Picturing the Primitive: Visual Culture, Ethnography, and Early German Cinema

Abstract

Oksiloff, Assenka. Picturing Primitive: Visual Culture, Ethnography, and Early German Cinema. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 227 pp. $65.00 hardcover. If cinema and anthropology had an uneasy relationship in turn-of-the-century England and United States, as Alison Griffiths has recently shown, same cannot be said of their first encounter in Germany. Here, according to Assenka Oksiloff, cinema and anthropology shared an obsession with body-an obsession that apparently allowed them to put aside what differences they had in other national contexts. Drawing on extensive archival research, Oksiloff analyzes primitive as a mythical topos, where discourses of German ethnography, cinema, and film theory intersect. Picturing Primitive makes an important contribution to what Thomas Elsaesser has called the new film history, a project that investigates how films and spectators draw upon existing discourses, exhibitions, and viewing practices, or develop new ones. In Section One, for instance, Oksiloff examines ways in which anthropologists such as Rudolf Poch coopt familiar images of objectivity (e.g. anthropometric photography) in context of cinema, while attempting to legitimate their use of movie camera as a scientific instrument. In treating cinema as a discursive formation devoted to visibility of body, Oksiloff shows how filmmakers seek to fix supposedly vanishing body of colonized subject, and thereby transform it into a lasting and uniquely dynamic artifact. In her fascinating analysis of Poch's 1908 Bushman Speaking Into Phonograph, one of many staged encounters between primitive and modern, Oksiloff also highlights performative aspects of ethnographic spectacle that suggest alternative, indeed contradictory meanings to those that Poch intended to document. Going beyond research film, Oksiloff explores a broad spectrum of genres, spanning documentaries, culture films, safari movies, globetrotting films, and colonial adventure films, from 1910s through 1920s. Her signal figure is Hans Schomburgk, who typically stitches together elements from several of these genres in order to make a single film, flaunting their seams instead of concealing them. According to Oksiloff, such hybrid films demonstrate how primitive literally and figuratively cuts across seemingly disparate genres, both popular and scientific. Section Two analyzes discursive cross-talk between anthropology and film theory in writings of Leo Frobenius, Georg Lukacs, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Bela Balas. Just as ethnographers establish new modes of observation and representation by harnessing new medium, film theorists employ discourse of anthropology in order to imagine origins of cinema and its nascent audience. …