‘For scientist, dawn and
twilight are one and the same phenomenon and the Greeks thought likewise, since
they had a single word with a different qualifying adjective according to
whether they were referring to morning or evening (...) But in fact no two phenomena
could be more different from each other that night and morning.’
(Levi-Strauss, 1995;
62)
“Rather than establishing
what is true, I want to see how truth is established”
(Miller, 1998: 3)
Abstract
By focusing in the connection
of cinema with magic traditions and scientific rationale, this article states
that film has always been a technologically produced special effect. Under the
concept of reality effect, we will analyse the power of illusion that
ethnographic documentaries possess in depicting objects and subjects. The aim
will be to remove pretensions of reality as opposed to fantasy or the common
notion of documentary as opposed to fiction films. Focusing in magic’s concern with
understanding nature and its notion of knowledge
is power this article aims to trace a line of continuation linking the
figure of the magician and the scientist through their systematic means to
possess the world. Thus, as a magician-anthropologist, connecting the rational
of the scientific with the supernatural of the magical, we further suggest that
cinematographers enjoy an influential position in our society to induce
discourses of truth through what they show; hence to fabricate something which
does not as yet exist.
Michel de Certeau initiates his seminal book The writing of history (1988) describing
Amerigo Vespucci as the voyager who arrives from the sea to the nuova terra. As if it were an inaugural scene, that moment will be the origin
for the conqueror to write the body of the Indians and to trace their path with
western ink. In fact, naked America will be now dressed as “Latin” America (1988:
XXV) and such moment of rupture, of writing, will fabricate a new history starting
also from a new origin. As I begin to write this article, I also start to
fabricate a narrative, or more precisely, to strengthen a paradigm that has
already been written in the last decades: It will be a discourse about cinema’s
discourse, an archaeological investigation to claim that film has always been a
technologically produced special effect, an art where reality and fantasy,
veracity and depiction, transparency and trickery are side by side, horizontally as it
were. Echoing
Foucault (1972), I am supposing that as any discourse, this formation of
cinematographic objects and subjects have also been controlled, organized and
selected from a hegemonic position with its own rules of separation and labels.
In studying cinema’s connection to magic traditions and scientific rationale, the
figure of the magician will be central for our task. The line of investigation
adopted here will try to reveal the formation of tricks and its coexistence
with statements of truth -or verité-
in documentary films. Hence, the kind of counter-attack proposed in what
follows will not serve to envelope but to remove distinctions of reality as
opposed to fantasy or documentary as opposed to fiction films. After all, as
Schopenhauer used to believe ‘the world is my imagination’ (In Bachelard, 1969:
150) and films are a magical realization of such dreams.
In the short documentary film No Lies (Mitchell Block, 1973), the
female protagonist Shelby Leverington reveals to the camera her recent sexual
assaults: it happens ‘all the time’ she says. Cinematically, we argue, she has
also been a victim of aggressive assault through the constant questioning
employed by the camera man with his direct cinema style. Towards the climax of
the film, yelling in a very disturbing manner, she pronounces the following
words: ‘You want to know what a rape is. You will never know what a rape is.
You will never know what a rape is! So, how can I explain it to you? There is
no way of explaining it to you’.
Once the documentary has ended and the screen
turns black, the credits inform the audience that the film has been a
constructed fiction rather than an unscripted confession: the film has been an
entire lie and an assault on both the film’s female subject and its audience. Rape,
as Vivian Sobchack has noticed, becomes here part of the act of cinema itself as
soon as we are revealed to be victims as well (1977: 15). As such, No Lies’ conjure is not very different
from the visual trickery employed by early filmmakers to astonish the audience.
Magician himself, George Méliès for example used to perform trick shots to
introduce special effects in order to make appear or disappear his characters.
In one of his first cinematographic endeavours, the Vanishing Lady (1896), Méliès amazed the audience by making a woman
vanish and later replacing her with a skeleton that appeared in front of the
camera (Boron, 2011). As he says: ‘I
invented this special type of unusual shot, which my clients called
transformation shots (...) I had found a trick stopping the camera, which
permitted me all kinds of substitutions’ (2011: 19).
If we were now to take these two examples
together and draw a common ground between ethnographic documentaries and
science fiction films what is seen as intrinsically cinematographic is the
power of illusion that the medium posses. In The Vanishing Lady as much as in No Lies the camera performs its capacity to make dreams
metamorphose into verité and illusion
to become interchangeable with reality itself: While special effects mediate our
fantasy experience in the former, reality effects are produced in the later by
showing things and making people believe in what they show. (Bourdieu, 1996) In
this way, cinema’s pretention of verité
becomes an unrealisable fantasy when unmasking the illusion portrayed by the
camera and the montage. After all, as Bazin used to believe, the myth that
inspired the invention of cinema was the re-creation of the world; a new medium
with the capacity to simulate our own natural processes to perceive the “world
out there”. (Currie, 1995: 79). The task ahead then is to extend Méliès magical
conjures and see what kind of trick is hidden in the meaningful and coherent cinematographic
montage.
In fact, the magical properties of cinema and
its connections to scientific reason have been acknowledged from its beginnings.
As Angela Ndalianis (2004) points out, it was the figure of the magician who
acted as an ‘artful scientist’ (Stafford in Ndalianis 2004: 227) to reveal the
scientific properties behind the apparent fantastic illusions portrayed by
charlatans of the eighteen-century. As expressed by Martin Scorsese: ‘We all
know, of course, that movies are the product of science and technology. But an
aura of magic has enveloped them right from the beginning, [because] the men
who invented movies were scientist with the spirit of showmen. (In Ndalianis, 2004:
227) This mediation of magic and science found in early cinema is not
surprising when looking at its connections to previous optical technologies.
Instruments such as the magic lantern or the camera obscura not only displayed
relevant scientific functions; they were also linked to magicians of earlier
centuries. In this regard, the definition of the word “screen” might be useful
to draw a path to underpin such historical connections. In 1810 the Oxford
English Dictionary described screen as a ‘transparent screen for the exhibition
of the phantasmagoria’ (Huhtamo, 2001: 2). As a matter of fact, phantasmagoria
was a variant of the older magic lantern projections. It enjoyed great
popularity among the public showing images projected from behind the screen.
Echoing Huhtamo, it aim was to create a sensory experience in the public only
achievable by hiding the technological tricks: ‘Phantasmagoria showmen did
their best to keep their machinery secret; they pretended that their show had
nothing to do with the old magic lanterns’ (Huhtamo, 2001). In this way, as a phantasmagorical
art, cinema can be read as this systematic concealing of the process of
production (Crary, 1999), and by render it invisible, cinematographers become
magicians who can make the source of moving images unidentifiable and hence
mystified.
Magic, by definition, is believed; an
unconscious fantasy that has the potential to create a reality. In his influential
work Theory of Magic (2001), Marcel
Mauss has observed that magic might probably be the earliest form of human
thought, the foundation of ‘the whole mystical and scientific universe of
primitive man’ (2001: XX). By giving great importance to knowledge –its concerns
in understanding nature- magic is attached to science in the same way as it is
linked to technology. Magicians, says Mauss, became early containers of information
for the astronomical, physical and natural sciences; In India, Greece and
elsewhere magicians were alchemist, doctors and astrologers, where ‘they
quickly set up a kind of index of plants, metals, phenomena, beings and life in
general’ (2001: 177). They knew how to dominate nature; their mainspring was
‘knowledge is power’ (2001: 176). Thus, what these observations provide is that
as a magician, cinematographers are in an influential position to conduct hypnotic
processes in their audience and to generate reality effects through their representations;
their moving image assumes the nature of a symbol in which the spectator’s mind
–governed by the old habits of magic that our specie is slow to throw off-
still contains a good part of those non-positive mystical elements that might
shape our notions of force, cause and effect (2001). Thus, at this point of my
investigation I see science not as a rupture but as an extension of the systematic
methods employed by magicians to understand and possess the world. In fact, it
is in science where we have now located the old notion of ‘knowledge is power’
and it is through such belief that science has acquired its current status in
dominating the world.
Here, the concept of symbolic efficacy applied
by Claude Levi-Strauss might be of help to trace stronger connections between
magic and science, and hopefully, to clarify why cinematographers enjoy a
central position in the production of myths. In his influential book Structural
Anthropology (1974), Levi-Straus observed a particular cure that shamanic
rituals had among the Kuna Indians in assisting women in difficult labour. There,
the sorcerer’s words, songs, gestures and glances emanated an influence in the
patients that removed their physical discomfort. Through their symbols, shamans
performed a cure consisting in the ability to make explicit a situation
existing on one level of the human system –emotional- to render it acceptable
to another level – psyche-. Interestingly, such isomorphism of our organic
composition is also at the heart of scientific therapy: psychoanalysis. Here
the figure of the psychoanalyst plays the same role as the shaman in provoking those
experiences. Nevertheless, they do it in a complete inverse manner: while the psychoanalyst
remains silent and becomes a listener to establish a direct relationship with
the patient’s unconscious, the shaman is the orator who invokes the
supernatural to penetrate the endangered organs and free the captive soul. It
is then through this particular symbolic capacity that both psychoanalyst and
shaman provide the unwell person with a language to express the pain and allow him
to recover.
Under these connections between the magician
and the scientist, the cinematographer becomes now a master conjurer; a
synthesis of both. In communicating his ideas, the director’s force to induce
myths relies in the explosive combination that connects the rational of the
scientific with the supernatural of the magical. Hence, this sort of
shamanic-psychoanalytic composition of the filmmaker allows him to provoke situations
that unite our experiences of the psyche with the emotions of the organic body:
his symbols are thrown to the unconscious –in possessing the logical- as much
as to the viscera –in possessing the sensorial-. Cinema, as such, becomes an
art of doing things and must be read in the domain of pure production. In this
vein, we argue that cinematographers hold a resourceful medium and can easily
take advantage of their know-how: The transformations, disappearances and
ghostly apparitions of Méliès’ trick films can now be extended as a metaphor of
the ethnographic documentary.
Similarly to psychoanalysts, director-ethnographers
–arguably through more silent effects and with less apparent tricks-, induce
reality effects in which they show us things with such conviction and coherence
that we can only believe in what they show. Such power is probably what Robert
Flathery meant when writing in 1951 that ‘film is the great pencil of the
modern world’ (In Lewis, 1969: 215). In fact, as a director-explorer he used
the camera to capture the life of others, and in that way, made of cinema an
equivalent of anthropology; the camera would be the new ethnographer’s notebook,
an encounter in which cinema will only solidify its magic traditions with the
scientific rationale of the XX century.
Flathery might arguably be one of the founding
figures of observational documentary cinema. In capturing the reality directly
he opened a path for a long tradition of ethnographic cinema which has
continued up to now through leading figures such as Jean Rouch, Errol Morris,
and more recently, through the innovative cinematographic expressions developed
by visual anthropologist at the Sensory Ethnographic Lab in Harvard University.
As a general principle, we could say that their cinema becomes a language to
express the reality from reality itself, a kind of duplication of “the real”
that is presented to us not as text, but as evidence (1979: 42). However, as it
might be inferred already, the tone of this essay has provided a quite
different reading of such pretensions of truth: What can cinema tell us about
reality after all?
Let’s take Flathery’s Nanook of the North (1922) as a last example. Here I state that his
pretensions of verité are not
inherently more truthful than fiction films, hence, I am suggesting that
documentaries and fiction films do not fundamentally differ, because as Albert
La Valley has correctly noted, all cinema is a technologically produced special
effect (In Ndalianis 2004: 214). The implication of this statement is that
documentary films are not efforts to bring the “real life” to the screen but the
imaginary life of our own fantasies and myths. There, the camera’s subjects
might seem real, but their character still imaginaries; they are still
performing a role. As William Rothman has pointed out in his text The Filmmaker as Hunter: Robert Flaherty’s
Nanook of the North (1998), Nanook is
claimed to be a real person, not a fictional character. However, real people
too, are characters within fictions: Our own definition of persona comes from
the Greek word prosopon, employed to
designate the mask used by actors to perform theatrical roles in the
amphitheatre. In cinema then, we are not only creatures of our own imagination,
but also we become creatures of the imagination of others, that is, exposed to
the filmmaker’s eyes. The “real” Nanook then, is he himself a character, ‘a
creature of myth in the sense that all human beings are’ (29, 115), but the
Nanook that we see is not only a person –or actor- that he himself imagines to
be, but the man that Flaherty films. The director has created a new persona, a
hero that we already infer from the title of the film. Flaherty’s Nanook is the
greatest hunter in all Ungava and we confirm it through what we see: a camera
that has the tendency to raise Nanook as the chief while the others are merely
his character’s decorum; the story of a man’s epic effort to keep his family
alive in a harsh natural environment.
Hence, cinema’s power of illusion finds in the
ethnographic documentary a particular visual effect, what we have defined in
this article as reality effect. The filmmaker, this kind of magician-anthropologist
has finally realized how to keep his tricks secret. He now knows how to make
the source of his images invisible, transparent as it were. Like the sorcerer, his
magic relies in the art of preparing and mixing materials that come together through
the montage. In his own way, he ‘prepares images from paste, clay, wax, honey,
plaster, metal or papier mâchè’ (2001:
66) to provide us with representations of our social life. Echoing Foucault, It
seems possible then, that filmmakers can make fiction work within truth, to
induce truth effects within fictional discourse, and in some way to make the
discourse of truth arouse, ‘fabricate’ something which does not as yet exist.
(1998).
In tracing cinema’s connection to magic
traditions and scientific rationale, we have argued that cinematographers enjoy
the capacity of a master conjurer who makes of his tricks coexist with what we claim
to be real. Thus, as an ethnographer, the filmmaker is in an influential
position to induce discourses of truth through what he shows. In this way, film
becomes an art in which reality and fantasy, transparency and trickery walk
side by side.
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