Framing the Other by Ilja Kok and Willem Timmers (review)

Framing the Other, a joint creation of Dutch directors (Ilja Kok and Willem Timmers), Ethiopian producers, and an Ethiopian cameraman (Yidnekachew Shumete), is a documentary about the contact zone between members of the Mursi culture and Dutch tourists. Unfortunately, despite the bi-national team, the film does not make significant steps toward destabilizing the conventional directionality that tends to characterize projects of “framing the other”—which usually consist of the framing of the non-Western person in relation to a Western subject. In an online interview the directors state their intentions to contribute to a “better understanding of the complex relationships between tourists and ‘the Other’” (http://framingtheother.wordpress.com). But one might argue that the very point of shifting the conventions of the African documentary is to accomplish the “de-Othering” of African people, a move that does not happen effectively here.

The documentary shows women of the Mursi culture of Southern Ethiopia who undergo a coming-of-age ritual during their teens. One facet of this process is the elongation of the young women’s lips into a pendulous, circular shape so that they can be used, among other functions, to hold decorative plates as adornment and also for serving meals to their husbands during special occasions. Dutch tourists travel to the Mursi area to photograph these women, a phenomenon that is recounted primarily through the contact between a Mursi woman, Nadonge Rege, and a Dutch tourist, Nell Kpteijn, who, as her commentary suggests, made at least one other trip to the area before being filmed in the documentary.

While Framing the Other archives an historically important phenomenon, the project teeters between old ethnographic methods and more progressive approaches. For instance, the members of the documentary team never bring their position as the “framers” of the action to the fore or reveal the maneuvers behind the camera. This was a missed opportunity to deprivilege the documentary camera and add a rich level of complexity to the film, especially since the cinematographer is Ethiopian, countering the tendency for Europeans to direct the camerawork in African documentaries. In addition, Ethiopians other than the Mursi play critical roles in the dynamics of the Mursi–Dutch contact (e.g., tourist guides, bus drivers). Including their insights and perhaps positioning them more centrally within the visual space of the film would have further destabilized and complicated the dynamics of Ethiopian/Dutch–Other/Subject representations.

Framing the Other does, to some extent, challenge conventional power imbalances that long have compromised African documentaries. But if it were to truly counter the long tradition of objectifying African people onscreen, the project would have presented more scenes with pointed rather than an open-ended conclusions. For example, speaking directly, in her own voice and in support of her own agency, Nadonge Rege describes how she and her peers reap maximum economic benefit from the encounter with tourists, developing their own optimal pricing scheme for photos based upon their various poses, whether it is a single portrait or whether a child is included, and so on. However, in the notes that end the film we learn that the most a tourist is charged for any photo is .88 Euros (20 Birr). Ironically, the Dutch tourists who are shown haggling over the Mursi-set prices have likely paid between 500 and 750 Euros to fly to the area.

We also are not truly brought in to the subjective worlds of the participants. According to the filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor, an “unprivileged camera style … preserves long takes and terrains within the finished films … [and] traces of the original encounters that gave rise to them … (“Reframing Ethnographic Film,” American Anthropologist 98 [2] [1996]:372). According to Eric Ames (“Herzog, Landscape, and Documentary,” Cinema Journal 48 [2] [2009]:49), Werner Hertzog’s long uninterrupted takes represent paths into “that which resides just beyond the visible,” providing glimpses into the interiority of...