The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle, and: Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (review)

These two new volumes from Duke University Press are welcome additions to the growing literature on early cinema. Each exemplifies the range and complexity of current work being done in the field, which focuses on much more than just film. The two books are concerned with the explosion of representations of the world taking place at the beginning of the twentieth century, not just in film but in other media as well: world’s fairs, early anthropological discourse, even the railroad becomes a kind of medium. Both books combine a historical approach (involving archival research) and a theoretical approach to their material, crossing the methodological boundaries of film history and cultural studies. Both share a concern with representations of the “real”: Lynne Kirby’s book Parallel Tracks details cinematic movement using the grand metaphor of the railroad, focusing on issues of spatiality, nationhood, and gender; Fatimah Tobing Rony’s book The Third Eye focuses on ethnographic representations, moving pictures of people. Kirby’s book fits into a somewhat familiar model of criticism that we might call the “shocks of modernity” school, which tends to outline the historical shift into modernity at the turn of the century via the writings of Walter Benjamin. On the other hand, Rony takes this same historical period and analyzes the racist and imperialistic ideologies undergirding representations of ethnographic Others using anthropological theory.

In The Third Eye, Rony moves from a discussion of the racist evolutionary discourses surrounding early ethnography to close analyses of many films, including individual chapters devoted to Nanook of the North (1922) and King Kong (1933). “It is astonishing how often the constructed nature of the ethnographic film is ignored,” Rony writes (12), and in the chapters that follow this all-too-true assertion she carefully and repeatedly dismantles the veneer of authenticity that has surrounded ethnographic film for decades. Rony divides ethnographic film into three representative strategies—inscription, taxidermy, and teratology—and these serve to divide the book into three sections (each consisting of two chapters), which move chronologically. The book is extremely well organized, especially considering the vast amount of material covered. Rony’s prose is lucid and engaging, succinctly communicating complex ideas without being reductive.

Rony begins with an excellent chapter documenting the fundamental pervasiveness of racism in nineteenth-century scientific thought. Race was conceived of as an evolutionary category, with Anglo-Europeans representing the pinnacle of evolutionary achievement and nonwhites occupying a supposedly less evolved, “savage” position representative of the past. Thus racial difference and geographical difference were transmuted into temporal difference, in a narrative of historical progression. Rony writes: “The ‘steeplechase’ is an important metaphor. History was a race: those who did not vanquish would vanish” (28). The primary figure Rony uses to exemplify this attitude is Félix-Louis Regnault, a French anthropologist who used film to study elements of the human body—cranial shape, posture, gestures, gait—which he thought signified race, much like his more well-known teacher Etienne-Jules Marey. A member of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris, Regnault’s work is characteristic of this nineteenth-century “knowledge system whose paradigm was relentlessly comparative” (28).

Rony’s sophisticated discussion of this knowledge system moves beyond a mere itemization of early anthropology’s racist attitudes and practices to demonstrate why this kind of knowledge was so compelling, showing how this thought functioned within scientific practice and filtered out into a complex net of popular entertainments such as world’s fairs and natural history museums. This kind of knowledge had the effect of rendering Europeans “historifiable,” as people with a history, while nonwhites were seen as “ethnographiable,” representative of a “primitive” early stage of evolution still surviving in the present—people without a history, without a civilization, without...