Experimental Film and Anthropology ed. by Arnd Schneider and Caterina Pasqualino (review)

Experimental Film and Anthropology seeks to find common ground between a film genre and an academic discipline. In their introductory chapter, editors Arnd Schneider and Caterina Pasqualino state their aim to "challenge and overcome a broad realist-narrative paradigm that—with few exceptions—has dominated visual anthropology so far." They do not define or explain this premise, but take it as a given. The foil of visual anthropology becomes the vantage point from which they address readers who might share their interest with the discipline's uses of visual and auditory media. Their approach is "deliberately impure and eclectic," defining "film" as "moving image products in the broadest sense" and using "experimental" to refer to the "genealogy of experiments with films' form and material in several pre- and postavant-garde movements." In this endeavor, they bring together filmmakers, film and cinema studies scholars, and anthropologists who write on topics ranging from altered states of consciousness to asynchronous audio-image relationships. These varied viewpoints presuppose—and at times subvert or recuperate—an interminable anxiety about representation and expression within anthropological practice. While the editors' central aim is one of dialogue and provocation, their lack of a more precise stance or argumentative armature toward the presumed "realism" of visual anthropology paradoxically reinforces the paradigms they seek to overcome. If the political-aesthetic infrastructures that have historically undergirded the discipline had been contextualized and interrogated, rather than taken as given, the contributors' varied interventions would have benefitted significantly.

One theme that emerges from this polyphonous volume is a tendency for authors to situate themselves in relation to a vague notion of "the real"—a concern that belies a lingering tension within anthropology surrounding efforts to reconcile the acknowledgement of artifice inherent in the anthropological project with its expressed aims of descriptive or figurative accuracy (an anthropological premise alluded to by Nicole Brenez in her chapter on Robert Fenz). While some of the contributors' work engages with these debates about representation, others unequivocally move away from re-presentation as an evaluative category and argue for other measures of assessment and analysis. Jennifer L. Heuson and Kevin T. Allen summarily express this tension stating: "We attempt to produce documents that evoke 'being here' but that also explicitly signal that a film (or other type of recording) is an artifact, not a representation, of experience." For Heuson and Allen, this tension is eased by the proclaimed transparency and self-reflexivity of experimental film. Indeed, many of the authors valorize the formal qualities of films that bear the marks or traces of their making, asserting that this formal reflexivity does not hide the illusory nature of representation under the chimera of feigned observational totality. However, pointing to the constructed nature of an artifact neither absolves the maker of responsibility for the aesthetic choices made nor challenges the disciplinary rubrics that uncritically hold realism in higher regard than abstraction.

In their chapter "Our Favorite Film Shocks," Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr discuss how a film is received or experienced to argue for a revision of anthropological rubrics and "notions of validity" in favor of the efficacy of the "cinematic shock" rather than the "perceived correspondence between cinema and the real." For Barbara Glowczewski, an experimental filmmaker-turned-anthropologist who investigates Australian Aboriginal ritual performance, "the real" is unequivocally located in the subjects' perceptions and expressions of their cultural phenomena. Glowczewski echoes Malinowski's aspirations to realize the native's vision of their worlds (1922) stating that an anthropologist's aim to give insight into another culture "can only be achieved if the singularity of our subjects' perceptions are taken into account; that is, the way they express their visions, memories, and history…". In a Latourian twist, Martino Nicoletti's argument for what he calls "visual media primitivism" transposes this agency onto the technical devices he uses in the field, stating: "I indeed try to preserve their fundamental expressiveness, their own eloquence; briefly, their own vision of the world." He thus...