapes: montage like no other cinematic means is ableto show and stress the absences of ethnoscapes, absences that are not normally visible.These absences cannot be filled with scenes that are complete and stand up on theirown, but again only with scenes that are characterized by their absences. [Eva Knopf,e-mail to the author, 8–14–2005; my translation]

Montage does not aspire toward the fictional. On the contrary, it mountsanother, additional reality, thus expanding and enhancing the actual observa-tional scene. This addition is not only supplementary but also changes whatcomes before and after. When the ‘‘absent’’ is speaking about the present and viceversa, when the presence of one scene is the absence of the next, the spiral ofmontage is set into motion.

I always wondered what George Marcus’s [1995] ‘‘cinematic metaphor of mon-tage’’ actually means in relation to montage in film. As the metaphor is meant todescribe a practice in ethnographic writing only, Marcus is very cautious aboutmixing up montage in film with the metaphor of montage in writing. Thereshould be an ‘‘oblique’’ [Marcus] correspondence between writing and ethno-graphic filmmaking, hence the question arises: what happens to the ‘‘cinematicmetaphor of montage’’ once it is metaphorized back into film, once it isreimported into its original medium? It would be interesting to find a screenadaptation of a ‘‘cinematic metaphor of montage’’ in Marcus’s sense, a modernistnovel containing montage techniques that later happened to be visualized.Marcus does give such an example, in Small World by David Lodges, whichwas made into a film by the BBC. Unfortunately the film is flawed, and it seemsto fail precisely in its montage techniques. Marcus comments:

Tellingly, film in this case has failed to accomplish what the novel has been able toaccomplish cinematically, not because it is not able to do so (in fact it probably could havedone what the novel did more easily) but because, unlike the novel, it did not appreciatethe central problem of realist representation in late modernity. [Marcus 1995: 51]

I would like to follow up Marcus’s explanation by proposing that montagedoes not stand as a reflexive signifier in itself precisely because it can be donemore easily in the film medium. In the process of double metaphorization, fromfilm to writing and back, the effect of ‘‘alienation’’ is lost. As happens often in thearts, the transportation of a technique from one medium or art form to another

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can create something new, and it seems that the ‘‘metaphor of montage’’ createsan alienating effect in writing which gives the modernist novel an effect ofsimultaneity, of a deterritorialization of actions, that is not automaticallyrendered by its screen adaptation.

As Marcus’s article shows, in the medium of writing, something extra (some-how hinting at deterritorialized cultural production) is added to the sentencesthrough means of montage; however, this ‘‘extra’’ is not automatically createdby montage in the film medium. Quite to the contrary, in the case of films itseems that the cut has to make up for something; there has to be some kind of‘‘lack’’ intrinsic in the image preceding the cut, a hint at an absence hors-cadre.This ‘‘lack’’ is a prerequisite for the most elementary cut, the cut to the gaze,but it can also be found in a broader sense in the trance scene in Les Maıtres fous.

There is an emotional texture inherent in every absence that connects directlywith the expressive use of the cut in film language. Each absence is peculiar,and it is up to the cut to define the character of the absence. When the image isnot the only thing that matters, as in Observational Cinema, the cut itself actuallybecomes the thing that matters. For example, the image of that which is absentmay relate to the future (a wish, a threat) or lie in the past (a memory, thebackground); it can be a conscious representation of a situation elsewhere(political protest) or, on the other hand, images might pop up in a random waylike a roaming mind. In order to react and interpret the manifold relationshipsbetween presences and absences in contemporary cultural production, the editingstyle or montage in ethnographic filmmaking must be eclectic, embracing the vir-tually unlimited range of cuts in film language. It should be noted therefore thatthe loose term ‘‘ethnographic cinema of montage’’ is not intended to discriminatebetween montage proper (like Soviet-style montage or parallel editing, where twoseemingly disparate scenes build up dialectically toward a meaning that trans-cends each individual scene) and other editing techniques. Once the spiral ofmontage has been set in motion, many other forms of ‘‘electronic quilting’’ [Stam2003: 37] come into play besides the flow of images, such as the interweaving ofsound and image. What is more, filming cultural geographies creatively will alsochange the interpretation of the cuts. In fact, the joins between two images can bedescribed in the way they present absences in terms of time or space and absencesfrom the dominant mode of perception. I would like to apply this thesis to theexample of the most popular editing techniques, viz.:

. Flashbacks and flash-forwards indicate an absence in time. In melodramas and infilms noirs, scenes that do not follow normal chronological patterns have beenused nostalgically to explain characters in a Freudian sense [Hayward 2006:157]. In today’s nonfiction filmmaking, a flashback may also serve biographicalpurposes in showing where a person comes from or where he or she is head-ing. Hence the following doubts arise: ‘‘To what extent are we all really globa-lized and nonlocalized creatures? With all due respect to Appadurai, I think heoverstates this. My view is rather that many people move through a series ofdifferent but localized cultures’’ [David MacDougall, e-mail to the author,11–30–2004]. Thus in an ethnographic film, a flashback or a flash-forward scenemight point to the previous or the next stage of a person’s cultural context.

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. Cross-cutting is the editing solution for synchronous events happening at differentplaces. The classic topos of that technique in fiction filmmaking is the chase, whichemploys accelerating cuts back and forth. Variations to successive shots depictingsimultaneous events are panel shots (the screen is divided into two or even moreparts). How should one film telephone calls? The split screen technique was aubiquitous solution in mainstream cinema in the 1970s. Could panel shots alsobe a way of presenting the simultaneity of different globalization effects? If so, thistype of ethnographic film is yet to be made.

. In parallel editing, images are connected that hitherto stood in different contexts,absent from each other in the public’s perception. This is a highly self-conscious editing technique and, though it strives to analyze and deconstruct,it also has a strong emotional impact. Its first precursor is the example ofEisenstein’s parallel montage of a starving child set against fat people engagedin the act of drinking, in his film Streik [1924].

Besides the above-mentioned three large montage patterns that present thequality of absences, there is a cornucopia of editing techniques which, in our con-text, is apt to interpret the relationship with the ‘‘absent.’’ What type of joins areused between the shots—hard cuts or lap dissolves? Seamlessness or abrupt jerkyjumps?

. This is where the school of continuity editing, also known as American editing,comes into play. The graphic, rhythmic, and spatial effects of continuity editingendeavor to deceive the eye and make a cut feel seamless (match-action, the 180-degree law, etc.). On the other hand, in violation of the laws of continuity edit-ing, a cut can be punctuated and purposefully rendered awkward and abrupt(a jump cut). In one instance, the present can be rudely interrupted; in the nextcase it can be freed up and expanded by the ‘‘absent.’’ Editing ‘‘absences’’creates a manifold layer of meaning that cannot really be put down on paper.For example, is the connection unproblematic between two scenes from differ-ent parts of the world, which are seamlessly connected, thereby creating asmooth flow from shot to shot and preventing viewers from noticing at first,or does it involve a touch of irony?

I would like to give an early example of a documentary film that is highlyinventive in joining and juxtaposing shots. The silent experimental documentarypiece On the Subject of Nice (A propos de Nice) [1930], by Jean Vigo and BorisKaufman, is also one of the first films in cinematic history to depict simultaneityin parallel worlds. One set of images shows society’s opulent side, making analmost sickening display of itself: at the ballrooms, at the beach, in the limousine.These official postcard images are deconstructed by a second set of images of thatwhich is overlooked: the poverty, the factories, the graveyards, the workingchildren. Vigo’s and Kaufman’s goal is to turn viewers into accomplices in a rev-olutionary society [Barnouw 1983: 77]. Montage can be a magic carpet that carriesviewers away to distant places, the way dreams do, and thus lulls them into adreamlike state. However, it must be stated that this effect represents just oneuse of the technique and is not inherent in it. On the Subject of Nice proves thispoint very well. Montage is the primordial means in film language of saying

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‘‘both . . . and,’’ ‘‘neither . . . nor’’: North and South, here and there, to left andright, inside and outside, subjective and objective.

In summary: when expression is not solely a matter of the images, the cutbecomes an expressive tool in its own right. To relate to the variety of absencesin a globalizing world, an ethnographic cinema of montage will rather risk beingeclectic than neglect any of the categories of the cut. The important point is thatmontage necessarily arises from the content, and that it establishes a unity withthe film’s form and style. Though individual filmmakers may use montage withdifferent intentions, cuts in montage scenes are always both about cutting andconnecting things. They are about splitting as much as splicing together; thusthey literally ‘‘cut two ways.’’ This dual character of the cut seems to me to lieat the heart of an ethnographic cinema of montage. In contrast to writing, analy-sis and (re)configuration cannot be separated.

I will now continue with the analysis of my own film, Ixok-Woman, focusing onthe successive development of the film’s content and form and on the ultimateemergence of a particular editing style from this interdependence.

EDITING IXOK-WOMAN

In the very early poetic days, documentary filmmakers had one main goal: ‘‘Youmust show how a rose smells.’’ But how does Flaherty’s dictum translate into ourtimes? The challenge in ethnography now is the adaptation and reworking ofanthropological practices to the ‘‘non-localized quality of cultural reproduction,’’to use an expression of Arjun Appadurai’s [1996: 48]. Focusing on the practice ofethnographic filmmaking, one arrives at the following questions: what do ethno-scapes look and sound like on film? How does deterritorialization taste? And in aclose-up, what could be the expression on the face of someone tasting it? Thisreflects the very situation I encountered while shooting the documentaryIxok-Woman, which I made together with Dieter Matzka in 1990 (hence, in thisarticle, I will continue writing in a plural form).

A woman, an actress from Guatemala, had captivated us with her stage per-formance: a one-woman show presenting the life of an indigenous Guatemalanpeasant. Her performance was so engaging that we were initially convinced thatshe was, in fact, an indigenous woman. Her name was Carmen Samayoa. Laterwe accompanied her from Vienna, Austria, to Hanover, Germany. During thefirst interview, Carmen resolutely distanced herself from her stage persona:she explained that she was not indigenous, did not know any of the Maya-Quichelanguages, and was actually a professional ballet dancer who grew up inGuatemala city.

I can still remember her expression at that moment. It was part contentious-ness toward us for naively confusing the real with the stage persona, partpride in the artistry and power of her acting which had misled us, and parthumbleness toward the real indigenous women who had contributed their lifestories to her art. There was also a certain demonstrative haughtiness in hermanner, perhaps due to having made a name for herself on the internationalstage and not being a simple indigenous woman to begin with. As she expressed

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all this, we discovered the subject of a film, a feature-length (sort of) portraitof Carmen.

Carmen’s work, her sense of artistic expression, her political and criticalattitude are to a large degree defined by her real existence as a woman and anartist. In a world full of insurmountable boundaries, she appears like a characterto whom boundaries and restrictions are foreign. And we liked her. During thecourse of our research, we found that no individual scene or shot was sufficientto convey Carmen’s experiences to a European audience. A character as rich andcomplex as Carmen called for an entirely different and equally rich cinematicstructure.

To show why Carmen and her partner Edgar were living in exile, we had toreturn to Guatemala; to show the violence that was inflicted by the state militaryapparatus on Guatemala’s indigenous population, we had to refer to Carmen’stheatrical performance; to show the veracity of the stage play, we had to filmthe military training operations in Guatemala; and to show how Carmen heldtogether the different areas of her private life—nationality, womanhood, race,the stage—we had to shoot scenes of her everyday life while she toured Europe.

When we submitted our project proposal to a German television network thecommissioning editor, though excited about the subject matter, was doubtful atfirst as to how theater scenes would actually fit into a documentary film. Later,when we showed him our first rushes of the stage scenes, he was enthusiasticbut now could not imagine how authentic footage from Guatemala could everfit into a theatrical sequence. Finally, our TV colleagues were so ‘‘diversely’’thrilled by one or another aspect of the film that we ended up receiving no tele-vision funding at all. After the film was completed, various television stationsoffered to air it, but without reimbursement. The many layers of the narrativeturned out to be a complete drawback for the market.

Montage in our film is mainly used to deal with that which is absent inCarmen’s life. What the film really aims to show, beyond its narrative line, hap-pens on the formal level of the montage pattern where the missing parts of a cer-tain reality are joined together in order to create the whole picture of the storyand the character. Once the shooting is finished, the film is the only place wherethe essential dimensions, the cause and effects of the story, blend together. On theone hand, this represents a hidden meaning; on the other hand, it is visiblymanifested in the editing style.

Carmen’s story could not have been told in a different way. In her everydaylife, absences are due to her move from Guatemala to Europe, from one regionalcontext to another. On stage, Carmen represents absent people, with the stageplay recollecting the life of peasant women from Guatemala whom Carmenand Edgar had met years ago in a Mexican refugee camp. What is more, thepowerful presence of the army in Guatemala must be weighed against that whichthey take away or ‘‘turn into an absence.’’ It is the job of the military, the police,and the paramilitary troops to ‘‘create absences’’ and take people away; manyhave been killed or have left the country. For all intents and purposes, thosewho are absent constitute the true reality of Guatemala. On the other side, inEurope, one meets immigrants but cannot fully understand their personal orpolitical background, which lies elsewhere. That is why this documentary ended

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up with three different layers telling one and the same story: everyday life inexile, the stage play, the situation in Guatemala; each layer had to be introducedand find its proper closure at the end of the film.

Back to film language: in Ixok-Woman, the cut must express the different levelsof the absences it has to fill between the pictures, be it unnoticed, seamless,visible, striking, or something else. I will select three examples of montage thatshow the technique’s eclectic character, as each of them employs a differentfilm language: a cutaway, a match action cut, and cross-cutting.

1. Cutaway: ‘‘Shots that Take the Spectator Away from the Main Action or Scene’’[Hayward 2006:96]

At the time of shooting, Carmen and Edgar could not go back to Guatemala asthis would have been too dangerous. They had hoped that the presence of thefilm team would allow them to move freely in Guatemala, but we doubted thatthe camera would impress the military personnel enough to leave them alone.Although Carmen had wished very much to show us Guatemala, she and Edgarhad to stay in Paris, which meant that the two do not appear in the Guatemalafootage at all. The introductory scenes of the film are set in Europe, their placeof exile. The sequence I am describing now is the point when the first image ofGuatemala appears in the film. The cuts are intended to create the closest poss-ible connection between the images of Guatemala and the two central characters.

Shot 1

Carmen on the road in Germany: it is raining, the car is moving through thegreenish, dimly lit mist of an industrialized landscape. Carmen is looking outof the window and as usual she is listening to the music of Mercedes Sosa, herfavorite singer [Figure 1]. A horn sounds (overlapping from the next shot).

Shot 2

Cutaway shot to the first shot, with music continuing: in Guatemala the sun isshining, a blue truck passes from the right, honk! honk!, at breakneck speed,advancing quickly, until it fades into a little spot in the picture [Figure 2].

Shot 3

Similar graphic composition as Shot 2: back to the wet road in Germany.

Shot 4

Another cutaway, this time to a factory outside in the rain. This sequence is actu-ally based on a deception, as one of two apparently similar inserts (Shots 2 and 4)is taken from a different context. The deception is made easy by the seamless

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transition from one cut to another that is due to the overlapping of sound, the cutto the gaze out of the window, and similarities in image properties.

Before continuing with the next example, I should describe an insert that didnot work. The following scene was therefore not included in the film: Carmentalks about her mother, telling us that she is a great cook. As we had filmedCarmen’s mother cooking at home in Guatemala, we could put the image besidethe interview. The effect was devastatingly comical, and now I know why.Carmen’s mother is duly represented during Carmen’s interview, and becausethere was nothing absent, nothing missing, nothing hinted at, the insert was justhilarious.

2. Match Action Cut: ‘‘A Cut from One Shot to Another Where the Two Shotsare Matched by the Action or Subject and Subject Matter’’ [Hayward 2006: 95]

On another level, Ixok-Woman is about a rather successful search for identity. Ittells the story of a never-ending journey of growth, of changing identity andmoving between various identities of the self. The deeper theme of changeneeded visualization beyond interviews. The scene I am describing now is oneof three similar ones, all of which break out of the narrative stream. They aremore like a poem in three stanzas or a video clip based on Mercedes Sosa’s song‘‘Todo cambia.’’ In technical terms, two 360-degree pans are woven together. Asthe camera advances in time with the music, the cuts do not feel abrupt. In eachtake, the camera digs the place in a full circle: one take is shot in the main squareof a little town in Austria, the other take at a crossroads in Guatemala. The mon-tage scene starts with Carmen and Edgar playing at the fountain on the Austriansquare where Carmen is turning round and round [Figure 3]—and the camerawith her. But with the cut to Guatemala, the geography is suddenly out of joint[Figure 4].

3. Cross-cutting: ‘‘Literally, Cutting Between Different Sets of Action that Can BeOccurring Simultaneously or at Different Times . . . ’’ [Hayward 2006: 94]

At one point in the film, we had to show the reasons why Carmen and Edgar lefttheir homeland of Guatemala and came to Europe. Some people still tend tobelieve that asylum seekers come to Germany for the less abrasive climate orto take jobs away from German citizens. It was therefore important to stressthe fact that asylum seekers leave their home country neither capriciously norvoluntarily. In fact, Carmen and her partner Edgar were on the blacklist of aparamilitary organization, and artist friends of theirs who had also been on theblacklist had vanished shortly before, never to be seen or heard from again. Theywere reportedly kidnapped in an unmarked white van with darkened windowsand no license plates. Carmen and Edgar noticed such a vehicle following them.An imagined threat or a real danger? Carmen and Edgar went to a theatricalfestival in Canada and first returned to Guatemala a decade later. We wantedto present, as clearly and vividly as possible, the perpetual day-to-day political

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violence directed at Guatemala’s indigenous population as well as at trade unionleaders, journalists, left-wing artists, and Catholic priests. Simply telling thesefacts in an interview would not have been powerful enough.

Witness accounts are associated with even greater problems. In some cases,the telling of their stories may have a liberating effect on the interviewees.In other instances, as with victims of atrocities, the interviewer sends his orher protagonist back to their most grueling memories. The situation is worsewhen the particular political system is still intact. Carmen and Edgar wantedby no means to heighten their fears: for them, what they heard and read everyday in the news about Guatemala and some other countries was enough. Inaddition, they were repeatedly asked naive, sensational questions by peopleeager to hear of cruelties that would surpass the ones found in RigobertaMenchu’s well-known book, Crossing Borders [1998]. Since Carmen and Edgarabhorred talking about torture and death, we decided to transport theirrefusal into the film as well. At one moment though, it did seem easier forthem to open up. When we visited—at their request—the Nazi concentrationcamp in Mauthausen, Austria, Carmen and Edgar began to talk, ask questions,compare; they remembered past events and spoke in whispers. They began toexplain things to us. It was in Mauthausen that they first realized that we toohave had a traumatizing history. And paradoxically, it was walking throughthe memorial grounds that led them to believe in a common basis capableof translating their experiences into ours. These two scenes form the preludeto a montage scene depicting the takeover of a village by the military forcesand a massacre. Talking, however, had profound limitations. We had to builda scene using both material from the theater piece and authentic footage frommilitary training operations in Guatemala. We worked our way from words toimages.

The narrative level of the military sequence begins at the training camp atSolola, interviewing Col. Letona, a man whose appearance initially suggests anintellectual but whose red beret emphasizes the fact that he belongs to the brutalSpecial Forces of the Kaibiles. Posed before a half-naked woman—a calendar pin-up hanging on a rock with her weapon in position—the Colonel talks with elo-quence about the gentle methods used by the military to convince the oppositionto join the Democratic system. The next scene sheds doubt on these words—asthough positioning images against the words that have just been spoken. Aftermeeting him, we drive past a group of washerwomen at a well who form the linkto a scene of Carmen on the stage adopting a similar body position as the washer-women’s. We receive partly amused, partly suspicious reactions from thesewomen: one hides herself behind the well while the sound of Carmen singingblends in.

I will outline this five-minute scene in technical terms. The action unfolds fromtwo scenes with different origins that are intercut in a cross-cutting style. The firstset of images shows a military training unit in Guatemala at the Solola MilitaryBase: gymnastics, shouting (‘‘desde la muerta’’), climbing, jumping; finally shoot-ing into a valley and running away. In the next piece of footage Carmen is aloneon stage, performing the military takeover of a village; the abduction of men, therape and assassination of women; the quiet after the military have left. The two

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pictures following show how the shooting of the villagers is presented with thehelp of one image depicting military training with firearms aimed at human fig-ures [Figure 5]—and Carmen’s bodily reaction to the bullets, a figurative dance ofdeath [Figure 6].

The massacre scene works because Carmen only mocks the soldiers’ pres-ence in her one-woman show while the soldiers in Solola only imagine theenemy during their training. Editing brings these two pretended actionstogether; the full reality is established only through editing. The filmed sceneis entirely and obviously invented; however, it is so reflexive that it never lullsthe viewer into a ‘‘dreamlike’’ state. It feels true thanks to Carmen’s expres-siveness and precision and to the authentic military footage. I will get backto this scene later.

Looking at the similarities of the above examples, it should be noted that eachmontage sequence is built on a continuing audio level that actually holds thefragmented imagery together. In the history of documentary filmmaking, findinga strong audio level, such as a song, has often been the prerequisite to mount amontage scene, as in Geoffrey Reggios’ Koyaanisqatsi [1983]. Whereas in Observa-tional Cinema the image is always deemed more important than the sound, inmontage cinema the soundtrack is at least equal to the imagery, if not more thanthat.

YOU ARE HERE

I would like to conclude this article by citing another difference between the twononfictional styles: whereas the camera is the object-fetish of the ObservationalCinema—a kind of an audiovisual vacuum cleaner, voraciously sucking in timeand space—the object ‘‘worshiped’’ in montage cinema is the screen.

To the extent that observational-style cinema has become the hallmark ofethnographic filmmaking, the long-take style has become the ObservationalCinema’s key element. A problem arises with the characterization of the‘‘long take,’’ as shots are not necessarily of long duration [Henderson 1971: 9;MacDougall 1999: 293].

If you look at most ethnographic films, the shots are actually fairly short, although the aimmay be the opposite. I’ve moved toward shorter shots myself, expressing observationalglimpses and perceptions, except for a few scenes where I think the long take is parti-cularly important. Also, if you look at many of the great ethnographic films, such asRouch’s and Jorge Preloran’s [e.g., Imaginero] and even Marshall’s and Gardner’s, youwill find that they are made up of short takes. [David MacDougall, e-mail to the author,11–30–2004]

As no clear definition of the properties of the long take exists, it might beconcluded that the observational style is better described by a certain use, orunderstanding, of the camera as tool. In that view, the long take is the result ofusing the camera as a black box—black as a metaphor for vacuum—which drawsin the three-dimensional data in front of the lens once the start button is pushed.

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Consequently, in ethnographic filmmaking, which is more often than not neithersubjective nor uninterrupted, it might be more appropriate to call ‘‘long takes’’‘‘vacuum shots.’’

What the camera is to Observational Cinema, the editing room and ultimatelythe screen is to an ethnographic cinema of montage. It is there that connections intime and space are reorganized. On the screen it is possible to understand theinvisible by taking things apart and reassembling them in a new way. The ver-acity of a montage sequence like the massacre scene in Ixok-Woman is on a differ-ent plane than the designating of an exact time and place. In fact, in the exampleof that massacre scene, the historical place as such becomes unimportant. Instead,a different place takes control: it’s the cinema. Montage scenes resemble an instal-lation, a performance that transforms the real-life space of the spectators. Car-men’s artistic endeavor approaches something like a ‘‘transcultural cinema’’[David MacDougall]:

Sometimes I feel that the public here, the Austrians or the Europeans, perhaps, don’tunderstand. Because what has to be communicated is the life that Guatemalans reallydo experience, and the people here are, perhaps, far too removed from all that. So I some-times feel that the audience doesn’t understand and I feel alone. And I think that, perhaps,they feel alone as well, when they can’t understand. [Carmen in Ixok-Woman]

The question of veracity and authenticity, ever so haunting in nonfictionalfilmmaking, eventually leads to the one most striking difference between theaesthetics of the ‘‘vacuum shot’’ and montage cinema. Montage cinema, asidefrom on the purely visual level, also marks a crucial shift in the position of theviewer. Let’s take the film To Live with Herds [1972] as a prominent example ofObservational Cinema, filmed within the restrictions of the vacuum shot. BeforeMacDougall describes the production work he stresses the overall intention:‘‘What we were trying to give was a sense of being present in a Jie compound,a situation in which few of our viewers would ever find themselves’’[MacDougall 1998: 200]. Certainly one is reminded of James Clifford’s remarkson ‘‘being there’’—which I referred to in my introduction—as the ultimate effectof ethnographic writing. The focal point of the scenes in Observational Cinemalies ‘‘there,’’ elsewhere, in front of the lens. However, in montage cinema, thefocal point of the pictures suddenly turns outside into the spectator, sitting‘‘here’’ and watching the film. Montage confronts the viewer with fragments: itis a reflexive technique that depends on the cognitive involvement of the audi-ence, who must make sense of the pieces all by themselves and put them togetheron a cognitive level to get the story right. In montage cinema, the last step in theprocess of film production is the reception: the film can only be completed in themind of the viewer. Instead of events occurring in the poetics of the vacuum shotwhere filmmakers try to give viewers the impression of ‘‘being there,’’ thelocation of the viewer, the movie theater, or wherever the film might beprojected, is transformed into the dominant location in terms of the here andnow in the cinema of montage. And this is what incites viewers to ask, ‘‘Whatis going on here?’’

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article was written for the Postcolonial Studies postgraduate program, overseen by Graham Huggan and Frank

Heideman at the University of Munich.

NOTE

1. My text ‘‘Travelling Images—Towards an Ethnographic Cinema of Montage’’ [2006],revised and rewritten, served as a basis for this article. I am very grateful indeed toEva Knopf and David MacDougall for their valuable comments on the first version.

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FILMOGRAPHY

Asch, Timothy, and Napoleon Chagnon1971 The Ax Fight.

Eisenstein, Sergei1924 Streik.

Gardner, Robert1964 Dead Birds.

Kiener, Wilma, and Dieter Matzka1990 Ixok-Woman.

Kuleshov, Lev1922 Creative Geography.

Lodges, David1988 Small World.

MacDougall, David, and Judith MacDougall1972 To Live with Herds.

Preloran, Jorge1969 Imaginero.

Reggio, Geoffrey1983 Koyaanisqatsi.

Rouch, Jean1954 Les Maıtres fous.

Vigo, Jean, and Boris Kaufman1930 On the Subject of Nice (A propos de Nice).

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