Constructing and Contesting Otherness: Ethnographic Film

Abstract

At the close of the nineteenth century a French physician, Felix-Louis Regnault, made the following observation in the course of his research into the anatomy and physical movement of people he referred to as ‘savages’: ‘All savage peoples make recourse to gesture to express themselves; their language is so poor it does not suffice to make them understood … With primitive man, gesture precedes speech’ (quoted in Rony, 1996: 3). By the time he published this description (in 1898), Regnault had already produced a number of filmed studies of so-called primitive people that have since been considered to be the first ethnographic films.¹ To Regnault, his films were documents which reveal, through close scientific observation, details of a ‘race’ of people who, plunged in darkness without adequate language, cannot represent themselves.² Regnault’s project of representing ‘inarticulate savages’ in ways intended to provide ‘them’ with a history intersected with the original aim of anthropology, a field of study that was then developing its focus. In a broad sense, anthropology established itself at the turn of the twentieth century as a Western academic discourse which assigned itself the task of representing non-Westernized peoples.