Indianizing Film: Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology

Introduction: The Question of Technology

Introduction The Question of Technology y The film and video training center CEFREC (Centro de Formación y Realizaci ón Cinematográfica) in Bolivia recently published on its homepage an image of the Quechua media activist Marcelina Cárdenas in traditional festive attire pointing a camcorder at the viewer (fig. 1).1 CEFREC’s homepage brings together culturally diverse indigenous video makers from distinct geographical and climatic regions. A young boy from the lowlands rises from the Andean hills and trains his camcorder on Cárdenas, a middle-aged video maker from Potosí whose body dominates the river land in the foreground. Her camera points beyond the frame, at once interpellating us, the viewers, and invoking the widespread practice of video making among indigenous peoples in the high- and lowlands of the Andean countries. Indeed, since the video makers visually occupy spaces far from their origins, the composition refers to indigenous media’s travels. No longer limited by the expense of cumbersome 16mm or 35mm cameras, film projectors, and production laboratories, analog and digital video enables the exchange of indigenous gazes interculturally among various ethnicities. Exotic images of South American Indians in body paint holding camcorders began to proliferate in magazines and on book covers in the United States in the late eighties (fig. 2). The appeal of such images for Western consumers still lies in the way they visualize a clash between the native body and new communication technology. As Robert Stam put it, “widely disseminated images of the Kayapo wielding video-cameras, appearing in Time and the New York Times Magazine [and on the cover of Stam’s book itself] derive their power to shock from the premise that ‘natives’ must be quaint and allochronic, that ‘real’ Indians don’t carry camcorders” (Stam 326). In other words, the photograph of the Kayapo cameraman joins two apparently 2 ndianizing ilm incongruous time-spaces: the time of indigenous peoples inhabiting what the West has come to think of as the premodern, a timeless realm beyond history, and the time of digital technology, proper to the speed and timespace compression of postmodernity. Like the images of Kayapo cameramen, CEFREC’s homepage joins indigenous bodies with the global technological present. Both images play on a notion of temporal unevenness that is a construct of colonial discourse, reiterated in mainstream media. Audiovisual media have been deeply embedded in capitalist and colonial relations. As Beverley Singer argues, “Indians have been misrepresented in art, history, science, literature, popular films, and by the press in news, on radio, and on television. The earliest stereotypes associating Indians with being savage, naked and heathen were established 1. CEFREC’s homepage, http://videoindigena.bolnet.bo (CEFREC). ntroduction 3 with the foundation of America” (1). Michelle Raheja explains that “hundreds of actualities featuring Indians engaging in putatively quotidian practices were shown in nickelodeons from 189 through 1908. These actualities and early documentary and ethnographic films simultaneously contributed to the myth of the vanishing Indian and helped to create a form of American spectatorship that coheres around the dichotomous relationship between Indian and white figures” (Raheja, “Reading” 1170). Though Singer and Raheja speak about North America, their words hold true for North and South American perceptions of indigenous peoples alike, not withstanding the ideological projects of racial assimilation or mestizaje dominant in Latin America. What Fatimah Rony calls “ethnographic cinema” (8)—educational and entertainment documentaries but also the polished, special effects– loaded fiction films produced and distributed by the global media corporations housing the North American film industry—has been key in fashioning colonial imaginaries across the hemispheres. These films represent travel 2. Kayapo video maker. http://www.amazon.de (Bernd Kulov). 4 ndianizing ilm and colonial others to Western selves. Ethnographic cinema offers viewers representations of indigenous archetypes: romanticized Indians or barbaric others who invariably inhabit modernity’s past. “The exotic is always already known,” as Rony puts it (6). The Kayapo image in figure 2 conjures these conventions for an ingenious politics of the exotic. The Kayapo have successfully exploited the apparent temporal clash in images of native video makers to raise awareness about their struggle against the incursions of gold miners, ranchers, and state development projects. As Alcida Ramos argues, “in a phenomenon similar to what happened to the term Indian—which the Indians appropriated, purged it of much of its derogatory undertones, and turned it into a political tool—they have instrumentalized exoticism...