Reviews

Lancit,Matthew. Funeral season (la saison des funérailles): marking death in Cameroon. DVD, English subtitles, 2010

Matthew Lancit is a young Canadian filmmaker who went to Cameroon to be with his French girlfriend. She was working in the Bamileke town of Dschang, and as it happens their flat was next door to the morgue. One thing led to another and the result is a film about ways of dealing with the dead in the ever-evolving complex of ‘Bamileke Tradition’. This is more concerned with secondary funerals rather than burials (something that morgues have changed), which can happen many, many years after a person has died. These ‘cry dies’ (to use the Cameroonian pidgin English) or ‘funérailles’ (as they are called in Cameroonian French) punctuate the dry season months every year. They can only occur once the family, friends, associated savings societies (tontines or rotating credit societies), and church and cult associations (where relevant depending on the affiliations of the deceased and surviving kin) have accumulated enough money to pay for celebrations lavish enough for the person concerned. In some cases nothing can (should) be done until the family (on behalf of the deceased) has built a house in the natal village, and one cannot commemorate a person until their own parents have been themselves commemorated. It is easy to see how an accumulation of commemorative debt can pile up on a family group.

Lancit is not an anthropologist and makes no claim to be one. What his film captures is both the joyous (and somewhat chaotic) exuberance of the organization of ‘traditional’ events in Cameroon and also the feel for how chains of connection get established which shape what happens in fieldwork. He goes to see a traditional doctor (he uses the term ‘witch doctor’) but spends more time talking to his interpreter than the man he was supposed to be interviewing. So he ends up going to the interpreter’s home village. Similarly his tailor and a motorcycle taxi driver end up being interviewed and taking him to funerals. We arrive in one village to interview the chief on the night his installation is being completed, so we hear the dancing but cannot see it, although later we attend the public festivities that mark the completion of the succession. (The new chief makes a speech in English lamenting the demise of tradition and the local language.)

Lancit is a player in all this. His Jewishness features as part of what makes him different from his girlfriend and other ‘Europeans’. We see him as an ingénue struggling with poor French and discussing what is happening and why people are so concerned to do this. He is also struggling with his own memories, his own dead, so we see stills of the Cameroonian dead and then a clip of a video from his Bar Mitzvah and a still of his now dead uncle (whom he is said to resemble).

Overall I enjoyed this film and can see a role for it in teaching since it so well conveys the character and feeling of its topic. It asks interesting questions yet does not pretend to be more than it is.

David Zeitlyn University of Oxford Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17, 632-680 © RoyalAnthropological

Peter Calde

Unsensational, intimate and quietly passionate, March’s meticulously observed examination of the crisis facing the small atoll of Takuu is an object lesson in patient documentary film-making .

March’s first documentary feature, the excellent Allie Eagle and Me, traced the pioneering feminist artist’s journey from lesbian separatist to fundamentalist Christian.

For this film, she made two trips to the atoll, 250km northeast of the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, charting the inexorable rise of the oceans swallowing the island and compiling a lucid, compelling and often visually ravishing portrait of Takuu life.

The sea is a constant, menacing presence in the film but, March’s camera finds the ineffable beauty in the environment too, sharpening the poignancy of the loss happening before her (and our) eyes.

More important she shows plainly what is at stake for the islanders as they debate what they should do. Ethnically and culturally Polynesian in a Melanesian country, they are far from comfortable with the plans to relocate them to the mainland – to a plantation, far from the sea and surrounded by a decade-long civil war. The proposal, which seems to be not much more than bureaucratic hot air in any case, takes no account of the cost in economic, never mind cultural, terms of uprooting a people from their ancestral home.

Rising oceans will displace hundreds of millions over the next half century and Takuu is the canary in climate change’s coal mine. This sobering and important film is a warning to the world, if only it would listen.

Lin Wen-Ling

French director Jean Rouch is among the directors to be presented at this year’s Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival. A prominent director of documentary films, Jean Rouch is also renowned worldwide as the founder of the Comite du Film Ethnographique at the Musee de l’Homme and the reality cinema (cinema verite) film genre that he developed in the 1950s remains influential today. In keeping with this year’s theme “Migration Story” Jean Rouch’s well-known and brilliant series of the 50s and 60s will be shown at this exhibition. Interestingly, some of the films were not edited and completed until 10 years after they were shot. Three of his works, The Crazy Masters (Les Maitres Fous, 1953-1954), Jaguar (1954-1967), and Me, A Black (Moi, Un Noir, 1959), will be shown at this year’s festival.

In these films, Jean Rouch probes historical factors of colonial Western Africa, such as the rise of port cities, economies, and employment situations, which brought about the movement of large populations. These films have three common themes: journey, the city, and modern life. The term “journey,” however, entails a different meaning and “city” manifests another dimension of life. These films all employ ritual and are divided into three sections each.

The Crazy Masters: A Journey of the Transformation of the Mind 
Opening up in downtown Accra, Ghana’s capital city, the film unceremoniously plops the audience into the middle of the bustling city, referred to by Rouch in his narration as “the true black Babylon,” packed with people from all over Western Africa struggling to partake of this the “best and most exciting city of Africa.”

In the second part of the film, the camera follows an impoverished group of Hauka disciples from Niger living in Accra as they flock to the suburbs where they take part in a ritual. In the heat of the ritual, large numbers of Hauka believers enter trance like states as they are possessed by the spirits of colonizers. Some begin taking on the expressions and mannerisms of the English (including the colonial English governor and his entourage). At this point, Rouch inserts scenes from the place where the “real” governor and his entourage met in Accra. This side-by-side scene arrangement brings the film to its dramatic climax and reinforces the film’s implication, that is, in the blink of an eye, the Hauka believers subvert the colonial power and authority of their white rulers as they imitate them.

Rouch, who employs a series of flashbacks in The Crazy Masters, returns to the city the following day to interview members of the Hauka sect that had taken part in the ceremony over the weekend. We see scenes of them back in their daily lives working quietly and efficiently, interwoven with scenes of possession from the previous day’s ceremony.

The debut of this film in Paris in the 1950s caused an uproar and discomfort among viewers, including African intellectuals. Not only were the trance shots a mockery to the government, they showed political structures, both colonial and post colonial, as illegitimate and irrational.

The Crazy Masters is a film about more than spiritual possession and marks a milestone in anthropologic films. Rouch employs visual and sound effects to carefully craft the film’s atmosphere, thereby providing a transforming power that leads members of the audience to reflect and fall into their own trances.

Rouch originally considered films concrete witnesses to culture. In The Crazy Masters, his views changed. He now saw the camera as an ethnographic tool to further the understanding of ethnic groups. Reality cinema contends that ethnographic reality occurs during encounters between researcher and subject or between individuals on either side of the camera. It is not simply the recording of reality. Rouch would no longer use his films to convey existent knowledge; rather he would use them to appeal to and/or influence the viewer’s mind, to throw his senses into turmoil, to overthrow old ways of thinking, and to introduce new depths to knowledge and new ways of understanding.

Jaguar: Moving to the City in Search of Wealth 
Many correlations, including similar settings, exist between Jaguar and The Crazy Masters. Migration, the city, and modern life, the central themes of The Crazy Master, appear again in Jaguar. Although they share the themes of journey and the movement of human beings and structures built on these themes, the films depict different characters, places, and events.

In the movie Jaguar, the three main characters, Lam, Ilom, and Damoure, journey from Savannah, Niger to Ghana’s Gold Coast to seek adventure and fortune, returning two months later. The film is divided into three distinct parts each built around their unfolding stories. The first section begins with the introduction of Lam, Ilom, and Damoure preparing for their journey and ends with them arriving at customs. The second section, focuses on their urban adventures. They reunite in the third section and return home.

Each of Jaguar’s three sections has his own distinct form. The dizzying movement of Rouch’s camera, for example, characterizes the first as it never stops moving, rotating, or shifting as if it were one of the characters. The documentary style of this film is also characterized by sudden departures in this section to surrealistic shots. Rouch employs light, plants, and scenery to reinforce the feeling of “leaving an unfamiliar world for an unknown one.”

In the second section of the movie, our three adventurers head off, each on his own quest. Their stories are staggered to lend to a sensation of confusing, fragmented modern city life. In contrast to the city, the village from which the three young men hail is set in a concrete time, giving it more of a feeling of reality, providing them social identity and legitimacy. Driven by the leading characters’ personalities, Jaguar develops gradually and its plot forms as it extols the subjectivity of man and, because his subjectivity offers limitless possibilities, the city becomes the ideal place for pursuing dreams, fantasies, and new identities. The three leading characters of this film, Lam, Ilom, and Damoure, represent the generations of people of this region that have headed to cities in search of adventure and fortune. Jaguar explores subjectivity and the migration experience of this area.

Me, A Black: A Week in the Lives of Immigrants
Young people from all over pour into Africa’s major cities daily in pursuit of fortune and dreams, but their dreams remain out of reach as the realities of life take precedence. They have no choice but to do odd jobs offering no promise for tomorrow and are referred to as the “new urban plague.”

In Me, A Black, a reality based documentary, a group of laborers from Niger working in the Ivory Coast’s capital city of Abidjan reenact their own lives in front of the camera. The first section of the film shows them throughout the course of a week as they perform odd jobs and try to secure steady work in an attempt to blend into the city. In the second part of the film, the camera follows “Robinson” as he spends his day off at the seashore. The third section portrays another week’s arrival.

Although the second part of the film portrays him relaxing and having a good time, he still cannot seem to find work. In the midst of his reveling, Robinson loses himself in reverie. His fantasies of being a champion boxer, only offer temporary reprieve from his plight. Robinson returns to reality as an Italian hits on the girl he likes and the Italian beats the intoxicated Robinson to a pulp. The scene is followed by the start of a new week as Robinson continues his search for work. Their homeland of Niger seems further and further away as do their childhood memories as they struggle in the bustling, booming city.

The boxer and fight scenes do an excellent job of bringing home the idea of the dialectical relationship between “reality” and “fiction.” Robinson’s dream of being a champion boxer becomes part of the film, revealing his desire to become wealthy as quickly as possible, while the scrap with the Italian heaves him back into reality. While shots of sweat and tears leave the audience wondering if the scenes are real or play-acted, they reveal reality and do an excellent job of accurately conveying day-to-day difficulties experienced by Niger youths in the Ivory Coast.

Tracing Silhouettes 
Like his peers, Rouch strove to realize ocularcentrism’s sight/visual knowledge, regarding things seen, on the one hand, as a kind of sight as optical fact, while viewing the act of seeing as a sense of perception, rather than sight as perceptual phenomena. The experimental nature of his films, however, reveals unique insight derived from intuition. The reality revealed in Rouch’s films, therefore, differ from that of other filmmakers, showing the fundamental distinction being their different ways of seeing things.

Reflecting reality, Rouch’s documentary films are concerned with viewer reaction to social realities, on the one hand, and are characterized by surrealist techniques such as intervention, fabrication, extemporaneous acting, and creative narratives, on the other, as the attempt to overthrow established views on social realities and provide opportunity for change. The effects created by the painstakingly deliberate blending and staggered use of visual and audio elements give the viewer more freedom and power to understand and interpret his films. The techniques he uses for divulging truth to his films their sense of authenticity.

The term “tracing silhouettes” symbolizes drawing outlines around the light of rationality. Rather than being distinct, the lines between rationality and irrationality, light and darkness, whites and blacks drift and shift. Pay close attention to the light’s periphery and see how Rouch’s films blend romanticism with surrealistic humanism.

Rolf Husmann and Jill Daniels

Imagine you’re organising a large international conference or festival, which you have worked hard on, investing a lot of time and money; three days before its due to start a typhoon hits your city, knocking out the underground, flooding your conference hall and cutting the electricity off in the hotels where your guests are supposed to stay. This was the situation which Hu Tai-li, founder and director of the First Taiwan Ethnographic Film Festival faced, when the city of Taipei was hit by disaster on 18 September. It was little short of a miracle that the Opening Ceremony took place, as scheduled, on the evening of 21 September 2001. Hu Tai-li and her small team of organisers, working round the clock, reorganised everything and with a great stroke of luck found a cinema in the heart of the city. (This meant more people came to the screenings).

This was the dramatic start of a new festival, to be added to the regular schedule of ethnographic film festivals. True, there are well-established events like “Bilan” in Paris, the “Ethno Filmtage” in Freiburg, NAFA meetings in Scandinavia or the RAI Film Festival in Britain, and there are Gottingen, Nuoro, and Sibiu which ring a bell in anthropologist-filmmakers’ ears, but now there’s a new one. Like most of the others, the Taiwanese festival serves the local scene of visually interested anthropologists, filmmakers and students as well as attracting ethnographic filmmakers world-wide.

The Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival will be held biannually, complementing the “Taiwan International Documentary Festival” also held biannually. It uses a wide definition for the term “ethnographic”. This was reflected in the variety of films shown in Taipei ranging from Margaret Mead’s Balinese films from the 1940s and Bob Connolly/Robin Anderson’s modern classic BLACK HARVEST“ to Metje Postma’s recent homage to Dutch horse-breeders “OF MEN AND MARES and new Taiwanese films such as the beautiful LIBANGBANG by Kuo Chen-Ti.

An important step in the realisation of this event was the foundation, in 2000, of the “Taiwan Association for Visual Ethnography” (TAVE), in which, amongst others, all three professors of anthropology teaching visual anthropology in Taiwan, namely Hu Tai-li, Lin Wen-ling and David Blundell, are involved. TAVE was established not only to support the new film festival, but also to take initiatives in the field of ethnographic film in Taiwan. A similar institution in the People’s Republic of China, called CAVA, was founded in 1995 after a “First International Conference in Visual Anthropology”, but soon lost its initial enthusiasm and has seen a varying degree of activity since. We hope, particularly from the perspective of the Chairman of the Commission on Visual Anthropology of IUAES (from which one of the reviewers writes) that such institutional frameworks as TAVE will have a lasting active life, and that similar associations be established in more countries.

TIEFF is aimed to cover a wide range of regions and topics, but will also focus on a few selected special fields and filmmakers. It has a theme, this year’s was “Island Odyssey”, but intends to complement the theme with retrospectives and important new work reflecting the subjects and concerns of international ethnographic filmmakers working today. The screening sessions were a successful mix of films both national and international, bringing together films and filmmakers from Taiwan and from the outside world. This is a recipe tried elsewhere, and it works well. In Taipei, the selection of films had a deliberate slant on films from the Pacific area, a rare thing compared with similar events, in which all too often Australian, and Pacific islands films are under-represented.

The different sections of the programme were not screened separately, but interweaved around themes and countries; there was a “Retrospective” devoted to Flaherty’s “Moana” and three films of Margaret Mead; the main festival theme “Island Odyssey” (with both an international and a national section), with special focus on films about Orchid Island off Taiwan’s south-eastern coast; a section called “New Vision”, which selected single films from a wide range of countries; and finally three films by the special guest, Australian documentary filmmaker Dennis O’Rourke.

Little needs to said here about Mead’s films or “Moana”, they are well known and there was no discussion after the screening. Where filmmakers or producers were present, “Q&A sessions” followed films. Most of the filmmakers were present, and with help of translators, there were short discussions. A downside of the typhoon was that the cinema did not have a meeting place where discussions could continue after screenings. A packed timetable of films also made discussion time short and didn’t help people to meet each other. Formal Q&A sessions always tend to scratch the surface of a film. They are useful to show the audience who the filmmaker is, they are usually pretty arbitrary in content. Most fascinating are the anecdotes by the filmmakers about how their film was conceived, what strange or funny coincidences happened along the way. Audience questions tend to concentrate on content and explanation. Deeper anthropological issues, and filmic ideas around style or methodology tend to be neglected. But in spite of this shortcoming, the presence of a filmmaker at a festival is always an excellent chance to get to know more about the film than just watching it on TV or in a classroom.

What has been said about filmmakers’ anecdotes, certainly holds true for the talks given by Dennis O’Rourke, whose three masterpieces THE SHARKCALLERS OF KONTU, HALF LIFE and CANNIBAL TOURS not only attracted the largest crowds, but were also supplemented by O’Rourke’s revealing and humorous replies.

Of more interest for this review are the recent films, both international and Taiwanese. In the “New Vision” section, seven films were selected on a variety of topics, countries and different styles. Included were, THE LAND OF THE WANDERING SOULS by Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh, a portrait of poor and cheated day-labourers in Cambodia , the ethnographically most interesting film A DOCUMENTARY ON THREE MOSUO WOMEN in South-Western China by Chou Wah-shan, and the film on healing of a psychically ill girl called KUSUM in India, presented by Finnish filmmaker Jouko Aaltonen.

The main topic of the festival was the island theme. “Island Odyssey”, which was divided into a domestic section covering six films from and about Taiwan, and an international section containing nine films. Of these PARADISE BENT by Australian filmmaker Heather Croall was probably the most talked about. Produced in 1999 and dealing with the Samoan fa’afafine, boys raised and living as girls, this film has been shown in many documentary festivals; the highly ethnographic topic of gender roles and sexual identity in Samoan society is an excellent example of how a particular culture can see behaviour as perfectly acceptable, which almost everywhere else is seen as abnormal.

Other films in this section of the festival included the beautifully photographed 1989 film by Brazilian filmmaker Cesar Paes on oral tradition in Madagascar: ANGANO ANGANO – TALES OF MADAGASCAR; a portrait of a Sumatran leader who is “THE POET OF LINGE HOMELAND (ACEH) by the young Indonesian filmmaker Aryo Danusiri, and ELMER AND THE FLOWER BOAT” by Oyvind Sandberg about a man in southern Norway who lives alone and spends every summer on the tiny island where he grew up, growing flowers, which he sells by travelling up and down the fjord delivering them to people who seem to have known and loved him for ages. This film, although not dealing with an ethnographic topic in the strict sense, entices the viewer by its wonderful slow rhythm and narration matching the life rhythm of Elmer. CHILDREN OF SHADOWS by American filmmaker Karen Kramer, is set in Haiti, where poor families are forced to give their young children to other families as unpaid servants. Told by the children themselves, as well as their ‘aunts’, the film paints a shocking portrait of a society where the poor exploit the destitute.

The domestic section of the “Islands Odyssey” was proof of the activities of young Taiwanese filmmakers. Most of them were social documentaries rather than films with an ethnographic topic in the strict sense, e.g. on the aftermath of the huge earthquake shaking Taiwan in 1999 or the feelings and aspirations of young Taiwanese baseballers who had won the youth world title. Although made in a curious mix of modern TV-style and sound story-telling, the almost two hour-long film by Yu Kan-Ping on the Taiwanese Hand-Glove Puppetry, a very old tradition which until this very day has lost nothing of its popularity in Taiwan won great attention by the audience. THEATER IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND falls into two parts, the first one an almost propagandist history of the puppet theatre as part of Taiwanese history in general, the second a much more lively portrait of several outstanding artists. The latest development is the incredibly vivid transformation of the puppet theatre from a local presentation to the TV world. Rather than being turned into a fully animated film series, characters have remained hand-glove puppets and have become TV action stars in Taiwan – an amazing way, and an economically very successful one, to uphold an ancient theatre tradition.

Of films devoted to Orchard Island CHING-WEN’S NOT HOME by Kuo Chen-Ti is a moving and thought provoking film which demonstrates how less can be more. Only 30 minutes long, the film tells the story of Ching-Wen who intends to build his family a house. To do this he must go to Taipei to earn money. Each of his family tells their feelings about who Ching-Wen is and through our imagination we build a picture of the largely unseen Ching-Wen and his importance to the family, both emotionally and economically. The film successfully reveals the interrelationship between the subject, filmmaker and viewer in a way many of the other films in the festival, with their emphasis on long takes of activities by the subjects did not.

As with similar reports of such events, only a fraction of the films shown can be reviewed here. Those mentioned, however, give quite a good impression of the diversity and quality of films presented at this first festival of its kind. The organisers are confident that, in 2003, the next one will follow. Let’s hope for it, and for similar – or even more – success. After all, there will not always be a typhoon!

To find out more about the programme or the future activities, either contact professor Hu Tai-li in Taipei under [email protected] or else try the festival website: www.tieff.sinica.edu.tw