Visual Anthropology Cross-Reading Report

Extract

[...] According to this vision, the ethnographic film, by its own characteristics as well as these constraints, must reveal the social reality, the major object of ethnography and in fine of anthropology. This same relationship to social reality is also at the heart of Saïd Temba's argument. Indeed, in his article, which sets out to assess the colonial reality of the early days of cinema in connection with the films created during this crucial period up to the 1970s, that is to say, until decolonization, the author shows that Western colonial expansion must be revealed to viewers. [...]

[...] Conclusion In this present work, we wanted above all to highlight that certain themes were common to the articles whose cross-report we had to establish. In fact, whether it was the film as a constructed object, or the relationship to social reality, and finally the relationship to the Other, these three articles inform us about the close links between image and anthropology and more particularly about the constant problem encountered by anthropology in order to account in an objective manner for social phenomena in foreign societies to anthropologists. [...]

[...] Should the ethnographic film be appreciated as a construction? It is interesting to appreciate in the first moment of this work how the three articles each return to the medium even, namely the film, used by a science such as anthropology and ethnography for heuristic purposes in as much as the image constitutes a non-negligible data. However, it is above all a matter of appreciating the filmic object as a construction that responds to interests, whether they are solely related to form documentary film) or on the background (which society decides to broadcast it and by what means). [...]

[...] Indeed, the ritual is a practice eminently studied in the field of anthropology, whether it is by the rites of passage3 or by its violence4, in as much as it is a precise revealer of a society. By the fact that it has a beginning, a middle and an end, the ritual can perfectly agree with the said classical construction of a film In parallel, one must well imagine that this question of construction reveals an important parameter, the fact that cinema has taken over from its creation, that is to say at the end of the XIX19th century, to establish connections with the world and especially with the colonial domain. [...]

[...] In fact, Alban Bensa shows in his article, and this is what will preoccupy him for most of his proposal, that a documentary film makes in fact to oppose the vision of a director (through his beliefs and ideologies) and those of the individuals or groups he is himself filming. It is for this reason that he returns to the notion of voice-over, that is, the commentary of such a film. In fact, according to him, 'the use of commentary consecrates the authority of the filmmaker who instrumentalizes his images so that they serve his own fiction best'10 » (Bensa, 2008). From then on, this misunderstanding is therefore officially established when it comes to narrating his film. [...]