Cine-Magic: Reality Effects and the Ethnographic Documentary

‘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.

Bibliography 

Bachelard, Gaston (1969) The Poetics of Space. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Boron, Lukasz (2011) Méliès and early cinema(gic): Conjuring the science-fiction film genre. York University: Cine Action.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1996) Sobre la Televisión. Spain: Anagrama

Crary, Jonathan (1999) Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture. Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Currie, Gregory (1995) Image and the Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: University Press.

De Certeau, Michele (1988) The Writing of History. New York: Columbia University Press

Eaton, Mick (1979) Anthropology, Reality Cinema: The Films of Jean Rouch. London: British Film Institute.

Foucault, Michele (1998) ‘Interview’ 74-75. In Toby Miller. ‘Introduction: Daguerrotropes and Such’. Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Foucault, Michele (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books

Levi-Strauss, Claude (1974) Structural Anthropology. United States: Basic Books

Levi-Strauss, Claude (1995). Tristes Tropiques. Pinguin Books. London.

Lewis, Jacobs (1969). The Emergence of Film Art. New York: Hopkinson & Blacke.

Mauss, Marcel (2001) A General Theory of Magic. New York: Routledge

Miller, Toby. (1998) Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ndalianis, Angela (2004) Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. London: The MIT Press.

Rothman, William (1998) The Filmmaker as Hunter: Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Rouch, Jean (1995). The Camera and the Man. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Sobchack, Vivian (1977) No Lies: Direct Cinema as Rape. Journal of the University Film Association. Vol. 29, No. 4. University of Illinois Press

Huhtamo, Erkki (2001) Elements of Screenology. Available online at: http://wro01.wrocenter.pl/erkki/html/erkki_en.html

Films

Block, Mitchell. (2008) No Lies. United States: Direct Cinema Ltd.

Flaherty, Robert. (1922) Nanook of the North. United States: Pathé Exchange.

Méliès, George (1896) The Vanishing Lady. France.