[Frameworks] ethnographic films

[david at lake ivan]

I was present at a very interesting discussion after a screening of "Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti," the film created by Maya Deren's husband Teiji Ito out of her footage of religious ceremonies in Haiti, shot in the late 1940s. The more deeply Deren became involved in Haitian religion, the more she was convinced that making a finished film was not appropriate, which seems to be the reason that she never used the footage herself, and instead wrote a book about the subject. Deren was a person who went into trance very easily, and apparently became possessed at the first Vodou ceremony she attended, despite knowing little about the culture. The Haitians who were present recognized many extremely culturally specific attributes of the spirit who had possessed her, and they decided that she was "really Haitian," despite the fact that  she was from Russia. They accepted her as a priestess, qualified to hold her own Vodou ceremonies, and she studied the religion in tremendous depth. Her book is fascinating because it brings an artist's perspective, rather than a trained scientist's, to an ethnographic study.

Ito's film really does follow many of the external forms of the cliché "othering" ethnographic film, with its male voice-over narration, although the music, the footage and the information in the film itself are all completely authentic and highly knowledgable. There were about 10 people at the screening, almost all of them white, and one of the viewers was a Haitian woman who was experienced with Vodou. This woman listened intently to the discussion, but didn't want to make her own contribution until the end of the discussion. She was very interested in both the film and the discussion, and took a lot of notes. Almost everyone else in the audience did the exact same "collective eye roll" and "groan" you mentioned, and the whole discussion revolved around how terrible it was that Ito had used the footage in this way which objectified and falsified the authentic experience of Haitians. (The fact that Ito was not white did not seem to enter into the discussion.) When the Haitian woman finally joined the discussion at the end, she said that she hadn't felt that the film objectified, falsified, or in any other way distorted her culture or her own experience. On the contrary, she felt that it was completely sympathetic and insightful, and that she had learned a great deal from the film.

David Finkelstein
david at lakeivan.org
www.lakeivan.org

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