Can Film Show The Invisible-Libre

Can Film Show the Invisible?
The Work of Montage in Ethnographic Filmmaking

Author(s): Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 53, No. 3 (June 2012), pp. 282-301
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research
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282
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 3, June 2012
Can Film Show the Invisible?

The Work of Montage in Ethnographic Filmmaking
by Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev
This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by striving for ever more
realistic depictionsa position often associated with observational cinemabut rather by exploiting the artificial
means through which human vision can be transcended. Achieved particularly through the use of montage, such
disruptions can multiply the perspectives from which filmic subject matter is perceived, thus conveying its invisible
and irreducible otherness. This, however, is an argument not to dismiss the realism of much ethnographic filmmaking,
but rather to demonstrate how montage can and must be used to break with the mimetic dogma of the humanized
camera. The effective image, we argue, depends crucially on maintaining a tension between a strong sense of reality
and its occasional, and therefore only then effective, disruption through montage.
The tradition of ethnographic filmmaking has throughout its

history been the target of numerous scornful attacks by anthropologists dissatisfied with its incapacity for generalization
and abstract theory making. Increasingly, dissatisfaction has
also erupted within the community of ethnographic filmmakers. Depressed by the number of what he finds to be dull
observational films screened at current ethnographic film
festivals, Jay Ruby laments the future of the discipline:
The overwhelming majority of the student films I saw . . .
employed what I regard as the overtired, outdated and highly
suspect conventions of observational cinema. . . . Are students actively discouraged from deviating from the orthodoxy. . . . How is our field going to advance if students have
to tow [sic] the line of one cinematic form? Why are the
young so timid? Are their mentors discouraging experimentation? Where are the revolutionaries bent on changing
things? (Ruby 2008)
From a different quarter, James Weiner (1997) points out that

what is most notably lacking in ethnographic filmmaking is
recognition of the invisible dimensions of human life that
cannot be recorded by a camera. According to Weiner, the
genre of realist indigenous ethnographic filmmaking that supposedly makes no attempt to teach Western notions or styles
of framing, montage, [and] fast cutting (Turner 1992:7) acChristian Suhr is a filmmaker and PhD candidate in the Section for
Anthropology and Ethnography of Aarhus University (Moesgaard
Alle 20, DK-8270 Hoejbjerg, Denmark [suhr@hum.au.dk]). Rane
Willerslev is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Museum
of Cultural History of the University of Oslo (St. Olavs gt. 29, P.O.
Box 6762, St. Olavs plass, NO-0130 Oslo, Norway). Both authors
contributed equally to this paper. This paper was submitted 29 IX
09 and accepted 11 XI 10.
tually works counter to indigenous ritualistic strategies of

making things visible by their very concealment. For Weiner
(1997:199, 201), the gaps between shots created through montage along with other nonrealist cinematic manipulations
would be a precondition for visualizing indigenous notions
of invisibility.
In an older and much debated article, Kirsten Hastrup
(1992) argues that anthropology communicated through photography and film inevitably is stuck within visible forms and
patterns, which can only be appreciated from the nave empiricist notion that the world is what it appears to be (Jay
Ruby, quoted in Hastrup 1992:17). In her view, invisible aspects of human reality can only be evoked through words
and textual abstraction. Hastrups case is built around her
own failure to photograph an Icelandic ram exhibition: The
texture of maleness and sex had been an intense sensory experience, but it was invisible. The reality of the total social
event had been transformed into a two-dimensional image,
a souvenir (Hastrup 1992:9).
Hastrup admits that her photographs, ill-focused, badly
lit, lopsided featuring the backs of men and ram, could have
been more illuminating had she been more experienced with
a camera. Nevertheless, she maintains that the thick, invisible, and secret meaning of the event could not have
been captured on celluloid, but had to be communicated in
words (Hastrup 1992:910). This, she argues, is because the
two media operate on quite distinct logical levels: the image
by means of its mimetic disposition is a mere simulacrum of
reality, only capturing features of social life that are visible.
By contrast, words are essentially formless in themselves, and
meaning, therefore, needs to be created through textual construction by selection and ordering. This allows words to
communicate existential spaces of cultural experience (Has-
2012 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2012/5303-0002$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/664920
Suhr and Willerslev Montage in Ethnographic Filmmaking
trup 1992:11) that are themselves invisible and therefore cannot be captured by a camera.
It comes as no surprise that both Weiners and Hastrups
arguments were received with much disapproval by visual
anthropologists (Crawford and Turton 1992:5; Faye Ginsburg,
quoted in Weiner 1997:213; MacDougall 1998:71). Lucien
Taylor fiercely argued against what he took to be an iconophobia in anthropology. In his view (Taylor 1996:88), anthropologys discomfort with images has to do with films
capacity to exceed theory and showing anthropologists purchase on the lived experience of their subjects to be rather
more precarious than they would like to believe. In a similar
vein, David MacDougall (1998:71) suggested that Hastrup
quite simply was giving up on photography too easily. According to MacDougall, words are superior in their capacity
of showing us the rules of the social and cultural institutions
by which [people] live (1998:259), but images are far superior in addressing subtle issues of social agency, body practice, and the role of the senses and emotions in social life.
In this article, we wish to draw renewed attention to the
key question that underlies much of this debate for and
against visual anthropology: Can film show the invisible, or
is it trapped within the visible surfaces of the social world?
Despite the criticisms raised, we find that Hastrups main
assertion that the camera is incapable of capturing the invisible meanings of social life needs renewed consideration. Of
key importance is the attention she draws to the fact that
although film and images taken by cameras may look similar
to our ordinary seeing, they do differ in significant ways.
Ethnographic filmmakers are quite certainly aware of these
differences, but their take on filmmaking has, as we shall see,
largely consisted in minimizing them, so as to let the camera
imitate the human eye.
Our period of accelerated technological innovations has
supported this development: first, with the advent of mobile
lightweight sound recording and, more recently, with digital
recording formats and affordable handheld camcorders,
which allow ethnographic filmmakers to make longer takes
than ever before. The shifts from black-and-white to color
film and more recently from 4 : 3 to 16 : 9 (widescreen) have
likewise enabled more realistic simulations of our normal field
of vision. Yet, as realized by Dziga Vertov (1929; Croft and
Rose 1977) almost a century ago, a camera is not a human
eye but a mechanical eye, which, rather than a continuous
stream of vision, provides a series of frames with a limited
range of contrast, color reproduction, depth of field, and angle. The real wonder of cinema, we venture to suggest, lies
not in its inferior imitation of the human eye, but rather in
its mechanical capturing of footage, which subsequently can
be put together with other pieces by way of montage.
Our task here is to explore how ethnographic filmmaking
may expand our horizon of experience if we take seriously
the key differences between the camera eye and the human
eye and consider the use of manipulative filmic devices for
transcending the limitations of human vision. We argue that
283
it is only when we embrace its mechanical, nonhuman nature

that the medium of film can become fully capable of conveying the invisible that Hastrup rightfully argues is so important to anthropology, but which she mistakenly holds can
be communicated only in words.
We shall begin our inquiry by looking into ideas about the
invisible in realist ethnographic filmmaking, then discussing
these ideas in relation to alternatives offered by cinematic
montage. Our aim is not to replace realist doctrines with the
radical constructivism of the Soviet and postmodernist montage schools (Eisenstein 1988:145; Kiener 2008:394; Michelson
1984; Minh-ha 1982). Rather, we want to offer a conceptual
framework through which to expand our understanding of
how montage and other disruptive devices can and must be
used to break the mimetic dogma of the humanized camera,
thus enabling an enhanced perception of the social realities
depicted in ethnographic films. Howeverand this is a key
pointusing film to reveal the invisible aspects of social life
depends crucially on maintaining a tension between a strong
sense of reality and its occasional, and therefore only then
effective, disruption through montage.
Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Pontys (2002) work on the
primordial totality of vision and Emmanuel Levinass (1969)
ethics of irreducible otherness, we finally arrive at suggestions
for how such imposed tension between realism and constructivism can open ethnographic filmmakings capacity for imagining other planes of seeing.
The Observational Tradition

Closely associated with Taylors and MacDougalls critique of
Hastrup is the distinctive tradition of observational cinema,
which arguably has shaped ethnographic filmmaking to the
extent of being identical to it (Banks 1992:124; Kiener 2008:
405).1 As a movement, observational cinema aims to inquire
into the role played by ordinary lived time and space in the
constitution of social life. As such, it operates within an essentially realist cinematic paradigm, using film mainly as a
medium of mimesis (Stam 2000:72; Taylor 1996:75). Observational filmmakers do not, however, see their goal in terms
of a simple one-to-one correspondence with everyday reality.
Clearly, it is misguided to confuse observational cinema with
naive empiricism or scientism. In fact, observational cinema
was partly developed as a reaction against the detached fly
on the wall film approach as seen, for example, in Gregory
Bateson and Margaret Meads Childhood Rivalry in Bali and
New Guinea (1952). Mimesis in observational filmmaking, as
Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz (2009:552) assert, is not
1. Even though observational cinema at present appears to be the most
influential school of ethnographic filmmaking, it is by no means the only
one. The history of ethnographic filmmaking shows a wide range of
experiments with poetic forms of film editing, postmodern deconstruction, and even fiction film (see, e.g., Gardner 1986; Minh-ha 1982; Rouch
1967).
284
simply a mirroring. Rather, it is a process of merging the

object of perception with the body of the perceiver. The mimetic camera is here used as a physical extension of the
camerapersons body (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009:548;
MacDougall 1998:200), thus allowing viewers intimate access
to the filmmakers sensuous engagement with the social life
portrayed. Paul Henley encapsulates this virtue eloquently in
his summation of observational cinema as
a cinematography based on an unprivileged single camera
that offers the viewpoint, in a very literal sense, of a normal
human participant in the events portrayed. This camera
should be mobile, following subjects and events. . . . Whenever possible or appropriate, long takes should be employed
in order to preserve the integrity of the events in the wholeness in which they spontaneously occur . . . stylistically the
camerawork should be low-key: the observational cameraperson should take particular care that neither the distinctive
temporal and spatial configurations of the events portrayed
nor, more generally, the characteristic social and cultural
aesthetics of their subjects world are smothered by demonstrations of technical or aesthetic virtuosity. (Henley 2004:
114)
As Henley points out, observational cinema builds on the

epistemological premise that deep insight into social life entails transmission of sufficient material detail of the observable
world from the viewpoint of a normal human participant
(Henley 2004:114). This brings us back again to the central
question of what constitutes the invisible. For observational
cinema, the invisible can be said to be that which is seen but
not usually noticed. By focusing on the most apparently trivial details of everyday activities, the cameraperson, along with
the audience, comes to observe the finest grains of day-today human existence. According to MacDougall (1998:255),
these concrete and detailed visible features of persons and
their environments have largely disappeared as signifiers of
culture in written anthropologys preoccupation with analytical abstractions: kinship systems, symbolic structures of
meaning, and intangible power relations.
MacDougalls recent film Gandhis Children (2008), about
the everyday lives of boys in a childrens shelter on the outskirts of Delhi, is a case in point. For more than three hours,
viewers are invited to explore shifting moments of joy and
despair as revealed in the boys facial expressions and bodily
gestures. The observable world thus becomes a pathway to
deep insights into the emotional lives of the film subjects.
Instead of contextualizing their lives in terms of abstract analytical categories, the scenes of the film drag us into what
Lucien Taylor (1996:76) has described as the ambiguity of
meaning that is at the heart of human experience itself.
Here, as in other observational films (see, e.g., MacDougall
1979; for more recent productions, see Grossman 2010; Spray
2007), a sense of reality is derived from the direct connection
of the camera to the lived body of the filmmaker. The camera,
in Grimshaws words, is humanized and submitted to a
particular humanist ethics premised upon humility or respect, expressive of the filmmakers sensitivity towards their
subjects (Grimshaw 2001:12930, 138). Consequently, the
observational filmmaker has to be cautious with any form of
cinematic effectabnormal framing, grading, extradiegetic
music, commentary, disruptive juxtaposition of shots, and so
onwhich runs the risk of disturbing the transmission of the
camerapersons lived experience of the life-world filmed
(Henley 2004:11516; Kiener 2008:407).
By favoring in this way seeing over assertion, wholeness
over parts, matter over symbolic meaning, specificity over
abstraction (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009:539), observational
cinema proposes that the strangeness of even the most exotic
people can be counterbalanced by a sense of familiarity
(MacDougall 1998:245)that is, a sense of how, despite cultural differences, we are ultimately all subject to the same
plane of embodied spatial and temporal existence. This is
exactly what MacDougall (1998:252) points to when he writes
that the image transcends culture . . . by underscoring the
commonalities that cut across cultural boundaries. In his
view, one of the key contributions of visual anthropology to
our discipline at large is the challenge that images and film
pose to abstract cultural representations, by returning our gaze
to transcultural commonalities of being human (MacDougall
1998:245).
The Invisible as Invisible

What if we do not buy into a notion of the invisible as that
which is seen but not usually noticedthat is, if the invisible
cannot be captured visually, but lies beyond visibility? Then
it seems to follow that the long camera takes of observational
cinema, indulging in abundance of visual detail, cannot be
sufficient for evoking the invisible. While observational filmmakers tend to avoid the use of manipulative filmic devices
and disruptive montage in order to preserve the congruency
between the subject as experienced by the film-makers and
the film as experienced by the audience (Colin Young, quoted
in Henley 2004:115), we find that montage, along with other
forms of cinematic manipulation, is a precondition for evoking the invisible in its own right.
Let us clarify what we mean by the key word montage.
In French, montage refers to the technical process of film
editing in the strict sense of the word. The cut from one shot
to another may, among other things, convey action-reaction,
make an effect of continuity or of time passed, visualize a
shift of perspective, make a jump from the whole to a part
or vice versa, perform a flashback, show parallel simultaneous
action, or simply contrast what was seen in the first shot with
the next. For the early American film director D. W. Griffith
(1915), montage was first and foremost used to depict organic
unity in diversity, in which parts act and react on each
other, threaten each other, and enter into conflict before unity
is eventually restored (Deleuze 2005:31). Hence, narrative coherence and consistency are the primary aim of this type of
montage. Thompson and Bordwell (2003) also locate in Griffith the beginnings of the continuity system, which aims at
preserving narrative clarity by avoiding shifts of camera angle
of more than 180 degrees, by using shot/reverse-shot to couple
the viewpoints of people within a scene and by cutting from
wide-angle shots to close-ups of the same actions taking place.
Through such techniques, the idea is to maintain unbroken
connection with each preceding [shot] (Alfred Capus, quoted
in Thompson and Bordwell 2003:46).
While editing in the continuity style of much American
cinema is provided to create an illusion of a smooth flow of
time, early Soviet filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein (1928)
and Dziga Vertov (1929) experimented in speeding up film
footage, slowing it down, making shots overlap so that actions
are repeated, or violently shortening the real-time duration
of events through jump-cutting (Thompson and Bordwell
2003:131). Rather than an illusion of real-time actions in
contiguous spaces, what they aimed for was a new cinematic
presentation of time and space (Sitney 1990:44). Thus, Eisenstein emphasized how shots were to be placed not next to
each other but rather on top of each other, so that each cut
consists in a qualitative leap (Deleuze 2005:38).
What we take from Griffith and the early Soviet filmmakers
is their concern with the filmic possibilities of juxtaposing
shots, thus enabling visual experiences that differ from normal
perceptioneither in the form of organic narrative wholeness
or in the form of radical shock therapy. In contrast to this,
most ethnographic filmmakers in the observational tradition
have been preoccupied with the cinema of duration as advocated by Andre Bazin (2005:39; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009:
539)that is, the ability of the camera to capture events and
actions in human life in the order and pace that they actually
occur.
In Griffith and Eisenstein, but even more so in the cinema
of Vertov, the camera was valued not for its capacity to imitate
the human eye, but precisely for its mechanical nonhuman
nature. For Vertov, montage referred not only to the piecing
together of shots in the editing room, but also to the assembly
of shots as framed and recorded in the camera (Aumont et
al. 1997:65). We adopt montage in this broadest sense as a
production technique, which is evident both in film shooting
and in the subsequent juxtaposition of shots during editing.
Whether in the camera or in the editing room, montage can
be defined as cinematic rearrangement of lived time and space.
Its set goal is what Vertov referred to as Film-Truth (Petric
1987:4, 8)that is, to transcend ordinary human perception
and offer views on reality of a super-real quality, emerging
from the juxtaposition of otherwise incompatible perspectives. While the humanized camera provides footage from a
perspective, which stands in an indexical relationship to the
familiar regime of human perception, montage, as here understood, is the production of superhuman vision that pushes
the frontiers of the observable world into uncharted regions.
A somewhat similar take on films capacity to decode reality
has been pursued by scholars concerned with cinema and
285
globalization. Thus, George Marcus (1994) points to our present-day entanglement in global cultural processes as a kind
of invisibility that is difficult to present with the long unobtrusive takes of observational cinema. Parallel editing, he
suggests, may be a method of setting the scene objectively,
so as to reflect the reality of the contemporary global world
(Marcus 1994:48). More recently, Wilma Kiener (2008:394)
has echoed this argument by pointing out how editing solves
the problem of showing whatwhile being absentis a necessary part of the whole. Montage, she argues (Kiener 2006:
3), make[s] visible [the] social and psychological effects of
the globalising and the postcolonial world. Thus, for both
Kiener and Marcus, the simultaneity of global cultural processes is a form of invisibility that can be rendered visible
through the use of montage.
In a similar vein, Dai Vaughan (1992:110) has addressed
the potential of montage for highlighting the constructed nature of all filmmaking, which often remains invisible in the
low-key montage style of many ethnographic films:
What are needed . . . are methods whereby the various
strands of the [ethnographic film] discoursethe referential
nature of the images, their demonstrative disposition, the
construction of narrative continuities in time and space, the
filmic and extra-filmic codingsmay be denied elision and
offered as separable to the viewers security.
Such methods could, Vaughan continues, consist in selective

jump-cutting, disagreeing voice-over commentaries, and excessively manipulative forms of grading that push the received conventions to the point of parody so that, while still
functioning to articulate the material, they would be perceived
in their arbitrariness. Trinh T. Minh-has film Reassemblage
(1982) applies several of these methods. Shot in a Senegalese
village, the film uses audio-video desynchronization along
with continuous abrupt jump-cuts of women breastfeeding
their babies, crying or laughing children, traditional dancing,
and corn grinding. In this way, the film effectively directs the
attention of viewers toward their own acts of seeing and the
ways in which ethnographic films conventionally establish
their subjects. The invisible that is made visible in Minh-has
deconstruction is effectively ourselves as ethnographic film
viewers and the politics of looking at others.
Despite their differences, filmmakers and theoreticians such
as Vertov, Marcus, Kiener, Vaughan, and Minh-ha share a
common understanding of the invisible. Whether in the form
of global cultural processes or of concealed power relations,
the invisible is understood to be something that can and
should be made visible in filmmaking by means of montage.
Here we seek to take the montage argument to a more fundamental level of analysis by suggesting that juxtaposition of
perspectives through montage is a key cinematic tool for evoking the invisible, without reducing it to forms of visibility.
The problem with the globalization of the film gaze, advocated
by Marcus and Kiener, is that it merely enlarges the field of
visibility to a global scale rather than deals with the question
286
of invisibility in its own right (see, e.g., Furtado 1989; Gandini

2003).
The use of montage in the service of deconstruction, as in
the film work of Minh-ha, carries yet another problem. The
supposedly concealed power relations, inherent in the objectifying gaze of ethnographic filmmaking, may perhaps be rendered visible by Minh-has complete disruption of her footage,
but only at the expense of dissolving the social world portrayed into obscure haze (Crawford 1992:79). To paraphrase
the film critic Rudolf Arnheim: in order for film to be more
than a naive simulacrum of reality, it must interrupt and
challenge our conventional visual logicbut only partially,
for no statement can [ultimately] be understood unless the
relations between its elements form an organized whole
(Arnheim 1957:170). Successful evocation rests not with the
pleasures of chaos (Arnheim 1971:3033) but with the filmmakers success in counterbalancing disruption with a general
compositional order, hence enhancing the viewers perception
of reality.
If the invisible is part of social reality, then how can we
approach it without merely substituting it with new forms of
visibility? In the following, we shall explore the notion of the
invisible shared by Merleau-Ponty and Levinas as a perceptual
impossibility, whichalthough it may be imagined intellectuallyis not achievable from any one perspective. The invisible here is understood to be an excess of visibility or an
infinite totality of vision that cannot itself be accessed from
any actual human perspective, but whose presence is the precondition for our possibility of perceiving anythingwhat
Merleau-Ponty refers to as the norm and Levinas as the
infinite Other. We shall suggest that by maintaining the
invisible as an excess or infinite totality of vision, montage
in film may enable us to imagine views fundamentally different from those given to us in ordinary perception.
The Invisible in Vision

One of the most fundamental differences between the camera
eye and the human eye lies in the way the two perceive the
depth and distinct identity of objects. Let us, therefore, begin
by considering the rather tricky question of how human beings are able to experience objects as three-dimensional. It
may appear to us that we perceive objects from the location
of our eyes: the world is centered upon the perceiver. Indeed,
the long observational takes and the humanized camera style
of much ethnographic filmmaking appear to reproduce this
egocentric experience of vision. This is also the basis of Edmund Husserls (1997) theory of perception, in which the
three-dimensionality of objects emerges out of a cognitive
hypothesis. The only thing we perceive, Husserl asserts, is the
objects facade. The back side of the objectits invisible
sideis not perceived and can, therefore, only be assessed
cognitively by building on our previous experiences of moving
around the object.
However, as the philosopher Sean Kelly (2005:96) has
pointed out, the basic problem with this theory of perception

is that, insofar as the back side is part of the object, and
insofar as we can never see the back side of the object from
our present position, no experience of an object could possibly present it as it really is. Thus, the real object slips away
as an imperceptible sum of all possible perspectives on it.
But what if vision is not subjective, but rather an effect of
our relations with one another (Willerslev 2009)that is,
what if vision exists, so to speak, between us rather than
within us? Merleau-Ponty (2002:79) points to exactly this
when he writes: When I look at the lamp on my table, I
attribute to it not only the qualities visible from where I am,
but also those which the chimney, the walls, the table can
see. What Merleau-Ponty suggests is that when we gaze at
the facade of an object, its back side is also perceived positively. But whereas the facade is perceived as determinate,
the hidden side of the object is perceived as indeterminate
(Kelly 2005:78). That is, rather than not being perceived, the
hidden side is positively perceived as absence of visibility. This
is so, Merleau-Ponty argues, because at the same time as we
perceive the focal object, we also perceive the infinite web of
possible viewpoints in which this object is situated. Thus, the
chimney, the walls, and the table are all perceived as alternative
viewpoints, from where we could have seen what, from our
present perspective, is hidden as the back side of the lamp
(fig. 1).
Hence, according to Merleau-Ponty, perceptual experience
is not, as Husserl argues, simply a presentation of sense data.
Neither is it simply something that goes on within us. Instead,
visual perception emerges as an intertwinement of our own
subjective viewpoint along with the focal object and the vast
sprawling web of viewpoints that surround it and provide its
supporting context (Merleau-Ponty 1997:248). It is, so to
speak, because vision is everywhere that we as perspectival
beings are able to see things from somewhere (Willerslev 2011;
Willerslev and Ulturgasheva 2007:92). So, contrary to Husserl,
the real three-dimensionality of objects is present in each and
every perception of them, but it is present in the sense of an
invisible and unattainable normthat is, the view from
everywhere (Deleuze 1994:37; Kelly 2005:91; Willerslev 2011:
519). As Merleau-Ponty (2000:187) expresses it: The proper
essence . . . of the visible is to have a layer of invisibility . . .
which it makes present by a certain absence. In other words,
while the view from everywhere implies the world seen in
totally clear and unambiguous visibilitythat is, the world
as laid bare in absolute transparencyit is a view that must
hide itself in order for the visible world to appear before
our eyes. As such, the view from everywhere is a view that
cannot be an object of our own perspectival seeing except
negatively, that is, by its absence (Holbraad and Willerslev
2007:334).
We may seem to have wandered a bit far in discussing the
perception of lamps, but it relates in an important way to the
key issue that interests us here, namely, the difference between
human perception and film. Criticizing Hastrup for neglecting
287
Figure 1. A lamp (Christian Suhr). A color version of this figure is available in the online edition of Current Anthropology.
how closely film resembles human perceptual experience, Taylor (1996:7576) emphasizes how, in particular, the long take
of observational cinema honors the duration of real-life interaction and the homogeneity of space by preserving the
relationships between objects rather than substituting [them
with] the abstract time and synthetic space of montage (cf.
Henley 2004:114). But is it really the case that the long take
of a camera so closely resembles our ordinary vision? One
major difference that comes to mind is the fact that the three-
dimensional reality we usually perceive is depicted twodimensionally in film. MacDougall (2006:270, 274) also points
to this fact, when describing how films construct for us a
three-dimensional space based on two-dimensional pieces.
But whereas MacDougall, in line with the observational doctrine, emphasizes how closely this construction resembles human perception, it is a construction nevertheless, which, in
order to achieve its reality effect, has to manipulate considerably with frame, color, contrast, focus, and depth.
288
Let us clarify this by considering one of the most fundamental differences between the technological mediation of
vision by the camera and ordinary human visionnamely,
the difference between viewing through one rather than two
eyes. As Merleau-Ponty showed us, the three-dimensionality
of things is given to us in human vision because we simultaneously appropriate a multiplicity of other possible viewpoints. Merleau-Pontys claim finds further support in the
fact that we normally never see an object from one position.
Most often, we see it as an intertwinement of two positions
that is, through our two eyes. As Arnheim (1957:11) has
pointed out, depth perception relies mainly on the distance
between the two eyes, which makes for two slightly different
images. The fusion of these two pictures into one image gives
the three-dimensional impression. Contrary to Taylor and
the realist codex of much ethnographic filmmaking, Arnheim
pointed to this fact as an example of how filmic vision radically differs from human double vision.
Hence, at the most elementary level, Hastrup is in fact
perfectly right when she states that the flat representation of
her camera did not reveal the same three-dimensional reality
that she had seen with her two eyes. Because of her two eyes,
whose vision bends around things, she was literally able to
see a bit more of the ram exhibition than what was later
depicted in her photographs. Human vision with its double
perspective is, therefore, always already one step ahead, toward
the view from everywhere, than is the single (Husserlian)
perspective of a camera lens. Despite current experiments in
3-D, film is still not able to reproduce the full human perception of space that observational filmmakers have tried to
imitate. While we in ordinary double vision are able to see
around things, this is not possible with the single perspective
of the camera lens. Whereas the three-dimensionality of things
is normally given to us as an inherent feature of our vision,
film has to shift angle, combine perspectives, and in other
ways manipulate the image in order to give a sense of the
three-dimensional features of what they depict.
Some Film Examples

If the camera eye is fundamentally inferior to human vision,
then how can film ever provide us with an anthropological
vision that challenges and enhances ordinary seeing? What
film can do (and what human vision cannot do) isthrough
techniques of montageto juxtapose its two-dimensional
pieces and combine them into multispatial and multitemporal
viewing experiences. In this way, montage offers the possibility
of breaking the boundaries of the ethnographically thin
2-D by delivering views of a multidimensional thick and,
if you like, super-real quality. This is what Vertov took to the
extreme with his dictum of the kino-eye, simultaneously
documenting and constructing reality: a cinema that, as its
first move, needed to break away from the mimetic disposition
of the camera.
Until now we have violated the movie camera and forced
it to copy the work of our eye. The better the copy, the
better the shooting was thought to be. Starting today we
are liberating the camera and making it work in the opposite
directionaway from copying. (Vertov, quoted in Roberts
2000:19)
Many ethnographic filmmakers have been inspired by the

films and writings of Vertov. The cinema verite movement,
developed by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, is a direct translation of Vertovs concept of Kino Pravda, meaning filmtruth. But rather than the intersubjective truth provided
by Rouchs living participatory camera (Rothman 1997:80;
Rouch 2003), which functions as an extension of the filmmakers body, Vertov aimed at transcending the intersubjective and, through montage, obtaining a new and truer vision,
extending beyond the subjective viewpoint of our human eyes.
In his classic film from 1929, The Man with the Movie Camera,
we see the metropolis at dawn with its citizens still asleep.
Yet it turns out that the city is a roomful of eyes, in that every
object, from the cars headlamps to the dummies in the shop
windows, grows a face of its own and stares back. By being
pushed into this odd realm in which every object has a presencea being and a face of its ownwe are forced upon us
a vision that does not begin and end in the human subject:
a vision that is already in place, waiting to inscribe us within
it. As James Elkins (1996:20) writes: Instead of saying I am
the one doing the looking, it seems better to say that objects
are all trying to catch my eye. Indeed, this echoes MerleauPontys claim that without the vast tangled network of viewpoints that surrounds us and weaves itself through us, there
would be no subjective viewpoint in the first place.
Within the world of ethnographic filmmaking, Timothy
Asch and Napoleon Chagnons much-debated film The Ax
Fight (1975) reveals a similar capacity for constructing visual
experiences composed of several points of view (fig. 2). The
film is about a conflict that broke out among two groups of
Yanomamo Indians. It discloses and discusses the same violent
event no less than five timeseach time from a new cinematic
perspective (Acciaioli 2004:141; Nichols 2004).
First we are presented with 11 minutes of unedited observational film footage, which covers the fight from its outbreak
to the end. Shouts and screams increase in volume as the
crowd of fighting men and women grows larger. At its peak,
the fight has moved into the shadow of a pent roof. Machetes
and axes glimpse in the darkness. Suddenly, the camera pans
quickly to the left, following a movement within the crowd.
We hear the sound of a severe punch, but the camera moves
too fast, and it is impossible to see what happens. A moment
later, we are back with the agitated crowd. The camera has
moved closer. The fight has paused. A young man kneels on
the ground, showing great signs of pain. We are left in bewilderment.
In the next section of the film, we hear the filmmakers
immediate reactions on the sound reel. Chagnon attempts to
make sense of the apparent chaos. He reckons that the fight
289
Figure 2. The Ax Fight (Asch and Chagnon 1975). A color version of this figure is available in the online edition of Current
Anthropology.
erupted because of the discovery of an incestuous relationship

between a woman and her son. However, as the next title
states, First impressions can be mistaken. Now the filmic
material is replayed in slow motion and with stills. In voiceover, Chagnon explains who is who and what strategies the
combatants employ. We learn that the fight evolved because
a woman had been beaten in her garden after having denied
giving food to a visiting relative.
The fourth section of the film attempts to make sense of
the fight in terms of kinship and alliance theory under the
heading Simplified structure of the conflict in terms of marriage and descent. The violent event can, according to Chagnon, be viewed as an expression of old hostilities between
three lineages. The fight comes to a standstill exactly at the
point where one of the lineages would otherwise have been
forced to split and choose sides between the other two, resulting in a cleavage of the village. As Bill Nichols (2004:231)
has pointed out, this abstract explanation probably represents
the furthest point one can get from the indexical profilmic
event as it actually happened. It is an account of underlying
social structures, which are invisible to the eye of the camera
and possibly also to the eyes of the actors themselves.
In the last section, the film presents yet another perspective
through which to understand the fight. The film material is
replayed for the third time, but now edited unchronologically
to emphasize a narrative structure quite different from that
of the kinship chart and the first unedited observational take
(Nichols 2004:231). Here one starts to wonder about features
in the footage that have not been addressed in the anthropological explanation. Seeing the steel axes yet a third time,
one is pushed to question where these axes might have come
from and what impact the surrounding world has on the
violent event. Furthermore, what leaps to the eye is how disruption of the chronological development of the event
through montage brings together two women in an argument.
While the critical role of women as initiators and participants
in the fight is entirely absent in Chagnons explanation, the
manipulation of the footage in the last part of the film strongly
emphasizes it. Linda Connor and Patsy Asch (2004:176) appreciate this manipulation, as it makes clear the inadequacy
of the anthropological explanation. As the filmic compression
of time unfolds hitherto unseen layers of the social interaction,
the in-depth thick ethnographic description of kinship and
alliance structures is rendered thin. Contrary to Hastrups
argument about the hierarchy between writing and film, the
filmic in this instance grows thick and comes to encompass
and transcend the anthropological explanation.
Seen in relation to one another, the five sequences add up
to a mosaic image, a phantom-like whole, which enables us
to experience and compare each perspective in relation to the
others. The inconsistencies, dissonances, and gaps between
the various contradicting viewpoints force us to consider what
yet other perspectives could reveal, thus making us create new
imaginary viewpoints that expand into infinity. Indeed, the
extensive and persistent debate (Martinez 2004; Nichols 2004;
Ruby 2000:129) about the film is itself a testimony to how
290
Figure 3. Gandhis Children (MacDougall 2008). A color version of this figure is available in the online edition of Current Anthropology.
difficult it is to settle in any single interpretational perspective.

In the end, there is no longer a camera to stand in for our
seeing, and so the viewpoints provoked are not the familiar
subjective regime of ordinary perception, but beyond human
vision. Indeed, through the absence of visibility, a sense of
the event as seen from everywhere is evoked as an impossible
phantom ideal (Derrida 1995:244). In this sense, The Ax
Fight emerges as an excess of vision that can only be approached through the lack of visibility, emerging through the
juxtaposition of conflicting perspectives. As Merleau-Ponty
himself expresses it: Since the total invisible is always behind,
or after, or between the aspects we see of it, there is access
to it only through an experience which like it, is wholly outside
of it itself (Merleau-Ponty 2000:136).
Both The Ax Fight and The Man with the Movie Camera
use a wide range of cinematic devices to force the viewer out
of the familiar regime of subject-centered vision. Most ethnographic filmmakers of the observational school are certainly
more cautious about using such extensive cinematic manipulation. Yet also within this tradition, we find powerful ap-
plications of montage. MacDougalls film Gandhis Children

(2008) provides an illuminating example. As already pointed
out, the film clearly inscribes itself within the tradition of
observational cinema. Nonetheless, in a few highly powerful
sequences, the use of the humanized camera hailed by observational filmmakers is thoroughly subverted. From the outset, the film twists our perspective through a series of shots
from the outside of the childrens shelter to its interior: from
the hallway of the house to the rooftop, through a window
to the balconies of the houses on the other side of the street
and out again at the street, before finally settling at the eyelevel perspective of the children, wrapped in blankets in their
bunk beds, slowly awakening (fig. 3). MacDougalls montage
creates suggestive ambiguities between interior and exterior,
presence and absence, finite and infinite space. These same
ambiguities continue throughout the film. First, however, it
moves on to explore the childrens lives through series of
observational camera takes in which the eye-level perspective
of the boys takes on an almost natural feel. The relationship
between image and world becomes virtually transparent: we
look through the eyes of a child, as it were, to the actuality

they point to. Yet at certain subtle moments the illusion of
experiencing life from the perspective of a child becomes
acutely clear.
This happens most forcefully in a scene featuring a boy
crying and asking to come home to his family. As the boy
continues to weep, the act of watching him through the passive viewpoint of a camera becomes increasingly unbearable
not only for the viewer, but also for MacDougall, whose camera faintly starts to shake before his assistant finally steps into
the scene and comforts the child. Over several jump-cuts of
the same camera shot, our viewpoint is inescapably split apart
in collision with the filmmakers perspective, the eye-level
perspective of the camera and the perspective of the boy,
whose demeanor demands that the filmmaker take action.
After this scene, each proceeding observational eye-level take
is forced upon us as a montage of our double and impossible
perspective as children engaged in perceiving other children
and as adults engaged in a strange form of self-deception. No
longer can we rely solely on one single situated perspective.
We are thrown back and forth between the various actual and
virtual viewpoints provoked by the film. This wandering of
perspectives, each of which modifies and objectifies the others,
results in a conglomerate or excess of visionwhat MerleauPonty denotes as the view from everywherewhich belongs
to no one in particular, but pushes us to see through the
actuality of all particular viewpoints offered. The long take
the hallmark of observational cinemais transformed into
the most disruptive and disconcerting of montage effects.
Before going further, it is worth making some preliminary
conclusions on the basis of the montage at work in The Ax
Fight and Gandhis Children. On the one hand, it is clear that
effective film montage does not necessarily have to involve
fast-pace editing or use of extradiegetic material. Neither does
film montage necessarily need to include a large range of film
angles. On the other hand, it is also clear that the long observational take of the humanized camera by no means automatically allies us with the social reality of film subjects.
Quite to the contrary, in fact: it is only when observational
cinema betrays its own realist commitment that the invisible
dimensions of reality are evoked. These rupturing leaps
emerge in peculiar instances where the humanized camera
fails to sustain the world it depicts, thus revealing that the
reality presented is much larger than what is seen. As already
argued, the work of montage appears less effective in films
relying solely on postmodern deconstruction (see Minh-ha
1982). Disruption cannot, so to speak, work as disruption of
itself. It must be a disruption of something rather than nothing. It is exactly in the paradoxical tension between the insistence on a reality out there and the inevitable failures of
recording this reality through a subject-centered perspective
that the most powerful ruptures of montage emerge. This also
implies that the effects of montage may not easily be constructed beforehand through acts of conscious thinking, as
in, for example, the feature films of Griffith and Eisenstein,
291
but rather seem to erupt unexpectedly in contradictions that

arise in the tension between the profilmic, the shooting and
the putting together of shots during editing.
Clearly, there is a strong sense of ethics involved in the
montage of both The Ax Fight and Gandhis Children. Ordinary human perception, which tells us that vision is located
where our eyes are, is so deeply shattered by the multiplication
of perspectives in these films that we find ourselves decentered
in an infinite totality of views that no longer affords us the
illusion of ourselves as the unique center of the world. In
what follows, we move on to explore how this approach to
ethnographic filmmaking resonates with Levinass ethics of
otherness.
The Invisible Face of the Other

An often reported crisis in the careers of many anthropologists
is the point where they feel that the analyses they write are
widening rather than reducing the gap between themselves
and the people they seek to understand. As Marilyn Strathern
(1988:67) points out:
Analytical language appears to create itself as increasingly
more complex and increasingly removed from the realities
of the worlds it attempts to delineate, and not least from
the languages in which people themselves describe them.
. . . There is thus an inbuilt sense of artificiality to the whole
anthropological exercisewhich prompts the apparent solution that what one should be doing is aiming to simplify,
to restore the clarity of direct comprehension.
Because of its presumed capacity for evoking the immediacy

of social interaction and its incapacity for abstract theoretical
language, ethnographic filmmaking has often been identified
as the answer to this crisis. As previously described, the ethical
potential of film in anthropology is often understood to rest
in the way it returns our gaze to the commonalities of being
human (Grimshaw 2001:133; MacDougall 1998:259). Film, it
is argued, can show us an unsurpassed richness of detail of
subtle bodily gestures, small nonlinguistic signs, and shifting
facial expressions that transcend the cultural explanations
evoked in written anthropology. With such qualities in mind,
MacDougall (2006:4) describes what he calls the autonomy
of being:
In fiction films as well as non-fiction films, we use found
materials from this world. We fashion them into webs of
signification, but within these webs are caught glimpses of
being more unexpected and powerful than anything we
could create. . . . A good film reflects the interplay of meaning and being, and its meanings take into account the autonomy of being. Meaning can easily overpower being.
Reading the literature on observational cinema, one could be

let to think that such glimpses of being most likely occur
when the integrity of the events portrayed in film rushes is
not subjected to meanings imposed by filmmakers. In general,
Henley (2004:115) argues, filmmakers should resist the
292
temptation . . . to play either the teacher or the artist, i.e.

subjecting the rushes to such an imposing intellectual or aesthetic agenda that members of the audience can no longer
draw their own conclusions about the significance of what
they are seeing. But is it really true that film has such a
privileged access to autonomous being? MacDougall (2006:
4) also points to this problem when stating that filmmakers
and film viewers are always already enmeshed in preconceived
meanings. Consequently, there is no such thing as a direct
and innocent access to being. Rather than trying to protect
glimpses of being from webs of signification, the primary
commitment of ethnographic filmmaking must, therefore, be
to unsettle and dislodge those preconceived meanings. As we
have just argued, the marvelous thing about The Ax Fight is
exactly the way it combines modernist empiricism with postmodern forms of deconstruction (Ruby 2000:130) and, in the
clash between otherwise incompatible perspectives, creates a
space for further imagination about the reality of the Yanomamo and the production of the film itself. Disruption of
our commonsense vision is, in other words, a precondition
for getting a feel for the being of others.
Here we take support from Emmanuel Levinas for whom
ethics and otherness go in tandem. According to him, the
self can neither appear nor sustain itself outside of its differentiation from other, which is why it is always and indispensably obliged to preserve the alterity of the other (Levinas
1969, 1987). To the anthropologist, there is, of course, nothing
new about this insight of the selfs relational dependency on
the ethical other, but it is nevertheless important to underscore, since the dictum of letting viewers see for themselves, advocated by much observational cinema, carries a
danger of disregarding all that which cannot be seen in the
particular instance of filming (Loizos 1992:54; Weiner 1997).
For Levinas, however, the encounter with the other is not
reducible to that which is visible alone. Beneath the expressions on the visible face is the invisible face, which cannot be
directly perceived, visually depicted, or represented in writing.
This invisible face conveys, according to Levinas, an excess
of othernessthat which cannot be reduced to the same
(Wyschogrod 2002:191).
All films by way of their contextualization of images add
meaning, define, and determine the otherness of others, thus
making visible what by definition cannot be visible, reducing
what is irreducible and bending it to fit its own needs and
ends. This, we may add, appears to be especially true for the
observational approach, which by way of its ontological priority to a shared humanity (Grimshaw 2001:133; MacDougall
1998:258) easily precludes the possibility of something being
infinitely other. This is not to suggest that observational cinema never considers the otherness of others, but that it does
so in terms of a subject-centered perspective, which only allows for an otherness that the filmmaker and the audience
are already prepared for. Grimshaw and Ravetz (2009:539)
describe how observational cinema was explicitly developed
as an aesthetics that respected things for what they were, for
their irreducibility and singularity. Nevertheless, this ethical

codex is based on the unprivileged subjective filming experience of a normal human participant (Henley 2004:114).
It is this subject-centered epistemology that we find problematic. For Levinas (1987:55), it is exactly the claim of a shared
humanity and a generic human perception, which succumbs
to the imperialism of the same. If indeed the other is infinitely other, then we cannot access the other as such. This
would, in Levinasian terms, be essentially unethical since we
cannot assume that there is a primordial sameness behind
difference. Like Merleau-Pontys normative ideal, Levinass
invisible other is a surplus, a plenitude of perspectives that
we can never actually take up. Hence, unlike the observational
claim to transcultural sameness, the argument advanced here
is that alterity itself is primary. Alterity is behind all human
relationships, and behind alterity there is nothing.
Whereas the ethics of observational cinema demands of the
filmmaker to be cautious with manipulative effects that disturb the ontological primacy of a shared human identity
(Grimshaw 2001:131), Levinass notion of the invisible other
requires the necessity of such disturbances, since the camera
from the outset has already reduced the others infinite otherness. In the words of T. M. S. Evens (2008:xiv), We must
. . . be prepared to offer ourselves up . . . to othernessnot
to resist but instead to enhance the way in which we are
always already open to the other in spite of ourselves. What
does this imply? It must imply the sacrifice of the most precious sacred cow of observational cinema: the subject. To be
ethical in this sense is not at all to maintain a distinctive
identity or perspective. On the contrary, it involves finding
the unstable zone of continuous becoming, where perspectives
are allowed to travel and cross the threshold of perspectival
seeing. This only happens when the illusion of the camera as
an extension of human vision is broken.
Previously, we discussed MacDougalls most recent film,
Gandhis Children. Despite the fact that MacDougall as a
writer is clearly adhering to observational cinema, his film
work seems to take us in a different direction. Thus, the
ensemble of film shots in Gandhis Children thoroughly destabilizes perceptions of what is home, not-home, security,
insecurity, joy, despair, childhood, and adulthood. By continuously twisting the partial totalities offered in each camera
shot, any form of subject-centered view on the life of the boys
at the childrens shelter is left indeterminate. If we experience
a sense of commonalities of being human, the dissonance
created through MacDougalls montage underscores that this
experience is little more than a surface phenomenon. What
we share with the children is what we think are commonalities. Thus, the films montage counters the ever-latent danger in realist representation of attributing sameness to the
irreducible otherness of others. In our view, MacDougall as
a filmmaker here counters the transcultural ethics, proposed
in his written work, with an ethics of infinite alterity.
The ethnographic film tradition offers a number of other
examples where the mimetic disposition of the camera is
splintered in this way by montage. One prime example is Jean

Rouchs widely debated film Les Matres Fous (1955), which
shows a hauka spirit-possession cult in Accra during British
colonial rule. Like The Ax Fight, the film emerges as a juxtaposition of several perspectives and commentaries that do
not at all correspond in a one-to-one concordance. A widespreadbut in Paul Henleys (2006:737) viewmisguided
reading of the film is that the hauka cult is a parodic resistance
and subversion of imperial power. This interpretation is
mainly evoked by Rouchs juxtaposition of a shot featuring
hauka performers cracking an egg on the head of a statue,
presumably representing the British governor, with a shot of
the real governor wearing a white plumed helmet (Russell
1999:224; Taussig 1993: 242). Henley (2006:754), however,
finds sufficient evidence in the film footage and in ethnographic descriptions on spirit possession in West Africa to
argue that, rather than an example of counterhegemonic resistance, the cultic event is in fact a fertility ritual, modeled
on the North African zar cult, where ritual participants attempt to assimilate the power of influential figures for religious purposes. Thus, Henley (2006:743) closely evaluates the
film footage on the basis of its assumed correspondence with
historical reality along with the ethnographic literature.
But can and should a film be judged according to how
faithfully it corresponds to things and events in the actual
world? Here we have pursued an alternative view on ethnographic filmmakinga view in which its task is not to mimic
social reality but rather to transcend our perception of it. A
faithful correspondence or fidelity between representation and
our human perception of actuality is not only impossible but
also unwanted. Film can express social reality only by making
it alive again through tampering with its source material.
Rouch understood this, which is why he orchestrated his shots
and commentaries so as to provoke multiple, contradictory,
and dissonant readings, neither of which was allowed fully to
dominate. Thus, Les Matres Fous allows us access to the excessive mysteries of the hauka cult, exactly by rejecting any
single perspective as its interpretative framework. Indeed, this
is also the reason why Henley (2006:757) must acknowledge
that the marvelous thing about Les Matres Fous is the impossibility of fixating and consuming the event in any uniform
perspective.
The Place for Film and the Invisible in

Anthropology
According to Hastrup (1992:21), the general purpose of anthropology is to expand the sociocultural worlds we live in.
The means to this end is the creation of analytical categories.
Only through such abstractions is it possible to transcend the
limitations of established forms. Marilyn Strathern suggests
that this can be done in the conjunction between deconstructive feminism and an anthropology aimed at creating adequate description. She writes: If my aims are the synthetic
aims of an adequate description, my analysis must deploy
293
deliberate fictions to that end. . . . The question is how to

displace [our metaphors] most effectively (Strathern 1988:
10, 12).
Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (2007:
710) have recently summarized how Stratherns analytical
framework amounts to a quiet revolution against the anthropological axiom that people may have different worldviews but ultimately inhabit the same world. What anthropology should be about, they suggest, is to upturn our own
assumptions so as to make room for imagining the possibility
of people inhabiting a multiplicity of worlds. This echoes the
Levinasian claim that respect for the others alterity should
not be equated with the mistaken view that all alterity is
derived from a shared existential ground. If informants tell
us that there is such a thing as a powerpowder, the anthropological exercise must be not about translating the idea
of a powerpowder into concepts we already know, but rather,
as Holbraad (2007:204) asserts, about upturning our assumptions so as to make it possible for us to imagine how
powder in this world actually is power.
Our argument is in line with this understanding of the role
of anthropology. While these writers conceive of anthropology
mainly as a linguistic enterprise, the montage of ethnographic
films provides us with a complementary and resourceful
means of making us imagine other peoples worlds. Although
the stance of the above-mentioned authors is grounded in
the humble . . . admission that our concepts . . . must, by
definition, be inadequate to translate different ones (Henare,
Holbraad, and Wastell 2007:12), the work of montage that
we have advocated is based on the admission that our ordinary
vision must by definition be inadequate as a tool for understanding others. Although Holbraad (2007) effectively explains the importance of conceptualization for experience and
that experience cannot be conceived of as separate or prior
to conceptualization, we may note that, despite his highpitched theoretical reasoning, the reality of powerpowder is
still hard for us to imagine. This, we argue, may in part be
caused by the fact that his analysis remains a linguistic enterprise and as such addresses only a narrow spectrum of our
imaginative faculties.
Indeed, as the celebrated fMRI scans of the human brain
indicate, the greater part of abstract thinking is not confined
to linguistic conceptualization, but appears to be concerned
with multiple forms of sensory abstractionparticularly, visual abstraction (Nijland 2006:3839; Roepstorff 2008:2052).
Film is a medium in which we can play with and develop
such forms of abstraction. A world where powder is power
is for many an invisible world. Rather than visualizing such
a world through theoretical reasoning or by reducing it to its
visible manifestations, the work of montage that we have
argued for here is a technique for evoking that world by
maintaining its lining of invisibility. It is only in the gaps
between its visual manifestations that its magico-religious reality can appear. We contend that this entails rejecting the
notion of imitating the human eye as films duty. As we have
294
seen, it is exactly when the mimetic dogma of the camera is

violated, when the mechanical eye detaches from our subjectcentered vision, that we intuit the invisible in its own right.
Ethnographic filmmaking provides knowledge of social reality
not by reflecting its details photographically, but by disrupting
the taking at face value of its visible facade through montage.
But although ethnographic filmmaking discovers reality
only by transcending it through cinematic manipulations, it
should not fight against its affinity to realism so hard as to
become totally abstract. This, as we have argued, leads to
nothing but obscure haze. Construction should be a means
of enhancing our understanding of social life. What is important is to strike the right balance between realism and
constructivism, simplicity and complexity, resonance and dissonance. The effective image must hold these factors poised
in tension with each other, rather than subscribing singlemindedly to any one of them. Only then can ethnographic
films push us beyond the frontiers of the visible world into
the uncharted regions of the invisible.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank David MacDougall, Peter Crawford,
Keir Martin, Ton Otto, Jakob Hgel, and the five anonymous
reviewers of Current Anthropology for providing much-needed
criticisms. Previous drafts of the article were presented at the
European Association of Social Anthropologists Biennial
Meeting in Ljubljana, August 2008, and at the Transcultural
Montage conference at Moesgard Museum, August 2009.
Comments
Rebecca Empson
Department of Anthropology, University College London, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW, United Kingdom
(r.empson@ucl.ac.uk). 31 X 11
This fascinating article puts forward a new method for ethnographic filmmaking. By incorporating disruptive moments of montage (both the juxtaposition of frames, and the
arrangements of things in a single shot), filmmakers will be
able to present multiple perspectives on a single event and
guide the audience to different ways of seeing the world. These
possibilities are not afforded in written anthropology, which
address only a narrow spectrum of our imaginative faculties,
nor are they possible in observational filmmaking with its
emphasis on long shots that risk dulling the subtleties of the
lived world.
Clearly, what is shown in film and writing is not all there
is to an event, and Suhr and Willerslev are keen to find a
method by which to reveal what they call the invisible that
is known but is not always visible to us. A camera is certainly
not a person, but the mechanical nature of the medium, they
suggest, can be used to our advantage. Here, the intervention

of montage enables an enhanced perception of social realities.
Note the word intervention. Pure montage leads to nothing
but an obscure haze, something which Suhr and Willerslev
warn against. Instead, we need to strike the right balance
between realism and constructivism (similarity/difference,
single/multiple, linearity/disruption). An excellent review of
Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnons film The Axe Fight
(1975) illustrates the productive use of different interpretations of a single event, challenging the viewers received interpretation of a film and presenting several points of view.
Two questions immediately come to mind. First, it is not
at all clear what the invisible is that the authors argue can be
revealed through this technique. Is it simply another perspective of an event, or is it something that is part of what
we are seeing, something we may perceive, but is not visible?
Second, how exactly can montage, as a method, reveal this
in a way that observational film cannot? If it simply amounts
to showing different perspectives of a single lamp in quick
succession as an interlude to a story about a lamp, this is not
the same as perceiving the reason for a certain lamp existing
in a certain room at a particular moment in time. Much of
this confusion comes from a slippage between the terms perception and vision. Perception is not only based on vision.
For example, I may perceive that there is some seriousness
to the situation, but this is not something visible to the human
eye. This comes from a host of other ways of knowing. And
maybe knowing is what the authors mean when they talk
of perceiving, apprehending, or anticipating the back side of
an object? Perception in this sense is about views fundamentally different from those given to us in ordinary perception.
What exactly can be revealed through this medium is not
always clear. Indeed it sometimes seems as if it is confusion
that the authors wish to highlight, so that it is through confusion that a different perception in itself is achieved. Note
that they do not stress a different perception of something
(that something is never clearly defined), but a different perception, or way of seeing in itself. It is clear that this different
way of seeing amounts to more than the depth perception
[created by] the distance between the two eyes over the
cameras one. Maybe what they mean here is that film, as a
medium, can dislodge and unhinge our commonsense vision,
allowing for different kinds of perceptions. Yet it is not certain
how they differentiate this from postmodern forms of disruption in writing.
Any kind of film is a political statement, a version and a
statement. But rather than emphasize the shared humanity
and commonality of ways of seeing (as emphasized in observational cinema), they stress the need for difference and
otherness in order to challenge our sense of vision. This is to
emphasize alterity and difference over similarity and sameness. Montage, they argue, can question received assumptions,
along the lines argued by Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell
(2007). The problem as I see it is that the means by which
they propose this can be achieved is not in itself based on

any ethnographic underpinning. Montage is not a local mode
of displacing, disrupting, and revealing a different way of
viewing the world. In this sense, if we are to follow their
argument concerning the potential of montage for multiplicity, they are proposing a single method for multiple forms of
vision, something observational cinema already achieves.
Martin Holbraad
Department of Anthropology, University College London, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW, United Kingdom
(m.holbraad@ucl.ac.uk). 31 X 11
As something of an unreconstructed iconophobe myself, I

find great merit in the way Suhr and Willerslevs ambitious
article relates sometimes rather parochial debates about the
pros and cons of ethnographic film as an anthropological
medium to concerns that go to the heart of anthropology as
an intellectual project. Their core argument is elegant and
clever: wedded to the ideals of observational cinema, they
show that traditional defenses of ethnographic film highlight
its ability to reveal the detail of social life as ethnographers
and ethnographic subjects alike experience it, which is so often
missed in the processes of abstraction that text-based anthropological analysis involves. The assumption here is that
the cameras role is to enhance the work of the human eye
so as to reveal aspects of ethnographic experience that go
unnoticed. But what if the real anthropological challenge were
that of revealing, not unnoticed aspects of lived experience,
but rather aspects of that experience that remain constitutively
invisible? Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, the authors identify the
ideal view from everywhere, comprising all possible perceptual perspectives, as the condition of possibility for any
actual perception. Montage, which explores the tension between possible and impossible vantage points of perception,
is then proposed as a prime means for approximating this
virtual ideal. So, it is precisely because it is unlike the human
eye that the camera can reveal the constitutively invisible
realms of human experience, by creatively disrupting ordinary
perceptions through montage.
Attractive as one may find such a paradoxical defense of
the cinematic eye as a gauge of the invisible, there are also
difficulties in the logic of this complex argument. In particular, it is unclear how Merleau-Pontys thesis about the conditions of possibility of vision (perception) can be transposed
onto an argument that, as it seems to me, is really about the
conditions of possibility of anthropological understanding
(conception). In fact, one may wonder whether part of the
difficulty here lies with the notion of perspective, which
seems to provide the bridge from perception to conception
in the authors syllogism. For example, are the various perspectives that one may (or may not) take upon a Danish lamp
in order visually to perceive it equivalent to the various per-
295
spectives Chagnon did (or, through montage, did not) take

upon a Yanomamo axe fight in order anthropologically to
understand it? If so, in what sense? Indeed, are questions
regarding the alterity involved in cases such as the latter,
as the authors suggest, also relevant to the conundrums of
perception such as the former? Again, how so?
Without a clearer account on this score, one is tempted to
suggest that Merleau-Pontys philosophy of perception may
not provide the best point of departure for a defense of filmic
montage as an aid to anthropological understanding. Indeed,
mainly by way of facilitating thinking on this front, I would
ask whether Merleau-Pontys friend and admirer Levi-Strauss
might not, anthropologically speaking, provide a more obvious point of reference here. For it strikes me that the ways
in which the authors sing the virtues of montage as a modality
of comprehension (as opposed to mere apprehension, or, better, as a peculiar mode of fusing the two) is remarkably similar
to Levi-Strausss famous argument about the science of the
concrete (Levi-Strauss 1966). Signs, argued Levi-Strauss, as
peculiar intermediaries between perceptions and conceptions,
are the currency of a savage thought that proceeds by endlessly
rearranging its raw materials by way of the novel juxtapositions of bricolage, exploiting the differences between them,
so as to arrive at novel possibilities of meaning. In a rather
literal sense, within the economy of filmic footage, montage
would appear to be also a form of bricolage in just this way
simply substituting image or shot for sign would appear
to take us straight back to this familiar anthropological territory. Such a transposition, arguably, would speak directly to
Willreslev and Suhrs abiding concern with comparing the
analyticalindeed conceptualpossibilities of ethnographic
film with those of anthropological texts. Certainly, in LeviStrausss concern with rehabilitating savage thought from habitual charges of irrationality, and the authors desire to see
film as a medium for sophisticated anthropological thinking,
there may be parallels worth exploring. Film, myth, and ritual,
then, would emerge as the most pertinent triptych for anthropological comparison in this context (cf. Levi-Strauss
1978, 1981).
Andrew Irving
Department of Anthropology and Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester
M13 9PL, United Kingdom (andrew.irving@manchester.ac.uk). 8
XI 11
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances,

declared Oscar Wilde. The true mystery of the world is the
visible, not the invisible: confirming how the study of surface
appearances is not to be concerned with the shallow, superficial, and trivial. However, Wilde then cautioned, Those who
go beneath the surface do so at their peril (1992:3). In asking
if film can show the invisible or remains tied to the visible,
296
Willerslev and Suhr challenge anthropology to put itself in

peril by venturing beneath the surface to elicit the invisible
dimensions of social life.
So what might such an anthropology look like? What epistemological and ontological adjustments are required to engage with the invisible, and what counts as evidence? The
persistent relationship between vision and evidence is suggested by the etymology of evidence in videre (to see). But
whenever we get under the surface, like a farmer digging in
the field, all that is revealed are further surfaces: the unseen
and the hidden rather than invisible. To what extent, therefore,
is the invisible being used in this article as a metaphor for
the unseen and unknown? Or for tacit, inchoate, or nonpropositional realms of experience?
Drawing on Levinas, Willerslev and Suhr suggest any attempt to understand or represent otherness, whether in text
or film, relies upon translating the Others world into familiar
categories to make them known and representable through
ethnographic writing and films digital code. This misrecognition, even violence, imposed on the Other willfully ignores
the limits of human perception and can never represent them
in their entirety. Indeed, if we can only observe ourselves as
an object and cannot know or completely understand ourselves (Kant 2006), then how can we claim to know the Other?
Epistemological and moral recognition of the irreducible alterity of the Other means many of their thoughts, actions,
and behaviors are destined to remain unknown or invisible
and may appear to us as highly irrational or perhaps even
insane. Nevertheless, Willerslev and Suhr argue, we must resist
the erroneous, but epistemologically convenient, practice of
understanding their actions by simply translating them into
the categories of Same.
As we cannot fully comprehend otherness, Levinas suggests
our primary duty is our ethical responsibility toward them.
Thus, rather than reducing the Other to a murderous (filmed)
object of our own making and imagination or imposing
meaning on their hidden dimensions, we need to recognize
the limits of understanding and representation, at the level
of both the human and mechanical eye. For to do so is to
understand how finitude and failure are necessary to understanding other people and confirms our limits as unfinished,
mortal beings who are not gods or even small gods.
It then becomes both a moral and a practical question of
using film, as finite beings with incomplete knowledge of
ourselves, other persons, and the world, to examine the necessary conditions that make mutual perception and understanding possible. An imagined mutuality of the world
which for Willerslev and Suhr concerns those dimensions of
social life agreed to exist beyond visionoffers a framework
for understanding the process whereby shared, intersubjective
modes of perception, belief, and action emerge among groups.
Shared reality is not therefore pregiven by virtue of being
human but is formed through an active process of interaction
between self and othersincluding the anthropologist, informant, and audiencewhereby difference is made visible
and negotiated. As such, strangeness, diversity, and otherness

are not the opposite of mutuality but the conditions that bring
it into being.
Consequently, as a fieldwork science::documentary art (Davis
2000) that combines practical methods and ethnographic representation, Willerslev and Suhr propose anthropology can
use film as a strategy for offering glimpses into unseen and
unknown worlds. For while observational filmmaking often
overlooks the unseen dimensions of human life, they argue
film possesses a potentiality for revealing the invisible, not in
a literal sense, but through the destabilizing effects of montage
whereby the correspondence between vision and reality is
made strange. Thus, rather than a systematic understanding
of the invisible (which would simply translate the unknown
into the Same), they suggest montage offers a practical approach in which social life is denaturalized in the way the
Russian Formalists used poetry to take words and objects from
ordinary, everyday usage and then recast them through unfamiliar eyes.
Crucially, Willerslev and Suhr argue, an anthropological
approach to visual ostranenie relies upon maintaining the tension between films effective representation of reality and its
occasional, and therefore only then effective, disruption
through montage. Like the fool in a Shakespearean tragedy
who interrupts the action and speaks directly to the audience
about truths that would otherwise remain hidden, montage
is also a well-worn technique that suspends the dominant
narrative. In doing so, the theoretical and documentary imperative found in observational film can be productively
transformed into ethnographically grounded modes of disruption to communicate invisible and unarticulated truths
not as static propositions but as emergent in action, raising
the possibility that something like a drama might emerge
from the otherwise smooth surfaces of social life (Turner
1982:9).
Jens Kreinath
Department of Anthropology, Wichita State University, 216 Neff
Hall, 1845 Fairmount Street, Wichita, Kansas 67260-0052, U.S.A.
(jens.kreinath@wichita.edu). 8 XII 11
The article Can Film Show the Invisible? presents a theoretically challenging attempt to reconfigure anthropological filmmaking on the basis of montagethe composition of visual
images or juxtaposition of successive film shots as a cinematographic technique. Taking montage as the key technique for
cinematographic production, Suhr and Willerslev stress the difference between the human eye and the camera eye. They
criticize the humanized camera eye in observational cinema
for being unable to disturb commonsense viewpoints of human
perception. Suhr and Willerslev not only call into question what
they label the mimetic dogma, but they also object to
traditions in social anthropology that criticize visual anthro-
pology or question its potential to present an insiders perspective. In proposing a theoretical framework that can show
multidimensional visual descriptions of indigenous viewpoints to substitute written ethnographies through visual accounts, Suhr and Willerslev attempt to solve the problem of
mimesis in ethnographic filmmaking by proposing a positive
answer to the question of the title. While arguing that the
difference between the human eye and the camera eye is
key for this breakthrough in representing the invisible, the
rather tempered answer they give finally negates the proposed
question: montage only constitutes the moment of rupture
in the perspectival vision, and therefore film cannot show,
but can only reveal or elude to, the invisible in its own right,
notably through the work of montage.
The opposition Suhr and Willerslev construct between the
cinema of duration (with its focus on vision, as represented
by the observational cinema) and the cinema of disruption
(with its use of montage, as exemplified by the cinema verite)
is more than questionable. Although even the discontinuity
and disruption between the single picture frames go beyond
the perception and thus remain invisible to the human eye,
the streaming of any film images in a sequential order creates
the image of continuity and duration. The speeding up or
slowing down of film streaming can reveal further dimensions
of social reality and interaction otherwise inaccessible to the
human eye. Stressing montage as the only device that interrupts the duration in the visual gaze, Suhr and Willerslev
primarily focus on the spatial dimension in the perspectivity
of human vision, leading them to neglect the inherently temporal condition of human vision. In this respect, they fail to
address various notions of sequence, tempo, and movement
in the visual field or to consider the processes of perception,
cognition, and imagination in the production and reception
of cinematographic devices.
Besides their bold epistemological claims and audacious
rhetorical devices Suhr and Willerslev employ, some fundamental theoretical problems underlying their argument remain unresolved. One of the main issues is the concept of
the invisible. Even though it is described as a quality related
to everything that is inaccessible to the three-dimensionality
of human perception, the invisible becomes an object of study
in itself, despite that it is outlined as a condition of human
perspective. The invisible is defined in terms of different phenomenological traditions with the radical otherness in the
perspectivity of human perception a` la Levinas or with the
inherent sociability of human vision a` la Merleau-Ponty. Leaving aside the lack of attention to the obvious differences in
their theoretical assumptions, the arguments of Suhr and
Willerslev regarding the juxtaposition of perspectives as constructed by cinematographic techniques of montage are in no
way related to jargon-laden terms, such as the view from
everywhere, excess of visibility, or multispatial and multitemporal viewing experiences. These terms remain conceptually vague, if not empty, when one considers the totalizing
implications of the language used to describe the super-
297
human vision or the super-real quality of the cinematographic techniques of montage.

One tradition of filmmaking that best fits this theoretical
framework can be found in Leni Riefenstahls work. In a
similar vein as Suhr and Willerslev, she aims to render visible
concealed power relations through montage. The manipulation of the filmic material through montage, which Suhr and
Willerslev strongly advocate, is one of the most common
features of Riefenstahls cinematographic account to make her
visual imageries more tempting and persuasive. In Triumph
of the Will (1935)her powerful cinematographic account of
the 1934 Rally of the National Socialist Party in Nurnberg
Riefenstahl visually depicts power relations in a way that is
further enhanced through her montage techniques, such as
juxtaposing different perspectives from opposite angles.
Moreover, going beyond the naive dogma of mimetic representation and observational camera, the excess of vision
in Riefenstahls montage technique also is used to simulate
an insiders perspectiveputting it through different angles
of the camera to achieve a merely passive and receptive position. When one considers this example, Suhr and Willerslev
do not seem to determine the various implications and possible consequences of their suggested attempt to use technological devices, such as manipulation of film material
through montage, to elude the invisible and capture the indigenous perspective. In their attempt to argue how film can
show the invisible, they still adhere to the mimetic dogma:
the invisible is imitated through the invisible devices of montage, whichother than the observational cinemarequire
imagination rather than vision.
Bill Nichols
Department of Cinema, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, California 94132, U.S.A.
(billnichols99@gmail.com). 20 XI 11
Suhr and Willerslev broach a crucial issue: How can ethnographic film contribute to understanding concepts and categories that escape the field of vision and the gaze of a camera?
Their discussion oscillates between two key qualities of the
cinematic image: indexicality and realism. Indexicality refers
to the precision of the correspondence: a photographic image,
like a fingerprint and unlike a sketch or painting, bears an
exact resemblance to what it refers to (Nichols 2010). Realism,
unlike the various modernisms (expressionism, surrealism,
etc.) and postmodernism (with its stress on surface, citation,
and repetition) minimizes its felt presence as a style to maximize the felt presence of what it refers to. Traditional historians often criticize historical films for factual errors: the
film anchors itself in a historical moment with indexical but
fictionalized links that are incorrect. History didnt happen
as the film purports it did. Traditional anthropologists often
criticize ethnographic films for conceptual failures and sty-
298
listic excess: inadequate or incorrect concepts are grafted onto

a filmed situation (usually with voice-over), or the filmmakers style obscures the indexicality of the image beneath
an expressive shroud of the filmmakers design. The essay
urges us to behold what we have failed to see: the trace of
an encounter and the mystery of being (human).
This oscillation may be a bit of a handicap. It brings the
essay into the anthropological mainstream, with vital qualifications, but displaces it from what montage achieves in a
broader sense. Rather than argue for showing the invisible, it
may be more productive to ask, as D. W. Griffith himself
asked, how films cause us to see anew, to see in the sense
of comprehend or verstehen what may have been in our visual
field and yet gone unattached to a system of signification.
Film, as semiologists have argued since the 1960s, is a language
without a grammar. And as Christian Metz argued, it is principally through editing, or montage, that it achieves its status
as a language, the centrality of long takes to ethnographic
realism notwithstanding (Metz 1974). A language, of course,
is not a transparent copy of reality, indexically or otherwise.
A language allows us to speak about reality and in doing so
to afford others the chance to see it anew. Montage, as the
golden gateway to discourse, is the means of doing so.
Of particular significance are two potential forms of seeing
anew: the sensory experience of immersive involvement in
what occurs in front of a camera, which indexicality and
realism can both amplify, and the representation of embodied
conduct that enacts values and beliefs, concepts, and categories tacitly. We may name such concepts, in voice-over, as
in an essay, but more crucially we witness their unnamed
manifestation, their embodiment in gesture, expression,
movement, rhythm, and speech. Sweetgrass (2009), for example, immerses us in the day-to-day world of sheepherders
in the high mountain pastures of Montana. With no voiceover, everyday conversation (and diatribes), and a soundtrack
of remarkable, intensified presence, the film is far more immersive and experiential than informational or conceptual. It
contributes something else, something film language makes
possible to a degree written language does not.
Among the things that find embodiment is how the filmmaker conducts herself in the presence of an other. A film not
only possesses an indexical trace of what occurred in front of
the camera, and sound recorder, but also an indexical trace of
how the filmmaker undertook to encounter others. It is the
trace of an encounter. Film language makes manifest aspects
of its speaker as well as its referent, and in particular it allows
us to see, in both a conceptual and experiential sense, what
qualities this manifestation displays. This places us at some
remove from the should vocabulary they attribute to Henley
(2004), which serves to establish limits and enforce compliance
with a (anthropological) doxa. We enter a place of encounter
that they refer to as an unstable zone of continuous becoming.
This is a far cry from adherence to indexical facts or to modest
interruptions of a realist style by montage. It is to claim a
distinctive voice for ethnographic film. The quality they so
clearly identify, and rightly stress, is the way in which film, as

a distinct language, opens onto a field of discursive encounter
between filmmaker, subject, and viewer as rich, variable, and
unstable as the act of being (human) allows.
Reply
We are grateful to the commentators for critically addressing
our text. It is a thrill to receive so much high-quality feedback
and to see the vigorous discussions that our argument has
caused, stretching from warnings of the danger that our approach may substitute multiple local perspectives with a single
universal method (Empson) over accusations of an antihumanism reminiscent of the propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl (Kreinath) to arguments for even more radically freefloating montage as a new distinctive voice of ethnographic
filmmaking (Nichols). We take all of these commentaries as
being suggestive of the acute need to rethink the broader issues
of visual anthropology and what montage may have to offer
anthropology in general. Since there is more food for thought
than we can possibly digest within the word limit, we focus
on some of the recurrent questions. We apologize for not
addressing them all.
Let us begin with a few clarifying remarks about what we
mean by the invisible and the potential of montage for
addressing itsomething that remains unclear to Empson
and perhaps to others as well. In the article, we discuss the
so-called view from everywhere and the otherness of the
other as examples of the invisible, which we broadly understand as that which constitutes the background or premise
of visibility, but which must hide itself in making things and
people visible. However, the invisible is, at least in principle,
as Kreinath suggests, everything that is inaccessible to the
three-dimensionality of human perception or, more precisely, that which allows us to perceive the world threedimensionally. Montages capacity to evoke the invisible is
summarized by Irving in a perhaps clearer prose than our
own, when he writes: Rather than a systematic understanding
of the invisible (which would simply translate the unknown
into the Same) . . . montage offers a practical approach in
which social life is denaturalized [by recasting it] through
unfamiliar eyes. Still, we insist on a notion of the invisible
as not simply the unseen (Irving), but as that which cannot
be seen. The defamiliarization of montage, therefore, cannot
show, but only evoke the invisible through the orchestration
of different perspectives, encroaching upon one another.
Montage can break the visual skin of the world, so to speak,
but it can never show the invisible in itself.
This stance does not imply a confused use of the terms
vision and understanding or perception and conception as suggested by Empson and Holbraad, but rather the
collapse of such dichotomies. As Nichols puts it, film language
makes manifest aspects of its speaker as well as its referent, and

in particular it allows us to see in both a conceptual and
experiential sense, what qualities this manifestation displays.
Empson suggests the Deleuzian term the virtual as another
way of talking about the invisible. Just as the distinction between
the actual and the virtual in Deleuzes work does not correspond to a simple dichotomy between what is perceived as
opposed to what is conceptualized, the invisible in our outline
contains both perception and conception within. The view
from everywhere is neither perceivable nor entirely conceivable
from any human position, yet it is nonetheless present by a
certain absence (Merleau-Ponty 2000:187) in any actual perspective. While it may be outlined as a theory, its true fullness
remains unthinkable: beyond conceptualization. As such, the
invisible remains nothing but a virtual phantasy (Caputo
1997:162), a synonym for the impossible (Derrida 1991:7).
By means of montage, we may address this very figure of the
impossible, but only by shattering any attempt at reducing it
to set forms of visibility.
It can be feared that on the other side of such a shattering
through montage, a new constellation of order may be assembled and naturalizedand against this both Kreinath
and Empson warn. Their alert is further fueled by our essentially antihumanist take on vision and cinema. Kreinath
even identifies an aspiration toward Nazism, when he writes
that the tradition of filmmaking that best fits [our] theoretical framework can be found in Leni Riefenstahls work.
To obviate any misunderstandings, let us clarify that our antihumanism simply implies that we reject the myth held by
observational cinema that vision begins and ends in the experience of the human subject along with its supposition that,
thanks to our shared humanity, we may get to others modes
of seeing simply by making film technology mimic embodied
modes of being-in-the-world. This humanist ideology has resulted in an aesthetics that favors handheld, sync-sound camera and which seeks to minimize artificially imposed montage
so thatin the words of Nicholsthe indexicality of the
image [is not obscured] beneath an expressive shroud of the
filmmakers design.
Contrary to this, we hold that the ways in which others
perceive the world are ultimately inaccessible to us, and this
very fissure is itself a condition for our engagement with
otherness. As Irving eloquently summarizes it: Shared reality
is not . . . pregiven by virtue of being human but is formed
through an active process of interaction between self and
othersincluding the anthropologist, informant, and audiencewhereby difference is made visible and negotiated. As
such, strangeness, diversity, and otherness are not the opposite
of mutuality but the conditions that bring it into being.
To acknowledge the antihumanist premise of vision is, we
believe, a valuable advance, but it is true as suggested by
Kreinath that it makes for difficulties with regard to the role
of human subjects and their intentions. In Riefenstahls films,
the subject is reduced to a merely passive and receptive position (Kreinath), a place or medium where the cinemato-
299
graphic truth speaks itself, thus placing the viewer in the kind
of servility that the Nazi ideology advocated for the German
people before the Fuhrer. To Kreinath, our proposed alternative to the imperious subject-centered ontology of observational cinema implies nothing but such a slavish selfabnegation with respect to the viewer. However, the work of
montage in films such as The Ax Fight, Gandhis Children,
and Les Matres Fous on which we have built our argument
serves to obstruct any such attempt of confining to a single
totalizing visual order. Through montage, they avoid the fetishization or rendering into an idol any particular perspective
as a substitute for the invisible. Instead, the viewer is left
essentially estranged with little hope for fulfillment or relief.
By all means, this use of montage shares little with the totalizing visual order pursued by Riefenstahl and Nazi ideology
more generally.
In Nicholss comment, an argument is made to more radically liberate the language of ethnographic film from indexicality and realism, so as to give it a distinctive voice of its
own. The indexical links between film and reality is of key
importance as we see it. Indeed, indexicality is the primary
material and source of tension in montage. Montage, in the
film examples we have discussed, consists in the bringing into
play perspectives from profilmic reality with those of filmmakers and viewers. It is by means of the incongruencies and
dissonances between multiple perspectives that the invisible
ground of the seen is allowed presence. In this sense, our
approach to montage can be located halfway between Empsons argument for keeping to local modes of displacing the
visible and Nicholss argument for a distinctive ethnographic
film language, less encumbered by indexicality.
Finally, we wish to address Holbraads comparison of our
montage model with Levi-Strausss bricoleur. It holds true
that bricolage, like montage, refers to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things at hand. Holbraad
calls attention to the parallels between Levi-Strausss concern
with rehabilitating savage thought from habitual charges of
irrationality, and [our] desire to see film as a medium for
sophisticated anthropological thinking. A comparison of cinematic montage with the mechanisms of myth and ritual is
certainly a pertinent project. We are skeptical, however, about
the degree to which the model of ritual and myth suggested
by Levi-Strauss adequately describes the work of montage we
have outlined here. In Levi-Strausss effort to rescue savage
thought from charges of irrationality, he may have emphasized
rationality too much. It seems to us that both the bricoleur
and the engineer in Levi-Strausss model seek to integrate and
consume the object within a totalizing order (the myth or the
project). The work of montage that we suggest here aims at
the opposite: that is, to reinstall the invisible where it has been
eradicated so as to make the object impossible to consume for
our gaze. Unlike the bricoleurs logic of the concrete, the
montage filmmaker may strive toward a plane of abstract formalization with the targeted aim of transcending the domain
of the visible and our commonsense perceptions of what is
300
known and possible. This function of film may find interesting

parallels in the disruptive mechanisms of various rituals, which
hardly can be addressed through the concept of bricolage. In
a forthcoming volume on montage in anthropology, Bruce
Kapferer (forthcoming) shows how a Sinhala Buddhist antisorcery ritual works as a Deleuzian montage machine by exploding the perspectives of the ritual participants, thereby allowing renewed access into the realm of the virtual. Kapferer
concludes that ritual, in important ways, anticipates modern
cinematic montage.
Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev
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Can Film Show the Invisible?

The Work of Montage in Ethnographic Filmmaking

Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 3, June 2012