Filmed Ethnography or Ethnographic Film? Voice and Positionality in Ethnographic, Documentary, and Feminist Film

Abstract

And tomorrow? Tomorrow will be the time of completely portable colorvideo, video editing, and instant replay (instant feedback). Which is to say, the time of the joint dream of Vertov and Flaherty, of a mechanical cine-eye-ear and of a camera that can so totally participate that it will automatically pass into the hands of those who, until now, have always been in front of the lens. At that point, anthropologists will no longer control the monopoly on observation; their culture and they themselves will be observed and recorded. And it is in that way that ethnographic film will help us to share anthropology.-Rouch (46)HIN 2009 I DIRECTED AND PRODUCED, along with Alexia Prichard, Soma Girls, a twentyseven-minute documentary that explores the lives of children of sex workers in Kolkata, India. Alexia, whom I met at a start-up cable channel in New York City in 2001, told me about New Light,1 a nonprofit, community-based organization in Kolkata, a city that is my mother's ancestral home and where I had spent many summers as a child. New Light conducts community work in the Kalighat area, and Alexia, impressed with their activism, wanted to collaborate on a film about them. I politely declined her suggestion in 2001 for I had several concerns. One, I feared that Alexia had asked me to collaborate on this film because I was Indian and that my involvement would be intended simply to give the film a stamp of authenticity. Two, and more importantly, I did not want to add to what is an oversaturated body of work, especially in Western media, featuring poor, malnourished images of Indian women and children in need of saving. To my mind, trafficking in such images perpetuates the status quo, reifies Orientalist assumptions, and further alienates those whom we claim to care about. Alexia was incredibly persistent over the ensuing years, and as I got to know her better, I became more trusting of her intentions. In 2006, we decided to work on a film together about New Light's community activism. Alexia made a reconnaissance trip in early 2007 without me, and we returned together a year later, me with toddler in tow, and began work on what eventually became Soma Girls (2009).Borders and Boundaries: Anthropology and Ethnographic and Documentary FilmHaving worked as an experimental and documentary filmmaker for several years, I returned to graduate school to study anthropology in 2001. Despite slippages between the two disciplines, I discovered some reassuring overlaps between documentary filmmaking and ethnographic fieldwork. Both methodologies look to document and understand the human experience through careful research and the willing participation of subjects. Both struggle with issues of power and representation of their informants, and thoughtful anthropologists and filmmakers worry about the ethical consequences of the end product. These overlaps aside, during the shooting of Soma Girls in Kolkata, I wondered why I never described Soma Girls as an ethnographic film (as opposed to a documentary). I certainly never hesitated to call my doctoral research ethnographic, which was considered an essential badge of honor for good anthropological training. If it was permissible, even prideful, for me to be working on a written ethnography of odissi dancers in India and the United States, why did I hesitate to call Soma Girls an ethnographic film? What were some of the key differences between documentary filmmaking and ethnographic filmmaking? Had ethnographic film become unfashionable, and if so, when and why?2 Were there differences in the approach to ethnographic cinema in the United States and other parts of the world? After all, both methodologies involve significant immersion in the community and a good level of participant observation. Although I am certainly not the first to raise such questions, I was interested in unearthing my hesitation-and this hesitation became a point of entry to examine some of the differences and similarities in what may be two approaches to filmmaking, ethnographic and documentary. …