Abstract
This book focuses upon a mythical moment in the intersection of film and anthropology in the German tradition: the birth of the “primitive” body as both a visual artifact and a mode of cinematic observation. The myth is situated within a broader context, what French ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch refers to as the “magical meeting” of the camera and the human subject at the end of the nineteenth century.1 The union, in its most general sense, stems from the fascination with recording and observing the human form. When the hand first turned the crank of the movie camera, the privileged object in front of the lens was more often than not the human body. From the very beginning, in the celebrated shorts by Lumière, Edison, and other early film pioneers, the body is displayed in various guises and performing a variety of activities: leaving a factory en masse; drifting in a boat or riding in a pram; dancing to form a swirl of movement bordering on the abstract; or, captured in close-up in 32 frames, caught in the act of sneezing. Visual anthropologists and film scholars alike have noted the simultaneous rise of cinema and of the body as an object of observation. Ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall regards the invention of the cinema as, in large part, a response to the desire to observe the physical behavior of men and animals.2 Similarly, Linda Williams takes note of the “visible intensification of the body” that came about with the emergence of film.3
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Notes
Jean Rouch, “The Camera and Man,” in Principles of Visual Anthropology. ed. Paul Hockings (The Hague: Mouton Press, 1975), 83–102.
Linda Williams, “Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 508.
See Pierre-L. Jordan, Cinema. First Contact-First Look Series, ed. Alain Nicolas (Marseille: Musées de Marseille, Images en Manoeuvres Editions, 1992), 107.
See Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacl. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 3–4. Rony refers extensively to Regnault, who identifies “those who squat” and use gestural language as primitive peoples.
See George W Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropolog. (New York: Free Press, 1987), 47, 239.
See Felix Regnault, “Poterie crue et origine du tour,” Bulletin Societé Anthropologiqu. 1, no. 1 (1895): 734.
V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledg. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 18–19.
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Objec. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 18, emphasis mine.
Crary is more concerned with the forces that shape a particular type of historical observer rather than with vision as a physiological “fact”: “Whether perception or vision actually change is irrelevant, for they have no autonomous history. What changes are the plural forces and rules composing the field in which perception occurs. And what determines vision at any given historical moment is not some deep structure, economic, base or world view, but rather the function of a collective assemblage of disparate parts on a single social surface.” Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Centur. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 6.
Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart, “The Rise and Fall of Scientific Ethnography,” in The Future of Anthropology. eds. Akbar S. Ahmed and Cris N. Shore (London: Athlone, 1995), 46. Although scientific ethnography drew from the empirical tradition of the nineteenth century, it also rejected another model that dominated the latter half of the century, namely Victorian evolutionary racism, according to Grimshaw and Hart. The Functionalist revolution heralded by Franz Boas and W. H. Rivers emphasized the coherence of a present social formation (what people did here and now) over a narrative reconstruction of the human past (see Grimshaw and Hart, “The Rise and Fall,” 49). In the present study, I argue that the twentieth-century German model attempts to incorporate a rudimentary evolutionist narrative in conjunction with an observational mode.
Otto Stoll, quoted in Michael Böhl, Entwicklung des ethnographischen Film. (Göttingen: Edition Herodot, 1985), 71.
Leo Frobenius, The Childhood of Man. trans. A. H. Keane (New York: Meridian, 1960).
Wilhelm Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology. trans. Edward L. Schaub (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 11–21.
Ernst Haeckel, The Last Link: Our Present Knowledge of the Descent of Ma. (London: A. & C. Black, 1898).
Klaus Kreimeier, “Mechanik, Waffen, und Haudegen Überall. Expeditionsfilme: das bewaffnete Auge des Ethnographen,” in Triviale Tropen: Exotische Reise- und Abenteuerfilme aus Deutschland, 1919–1939. ed. Rolf Schöning (Munich: edition text & kritik, 1997), 55.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams. trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965), 588.
For an overview of recapitulation theory and how it relates to theories of evolution and the primitive, see George W. Stocking Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropolog. (New York: Free Press, 1968), 110–132.
Eugene Dubois, quoted in Peter J. Bowler, The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Pas. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 103.
Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decade. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996) and Paolo Cherchi Usai and Lorenzi Codelli, eds., Before Caligari: German Cinema, 1895–192. (Venice: Edizione Biblioteca dell’Immagine, 1990). I make reference to important archival and critical studies contained within these volumes during the course of the present study.
Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicines Visual Cultur. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 37.
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame Narrative. ed. Thomas El-saesser (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 57.
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© 2001 Assenka Oksiloff
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Oksiloff, A. (2001). Introduction. In: Picturing the Primitive. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05687-0_1
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