Close Reading Question:
In How do People Structure Reality Worth and Adair set forth a model which serves a good hermeneutic, or mode of intepreting, to compare what linguists strictly define as language and "film language." However, with post-structuralist analysis available in retrospect, many elements of their text seems to fall prey to normative and arbitrary constraints present in western practices which they seek to veer from. Their analysis seems to rely on "Chomsky (1965) and others [hypotheses] that what actually happens when one learns to speak a particular language is that one learns the relations between the innate deep structure of language in general and the particular surface structure or grammer of his language (17)." A relationship which is arguably out of reach of anthropological grasp because one must grasp the "general" nature of language in terms of specific languages, either by their relationships between their units of communication and their referents or among various languages themselves. Furthermore, the "I know exactly what he meant." of the film viewer doesn't differ much from the same utterance in reference to a novel or other speech act. It is still plagued with the same questions applied to other mediums/methods: How can we be sure we understand? Who is it that we really understand? Do we understand the film creator as s/he wishes to be understood or is it possible to perceive meaning that wasn't meant to be sent?
Even if we continue to use linguistic analysis the relationship of specific languages to a great, imaginary "general" language must certainly be looked at as relationships between signifiers and signified, with the anti-positivist and contingent foundations attributed to signs. Even if these relationships are real and "visible" would not the subjective interpretation of them lead to complications and dead ends in ways of defining their structure? And do these problems become augmented when dealing with cultures who do not have the same (historical) relationship to film 'language', or any language, or form of communication (think Derrida's critique of Triste Tropique) for that matter
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Worth and Adair's project brings to mind our explorations in the previous week of the study of physiognomic differences and of Muybridge's archive of the human body. Their interest, however, is not in the biological differences between groups of people (or, thinking back to the week on animals and Agamben, man and animal or ape), but rather the cognitive differences between people of different cultures. I think Atilio is correct in noting the difficulty in determining a general nature of language (for Worth and Adair a
ReplyDeletefilm language") and then determining what is "universal" and what is specific to one group's film language. Then one must ask, why is this characteristic unique to this culture? What about the culture makes it possible for this characteristic to exist? The whole project is bound up in the act of interpretation, which Worth and Adair acknowledge as subjective ("Of course no view of one man by another is entirely objective" [26]) but at the same time seem to dismiss by touting the bio-documentary by the Navajo as able to reveal "aspects of coding, cognition, and values that may be inhibited, not observable, or not analyzable when the investigation is totally dependent on verbal exchange" (28). It seems almost as if they expect that all of this coding and cognition will somehow be even more explicit--requiring less interpretation, perhaps--in a movie than in spoken language. It seems to me, however, that with all the visual interpretation now required, there is much more to misinterpret. Worth writes that the bio-documentary "often captures feelings and reveals values, attitudes, and concerns that lie beyond conscious control of the maker," and it is then presumably up to the anthropologist to suss out what those unconscious feelings, values and attitudes are, to interpret them, but from the framework of culture that has a different and longer relationship to film and the production of film than the culture in which the film was created.
It is interesting that Moore and Roth, writing some thirty years later, are more interested in the function rather than the form of indigenous video. Moore asks what is at stake in handing over the camera and critiques the use of indigenous video as a cure to our own theoretical questions/problems with representation of the other in ethnographic film. Roth is interested in the relationship between the Kayapo and media, their use of the video for political ends, and the significance of this for both the Kayapo and those who generally have the "power" of representation. What happened in the years between Adair and Worth's project to motivate this shift? How do we tie this in to the post-structuralist shift and the anthropological crisis of representation?