Objective Graphics relates Karl Popper’s epistemological ideas to the development of mechanical substitutes for human sensoria—tape, film, digital imaging, radiography, tomography, cloud chambers, whatever. The last twenty-five years have seen this field hugely expanded.

The Cinema of Witness and Matters of Fact argue for the importance of photographic records of events reliably telling us about the external world—from race meetings, on the one hand, to the exposure of Belsen and Buchenwald on the other.

From an earlier time, an aesthetic impulse owing more to Cézanne than to CAT–scans produced Observation and Identity. This argued that the observation of particulars takes one ever closer to “things in themselves”.

Reality graphics in the Modern World

“Americans jolted by gruesome TV pictures” reads the morning paper in a report from Somalia. The battered face of US helicopter pilot Mike Durant looks fearfully out of a front-page picture made from a CNN videotape. And once again—only a year after the Rodney King episode of 1992 and the burning of central Los Angeles—the graphic evidence of film and video records seems likely to play a prominent part in our lives.

Looking back a bit further there were the audio tapes which precipitated President Richard Nixon’s downfall. And before them, providing irrefutable evidence of acts so far outside the range of normal human behavior that a sceptical later generation finds them increasingly difficult to believe, there were the film records made by the cameramen who entered Belsen and Auschwitz.

Each of these cases involves graphic facsimiles provided by mechanical record-keeping devices in which the role of human subjectivity is either negligible or irrelevant. All of them involve situations which are either difficult (Mike Durant’s) or impossible (Rodney King’s, the Nixon tapes, the death camp footage) to rehearse, repeat, direct or in any way control.

And all of them represent, in varying forms, the vital modern role of “reality graphics” in providing reliable information about states of affairs and matters of fact. Instead of reality graphics several synonyms would serve as well: objective graphics, video documents, electronic transcripts, biofacsimiles, and so on. What is denoted is the entire class of alinguistic mimetic facsimiles used for scientific research and public information—from the cloud chambers of nuclear physics, to satellite imaging, to medical endoscopy, to the scenes on the evening news. All of them indispensably assist both enquiry and observation today. Without them we would be handicapped in many ways.

The popular opposing view

This is not a popular view in social science. Anthropologists in particular urge us to regard the world not as the totality of facts or of things but of meanings. These are felt to have nothing to do with empirical observations, instrumental technology, or truth. “Thought lives on meanings, meanings are culture-bound. Ergo, life is subjectivity,” notes Ernest Gellner, summarizing the prevailing outlook. “Objective truth is to be replaced by hermeneutic truth” in a closed universe of self-admiring subjectivities (Gellner 1992: 24, 33, 35).

Besides, it’s argued, all the world’s a stage, Goffman rules, and today only simpletons could possibly be unaware that social life is full of deceit and dissimulation, of tricks and masks, or that wherever cameras are employed we find information and misinformation and disinformation inextricably combined.

There is of course something to this point of view. But to my mind it encourages a much too limited view of a large subject. I take it that even Hermann Eutic himself wouldn’t actually claim that we would know more, or would know it more reliably, if there had been no video evidence from Somalia showing Mike Durant; no endlessly reviewable tape of the beating of Rodney King; no recording of Richard Nixon’s voice; no cine-camera record of Belsen and Auschwitz.

I also assume that even the most besotted post-modernized devotee of interpretation would hardly have the gall to maintain that the unmediated subjectivity of Richard Nixon or David Irving (the latter being a man who maintains that the Holocaust never happened) would actually be preferable to the electromagnetic and photographic evidence we possess.

It is cases like these which make one realise that the account of culture as universal subjectivity and more-or-less motivated deception goes altogether too far. More than this, it demonstrates an ivory-towering blindness to life today. The entire fact-seeking and reality-testing side of modern culture is left out—that large part of it concerned with accuracy of description and adequacy of formal argument, and which has as its distinctive legacy the achievements of modern natural science.

Furthermore, the spill-over of its techniques into the public domain has had wide ramifications. In the last thirty years there have been huge advances in the ways citizens monitor their own activities and learn what is going on abroad. The images from Somalia and Moscow in 1993 were part of this. Real-time transmissions around the world never stop, from skirmishes in the Balkans to football matches in Paraguay, and each of these events may be taped, enlarged, reviewed in slow motion, or speeded up, all in the cause of seeing more clearly details of action and performance.

Yet to read theorists of ethnographic film you would hardly know this was happening. Intent on blurring the boundary between words and things, fiction and fact, the linguistic representations of narrative and the nonlinguistic (or a-linguistic) mechanized graphic records of events, they seem unaware of the deeper cognitive reasons for the continual expansion of facsimilizing in modern life. They still write as if what are called “documentaries” (those highly artificial artifacts) were the primary unit for analysis. In small groups at conventions they still gather in darkened rooms like Plato’s cave, admiring the shadows on the wall, seemingly unaware of the world outside.

From perception to transcription

Can we love the cinema and Plato too? asks Bill Nichols (1991: 187), before reluctantly answering “No.” But perhaps he’s been looking in the wrong part of the Agora. It was Aristotle, not Plato, who gave his mind to the question of likeness or “mimesis”. Just as it was Aristotle who first considered the need for mimetic accuracy in representation. And he went straight to the point. “A work of art is a likeness or reproduction of an original,” he wrote 2,300 years ago, “and not a symbolic representation of it” (Butcher 1951: 124).

This contains an important distinction, and it is a thousand pities that Daguerre and Fox Talbot and photography itself were not around at the time to help Aristotle develop his thoughts. They could have taken a photograph of his pupil Alexander, and its significance would have struck the sage at once. Almost certainly he would have felt impelled to revise the above passage as follows: “A photograph is a likeness or reproduction of an original, and not a symbolic representation of it.” For as S.H. Butcher noted in his 1894 commentary, Aristotle is saying that

A sign or symbol has no essential resemblance, no natural connection, with the thing signified. Thus spoken words are symbols of mental states, written words are symbols of spoken words; the connexion between them is conventional. On the other hand mental impressions are not signs or symbols, but copies of external reality, likenesses of the things themselves” (Butcher 1951: 125).

Just why Aristotle should have thought this distinction important I’m not sure, but it is entirely in keeping with his interest in the accurate observation of living things.

And it shows that the difference between verbalizing and mental picturing had been noticed at quite an early stage. Anyone who tries to give a detailed verbal description of what he sees—the cat on the mat, the flowers on the table, the computer on the desk, with their colors and positions and size—will quickly find how hard it is to translate the one into the other. In the first place, because so many bits and pieces of verbal code are required. In the second place, because you also need to know about sentence construction and narrative form. And lastly, because of the sheer instability of things. The cat rises and slowly walks away, and even with the help of tense it is hard to bend language round the curve of time.

The limitations of words

Adequate verbal description always presents cognitive difficulties. But it is not merely difficult, it is next to impossible in the case of action which is quick, fleeting, unique, and uncontrolled. Then there’s the additional problem of how to communicate this sort of thing accurately to others.

In order to accurately record and communicate the sort of ever-changing pictorial imagery in the mind something very much better than language had to be devised, and eventually in the nineteenth century it was. Daguerre and Fox Talbot, and later Thomas Edison, met both the technological challenge and the cognitive need.

But in science the large class of facsimiles I am calling reality graphics were not developed and refined in order to provide us with “symbolic representations”—least of all the representations of literature. Homer had done that well enough, and the works of the Greek dramatists are both timeless and exemplary. There is no useful sense in which language, literature or symbolism have developmentally “progressed” since classical times, nor are they likely to in the future. And the reason is plain.

Language stands at a fixed and irreducible distance from whatever it describes, and this distance or gap has always been a problem. The true significance of all the facsimilizing going on around us lies in the historic effort of modern instrumentation to try and close that gap, to supersede the fuzziness and uncertainty of linguistic codes, to provide better, more accurate and permanent “likenesses of the original”, in Aristotle’s phrase. Photography, along with the whole range of ingenious imaging techniques we use today, is a cultural response to our cognitive need for better descriptions of states of affairs and matters of fact.

But doesn’t this ignore the obvious communicative use of such images? Weren’t the photographs from Somalia of the downed helicopter pilot Mike Durant sent by the Somalis as conscious messages of triumph, of popular defiance, of ethnic pride? Weren’t they deliberately intended to humiliate and embarrass President Clinton? And weren’t they correctly received and interpreted in America as such?

They were indeed. Any photograph may be used for any purpose. And for the purpose of argument reality graphics of this kind function very powerfully. Yet it is precisely because of their independent and superior reliability as objective a-linguistic records that they so powerfully influence our opinions and beliefs. A second-hand verbal report by Somalis about a captured US soldier admitting that “killing innocent people is wrong” belongs simply and exclusively to the error-prone domain of journalistic communication, and at its worst may be only hearsay. A video of that pilot uttering those words is both a communication and a quite different thing.

Confusion has arisen because of a tendency to treat all communicative phenomena as embodying a universal semeiosis. But the enjoyment of reducing everything to the lowest common denominator—all the world’s a text, etc.—is merely a hindrance here. It is unhistorical, it precludes an evolutionary view of the matter, and it fails to discriminate between the generalized linguistic use of pictures as expressive signs and symbols, and the specific role of facsimilizing as an emergent nonlinguistic level of description.

Karl Popper on language

Karl Popper’s comments on language may be helpful here. In his essay “Epistemology without a knowing subject,” he writes that the lower and universal linguistic functions of self-expression and signalling (to be found in all animal languages and all linguistic phenomena) need to be distinguished from the higher functions of description and argument (in Homo sapiens). There is a connection here with my suggestion that the universal communicative functions of pictures (of all sorts) need to be distinguished from the unique descriptive function of reality graphics (a specific sort).

And what Popper says next about the reason for all the confusion is also revealing. “The two lower functions are always present.” he writes. “when the higher ones are present, so that it is always possible to ‘explain’ every linguistic phenomenon, in terms of the lower function, as an ‘expression’ or a ‘communication’” (Popper 1973: 120). In his following statement too Popper’s thought can be read as illuminating the cultural role of “reality transcriptions” as an extension of “linguistic description”—a role which sees them helping to clarify issues of truth or falsity in the cases of Durant, Nixon, David Irving, and Rodney King:

With the descriptive function of human language, the regulative idea of truth emerges, that is, of a description which fits the facts … The argumentative function of human language presupposes the descriptive function: arguments are, fundamentally, about descriptions: they criticise descriptions from the point of view of the regulative ideas of truth; content; and verisimilitude” (Popper 1973: 120).

Although it is an important consequence of this line of thought. we need not go into the emphasis Popper places on the higher functions of language as indispensable to cultural rationality. But one last sentence is worth quoting: “Without the exosomatic descriptive language—a language which, like a tool, develops outside the body—there can be no object for our critical discussion,” no objective foundation, that is, for determining matters of fact (Popper 1973: 120).

Today a whole range of modern devices for recording, imaging, storing and reproducing data augment the “exosomatic descriptive language” on which analysis and argument finally rest. In the past, verbal description and argument provided the sole basis for truth claims. It was all we had, and its overall cognitive role has always been confused by the fact that any use of language contains a rhetorical and expressive element. It remains of the greatest importance. But today it is everywhere reinforced with mechanically produced facsimiles which in many cases provide evidence of a more accurate kind. Because such evidence often “fits the facts” more exactly, it is important in establishing matters of fact.

The structural integrity of events

Our starting point, then, is that the basic materials for analysis are alinguistic. Next one sees that this material comes in isolable units—units we shall call events. These may be as short as a wink or as long as a marathon. They may be as trivial as a talk-show or as grave as a survivor’s report of a death camp. They may be as simple as a pitcher’s toss or as complicated in their framing as a play within a play within a play.

Whatever and wherever, when matters of fact matter, the reality graphics recording such events are bound by some concept of completeness and coherence. Bound, that is, by the structural integrity of events.

It might be noticed that the last 30 years have seen huge changes. At a New York film school towards the end of the 1950s a favorite class exercise was to give the student a scratched and valueless 16mm. print of an old documentary and tell him to reconstruct it. The challenge was to show one’s cleverness by treating each scene as an independent semantic unit, constructing new sentences and new meanings, writing a new commentary and fabricating a whole new interpretation which stood the old film on its head.

It demonstrated that where there’s wilfulness there’s a way, and was generally in accord with John Grierson’s definition of documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality”. The original people in the original scenes and the intention of the original work didn’t matter: these were grist for the mill. “Give it the treatment,” was the instructor’s advice—the creative treatment of actuality. And we did.

But cinema verité put an end to all that. And soon cameramen filming speech and music discovered the joys and frustrations of dealing with complicated internal structures of both sound and sense. Editorial fragmentation went out; unity and continuity came in. A manipulative eagerness to impose the merely extrinsic meanings of filmmakers became less and less acceptable, and a respect for intrinsic meanings took its place.

Above all, an indifference to the true dimensions of behavioral forms was no longer permissible. Replacing it came a respect for the natural topography of events, along with the assumption that for facsimiles of such events to be fully intelligible that shape had to be preserved.

This requirement applies to the minor as well as the momentous. It is as important to parents who record scenes of bathing the baby as it is to historians of the Holocaust watching the long unbroken record of Abraham Bomba, in Shoah, talking to Claude Lanzmann about Treblinka. And in the field of mass communications exactly the same considerations apply wherever matters of fact most matter—in international politics and their modem sublimation, sports.

When the helicopter pilot Durant replies to his Somali interrogators that “innocent people being killed is not good,” we know that any sign of a cut or deletion between the “is” and the “not good”—any flip-overs or image break-up or loss of lip-synch—would be grounds for suspicion; grounds for suspecting that a news editor was making Durant say something other than what he in fact said. Grounds, that is, for questioning the descriptive adequacy of the transcript of the event.

Sports fans are particularly demanding. In Formula One racing, lenses are attached to the cockpits of cars, and one gets immediate objective verification of whether or not Ayrton Senna was the culpable party in a “shunt”—whatever the subjectively volunteered extenuating circumstances of worn tires or driver fatigue. In football, vast sweeping views of the field bring audiences a whole range of complicated plays, and if signal drop-out occurs and a continuous and coherent presentation is disrupted, fragmented, and made unintelligible, viewers get very upset.

Their irritation reflects an intuitive understanding of the connection between cognition, continuity, and the phenomenal nature of the world. And this can be seen in both symbolic and non-symbolic representational forms. Where tense bends language round the curve of time (what was becomes what is and then what may be), the sinuously agile facsimilizing of cameras and lenses follows the temporal shape of events.

Where do photographic “stills” fit into all this? Mostly they don’t; for the reliable depiction of either identity or behavior time frames of 1/250th sec. are not enough. Casting directors might once upon a time have made do with portfolios of glossy still shots arriving in the mail from aspiring actors. Now they require videos of performance. In India matrimonial arrangements negotiated at a distance depended on carefully posed stills of prospective brides and bridegrooms, but as the MacDougalls’ recent film Photo wallahs shows, painful revelations often ensued (MacDougall 1992). Will videos soon displace stills as more reliable evidence of the wares on offer? Will there be a demand for more fully portrayed identities and events? It’s inevitable. In life, marriage is one of those times when matters of fact matter most.

Aristotelian unities

The need to pay attention to natural forms of life and action has a long history. In The poetics Aristotle’s conscious concern was with artistic mimesis. He wanted to define criteria for literary representation. But a naturally empirical turn of mind inclined him toward rules for storytelling which were essentially rules of intelligibility—rules designed in cognitive terms—and this in turn led to his famous declaration that “episodic plots are the worst”, and that the best narratives portray “one action and the whole of it” (Butcher 1951: 35, 37).

He warned that “if any part is displaced or deleted” the whole meaning will be “disturbed and dislocated” (ibid: 35). A meaning which is dislocated has been changed, perhaps irremediably. All of which indicates that from the very start of critical thinking about narrative, when cognitive matters mattered, displacement, deletion, disturbance and dislocation were seen as injurious.

Critics and dramaturgical theorists have always had trouble with this; and rightly so. When taken too seriously the principle of “the unity of action” amounts to a disabling restriction on the imaginative creativity we expect in all great drama. Where Aristotle’s rules more naturally belong is in empirical science, not art. And for documentary filmmakers they usefully set out general conditions of intelligibility for both the recording and understanding of social events.

The criteria of naturalistic coherence in time and space derive from our cognitive need somehow to seize phenomena in flux, making them available for contemplation. Respecting these criteria in the realm of reality graphics—respecting the structural integrity of events and employing lenses and framing procedures which retain bounded and isolable features of scenes intact—became defining criteria for the descriptive adequacy of the results.

Karl Heider included this understanding in his recommendation that ethnographic films should portray “whole persons in whole acts” (Helder 1976: 107-109), and the cognitive rationale is not hard to see. Happenings are related as cause and effect, and to ask for the preservation of natural sequences is to ask for rules of facsimilizing in which “the logic of the situation” and “the logic of understanding” correspond.

Yet descriptive adequacy is only a first step. The objective record is only a foundation. Beyond it lie the perplexities of Goffmania, and upon entering this country one must ask the people whose images appear in these records who they are, and what they are doing, and why? Actors must explain their roles. When they do, will they confirm or deny their appearances?

Once filmmakers and editors have taken the original film documents and cut them about—using the shots of the cameraman as semantic units endlessly rearranged—will the intrinsic and heterogeneous meanings of the “footage” correspond to or contradict the extrinsic homogeneous meanings imposed by filmmakers in “films”? Once assimilated to this or that communicative form, will the men and women whose biofacsimiles appear in these films still recognize and confirm their identities and their acts?

Objective graphics, subjective confirmation

Trees are one thing; the rafters of a house are something else. And in most cases it would be difficult to draw any secure conclusions about the nature and form of the former from the latter. Of course, if one were able to interrogate individual pieces of lumber they might confirm their original identity despite all the cutting and sawing and industrious human use. But one should never lose sight of the fact that pieces of lumber begin as trees.

In much the same way it is a mistake to define the nature of reality graphics in terms of the artefacts called “documentary films”. For here once again we are dealing with constructions, in this case constructions in which the alinguistic products of facsimilizing are put to quasi-literary use. And the questions to be asked are much the same as the imaginary questions we might ask the planks and rafters: How much do the extrinsic purposes of the filmmaker allow the grain of original identities to be preserved? How much of the intrinsic meaning of the original event survives? What guarantee do we have that things really and truly are what they seem?

Suppose that helicopter pilot Mike Durant were to say in reponse to being shown his picture back in the U.S.A.—”That is not me”: suppose that he were to deny that he was the man in the truncated video clip. This plainly involves rather more than the repudiation by an annoyed and humiliated sitter of an artist’s unsatisfactory likeness in pen and ink. It is to deny the look of my eye while talking, the curve of my mouth as it speaks, the sound of my uneasy voice.

Such a repudiation has about it something of ontological suicide, and indicates the importance of the evidence of human actors themselves. As it happened, pilot Durant never did any such thing. And this example is only used to emphasise that if the built constructions of “ethnographic films” are to be persuasive, participants must confirm that even when the shots representing them have (so to speak) been cut, and sawn, and stained, what appears on the screen truly is what it purports to be. Here subjectivity plays an important role. It authenticates (or repudiates, as the case may be) the graphic reality portrayed.

I am not arguing here the general point that the self-understanding of agents is the only understanding relevant in social analysis: it is not. But in facsimiles of cultural phenomena the minds of agents are certainly the first things we should consult. A widespread feeling that this is so has deeply influenced ethnographic filmmaking in recent years. Underlying it is the tacit assumption that if asked, if given an opportunity to comment, the agents portrayed would themselves confirm and corroborate the meanings, the understandings and the interpretations which the communicative forms and formats of film convey.

One might indeed arrange ethnographic films along a continuum from those in which the intrinsic meanings of agents are central (the MacDougalls’ African work; Ian Dunlop’s later work in Australia) to those in which such meanings are largely irrelevant to the filmmaker’s extrinsic artistic considerations (Robert Gardner’s Forest of bliss, for instance). In this film about death and dying in Benares (a “silent” film in the sense that though dialogue is heard it is untranslated), a variety of implied or insinuated meanings were noted by Alexander Moore and Jonathan Parry (Moore 1988; Parry 1988).

But those meanings are all very ambiguous. One suspects that if some of the participants in Forest of bliss were shown the scenes in which they appear and asked “What are you doing?” the result would make a most diverting companion to the film itself. Surely in no other work claiming anthropological consideration is the disjunction between intrinsic meaning (the participant’s) and extrinsic insinuation (the filmmaker’s) so radical or so complete.

There is of course an infinite variety of intermediate types of ethnographic film, and an examination of selected cases throws light on what happens to reality graphics when they are used in various ways—anthropological, educational, or political. In each of the cases to be discussed the foundation of the work consists of reality transcripts having a greater or lesser degree of descriptive adequacy: in films about matters of fact that is the sine qua non. After that come the various ways in which subjectivity authenticates the record, witnesses speak, lawyers argue, and the wider processes by which reports become known as reliable begin.

Coniston Muster (1972) is a 30-minute film 1 made about Aboriginal stockmen (cowboys) on a central Australian cattle station (ranch). Its shooting ratio was about 20: 1. Much editorial work went into scene selection and sequence construction, and a variety of grammatical devices are employed. Action sequences are cut for kinetic effect. Extrinsic spoken narration is spare and only used at the beginning to set the scene. Silent episode intertitles are employed to punctuate and separate, to raise introductory questions, to point and comment.

All of which should make clear that the final result is very much a designed and packaged artefact for the marketplace. Yet the credibility of the result, if it is credible, depends largely on the descriptive adequacy of the original reality transcripts, the unedited footage, reinforced by the spontaneous commentary of an Aboriginal participant, Coniston Johnny, recorded as he watched the uncut film.

It is Johnny who identifies people and who personally answers the ever-present question, “What’s going on here?” In a scene which at one point includes himself he catches sight of an old friend struggling to lift some harness onto a truck. At this point he says, “There’s Paddy! Poor old bugger! [laughs] Loading them up. Helping Maurice load the truck.” Like most of his other comments these simple words go only a little beyond the self-explanatory nature of the event, so why are they appreciated by audiences?

Because that little is a crucial part of subjective authentication. Only a participant’s mild humor (“Poor old bugger!”) is either appropriate, understandable. or justified. It grows naturally out of the intersubjective experience of the world presented on the screen and is the expression of present consciousness reliving past events. At one level the image before him on the screen is merely the shadow of a shadow. At another it is closer to the Ding an sich than his own memory could ever hope to attain.

Johnny’s utterance is in part a communication with the world beyond the shadow, in part the murmured rumination of memory talking to itself. In either case his voice is self-evidently unrehearsed, undirected, and uncontrolled. During scenes in which a wild bull is released from a stockade in the early morning he begins to re-enact the desperate ride of the man who brings the animal back, and as he cries out in warning to the rider, past and present, objective graphic and subjective authentication, the viewer and the viewed, become for the moment phenomenologically fused.

Objective record, subjective disconfirmation

By way of contrast one might consider a particular sequence in Maasai women. This popular introduction to Maasai culture has been widely seen, and combines a certain amount of undirected observational material with interviews conducted by the anthropologist Melissa Llewelyn-Davies examining the situation of women. It is a useful film which I have often shown to classes in Sydney. But much of the information conveyed by the narration is both generalizing and normative—a feature hard to combine with the specificities of actual events.

Worse than that: because of a visible incongruence between the descriptive footage, on the one hand, and the information supplied by participants on the other, serious implausibilities arise. This is spectacularly so in the case of a sequence treating the subject of clitoridectomy.

It would be absurd to suggest that either the filming or the subsequent presentation on broadcast television of such an event was either practicable or desirable: it was not. But equally plainly it was open to the filmmakers to recognise this fact and not to pretend otherwise. As it is, the sequence treating this matter provides a clinical example of what happens when none of the criteria here being considered is satisfied—neither completeness and descriptive adequacy, nor subjective authentication.

The relevant scenes show a young girl being prepared for the operation, a few close-ups of her head being shaved, an interpolated interview from another time and place with an older woman, and then a number of post-operative scenes from which the patient is entirely excluded showing general collective celebration. Nothing of the surgical actuality is shown, and virtually nothing which even suggests the patient’s anxiety and tension before the event. As a result, a large burden of responsibility rests upon Llewelyn-Davies’ spoken commentary. This is perversely unequal to the task. It consists of a sustained attempt to abstract, romanticise, etherealise, and generally gloss over the painful bleeding centerpiece of the occasion.

The language of the narration is itself revealing. After all, what exactly is “female circumcision”? To most people it suggests an anatomical improbability, not the cutting off of the clitoral hood or the labia minora. Appealing figures of speech are employed poetically to distance and transfigure the occasion. The circumcision ceremony is described as “a girl’s farewell to childhood”, something “expected to transform a giggly girl into a mature and thoughtful woman” which is all in all “a bit like a white wedding”.

That the scenes dealing with the occasion are noticeably fragmentary and interrupted only increases one’s suspicions. In an abruptly inserted interview Llewelyn-Davies asks her principal female informant (and this interview fragment is used directly after the distressed face of the patient has been glimpsed), “Is the girl happy?” To which the Maasai woman appears to reply, “Very happy. Part of the ritual is to brew mead from nectar and honey … Her mother and father wear charms and they are happy because their daughter isn’t pregnant and they are drinking mead.”

Yet all too obviously the “happiness” referred to has nothing directly to do with the patient’s state of mind as she faces the knife—and from the look of the editing, nothing to do with her state of mind at all. It is a normative statement referring to how her father and mother regard such a ceremony overall, and its use at this point is decidedly misleading. Next we are told that “after the ceremony has taken place, the branches of a special tree are brought to mark the house where the girl is recovering” (one of the rare implicit references to the surgical nature of the event); and a procession of singing girls appears, adding both a musical and visual distraction from the matters of fact at hand.

Of course we know what Llewelyn-Davies means by her remark that “It’s a bit like a white wedding”. But with respect, analogies made on the lofty level of what all rites de passage have in common scarcely enable us to share, or even to glimpse, the experiential level of genital mutilation performed in a hut without benefit of antiseptic or anaesthesia. What would the participant herself have had to say about the event? Would the patient have endorsed the interpretative overlay? Would she have agreed with the older woman’s enthusiastically “functional” assertions? Or was she a victim of cultural circumstances that she would dearly like to see changed?

More to the point, perhaps, how complete were the original records of the event?—what uncut reality transcripts were made and available? Loizos tells us that the screams of the patient had been recorded, and that “a lively debate [took place] in the cutting room about how the issue should be handled”, one view being that “perhaps the girl’s screams should be heard, thus giving ‘symbolic’ expression to what was visually too horrific” (Loizos 1993: 123). In the event, however, nothing is shown, the screams are silenced, and the narrator pours a syrup of generalizing sociological interpretation over a whole episode. ¹

But the relevant points are these: the original camera record is entirely inadequate. On top of this the natural shape of the event is broken up in a deliberately misleading way, being interrupted with highly tendentious “happiness” comments from an interview conducted at another time and place, followed by scenes of communal jubilation. Finally, no attempt is made to obtain the participant’s view of the event by exploring the intrinsic meanings available from the actor; indeed, quite the reverse. The “meaning” of the event is pretty much what you will find in Arnold Van Gennep. How extrinsic can you get?

A lot more than this, to be sure. Instead of even the pretence of observational spontaneity one might for example have tried to organize the local community into acting out the whole episode, thus ensuring that nothing untoward occurred—no screams, no blood, no pain. In this ideal/typical functionalist version of the circumcision ceremony the desired social consequences toward which Llewelyn-Davies’ account is skewed—solidarity, unity, collective cohesion, happiness would then be even more systematically brought out, the numerous details of Maasai dress and decorum and speech and behavior being pointed toward this overriding goal. Real people would go through the motions of somewhat unreal acts. Real places would provide the backgrounds or “sets” for unreal scenarios.

There is of course a well-known tradition of political documentary which has always been made in this way (and Man of Aran was too). In this kind of work actuality is to be moulded as public opinion is moulded, and is always subordinated to overriding political goals. And if the set is a set-up, the men and women merely actors, the presentation of both self and setting a version of the Goffrnanian world where nothing is what it seems—what relevance have the criteria here set out? What can be done when the action is all too clearly rehearsable, directed, and controlled?

A witness testifies to events

Marina Goldovskaya’s remarkable recent film, The Solovki power: evidence and documents, suggests one possible approach. “Those who control the past control the future” was for seventy years the ruling principle of Soviet historiography. In accordance with this goal huge quantities of documents and evidence were either destroyed, or hidden, or suppressed, and systematic falsification was institutionalized.

But with Gorbachev the control of the past was relaxed, and among the things which escaped from the archives in 1986 was a film made about an early Soviet labor camp (the model for numberless others) built on the Solovetski Islands in the White Sea. This camp had been established in 1925 in an abandoned monastery. The treatment of prisoners was typically brutal. Escapees’ reports published in the West became an embarrassment. And so it was that in 1927 the GPU (later the KGB) commissioned a film to show the benevolent and uplifting nature of their prison regime.

“With an iron hand we shall drive mankind to happiness,” a Bolshevik poster had announced in 1918; and among those caught by the iron hand was 15-year-old Yefim Ligutin. Driven by a romantic yearning for faraway places and the sea he had run away from home. Unfortunately for him this was construed as the attempt of a would-be spy to enter foreign countries. He was sentenced to death, and when the sentence was commuted to imprisonment at Solovki he began the first of seventeen years in prison. Like a surprising number of other former inmates—scientists, engineers, writers, academics—this man was still available to be interviewed when Gorbachev freed Russia to inquire into its past, and in 1988 Marina Goldovskaya talked to them, showing the old propaganda film and inviting their comments on the mysterious world it both did and did not show.

This process can be seen as another variation on the theme of “objective record, subjective authentication”—except that the reality of the 1927 film was that of a “Potemkin Village”, and the role of living witnesses was one of retrieval: as each man and woman speaks it is less to confirm and authenticate than to disconfirm and repudiate the “creative treatment of actuality” the GPU had engineered. ²

“How nice and clean—and there’s linen too!” a former inmate says ironically about the scene. “A white tablecloth and even flowers. It must be a wrong close-up.” The remark is as spontaneous as it is revealing. The deception of the close-up derives from its role in information control. Beyond the frame of the close-up is the scene as a whole; beyond the scene, the play; and beyond that the play which contains a play. Yet within the tradition of situational encompassment this is something special. For to pull back and reveal the frame outside the frame is to reveal the high barbed-wire camp boundary within which this entire tragicomedy of political deceit is set.

In reality graphics treating matters of fact it is often tacitly assumed that what is contained within the narrower view typifies what is present in the wider field as welt, that the phenomenon pictured is continuous in space. In the kind of self-authenticating work of the MacDougalls in East Africa, we know that to pull back from the group of men gathered under the men’s tree—casually conversing, idling, working on strips of hide we will find across the wide plain beyond other men under other trees. Numerous clues lead us to trust the image.

By way of contrast, in the kind of work represented by the GPU’s propaganda piece we know that if we could pull back from the table with the white cloth and the flowers we would find only bare boards, dirt, and misery. Numerous clues lead us to distrust the image: the cramped view, the short takes, the posed people, the relentless voiceless smiles. We can be confident that tomorrow the cloth and the flowers will be gone forever—for what is presented is a space-time discontinuity so extreme that if one had been able to search the whole wide universe in the year this film was made, nowhere else could a camera crew be found in a concentration camp getting up to such theatrical tricks.

And one by one the former inmates confirm that this is so. “For God’s sake, what nonsense!” cries Yefim Ligutin, now 78, “My God, what rubbish! This never took place in Solovki. It’s just for show. Is that how they served food in the prisons? It’s a fake!” The scene shows a neatly dressed camp guard solicitously tasting the stew to be served to prisoners, followed by a title which claims that “Prisoners may request dry rations if they prefer them.” Throughout the Gulag dry rations were nauseatingly strong-smelling dried cod and a little bread and were universally detested. When Ligutin was offered this salted fish for the first time he was sickened, and struggled to get near an open window. Two guards knocked him down and kicked him in the kidneys.

“What I noticed then,” he says, “I have never forgotten: the shiny black boots of my tormentors.” And he laughs at the memory. Such scenes in Goldovskaya’s film draw on the intrinsic and unique experience of participants, those who have truly been there and had that sort of thing done to them. For this there is no substitute.

But the most remarkable fusion of reality transcript and subjective recollection occurs at a later point. It is when the eyes of the 78-year-old camp survivor stare into the eyes of the 16-year-old he then was. He remembers when the film was being made. The crew had begun working in the camp and he recalls as a boy sitting and looking toward the camera. Now, after sixty years, he meets that boy again. As he does so he sees the facsimile of an enduring identity whose experiences, accumulated over 17 years in prison, would at last bear witness against those who could no longer control the past.

The orthodoxy of cinema theory

With monotonous repetition it is asserted that the objectivity of reality graphics is merely naive nonsense. Questioning the underlying assumptions of research films Luc de Heusch once wrote that the camera’s objectivity is “a myth” which is based “on a belief in its magic powers” (de Heusch 1962: 23).

What this means I’m not sure, but in the cases of Durant, of King, and of Nixon, it seems less than self-evident that magic gives these transcripts their persuasiveness. An even more sweeping claim was made years ago by Asen Balikci and Quentin Brown to the effect that “any subject that the camera photographs has been discovered already by the eye of the man behind the camera and hence the record acquires only the quality of illustration” (Balikci and Brown 1966: 27).

To which one can only respond that the cameramen Balikci and Brown are referring to differ radically from any I have known. On the evening news tonight there was a report about the Goroka festival in highland Papua New Guinea, one scene alone showing a quantity of uninterpreted data which it would take a well-informed anthropologist six months’ work to unpack.

Recent reports from Moscow presented wide-angle views from a high building showing crowds, military vehicles, trees and flowers in a park, and a line of distinctive edifices on the far horizon. If you were to give a highly magnified still of that scene to a dozen specialists in Russian affairs with a request for the interpretation of all identifiable military, botanical, demographic and architectural contents, six months might not be enough.

It is of course correct that in the normal course of events 99.9 percent of those data (add additional digits to taste) will never be interpreted. This is both true and irrelevant. After all, 99.9 percent of all sensory data in biological systems are uninterpreted, but so what? Sensory inputs of sight and sound last at their very best for the life of the organism—at worst they are erased within the hour. The cognitive difference between these two procedures (and the advantage of the mechanical over the biological) is that the cultural invention of facsimilizing makes data permanently available for review—whether or not this ever happens.

What then is the status of transcript data which are forever uninterpreted? Of “research footage” which is never seen? Of the ten miles of audio tape from Papua-New Guinea the linguist never gets around to analyzing? Of the video record from the monitor in the local bank before it is wiped out each month? It exists in a condition of latency—rather as latent photographic images exist before they are developed. Human consciousness is the chemical reagent which realises whatever potential is there, making it available for the next step in the construction of our knowledge of events.

A personal example comes to mind. Around 1971 the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies made a film, Larwari and Walkara, about Aboriginal ceremonies in the vicinity of Hooker Creek (now Lajamanu). As the cameraman on the project I worked with the anthropologist and liaison man Stephen Wild. Wild knew both the people and the language, whereas 1 knew neither, and knew even less about the rituals to take place. That they took place at all was largely due to our providing the food, transport, and encouragement needed to precipitate the events involved.

We also urged those responsible to do whatever they were going to do in as traditional a manner as possible. Beyond this we simply filmed what people chose to do, and my own role was little more than that of an uncomprehending observer of a three-day rite which both anthropologist and Aborigines believed to be important.

A complete and unedited copy of the original photographic transcript was subsequently given to the community, and a shorter edited film was also made. Then we all went off to do other things. Some years later however the data the footage contained were found to be relevant to an Aboriginal land claim, and statements made by individuals appearing in the film were mentioned in court. In this way the latent information of the original footage (an objective account of the event) was used as evidence on the basis of which legal argument determined certain matters of fact.

All in the cameraman’s head?

As to the remarkable claim that “it’s all in the cameraman’s head,” or that this or that subjective factor caused this or that subject to be filmed and the rest to be ignored, all I can say is that in this particular case the material used in evidence was wholly uninfluenced by the subjective interests of either the cameraman, the soundman, or the Chief Cook and Bottle-Washer who was also along on the trip.

Our very ignorance of the specific sentences on which argument would later rest ensured that all we did was to frame them, hoping that the result would satisfy minimal standards of descriptive adequacy. All such utterances were entirely unrehearsed, undirected, and uncontrolled—how could it be otherwise? In brief, the objective record we so blindly produced was the adventitious consequence of the disinterested documentation of events.

This film was indeed made by subjective persons with subjective purposes. Another tirelessly repeated absurdity claims that because photographic and video records are made for a purpose, the undeniable subjectivity of the intentional act subjectivizes all the consequences. In other words, that because my subjective purpose directed me to take a shot of a marketplace, all the data such a shot contains are equally the product and consequence of the initial subjective state.

But this is a non sequitur. The plenitude of data in reality graphics is an unintended consequence of purposive action—and like innumerable other unintended consequences it is absurd to pretend to “explain” them in terms of initial subjective conditions. The inventor of the automobile did not have Los Angeles “in mind”. Yet Los Angeles was certainly one of the objective consequences of his invention.

In the same way the superabundant data which register without any thought whatever on the part of numberless photographers in numberless shots every day are an unintended objective consequence of purposive action. Since in this case the specific product is not Los Angeles, but mere data in graphic form, it is appropriate to describe the result as an objective graphic. In the new world of facsimilizing such products are among the cognitive matrices of our lives.

Truth and consequences

Two images are relevant at this point—the gallows and the ivory tower. The first defines a situation of utmost seriousness, the kind which Dr. Johnson had in mind when he said that nothing so concentrates a man’s mind as the knowledge that he will soon be hanged. The second indicates a situation of legendary inconsequentiality, the sort of privileged unseriousness found only in the groves of academe.

Serious situations of life or death not only concentrate the mind, they put it under the kind of cognitive pressure which makes people rather more interested in distinguishing between truth and falsehood than they might otherwise be. Ivory towers, in contrast, are synonymous with the absence of any cognitive pressure at all. Matters of fact are always conjectural. Anything may be said; anything may be believed; beneath the “dreaming spires” the dreamers dream.

The appointment of cameramen to university posts in the last twenty years saw the academicization of a formerly honest trade. When this happened, putting a frame round the action gave way to framing arguments for other university folk. It became important to publish, and even more important to keep up with the latest fashions in anthropological thought. Each of these steps meant a move away from dealing with the non-semantic dimensions of culture, a retreat from fact-finding activities and exposure to serious cognitive pressure, and an increasing interest in the traditional preoccupations of arts faculties in ivory towers: that is, with words and meanings.

This has involved a more and more tenuous connection with the world in which reality graphics belong, and in which the only distinctive tradition of ethnographic filmmaking originated: the empirical tradition of direct behavioral observation. Where once an ethnographic filmmaker produced a film, and attached to it an appendix of published notes, today’s film may be merely an appendix to an essay. Sometimes an agonising selfconsciousness supervenes.

All of which closely resembles the situation in anthropology as a whole. Where fieldwork is more and more a thing of the past, where the study of culture has turned into the study of the “writing” of culture, where commentaries on commentaries proliferate and Sir Edmund Leach recommends that ethnographies should be read as novels, anthropology has become in some places little more than the onanistic subliterary chatter of people with nothing better to do.

Outside the universities, however, the cognitive needs of our culture still make themselves felt. There it is noticeable that where the stakes are high and when the consequences of getting things wrong are serious—when matters of fact matter—reality graphics are called on again and again. Hence the importance of the scenes of Mike Durant and Rodney King. Hence the significance attaching to the Nixon tapes and the footage from Auschwitz.

Where the consequences of error are momentous, the role of documentary footage in providing the evidential foundations for our knowledge of the world is most unlikely to diminish. Indeed, quite the reverse. Off campus, driven by our need for reliable information and broadly governed by the rules of intelligibility which Aristotle so presciently set out so long ago, reality facsimilizing shows every sign of continuing to expand.

1 For years Marxists berated functionalism for offering rosy interpretations of conflict and domination. There is a certain irony in the fact that someone like Llewelyn-Davies should make a film in which functionalistic talk about happiness and community well-being obliterates a young girl’s screams.

2 Named for one of Catherine the Great’s ministers, Potemkin, who inaugurated systematic theatrical deceptions for state visitors on their tours of the Russian countryside the chief object of such deception being Catherine herself. This tradition of political disinformation involved the building., painting, and populating of whole ersatz villages of happy peasants. Although fakery of this kind went on for over two hundred years in Russia, under Stalin it was carried to extremes never known before.

BALIKCI, ASEN, QUENTIN BROWN 1966 Ethnographic filming and the Netsilik Eskimos. Educational Services Incorporated Quarterly Report (Spring‑ Summer): 19‑33.

BUTCHER, S.H. 1951 [1907] Aristotle’s theory of poetry and fine art. New York: Dover Books.

GELLNER, ERNEST 1992 Postmodernism, reason and religion. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

HEIDER, KARL 1976 Ethnographic film. Austin: University of Texas Press.

HEUSCH, LUC DE 1962 The cinema and social science. Paris: UNESCO.

LOIZOS, PETER 1993 Innovation in ethnographic film. Manchester: Manchester University Press; Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

MACDOUGALL, DAVID 1992 Photo Hierarchicus: signs and mirrors in Indian photography. Visual Anthropology 5: 103‑129.

MOORE, ALEXANDER 1988 The limitations of imagist documentary. Society for Visual Anthropology Newsletter 4(2): 1‑3.

NICHOLS, BILL (WILLIAM JAMES) Representing reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

PARRY, JONATHAN P. 1988 Comment on Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss. Society for Visual Anthropology Newsletter 4(2): 4‑7.

POPPER, KARL 1973 Objective knowledge. London: Oxford University Press.

CURLING, CHRIS, MELISSA LLEWELYN‑DAVIES 1974 Maasai women Color, 53 minutes.

GARDNER, ROBERT 1986 Forest of bliss. Color, 90 minutes.

GOLDOVSKAYA, MARINA 1988 The Solovki power. B & W, 90 minutes.

LANZMANN, CLAUDE 1985 Shoah. Color, 9 hours, 30 minutes.

MACDOUGALL, DAVID, JUDITH MACDOUGALL 1972? Under the men’s tree. B & W, 20 minutes.

SANDALL, ROGER
1972 Coniston muster. Color, 25 minutes.
1974 Larwari and Walkara. Color, 45 minutes.

(Visual Anthropology, Vol 6, pages 367—379)

“You must bear witness to our suffering, and to the injustice done to us.”

[Last words of a woman about to die, spoken in the gas chamber to the Czech Jew Filip Muller, a man who lived to survive the Auschwitz 'special detail'. Muller is interviewed in Part Two of Shoah.]

Riga is not usually associated with the origins of anthropology. Yet perhaps the historic contribution of the capital of Latvia and the Latvians deserves to be better recognized. It was while staying there in the years 1764-1769 that Johann Gottfried Herder began to develop some of those ideas about culture which have since become so widely adopted—culture as both autonomous and unified, as incommensurable experience, as an intrinsically valuable source of identity—and it was the stimulating ethnographic environment of Riga that put these ideas in his head.

The more he saw and heard of life in the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire the more Herder became convinced that if a choice had to be made between the French Enlightenment (which saw civilization spreading out imperially from Paris) and the virtues of not-so-civilized independent cultures, then there was a lot to be said for the latter. He and his teacher, the student of languages Johann Georg Hamann, were particularly impressed by the million or more Latvian folk songs, a lively tradition little known in Paris, Berlin and Weimar. ¹

“He watched the Latvians’ love of singing and poetry”, a contemporary author wrote of Herder, “their ability to improvise, the extraordinary emotion of their love songs, into which they pour all the possible tenderness of a lover’s melancholy and describe the whole endurance of a sensitive heart in such an artistic way that we cannot but be deeply moved by their songs”.

The little tinkling Latvian bells also caught his attention; and it is therefore highly appropriate that both songs and bells, musically united in great gatherings of choirs at traditional singing festivals, are at the center of the resistance to Soviet hegemony presented in the late Yuris Podniek’s Homeland. A distinguished and original work honoring Baltic independence, his film celebrates the choral rising which took place in 1990, a form of cultural politics which contributed more than a little to securing the new-won freedom of the Baltic States. ²

Delicately tinkling bells and radiant women’s faces alternate with guns and gunfire. Human voices sing in solemn concert against images of planes and tanks. Meanwhile the accumulated force of memory and moral wrath is directed against a terrible history. Cutting to and fro between past and present, using black-and-white footage from the twenty independent years between the wars, the meaning of this history is examined—especially the consequences of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact. On 23 August 1939 Stalin said to Hitler: “You take Poland”; while Hitler said to Stalin: “You take the Baltic States”. David Low’s well-known cartoon, “Rendezvous”, summed up this unholy alliance as nothing else could.

The immediate result was the wholesale Sovietization of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, beginning in June 1940. At a time when few in the West were looking, and nobody could have done anything anyway, communist governments controlled by Moscow were set up, this being at once followed by the state seizure of all newspapers and radio stations, banks, land, urban real estate, factories and transport—without compensation of course. Meanwhile long lists of men, women, and children, all of them candidates for “‘liquidation”, were being prepared. And on June 13-14, 1941, in a single night, those listed were seized and shipped off to Siberia. In one year of Soviet occupation, June 1940-June 1941, the total Baltic population executed, deported, or conscripted by force into the Russian army has been estimated at 124,467 (this being those for whom there are definite names).

But this was only the start. Soon Germany declared war on Russia and Hitler’s war machine rolled in. The deportation and massacre of the Baltic Jews began, along with the destruction of thousands of non-Jewish Baltic people. The Nazi occupation lasted until 1944. Then, after these three grim years, the victorious Russians came back to stay. Just as the Nazis destroyed anyone they thought might have been sympathetic to the Soviets, the returning Russians set about the persecution and deportation of anyone they thought might have cooperated with the retreating Germans. At the end of it all some 800,000 people had been shipped like cattle, in hideous conditions from which large numbers died before ever reaching their destination, to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and other places in the east and north. ³

This is the tale of suffering, leading up to the 1990 Latvian Song Festival, its 358 choirs of 24,000 people, and its heart-felt singing of national songs banned for 50 years, which provides the moral dynamic for Yuris Podniek’s film. It has six main ingredients. First, a huge choral festival attended by thousands of brilliantly costumed and strikingly handsome women singers. Second, scenes of Soviet military forces on manoeuvres (large areas of the Baltic States have for decades been used for Soviet bases and army manoeuvres, the farmers having long since been turned off the land or deported).

Thirdly, footage from the past showing glimpses of the earliest days of the song festivals, and more than glimpses of the arrogant steel-clad might of this or that imperial power rolling through Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn. Fourthly, interview material with young and old survivors. Fifthly, scenes from settlements of Baltic exiles in Siberia, showing the exhumation of the dead and the transportation home of their remains. And sixthly—and intimately continuous with the preceding—scenes of Lithuania’s Hill of Crosses, a religious shrine twice bulldozed flat by the communist regime, which in its phoenix-like capacity for renewal symbolized, like nothing else, resistance to both Marxism and the Party.

What welds this material together is the poignant use of traditional choral singing, along with a low-keyed jaggedly nervy score by Martin Braun composed for invading weaponry and troops. The different elements work to produce a film which is simultaneously political in purpose, cultural in content, and has an almost musical form. But what is the deep reason for all the choirs and singing? It is because this was the only form of nationalistic expression allowed under the Soviet regime. Free nations normally display their independence and unity by putting their armed forces on parade, but of course nothing like this was possible for the subject Balts. In its generosity, however, Moscow did allow them to parade their choirs. The contrast reveals a lot—especially about the “‘gender effects” of military domination. For what sort of a Baltic culture do these choirs portray? What is emphasized, and what seems strangely missing?

The strong immediate impression this film conveys comes from scenes of Latvian and Estonian women, either in powerful close-ups showing intense but contained emotion, or in smaller groups, or in the great massed choirs in the arena singing the national songs which provide Homeland’s irresistibly emotional “score”. Their white costumes with hand-woven red headbands and waist-sashes provide a matching visual unity for the theme of national solidarity and shared tradition.

In Homeland they and their voices represent Baltic “culture” par excellence, and they are repeatedly contrasted with Russian officers and their exaggeratedly peaked caps (the dominant male presence) or with assorted weaponry. As a result Latvian culture is strikingly feminized. There would be nothing wrong with that if the characterization was true. But in this case one feels that it is neither a Baltic tradition, nor a Latvian trait, but a profound sociological consequence of the kind of military domination which systematically removes men from effective power.

Virtually the only male characters of any significance in Homeland are (1) old, (2) broken, (3) corrupted, (4) dead. Or various combinations thereof. The presence in the film of a man who—incredibly—first conducted massed choirs before the Tsar, and who still manages to look creakily debonair, is a huge bonus: what a symbol of cultural indestructibility stands there!

But all too clearly he and other men associated with the song festival represent the tolerated and innocuous domain of Art, not the contested domain of Power. Effective male political leadership has for 50 years been co-opted, removed, or repressed. In the eyes of the regime, however, musical activities were harmless enough. One remembers the derision heaped by Moscow on the first president of newly independent Lithuania, Vytautas Landsbergis. The “music-teacher,” they called him dismissively.

Beneath the ruined rafters of what must once have been a family farm (destroyed during the collectivization of the 1950s) a man who suffered 47 years of exile sits meditating, and as he tells his story another source of Baltic male attrition becomes clear. This man had been drafted into no less than four armies: first, the Latvian force formed to defend his homeland in 1939; second, the “Popular Army”, this being the name under which the Russians took it over; thirdly, The Red Army itself; and fourthly, the German army which drove out the Russians in 1941. In each case he was conscripted against his will. We learn that during the Second World War the Nazis and the Soviets forced fully ten percent of the male population to serve in their armed forces.

This figure from the past is followed by a more shocking contemporary statistic. In a title superimposed on a funeral cortege we read that “One murdered conscript is returned to the Baltic States every third day”. No explanation for these killings is offered, but the implication is that in the Imperial Soviet Army at the end of the 1980s, with discipline deteriorating, and national tensions violently erupting within the ranks, the victimization of helpless and isolated “colonials” had reached such a point that murder was commonplace. One wonders what the complementary figure might have been for the deaths of Georgian conscripts, or those of Islamic background from Azerbaijan or Tadzhikistan.

There were also more dishonorable duties associated with Soviet occupation. Baltic men who were not yoked for service in the Army were suborned into dirtier jobs. When a political candidate in the forthcoming elections is interviewed we find that he had worked in a minor capacity for the KGB. His duties required him to open and read letters sent to and from Baltic exiles overseas. He doesn’t seem to regard this as a serious electoral disadvantage however—”everybody had to do something like this”—a fact which footnotes the pervasive moral debilitation which accompanied Moscow’s emasculation of its subject states.

An aspect of the film which assumes a growing importance with repeated viewings is the strongly Christian message, towards the end, implicit in the handling of the Lithuanian material. Here the director shifts from the “Baltic” cultural emphasis of the song festivals to a religious theme. It is a theme which is neither new nor surprising: namely, that the eschatological doctrines of Christianity have since its beginnings appealed to the oppressed and the enslaved. Solzhenitsyn and others observed the superior ability of both the “Old Believers” and the members of various Russian sects to withstand even the worst that Soviet labor camps could offer.

Presumably this is because Christians who are crucified politically, culturally, and sometimes personally, spontaneously identify with Christ. There is no small irony in the fact that the most triumphant millenarianism of our time (the Marxist Church Militant) should have been defeated on a philosophical level by the much older, purer soteriology which for seventy years it struggled aggressively to displace.

At all events, one feels that in Lithuania the symbol of the cross became, for many, a symbol of their own condition. They too had suffered innocently and they too had stoically endured. The persistently rebuilt Hill of Crosses is a symbolic memorial to both the living and the dead, and the image of it at the end of the film mist-shrouded and floating in space, is fittingly ethereal.

At an elementary level, no doubt, carving and constructing crosses to replace those destroyed by the bulldozers provided both men and women with something emotionally and physically satisfying to do. Though of different sizes, many crosses are elaborate quasi-sculptures which obviously require both muscular energy and creative imagination. At another level, however, they seem to be a concentrated moral expression of the underlying religious philosophy which enabled Lithuanian nationalism to endure.

It is noticeable that aside from the stills to be found in certain exile publications, there seems to be little extant photographic evidence of the atrocities associated with both Nazi and Soviet occupation, expropriation, and deportation, (though no doubt hidden archives are now everywhere coming to light).

Although the events described above provide an ever-present moral background there appears to be comparatively little directly picturing them which can be seen. Such events are of course shameful— sufficiently shameful for those responsible, both Nazi and Soviet, to have done their utmost to conceal their actions from public view. This is in accordance with one of the Laws of Totalitarian Information Control: the more shameful the episode, the fewer the photographs— indeed, the less the documentary evidence of any kind.

This was true of the Holocaust until, at the end of World War 11, an appalled and nauseated team of reporters and cameramen were allowed through the gates of Belsen and Auschwitz. What they filmed in the space of the next few hours and days remains etched in the memory of mankind. But suppose the photo-record they made didn’t exist? Suppose the Germans had had time both to wipe out the European Jews and erase all evidence of the crime? Suppose that not just years but whole decades had been allowed to pass before circumstances permitted open enquiry? Wouldn’t the repulsive perversities of those like David Irving (who claims the Holocaust never took place) be that much more plausible?

Such questions arise when one turns to films about the “Soviet Holocaust” of enforced collectivization fifty years ago. These are gradually appearing in the course of a post-glasnost outpouring of news and journal reports about Stalin’s terror and the lives it cost. For example, in June 1988 Russian readers learned of the 100,000 corpses found at Kuropaty, near Minsk, all shot during the period 1937-41. In March 1989 between 200,000 and 300,000 bodies in a grave near Bykovnia in the Ukraine were officially acknowledged as “victims of Stalinism”. And these examples seem to be merely the corners of a continental boneyard.

Recent assessments of the totality of human life lost under the Soviet regime are staggering: In September 1987 Yu. Poliakov, a leading Soviet demographer, estimated that during the Civil War, 1918-1922, the country’s population decreased by thirteen million. In March 1989, Roy Medvedev, a former dissident and notable historian, estimated the total number of Stalin’s victims (from 1927 to 1953) at forty million. V Pereverzev, writing in the Russite magazine Molodaia gvardiia, put the losses for the 1918-1939 period at 20.1 million..” Others have argued that these figures are too low. In June 1989 an article by 0. Marinicheva in Komsomol.’skaia pravda “estimated the total losses due to the brutality of the Soviet regime since 1917 at ninety million people’.’ [Krasnov 1991: 129-1301. ⁴

All such figures are estimates. But they suggest that the Soviet Holocaust was of a range and magnitude (and was directed by the Soviet government against its own citizens it should be remembered) well in excess of anything the Nazis achieved. Only a part of this colossal tragedy concerns us here—that dealt with by two films on collectivization and deportation to the labor camps, an episode in which "only" 14.5 million perished.

Since those unaware of these figures may be surprised, and will inevitably ask why it is that they are not as widely known as Hitler's infamies (one still meets academics who seem to believe they are all invented), it is perhaps necessary to make a brief comment on this before we start. The reasons why Hitler's murders have been so well-advertised, and Stalin's, by comparison, so well-concealed, are quite straightforward.

First, when Hitler attacked the European Jews he attacked a literate and influential European population whose leaders were to be found in some of the most prominent positions of cultural, scientific, and commercial life. Until the outbreak of war they were able to emigrate and those who did so were able to make the Jewish predicament known outside Germany. Only in the period 1942-45 was international communication extremely difficult, and a reliable account of what was happening in the death camps all but impossible to obtain.

In contrast, when Stalin attacked Russia's peasants he attacked a largely illiterate, powerless, rural population behind closed frontiers. They were unable to emigrate, were sent to their deaths into the vast and inaccessible silences of the north and east, and were wholly incapable of mobilising international opinion.

Secondly, Stalin's quasi-military assault on the countryside, with its grain seizures, deportations, and genocidal man-made famine of 1932-33, was largely overshadowed by the rise of Hitler in Germany—a political drama which was at once more visible, more portentous, and of much greater immediate concern to Western opinion. Reports to the effect that a few million peasants were suffering under Stalin were easily shrugged off. After all, a weary West complained, Russia's peasants were born to suffer. What else was new?

Thirdly, Western intellectuals were (rightly) as well-informed and alarmed about the prospect of fascism in Germany as they were (wrongly) ignorant and complacent about the murderous despotism which had evolved in post-Revolutionary Russia. Scores of communist-sympathising fellow-travellers, from George Bernard Shaw to Romain Rolland to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, kept up a chorus of praise for the Soviet regime even in the midst of its atrocities.

Anyone brave or independent enough to report what was actually happening was reviled as a crypto-fascist or worse. Large numbers of academics in the West had convinced themselves that collectivization was a good thing—whatever the cost. It was not a good thing—it was a terrible thing. Yet never have so many well-meaning intellectuals been so ready and so willing to shoot the unwelcome bearers of bad news.

Fourthly, and finally, the contrast between our knowledge of Nazi horrors and our ignorance of their Soviet equivalents is explained simply by the defeat of Germany. A victorious army marched into the Nazi death camps and exposed them to the eyes of the world. No such merciless exposure was ever visited on the numberless camps in the Gulag Archipelago (which, after all, belonged to our World War II ally) and for this reason the 'peculiar institutions' of the Soviet penal system have always had a more nebulous existence in the Western mind.

So it was that the entire historical episode of collectivization, deportation, and the "gulagization" of millions of Russian and Ukrainian peasants in the early 1930s passed almost without notice in the West, and whole populations went to their doom. In the Kuban, for example, a region in southern Russia which features in the film Leningradskaya Village, we are told that no less than half the total rural population either died of famine or was deported. And the question once again is this: in attempting to produce a film about something so shameful that the entire apparatus of state security was mobilized to prevent any record of it surviving, what can you do?

One answer to this question is that you can interview survivors. Memory bears spoken witness to events. Claude Lanzmann's Shoah is the paradigm and exemplary case, and it must have been prominently in the minds of those who made the film in the Kuban. Those familiar with Shoah will remember the deceptively idyllic opening scenes of field and stream, of willows along the banks of the Narew, and of the return of Simon Srebnik to the dark pine forests of Chelmno. Srebnik is one of only two survivors out of 400,000 murdered there.

The controlled artistry with which this man is introduced to us and his history is self-revealed through prolonged silences during which the viewer is compelled to bring a more than usually serious level of attention and concern to the task of watching a TV or movie screen; through the close involvement of the audience in the painful process of recollection; and through the perfect complementarity of interviewers, interpreters, witnesses, and theme.

Even within the first ten minutes of its entire nine and a half hours it is clear why Simone de Beauvoir should have written: "1 would never have imagined such a combination of beauty and horror. True, the one does not help to conceal the other. It is not a question of aestheticism: rather, it highlights the horror with such inventiveness and austerity that we know we are watching a great oeuvre. A sheer masterpiece." [Lanzmann 1985: x]

Leningradskaya Village is firmly in this tradition, and though its makers were plainly not aiming at anything as ambitious as Shoah, and were constrained by the one-hour program format of television, it combines with two other episodes in “The Hand of Stalin” series to present both an honorable and distinguished portrayal of aspects of the Soviet Holocaust (the other two one-hour episodes being Kolyma, about the labor camp complex in Siberia, and Leningrad, about the terror and arrests of 1937-38 in that City). ⁵ Comparison with Shoah is useful-it reveals the much more difficult circumstances in which “the cinema of witness” has to operate in today’s Russia than in Poland when Lanzmann made his film.

To interview a man in Poland in the early 1980s about the 1940s was to ask him to recollect events which, however vivid in memory, had long outlived the Nazi state. The Gestapo was no longer just down the street; a midnight knock on the door was no longer possible. By way of contrast, in 1989 in a Cossack village in southern Russia the claustrophobic atmosphere of state thought-control is still present, free speech is an unfamiliar novelty, and some degree of fear and suspicion regarding anyone enquiring into the fraught subject of collectivization is unavoidable.

It is therefore not surprising that the filmmakers feel obliged to explain at the outset the inhibiting context in which their interviews took place. In the Soviet Union, we are told, “by the spring of 1933 seven million had died of famine, and thirteen million had been deported. Only now, after 50 years of fear and silence, are the survivors beginning to speak.” Their diffidence is understandable. Time and again there had seemed to be a “thaw”—a relaxation of controls and a spirit of greater freedom encouraged by the regime. Time and again those who spoke out during such intervals of liberty were seized and imprisoned. Why should the Gorbachev dispensation be any different? Why should these filmmakers be trusted?

A wrinkled Party activist begins his tale by defending collectivization as “‘imperative. Collective farms were a great achievement”, he says. “How were we to feed the workers? Workers had to be fed”. True enough, but since modern analyses suggest that there is no reason whatever to think that traditional arrangements could not have fed them (see the article by Kseniia Mialo, p. 375), this is largely irrelevant. The question is: supposing that collectivization was desirable as a political goal, was it necessary to force it through at the cost of millions of lives?

For those running the USSR in 1930 the only possible answer to this question was a resounding “Yes!”. In their eyes rapid industrialization was essential, and capital to finance industrialization had to be extracted forcibly from the peasants. This was coldly and deliberately done by seizing their grain, selling it at a profit abroad, and using the income to buy Western machinery and to fund huge capital works. Meanwhile the peasants starved. For a variety of reasons this overall plan and purpose is only allusively treated in the interviews with surviving villagers (whereas it is central to the film Harvest of Despair discussed below).

Yet much can be learned from the style of the allusion itself. There is a studied reluctance on the part of all informants to ever identify those responsible—or even to name Stalin, 50 years after his death, as principal villain of the piece. Instead people say of the disasters that befell them that “they” wanted it, or “they” or­dered it, or “they” did it. It sounds like an inversion of the “we” of Zamyatin’s novel—the declamatory “we” that represents the voice of power at the Center is here seen from the submissive periphery as an anonymous “they” from whom all orders come.

No doubt there is something here of the eternal rural suspicion of distant cities and legislatures. Yet not only the peasants in Leningradskaya Village adopt this usage. Urban Party “activists” and ex-army men who came to the village in 1930 to direct the grain seizures and to round up victims for deportation also habitually refer to an anonymous “they” and their purposes. Perhaps we need some deep-thinking post-modernist to guide us here: plainly “they” is a key term in a discourse of generalized subjection and fear.

As for why it was necessary for the army men and the Party activists to do “their” bidding, starving millions, and sending more millions to their doom in the freezing wastes, we are told that both soldiers and party men were just “carrying out orders.”. And as he says this the merciless Red enforcer of yesteryear squirms, fidgets, and wrings his hands.

“We communists would meet and say ‘This is wrong’. But what could we do about it? You had to carry it out. If you’re a communist, then do it. So we followed instructions … How did I feel? I felt it was wrong. But I couldn’t do anything. I had to act wrongly, I had to. And I did so.”

It would be exaggerating to describe this cadre-leader, who ransacked the homes of starving peasants, and personally deported some 3000 of them to death and destruction, as conscience-stricken. But he does show some remorse. And the subtle difference between the taking of life for reasons of sheer racial annihilation (Nazi racism) and the taking of life in pursuit of some messianic social goal (Soviet communism) tends to soften one’s moral response.

As in Shoah the timeless beauties of field and stream, of spreading meadows and shivering poplar leaves, of flights of crows at sundown, provide a poetic counterpoint to horrific recollections which seem, against such scenes and in the light of recent events, to show the vanity of revolutionary ambitions. As in Shoah, the symbolic engines of destruction are lines of dark and faceless freight-cars, (the “ships of the Gulag” in Solzhenitsyn’s phrase), remorseless, inhuman, all iron inevitability and dismal clangs, rolling on steel rails slowly toward the east:

“It was morning” a craggy woman survivor tells us, standing in the railway yard where she had seen it happen. “They came to me and said people were being deported. Wagons were there and people were being loaded into them.” Then one of those who was being loaded takes up the tale. “We were young, and all we had were a lot of children. We were poor and barefoot. They loaded us into a wagon and off to Saratov.

The doors were locked and never opened. There were guards. The doors weren’t opened until we reached the destination in southern Kazakhstan or somewhere. There they unloaded us out onto the frozen ground. It was the start of January. We stayed to weed sugar-beet. Everyone was dying of hunger—the young, the old, everyone.”

“That’s where my four children died. ‘Look, said a doctor, ‘the children are dead, yet they walk as if they were alive. They are dead, yet still they move.’ A day or two later they too died. Every one.” The interviewer then asks whether she had any more children. “No. I didn’t want another family. I felt sorry for the children. I didn’t want any more,” she says, as her ancient face trembles with emotion and she is unable to go on. Another survivor, a man, says bluntly: “It was genocide. I had six uncles. They, with families of sometimes seven, were all deported. After a month none of them were alive. Not one.” He finds the memories too bitter to be borne, and asks that the interview be ended.

As more than one informant reports, this village was “on the blacklist”. Why? “Because there were Cossacks and kulaks, who had to be disposed of. Basically, the Cossacks had to be disposed of.” “Dekulakization”—a word almost as ugly as the brutalities it describes—we shall assume to be understood. But why were the Cossacks targeted? Both the Kuban and the Don Cossacks had strongly resisted collectivization, and reports exist of a full-scale peasant revolt which was put down by the Soviet government with heavy loss of life.

A sociological reason for this resistance is worth noting. The distinctive arrangements of the mir (or commune), involving the rotating use of strips of collectively owned land, do not appear to have been found among the Cossacks. Out on the edges of the Tsarist Empire—in Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, and in the southern Cossack regions—peasants tilled their land individually by households. In these non-Russian areas “each household held, either in ownership or under lease, a parcel of land which it cultivated as it pleased” [Pipes 1991: 98]. As successful independent farmers the Kuban Cossacks had no desire whatever to be collectivized. It was for this contrariness that the village was on the blacklist. This was why thousands of villagers had to be “disposed of”.

What do Russian anthropologists say today about this grim episode, now they are free to speak? Some idea can be had from the article by Kseniia Mialo, “The Thread That Was Torn: Peasant Culture and the Cultural Revolution”, which appeared in Novyi mir in August 1988. According to the summary provided by Krasnov, “the destruction of the Russian peasant way of life was a ‘cultural catastrophe’ which she likens to the Spanish destruction of the Inca and Aztec civilizations, the annihilation of the Albigensians and the Huguenots in France, and the decimation of the Indians in North Arnerica.”

In place of the blindness of Western colonizers, she sees the blind destructiveness of “Soviet ‘leftists’ who had no respect for the ‘primitive’ culture of the Russian peasantry on whom they forced both collectivization and ‘cultural revolution’, with disastrous results, not just for the peasants, but for the rest of the country.” [Krasnov 1991: 115]

Mialo “charges Soviet historians and sociologists with either ignoring the tragedy of the Russian peasantry or ‘creating a myth according to which the victim was just about the sole perpetrator of the crime’.” Nor does she find any economic justification for destroying the `primitive’ Russian peasantry: “Far from being an obstacle to modernization and industrialization” they could well have advanced Soviet agriculture on the basis of their own traditions [Krasnov 1991: 116].

Is one to assume that Leningradskaya Village is the first documentary of any significance to treat this subject? Not so. Although reports based on comprehensive interviews with the people affected, in their own villages, have been impossible until the collapse of the Soviet regime, there have certainly been other attempts to deal with the same events. One which has been made available to me is the early 1980s Harvest of Despair.

Produced by the Ukraine Famine Research Committee of Toronto, Canada, this documentary was made outside Russia, well before Gorbachev and perestroika, at a time when the very idea of conducting open on-site field research critical of Soviet policies was absurd. It also, however, makes wide use of interviews, though the men and women who speak are of a different kind to those in Leningradskaya Village: German diplomatic personnel who were present in Moscow and Kiev in 1932-33; Malcolm Muggeridge, then working as a young journalist in Russia; Lev Kopelev, whose account of his life as a zealous enforcer of collectivization in those days, The Education of a True Believer, appeared in 1981; and Petro Grigorenko, a former Soviet General.

Also heard from are a number of ordinary men and women, then living in Ukrainian villages, who have both survived and made their way to the West. What they say about the Ukraine wholly confirms and corroborates all that one can now hear said by the Cossacks of the Kuban.

The presentation is however very much more complicated and confused, since Harvest of Despair is first and foremost an impassioned pre-Gorbachev defense of Ukrainian nationalism, and a plea for cultural and political autonomy. As such it places collectivization and the famine of 1932-33 in the historical context both of Soviet nationalities policy and international relations, and it can be said that this wider frame of reference is ably handled by a writer, Peter Blow, with both a grasp of the facts and a persuasive interpretation to offer.

The narration brings out well the connection between the diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in November 1933 (when 25,000 per day were dying of hunger in the Ukraine), and the reliance of the U.S. State Department on the systematic mendacities of the New York Times reporter Walter Duranty (according to Muggeridge, “not only the greatest liar among the journalists of Moscow—the greatest liar I ever met in fifty years of journalism”); the complicity of Germany in ignoring the famine since exports of machinery to the Soviet Union, paid for by grain, were helping to keep Germans employed; and the sinister role of a deluded collection of Western leftists, conspicuous among whom was George Bernard Shaw, in assisting the Soviets to achieve a monumental cover-up of what was happening. The thirties were a terrible time. In Harvest of Despair this especially terrible chapter is well told.

More important for our purposes however are two other aspects of the film: first, the indications it contains of a wealth of original photographic material documenting collectivization and the famine, and secondly (and regretfully) the sadly counterproductive form in which this is presented. Rarely can material of such gravity have been so compromised. Parts of this film are virtually a clinical exhibit of what not to do if the very important information you possess, and the argument you wish to present, are to be taken seriously.

It is as if the director had unresistingly succumbed to the style of the 1930s and 40s newsreels he was required to review. Everything is taken at a headlong rush. Never is there time to reflect. If an army parade is shown, a busy fragment of band music is heard; if children are starving, misery music assails the ear; and if the bodies of the dead are being taken away a burst of choral mourning tells us how to react. Scenes and moods follow one another without the viewer ever having time to digest what they contain, let alone to express an appropriate emotional response. The result, at times, is to turn a real tragedy into a comedy of unintended effects.

Others might not be as jolted as I was by the disharmony of style and subject. But just as one was grateful, years ago, that Night and Fog had brought another moral and artistic dimension to the newsreel view of Belsen and Auschwitz, one can only hope that the material on collectivization will one day find a modern Alain Resnais. What do the archives actually hold? How might it be assembled? Is there in fact anything more than is shown in such a fragmentary manner here? What do the old Soviet archives contain—or was it all destroyed? ⁶ Perhaps it might be a suitable subject for Marina Goldovskaya, whose remarkable The Solovki Power documents the origins of the Soviet forced labor camps.

The trivializing complained about above is the effect of a certain narrative style. It assimilates material of profound documentary importance to the story-telling conventions of old-time propaganda pieces or to the declamatory rhetoric of “Time Marches On!” But there is of course a more serious form of trivialization now popular in the universities—one which seeks to divorce the photographic image from whatever it objectively represents, and to diminish its claim as primary data for our knowledge of events, all this in the course of a general subjectivizing of epistemic issues.

As I have suggested above, it seems to me that this does little to help stiffen our resistance to the David Irvings in our midst. It is Mr. Irving’s view, regularly stated, that the Holocaust never happened and that the death camps were built as postwar tourist attractions. He continues to claim that no Jews were gassed by the Nazis during the Second World War. Speaking to the London newspaper The Independent in 1992 he said: “It’s going to be a hot twelve months, but at the end of it the gas chamber legend will have vanished once and for all”.

How does one deal with this sort of thing? There are various approaches, no doubt, but surely the best proof of the falsity of Irving’s views is provided by the stills and cine-camera footage taken during the first hours and days after the allies entered the death camps. Such photographs, used in books, films, and educational displays about the Holocaust, are widely and correctly seen as irrefutable evidence of the crime.

There will always be David Irvings, on the Left as well as the Right, just as there will always be a sizeable constituency of wishful-thinking fanatics of one persuasion or another eager to accept the frauds they offer. It is salutary to remember that innumerable apologists for the Soviet regime are still convinced that the Soviet Holocaust “never happened—or that if it did it was a minor demographic blip which certainly didn’t involve 14.5 million dead.

I even have a colleague who thinks the widespread reports of cannibalism during the famine (such behavior is matter-of-factly described by several eye-witnesses in both the films under discussion) are “just propaganda”. Keeping our heads clear on the factual nature of the photographic record, and our minds open to the extraordinary experiences related in such examples of “the cinema of witness” as Leningradskaya Village, is one way of keeping the Irvings of both Left and Right under control.

1. See Isaiah Berlin’s Vico and Herder. Herder’s stay in Riga is mentioned by Arnolds Spekke in his History of Latvia.

2. Homeland. 1991. Produced and directed by Yuris Podnieks. Executive producer, Roger James. Associate producer, Chizuko Kobayashi. Made in association with NHK, the Baltic Branch of the Soviet‑British Creative Association, and Central Independent Television. Cameramen, Andres Slapins, Gvido Zvaigzne, Yuris Podnieks. Editor, Antra Tsilinska. Music, Martin Braun. Also involved were the Riga Documentary Studio, the Latvian and Estonian Film Archives, and Panavision USSR.

Yuris Podnieks made a subsequent film, Homeland Postscript, about the attack by Soviet Black Berets on the Latvian Interior Ministry on January 20th, 1991. In the course of their work his two cameramen, Andres Slapins and Gvido Zvaigzne, were shot and killed. Yuris Podnieks himself died in what is called “”a diving accident”, in a lake not far from Riga, some time later. A useful journalistic account which complements Homeland is Clare Thomson’s [19921 The Singing Revolution: a Political Journey through the Baltic States. See also the new book by Anatol Lieven, The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence [1993].

3. See Arnolds Spekke, History of Latvia: an Outline, chapter 18, “‘Ten Years of Foreign Occupation”. For Lithuania, see the relevant chapters of Albertas Gerutis, Lithuania: 700 Years.

4. Conquest 1976 is a good study of the whole subject of collectivization. Kopelev 1981 and Kravchenko 1989 contain the experiences and eye-witness reports of participants.

5. Leningradskaya Village. 1990. (Part 1 of “The Hand of Stalin” series). An October Films/PTV Co-Production for BBC Television. Director and cameraman, John Walker. Editors, Steve Stevenson, Kevin Ahern. Research, Liana Pornerantsev (USSR), Rebecca Penrose, Soviet Coordination in the Kuban, Pavel Tsavalanov, Boris Vergun, Sergei Grigoriev. Series producer, Tom Roberts. Series consultant, Michael Ignatieff. “With special thanks to Memorial-USSR; Dasha Chudoba, Ethnographic Museum Krasnodar.”

6. Harvest of Despair. (1984) Produced by the Ukraine Famine Research Committee, Toronto Canada. Directed by Slavko Nowytsky, Writer/Story consultant, Peter Blow. Filmmakers researching this episode of 20th Century history may find useful the list of institutional sources of still and film materials on which the editors of this film have drawn: Thorn EMI Elstree Studios, London; Cinémathèque Gaumont, Paris; Visnews Ltd., London; National Archives and Records Service, Washington; Library of Congress Motion Picture Archives, Washington; Sherman Grinberg Film Libraries, New York; The New York Times, New York; Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Toronto; Lypinsky East European Research Institute, Philadelphia; Ukrainian Orthodox Museum, South Bound Brook; Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre, Winnipeg; Foundation to Commemorate the 1933 Famine, Montreal.

7. The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Monty and Rita Rutkovskis, who drew his attention to the Latvian materials discussed above.

Berlin, Isaiah 1976 Vico and Herder. London: Hogarth Press.

Bullock, Alan 1991 Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. London: HarperCollins Publishers.

Conquest, Robert 1976 The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. London: Hutchinson.

Gerutis, Albertas (ed.) 1969 Lithuania: 700 Years. Baltimore, Md.: Maryland (Recovery Communication, Inc.)

Kopeley Lev 1981 The Education of a True Believer. Aldershot: Wildwood House.

Krasnov, Vladislav Russia beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth. New Brunswick, N.J. Transaction Publications.

Lanzmann, Claude Shoah, an Oral History of the Holocaust. The complete text of the film. New York: Pantheon Books.

Lieven, Anatol The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Pipes, Richard 1990 The Russian Revolution, 1899-1919. London: Collins-Harvill.

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. 1974-1978 The Gulag Archipelago. (3 vols.) London: Collins-Harvill. Thornson, Clare

1992 The Singing Revolution: A Political Journey through the Baltic States. London: Michael Joseph.

Introduction 2004

What exactly was behind that talk about ‘observation languages’, ‘elementary propositions’, ‘basic statements’, and ‘protocol sentences’ once found in Wittgenstein and Carnap?

The idea seemed to be that if you only simplified things enough and got back to the nitty gritty of bald description (or somehow got back to the ding an sich through bald description) then language wouldn’t lead you astray. But as any cameraman might have explained, if you’re really interested in descriptive accuracy, then for very large reaches of the known universe, both micro and macrocosmic, a photon map beats verbalising any day.

As for information about the unknown universe—photography is much better than words. It’s a pity that Karl Popper, who clarified a number of things, carried his hostility to the “bucket theory of the mind” and to naïve empiricism so far he would probably not have understood that bottomless information buckets can be very useful.

They certainly are in cosmography. He himself believed that selective perception sabotaged human observation at every point. In a typical statement he says that “most dissectors of the heart before Harvey observed the wrong things—those which they expected to see. There can never be anything like a completely safe observation free from the dangers of misinterpretation.” [Conjectures and Refutations, page 41, footnote 8.]

No doubt this is so. But real-time photon maps can show you the circulation of the blood by staining techniques (whatever you may believe and however determined you are not to see it), just as they can record the activities of particles in cloud-chambers (which no-one can either see or predict) and show the vortices of sunspots or the explosions of distant super-novae.

Theory of course must design and cast the net; but what is caught is something else again. In informational terms, man proposes: photography disposes. For countless areas of countless branches of the natural sciences (not the social sciences, where consciousness and feedback supervene) mechanical description replaced linguistic description long ago.

Such, anyway, were the ideas 25 years ago behind this free-wheeling rumination on aspects of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus along with Popper’s theory of ‘World 3’ as set out in Objective Knowledge. The essay first appeared in Art International in January 1978. Since that time both the reach and grasp of what I call ‘objective graphics’ (which supersede human sensoria for observational and record-keeping purposes) have continually expanded until now there is hardly any aspect of life free of electronic eyes and ears. Furthermore, they are valued precisely because they work like buckets, catching and holding far more evidence than is sought twenty-four hours a day.

Epistemology without a knowing cameraman

[Art International, January 1978]

“It frequently happens, moreover … and this is one of the charms of photography … that the operator himself discovers on examination, perhaps long afterwards, that he had depicted many things he had no notion of at the time.” Fox Talbot, pioneer photographer, 1844.¹

Among the defining criteria of the objective knowledge of World 3 is the “possibility or potentiality of being understood, (the) dispositional character of being understood or interpreted … And this potentiality or disposition may exist without ever being actualized or realized”. Karl Popper, 1973.²

“2.131: In a picture the elements of the picture are the representatives of objects.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1922.³

ONE

Fox Talbot’s modest view of the photographer’s role belongs plainly to another time and place. Nowadays things are much changed. The nineteenth-century’s humble “operator” working quietly away in the decent obscurity of his darkroom has long since given way to the strident practices of “creative artistry”, and it is not to be expected that an ambitious creative artist would acknowledge, much less admire, those accidental impingements of an objective world which the genius of the photographer “had no notion of at the time”. In the most famous examples of photographic creativity nature herself plays a secondary role. And as for the dumbly mechanical nature of photography, the less said about that the better.

The main reason for this state of affairs is embarrassingly obvious: it is the historic deference of “rude mechanicals” for “art”. Few artisans more than photographers have felt so keenly and so long the pressure of an older and more prestigious tradition. There is scarcely a primer on lensmanship which doesn’t pointedly emphasize, sometimes on the very first page, that taking a picture “is not just a mechanical act”. There is scarcely an introduction to an album of photographs which doesn’t go out of its way to celebrate the role of the interpretive human eye behind the uninterpretive, glassy lens.

In modern times this endemic subjectivism has been given a huge boost by the cult of self-expression. No opportunity has been lost to equate the taking of pictures with the making of pictures (the second, of course, being the more admirable), as if the artist’s ego felt imperilled by any recognition of the essentially objective, physico-mechanical nature of photography itself. Underlying this, needless to say, is the assumption that mental states are self-evidently good, whereas machines are self-evidently bad. Ergo, if I use a machine like a camera I must justify this use in terms of its thorough subordination to mind; I must show that what science takes to be an instrument of improved perception is more wisely seen as a self-expressive device.

All of which this particular cameraman finds somewhat perverse. The struggle to distinguish what is inside our heads from what is not has been embarrassingly long and difficult; and in this struggle, photographs (along with tapes and digital imaging as well; together they make up the family of “objective graphics”) have played a very useful role. Just think, for example, what progress might have been made if cameras had been around in the 18th century. Would Sam Johnson, refuting Berkeley’s subjectivism, have kicked a stone or taken a photograph? Given his natural boisterousness he might easily have done both.

At all events there’s not much doubt that he would very soon have noticed what Fox Talbot noticed over a century ago—that the world of objective graphics is full of surprises. Not only does the operator never get quite what he expected, in most cases he gets more.⁴ That of course is precisely why film and tape are now used for both scientific enquiries and social investigation, from radio-telescopic explorations of space and the mapping of x-ray nebulae, all the way down to the police tape recordings of witnesses’ statements or last night’s television news.

And this has profound implications. Today the more vulgar forms of irrationalist epistemology shelter behind two protective doctrines—the Doctrine of Selective Perception and the Doctrine of Ideology. The first declares us to be incurably one-eyed; the second accuses us of only using that eye which serves our own interests, narrowly defined. But the interesting thing about objective records on film and tape is the way they relentlessly undermine these doctrines by their very nature. An incorrigible ideologue soon finds what he’s up against. The camera’s sheer inclusiveness works against him, and the only way he can make its images say what he wants them to say is by the most determined, and visibly eccentric, editing.

Negative evidence for this can be found in the total absence of modern documentary film-making in those vast political regions where they take ideology really seriously—between the River Elbe and the shores of the China Sea. For it is not always understood, and perhaps needs stressing, that the technology of social enquiry does not exist in a vacuum: It presupposes a social philosophy and political environment which allows and encourages enquiry to take place.

Is it possible to pursue this question further? Can we look beyond the social arrangements which allow the technology of empirical enquiry to exist, and examine some of those ideas which, if they have not actually furthered, have at least accompanied its rise? After Marshall McLuhan’s extravagances it has become harder than it should be to argue the less apocalyptic connections between technology and other areas of life and thought.

But this doesn’t mean that they don’t exist; and to the objectivist more interested in the kind of thinking which relates thought to things rather than to sensations (let alone the stoned sensoria of mass society), there may still be a few lessons to be learnt.

TWO

In order to draw as clear a distinction as possible between objective and subjective graphics Fox Talbot’s observation is a good place to begin, especially that scene of a photographer dusting off an old print and being delighted to find all sorts of things in it he didn’t know were there. This experience, while common enough in photography, is even more common in documentary films, where individual frames may be examined and found to contain far more than the cameraman was conscious of at the time.

By way of contrast, you can’t imagine Brueghel the Elder dusting off an old canvas and finding a dog or a steeple he was unaware of painting years before. In subjective graphics the painter inspecting his past work finds only what he expects to find—or if he doesn’t, he attributes the unwanted trouvaille to a failing memory of events. This predictability is what makes subjective graphics “closed systems” in a solipsistic sense, and while on the one hand it helps to make them more reassuring (which is one legitimate function of art), it also guarantees a certain epistemological sterility on the other. An exhaustive list of everything stored in the memory of the painter’s mental cupboard will tell you all that the work of art has to say: the state of affairs it represents is a state of mind.

Now just the opposite is true of objective graphics. You could have the fullest possible inventory of everything in a photographer’s mental cupboard and it wouldn’t help you a bit. This is obvious enough in the case of the sort of electronic scanning equipment used in radio-telescopy which is, by definition, searching the sky for things which may or may not exist. But although less obvious, it is also true of the cameraman shooting film for the evening news.

Cameramen are only human, and it must be confessed that not all of them are single-mindedly absorbed in their work. It often happens that their attention swings to and fro between whatever can be seen in the viewfinder and such normal human preoccupations as food, and sex, and vengeance. It might even be argued that a highly skilled cameraman should be able to give his mind almost entirely to the latter; for it is one of the marks of his skill that after long experience he knows so exactly what the producer back at the studio regards as “news” that he is able to frame it and film it almost subconsciously.

Of course news film is comparatively demanding: certainly the work keeps you awake. But when you turn to something like a cricket match on a drowsy summer’s day then the cameraman’s mind is bound to wander; while sound recordists, especially during interviews, are always falling asleep on the job. Yet despite the mental vagaries of their operators, cameras and sound recorders (no less than radio-telescopes) continue faithfully imprinting their maps of states of affairs. And like Fox Talbot’s photograph, the resulting mechanical maps possess “the dispositional character of being understood or interpreted” as Popper puts it, whether or not this ever actually happens, and whether or not there is any available consciousness to do it for any number of years.⁵

To speak of objective graphics as maps, and maps, moreover, containing coordinate points, is plainly to use the word map in an extended sense. The extension however is not mine alone: it has already been made by those astronomers who in recent years have provided us with pictures of radio-galaxies and supernova remnants—pictures which they call maps.⁶

And the interesting thing about this usage (and about the images themselves) is that it brings out the generally hidden nature of photographs and tape recordings as patterns of coordinate points too. In an x-ray map of a nova the sky has been scanned to detect varying intensities of x-ray emission; and the finest discriminable units of emission are then displayed as a chequered pattern of variously coloured squares. It is true that the colours are arbitrary and reveal more about the responsible technician’s aesthetic taste than anything else. But as in all objective graphics the position of the squares is emphatically not arbitrary. In these astronomical maps each little square (or “element of the picture” in Wittgenstein’s phrase) is a coordinate point defined as so many seconds of arc in a given sector of sky; and furthermore, there is a close resemblance between these squares and what Wittgenstein, talking about linguistic maps, referred to as “the representatives of objects”.

Now although it is a long way from the grand cosmic imagery of a supernova to the family snapshot taken last summer, it is their shared character as maps, maps made up of definite coordinate points formed by electromagnetic waves, which certifies their objectivity. In the case of ordinary photographs of daily life we usually attend so exclusively to form and content that the underlying principle of coordinate pointillism is overlooked. Yet that is how they are made. A light ray emanating from a spot in the world follows a mathematically fixed path through a lens and ionizes an atom of silver in the photographic emulsion. Simultaneously a neighboring ray ionizes a neighboring atom, making two. And so on ad infinitum until all the particles in the emulsion have been either struck or not struck by rays of light.

In the final event what we get, multiplied a million-fold, is a map consisting of a myriad minute particulars, each ionized atom (or developed crystal) a point in a coordinate graphic system corresponding to the world beyond. In recordings on magnetic tape, whether sound or video, we find the magnetization of iron particles instead of ionized atoms of silver: but in each case what the patterns of particles amount to is a system of coordinate points. Both ionized atoms and magnetized particles are “representatives of objects” which map the physical world.

THREE

In discussions of this kind the word “representation” seems impossible to avoid. This is unfortunate because it is all too easy to confuse the pictorial and the political meanings of the term; indeed this confusion is almost inevitable since their meanings are very nearly the same. Political representation proposes that a man be said to represent a district, a class, or a nation, when he synecdochically “stands for” numerous other human elements in the political map. It embodies, in brief, an organizational economy of time and motion. According to the pictorial meaning, on the other hand, a few strokes of paint may “stand for” trees or towns or people. This embodies an economy of meaning and display.

And for a perfect example of the way these meanings blur together into one we need look no further than the quotation from Wittgenstein already cited: “The elements of the picture are the representatives of objects.” Reading this, one all too easily conjures up an image of a kind of pictorial House of Representatives full of splashes of paint and spots of colour in various shades of red and blue. With this in mind it becomes as much an ethical as an artistic necessity to know upon what principle a splash of paint represents a collection of men, and by what right the painter decides that it shall.

There is a decided risk here both of burying the argument under a metaphor, and of politicising the whole discussion; nevertheless it may as well be stated that in objective graphics the process of “representation” has much more of a particularistic, grass-roots character built into it than it does in either painting or politics, for its history has been guided by the ideal of one man/one vote/one representative. Under the normative goal of fidelity, and of higher and still higher fidelity, objective graphics continually strive toward an ideal in which each discriminable unit of space/time in the universe should be represented by a discriminable unit in the photograph or the recording tape as well.

Fidelity and faithfulness are qualities which are less admired today than previously, but in the case of objective graphics a forthright and unembarrassed use of both terms should be encouraged at all times. This is partly desirable for historical reasons, since as far back as 1828 we find Nicéphore Nièpce, the man who first obtained and fixed a camera image, proclaiming his intention to “copy nature with the greatest fidelity”.⁷ But it is also appropriate, despite an uncompromisingly technical foundation, and a vocabulary of things like “linearity” and “time-base stability” and “frequency response”, because the precise modern concept of high fidelity really incorporates the older, vaguer, nineteenth century one.

The effect of measures like frequency response is to make exact and explicit the implicitly quantitative nature of old-fashioned “exclamatory” fidelity—what might be called the fidelity of the “aha!” response. The “aha!” response is determined by the frequency response, and it can be heard today every time two photographs or films or radio-telescopic pictures or sound or videotapes are compared and one of them is found to contain incomparably more and clearer detail than the other. In objective graphics the Law of More is the law of their evolution.

The Law of More insists that if an astronomer is given a choice between two radio telescopes he is bound to prefer the one giving most detail, just as it requires that any ordinary photographer should choose the sharper of two lenses. Whether the available detail is used is another matter. It is of course true that the astronomer may elect to display his data in deliberately coarsened aggregates, just as the local photographer may not always want to use the finest resolution of his lens in the final prints. To take a famous example, when Julia Margaret Cameron softened the focus on such portraits as her head of Sir John Herschel, turning the astronomer’s hair into a corona of solar flares, she pioneered a technique used by numerous cameramen to spiritualise the flesh of Hollywood stars.⁸

But this only goes to show the mutual antipathy of objective and subjective graphics. And in the resulting fog of soft-focussed spirituality it is important not to lose sight of the main issue. This is that the capacity of one instrument to get more detail than another, and the “disposition” or “potentiality” of these details to represent objects (whether or not this capacity is realised), is what guarantees that it will be the most sought-after instrument in its field. For a man who wants to find out what there is in the world, rather than what he has in his mind, the most highly prized instrument is the one which represents with the highest fidelity physical states of affairs.

A physical state of affairs always exhibits varying degrees of order, more or less; and physicists sometimes say that degrees of order and quantities of information add up to much the same thing. This is directly related to the Law of More which governs the evolution of objective graphics, for what the constantly multiplying coordinate points in higher and higher fidelity images are actually coordinated with (or what they correspond to), are the degrees of order perceptible in the world. When information is synonymous with order it is measured in “bits”, those anonymous minimal units which enable us to distinguish, to discriminate, to tell features from featurelessness, and something from nothing (or some thing from no thing).

As narrowly interpreted by a biologist the Law of More might mean more detailed information about organelles; as interpreted by an astronomer it might only mean more detailed information about galactic boundaries; but in its broad and general form applied to all objective graphics indiscriminately the Law of More always means more “bits”. From which it follows that what the “ahas” of the exclamatory criterion of fidelity really celebrate is the ability of objec­tive graphics to distinguish finer and finer degrees of organization in the physical world; to map it, as it were, with closer and closer coordinate perfection.

These considerations should further sharpen our distinction between objective and subjective graphics, for in the realm of art the degree of order reflects the order in the artist’s mind. There, as Gombrich was at pains to show, norm governs form;⁹ and the vocabulary which elaborates on this relationship is one which richly exploits the possibilities of Symbols and Meaning and Sense. No one who has enjoyed using such terms could be insensitive to their loss, or unaware how poor a substitute for such heady notions a diet of anonymous “bits” of “information” must seem.

To insist that a professional appreciator of subjective graphics should forgo this prestigious and delightful terminology in favour of mere “bits” would be to dash from his lips a beaker full of the warm south and replace it with a mug of gruel. Meaning, after all, is sought by poets; whereas information is more often sought by the police. But there it is; and as a true prophet of the Reformation of Objective Graphics ich kann nicht anders. Besides, a renunciation of Symbols and Meaning and Sense will make it a lot easier to relocate Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning where it naturally belongs—in the world of objective graphics.

FOUR

It would not be too hard to find people who would agree that of the two Wittgensteins, Wl and W2, it is the objectivistic thought of the Tractatus which is more scientifically significant. But even among these there would be few defenders of the “picture theory of meaning”. Wittgenstein’s early belief that language pictorially maps reality, and his attempt to define the conditions of exact linguistic cartography, are generally regarded as woefully misconceived. No doubt they were: but then it is precisely because language can never map reality with anything approaching coordinate precision that objective graphics are important—they do it so much better.

And when one ponders on those parts of the Tractatus one can understand it is hard to avoid being struck by the ways in which Wittgenstein’s criteria for linguistic representation, and his atomistic criteria for fidelity, fit much more naturally the representation of objective graphics. “A picture is attached to reality” we read at 2.1511.¹⁰ “It reaches right out to it” with what seem to be feelers connecting words and things. Like most people who have never actually seen a Wittgensteinian picture I rather doubt if this is so. But how much more sense the same idea makes in the case of objective graphics, for exact ontological maps inhere in the very process by which they are made, projected and drawn by electromagnetic waves which do indeed “reach right out” from the reality they project.

Wittgensteinian fidelity even has a numerical criterion which relates to the Law of More. At 4.04 we read that “in a proposition there must by exactly as many distinguishable parts as in the situation that it represents”.¹¹ Now the Law of More requires that for any given field of view or state of affairs, cosmic or microcosmic, the more faithful report is the one which provided more discriminable bits. And by making only a few substitutions to 4.04 we can see how easily it can be adapted to our purposes: “In an objective graphic there must be exactly as many bits as in the situation that it represents.” If there are not exactly as many bits then the fidelity will be lower, and the information inherent in the state of affairs will not be faithfully represented.

Lest some of these speculative interpretations be thought too whimsical to be taken seriously I should perhaps add that there is more to 4.04 than the short excerpt given above. In a second paragraph Wittgenstein reinforces his notion of numerical equivalence by adding that a proposition and a state of affairs “must possess the same logical (mathematical) multiplicity. (Compare Hertz’s Mechanics on dynamical models)”. The reference to the famous physicist is significant: he was a man who had thought much on the nature of faithful representation. And it is appropriate that the quantification of fidelity has become inseparable from his name; wherever you find audio systems in handsome cabinets of teak veneer men talk about hertz or kilohertz to establish the fidelity with which their systems represent.

Yet it is perhaps an earlier thought in the Tractatus which most clearly relates to that essential feature of objective graphic representation—its coordinate nature. At 2.15 we find that “the fact that the elements of a proposition are related to one another in a determinate way represents that things are related to one another in the same way”.¹² Points which relate to each other in a “determinate way”, corresponding point for point with reality, are really coordinates. And once this is grasped it becomes apparent that Wittgenstein’s “picture theory of meaning” is equally, and perhaps more usefully, a “coordinate theory of representation”, a rechristening which preserves his general aim of establishing certain principles of analysis while avoiding all reference to symbols and meaning and sense. “In an objective graphic the elements of the picture are the representatives of objects.” And in the sense that they represent them, they are indeed.

Which brings me to that outstanding example of musical low-fidelity, Wittgenstein’s gramophone record; or rather, the serial stages of music he describes from idea, to score, to performance, to the objective graphic of the mechanical recording. After all the plain good sense about mapping and coordinate correspondence, what he has to say at 4.014 is painfully disappointing. Despite the importance attached to numerical equivalence and to the correlations of parts which exact correspondence requires, he seems casually to imply that there’s really not much difference in the representational fidelity of machines and men:

“A gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes, and the sound-waves, all stand to one another in the same internal relation of depicting that holds between language and the world.”¹³

Now it’s one thing to say that they share some general internal relation, and another thing entirely to imply an external equation. Yet this is what soon follows:

“4.0141: There is a general rule by means of which the musician can obtain the symphony from the score, and which makes it possible to derive the symphony from the groove on the gramophone record, and, using the first rule, to derive the score again.”

I suppose much depends on how precisely we interpret the word “score”. But the gist of what he says is not only at odds with my general argument here; it also contradicts his own numerical and structural criteria for facsimiles. The distinction between what happens when a musician reads a score and when a needle reads a groove is absolute. We have high-fidelity amplifiers and we value them. We don’t have high-fidelity violinists and no-one would pay to hear them if we did. What we look for in violinists are those felicitous infidelities of style which would be the despair of anyone who wanted all performances of a score to sound the same. These infidelities ensure that one performance is never a coordinate representation of another.

Introducing a human performance governed by general rules of interpretation into any chain of mechanical replications is the surest possible guarantee of low fidelity. And this particular example of Wittgenstein’s early thought is not only significant for the way it dramatises the contrast between objective and subjective graphics; it also forms an intellectual bridge between the hard-edged objectivism of the Tractatus and the notably soft-edged subjectivism of his later years.

It’s a long way no doubt from the subjective degradation of musical performances in the Tractatus to the preoccupation with rules and games in the Investigations; and from there to the modish wisdom of the academicians of ideology. And perhaps the only excuse for mentioning them all in one breath is to suggest that once you lose your grip on the idea of description as fidelity to states of affairs, a fidelity expressed in quanta of information, then very little stands in the way of the arrant subjectivism of the present day. The ruminations of the Investigations relativise truth into linguistic localism; in the doctrine of ideology the point is power.

FIVE

A recent study of Wittgenstein¹⁴ gives some credit to the Austrian psychologist Karl Buhler for redirecting the ideas of the Tractatus away from the picture theory of meaning. It appears that Buhler’s view of the mind was aggressively anti-pictorial: whatever thought and thinking might consist of, images and imagery were mere mental decoration. Instead he proposed something called “imageless thought” and regarded vagueness in human communication as inherent, irremediable, and at times desirable.

While it is highly unlikely that the author of Objective Knowledge would agree with all of this, Buhler’s view of the mind as engaged in a continuous process of eliminative enquiry does appear to have influenced Popper’s thought, and Buhler’s evolutionary views on language are often mentioned. From the view of the mind as always searching for answers to questions it follows that there is no such thing as the blank reception of data radiating from objects “out there” which is then imprinted on human senses as light waves imprint themselves on photographic film. The mind, Popper reminds us, is a problem-solving device, not a bucket.¹⁵

With this proposition no advocate of objective graphics would disagree. Yet the metaphor of the bucket, so inapt as a psychological model, is entirely appropriate as a photographic model. Buckets and cameras are similar sorts of things. Both have large orifices with a habit of indiscriminately sweeping things up, water in one case and light-waves in the other. Of course when Popper rejects the bucket theory of the mind he is also rejecting, and rightly, the photographic theory of the mind as well.

But why allow bad metaphors to prejudice one against good machinery? Especially since there is such a strong resemblance between the impersonality of that knowledge he finds stored for an indifferent posterity in “World 3” and the impersonality of the representations of objective graphics, the information they give us about physical states of affairs which always remains as a disposition or potentiality only awaiting the arrival of some Fox Talbotian trouveur who “discovers, on examination, perhaps long afterwards” things which no-one previously had any notion existed. Popper writes about unconsulted books in libraries which contain knowledge in the form of as yet uncontroverted statements about the nature of things; and stresses that these statements are quite independent of any experiencing consciousness.¹⁶ Surely much of the information contained in objective graphics is similar?

It’s true that one of the things Popper values most as an epistemologist is verisimilitude, and truthful assertions approximating more and more closely to that state. Whereas objective graphics belong to a nonlinguistic and alogical universe of physical representations which show, which display, which mirror—but which do not assert. Sometimes they show with marvellous detail, but for all their precision and exactitude they lack the unique linguistic possibility of negation.

Wittgenstein’s dogged attempt to assimilate words to pictures in the Tractatus was really aimed at having the best of both worlds; the exactitude of neutral representation and the possibility of propositional affirmation and denial which only belongs in the normative universe of logic. This can’t be done. But what pictures can do (and what objective graphics do every day) is provide the necessary observational evidence for propositional assertion. And surely this evidence is part of the objective knowledge of “World 3”? Surely when Rutherford said to Chadwick that all sorts of subatomic activities had been “going on” and expressed surprise that his colleague hadn’t known about them he was implying that this was something which Chadwick did know now; or at any rate knew more reliably as a result of the cloud chamber evidence?

It would hardly seem so from a reading of Objective Knowledge, where remarks on the role of special instruments in building up the picture we have of the physical world are few and grudging. In fact one of the only places where the impersonal mechanical fact-gathering is seen in a favorable light is on the occasion when Popper draws on the arguments of that little-known epistemologist, Winston Churchill:

“Some of my cousins who had the great advantage of University education”, wrote Churchill, “used to tease me with arguments to prove that nothing has any existence except what we think of it … I always rested upon the following argument which I devised for myself many years ago … here is this great sun standing apparently on no better foundation than our physical senses. But happily there is a method apart altogether from our physical senses, of testing the reality of the sun … astronomers … predict by (mathematics and) pure reason that a black spot will pass across the sun on a certain day. You … look, and your sense of sight immediately tells you that their calculations are vindicated … We have taken what is called in military map-making a ‘cross bearing’. We have got independent testimony to the reality of the sun. When my metaphysical friends tell me that the data on which the astronomers made their calculations were necessarily obtained originally through the evidence of their senses, I say ‘No’. They might, in theory at any rate, be obtained by automatic calculating-machines set in motion by the light falling upon them without admixture of the human senses at any stage …”¹⁷

Popper comments: “The argument is highly original; first published in 1930 it is one of the earliest philosophical arguments making use of the possibility of automatic observatories and calculating machines (programmed by Newtonian theory).”¹⁸

I know of no other place in Popper’s writings where the true significance of objective graphics is recognised. And the basic reason appears to be the one already alluded to—a suspicion that the secret motive of anyone using mechanical analogies is to promote that epistemological enemy, “the bucket theory of the mind”.

Yet the details of Churchill’s statement are certainly illuminating. We have automatic calculating machines, set in motion by light falling on them, and “without admixture of the human senses at any stage”. This description exactly fits a considerable amount of hardware now orbiting the earth or voyaging to distant places, hardware which is receiving and storing information on the degree of order in the immediate environment at a rate no mind could cope with, is processing it in the form of coordinates subject to instant recall, coordinates which as in all mechanical graphics are “the representatives of objects”.

Of course automatic machinery can be set in motion in more ways than one—sometimes it is triggered when you enter a room. That is how many of the White House tapes were obtained. And it would be hard to find a better example of the discrepancy between intention and use than these unusual examples of modern recording techniques. Presumably President Nixon had the tape-recorders installed in the basement in the hope that he would be laying the foundation of a memorial Nixon archive to be at least as large, if not as pretentious, as the Johnson mausoleum down in Texas. And for months the recorders turned dutifully on and off, building up an impressive store of information about states of affairs which were also affairs of state.

At the end of it all someone went through the tapes and made a number of unexpected discoveries which had been doggedly concealed up to that time. Subjectively they shouldn’t have been there at all. Subjectively, they weren’t. As the President said to Haldemann, advocating an implausible degree of low-fidelity playback: “You can say I don’t remember; you can say I don’t recall.”¹⁹ And it is also true that some of the coordinates were missing. There were long gaps in the tapes where a beleaguered subjectivity had tried stubbornly to mis-represent.

But despite all this there was still enough unerased objectivity to ruin the Administration. For—if I may paraphrase Fox Talbot—it is one of the charms of objective graphics that an operator may discover, days, months, or even perhaps years later, that he has done and said many things which all his faculties tell him could never have taken place at the time.

2. Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge, Oxford, 1973, page 116.

3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961 (trans by D.F. Pears and B.F.McGuinness), page 15.

4. President Nixon, for example, got much more than he expected. The history of the White House tapes exemplifies the dramatic consequences of the data acquisitiveness of objective graphics.

5. A story from the early days of nuclear research at the Cavendish Laboratory nicely illustrates the contrast between the mental state of the operator and the result of his work. We are told that when Chadwick showed Rutherford the first cloud-chamber photographs of recoiling protons, Rutherford exclaimed: “Do you mean to say that all this has been going on and you didn’t know it!” (Understanding Physics Today, by W. H. Watson. Cambridge University Press, 1963, p. 16.)

6. See “X-Rays from Super-Nova Remnants”, by Philip A. Charles and J. Leonard Culhane, Scientific American, December 1975.

7. [When the essay was originally printed in Art International the footnotes accidentally terminated at this point. The passage from Churchill occurs in his autobiographical My Early Life.]

Regrettably, the remaining footnotes were omitted when the article was originally printed in 1978, and cannot now be found.

Research institute or sacred site?

Bryan Wilson’s piece about secularisation (Encounter, October 1975) overlooks one of the more poignant features of the modern scene—the new role of anthropologists as custodians of primitive religion, and the conversion of ethnographic research institutes into bastions of religious faith.

I don’t mean to suggest that every bright-eyed PhD candidate in anthropology today sees himself in a priestly role, or feels inspired by a religious vocation. Most are as sceptical of sorcery as of perdition. But what George Feaver has called the New Tribalism is a proud creed, and its gods are jealous gods. Syncretised with the pride and jealousy of the Old Tribalism the result is a powerful endorsement of totem and taboo.

Of course it is still possible to be both an anthropologist and a sceptic. Nevertheless both individual scholars and entire research organisations are finding that the price of an accommodation with science has often to be paid on bended knees.

Take for example the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. This was set up in the good old days when social scientists were less apologetic about their trade, and primitive religion was still something you studied rather than endorsed. A culture was dying, and the Institute was to record what still survived. It was in this spirit that a series of films were made showing Aboriginal secret ceremonies—films which it was hoped would provide an observational basis for future research and an educational resource for Aborigines and Whites alike.

Realism too realistic for its own good

But this was not to be. It seems realism can be too realistic for its own good. Like most modern documentaries the films stick close to actuality. Unlike most modern documentaries this very feature was a serious handicap. For surely, it was argued, if the original actuality were an awfully secret affair, shouldn’t the alarmingly realistic facsimile be secret too?

Such was the feeling of old tribesmen adhering to the Old Tribalism. In recent times such a view had scarcely affected the march of science in Sydney and in Melbourne; the physical universes of tribe and metropolis were distinct, and their respective ethical universes were too.

But now things have been changing. What if a secret ceremonial scenario were sent back from the film labs in Sydney and projected to the wrong people out in the bush? The ubiquitous projector made this possible. The thirst of Aboriginal communities for films of all and every kind made it probable. To forestall such an eventuality restrictions were put on the distribution of the films to ensure that they would never travel unchaperoned beyond the city limits.

Such restrictions satisfied the pride of the Old Tribalism—a pride of exclusiveness. But soon the New Tribesmen pointed out how unfair and wrong it was to allow white women and children and uninitiated men in Sydney and Melbourne to see the films while their black compatriots were forbidden. In contrast to that of the Old Tribalism the pride of the New Tribalism is egalitarian; and this emotion is much harder to satisfy. Those who most strongly feel it are apt to strike all-or-nothing attitudes: if all cannot share equally, then none shall share anything at all.

And so it was to be. Driven by the threats of the New Tribals and their white devotees, fearful of alienating the Old, the Institute proceeded to extend the parochial ethical scheme of Aboriginal society (with all its prohibitions and resolutely anti-feminine rules) to the Australian nation as a whole. Henceforth only mature males with impeccable bona fides would be allowed to see the films.

The Institute had been set up to “do science”, a secular activity. Yet in a curious way it has ended up “doing religion.” In its own eyes the Institute may have seen itself as a producer of scientific records; but in the eyes of Tribalism, both Old and New, its true role was that of a manufacturer of religious artifacts. And having become an archive of sacred objects it was hard to refuse doing priestly duty as the temple guardian as well. In this way a scientific body found itself gradually moving from the world of fact to the world of faith—and from the dull routines of research to the higher excitements of revivalism.

The perils of revivalism

Revivalism is a notoriously emotional business, and it was only to be expected that some of the more ardent spirits should have been carried away. Out in the bush, zealous young white converts to the New Tribalism took it upon themselves to spiritually fortify Aboriginals whose faith was on the wane. I remember one evening hearing an old Aboriginal stockman complain about the nuisance of local sorcery—he had been a victim of “bone-pointing” that very day. A young white enthusiast from the city gently corrected him.

It was patiently explained that whatever its discomfiting effects on individuals, bone-pointing played a vital cultural role in stiffening social discipline and ensuring community respect for traditional rules. The old man fell silent, put on his hat, and went silently off into the night.

But it was not in the bush, it was in the nation’s Academies, that logic was stoically pushed to an extreme. If films could be banned, then why not books as well? Didn’t they too contain illustrations of sacred didgeridoos and churingas? Couldn’t they also make public and known what must never be seen or shown? Pursuing this line of thought one scholar at the University of Sydney, reviewing a new book of ethno-archaeological research on “The Foragers of the Australian Desert”, drew the sado-masochistic conclusion that

“In fact I myself have no business looking at this book and will immediately consign it to the deepest box in the darkest available cupboard; I fear that not all other Europeans in the area who may have purchased it will do the same. . . .” Mankind, December 1971, p. 157.

The desire to appease

Such zest for intellectual self-immolation gave the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies pause, the more so since men and women of similar opinions loomed increasingly large among its younger membership. Now it has tried to come to terms with current events in a document which sets forth The Institute’s Philosophy and Function. And it is encouraging to see that its tone is not wholly apologetic. We are told that if the Institute is to continue to do scientific research rather than to become some kind of service agency for Aboriginal communities, or a super-secret repository of Holy Objects, then

for the time being it must be serviced and operated by people qualified to do so. Aboriginality per se is not a substitute for qualifications, training and experience in the techniques and processes of human biology, archaeology, archival work, bibliography and the like.

All of which is clear enough (despite the evasive definition of science as consisting of techniques and processes rather than an attitude toward truthful explanation which scientific methods embody and express). But will the Institute have the courage of its revivified secular convictions? Those whose ears are sensitive to religious overtones can only read what follows with misgiving.

The Committee believes that the Institute can assist greatly in providing Aborigines with a repository of knowledge which can assist in the confirmation of those aspects of Aboriginal life and culture that are central to the whole concept of Aboriginal identity.

It remains to be seen how anthropologists will succeed in combining the central western tradition of disinterested inquiry with the “confirmation” of Aboriginal life and culture—especially when the confirmation is of patently false beliefs about oneself and one’s community, and archaic patterns of the sacred and the profane.



‘But Cézanne’s apples are a real attempt to let the apple exist in its own separate identity, without transfusing it with personal emotion. Cézanne’s great effort was, as it were, to shove the apple away from him, and let it live of itself.’—D. H. Lawrence (‘Introduction to His Paintings‘ in Selected Essays, Penguin Books)

‘But its true merit [that of Bicycle Thieves] lies elsewhere; in not betraying the essence of things, in allowing them first of all to exist for their own sakes, freely; it is in loving them in their singular individuality.’—André Bazin (What is Cinema?, Vol.II)

One

The resemblances of thought and language are striking. In an introduction to his translation of Bazin’s work Hugh Gray notes that the critic’s enthusiasm for individuality echoes Duns Scotus, and perhaps it does. Certainly it’s of a piece with Bazin’s generally Franciscan outlook. Lawrence’s predilections are less easily associated with the medieval mind, but even if they could be it’s unlikely that this would explain very much. The fact is that when two such different men speak with one voice on the relation of art to life it’s because they loved life as much as art; and both knew, instinctively, that beyond all questions of aesthetics or epistemology life only resides in the identity of particular living things.

For Bazin, commitment to identity implied also a commitment to time. When he praises the slow-paced scene of the servant girl awakening and washing herself and making coffee in Umberto D, it’s the novelty of duration which fires his mind. ‘The camera confines itself to watching her doing her little chores’ he says, noting that in this way De Sica defied the ‘art of ellipses’ which dictated film structure elsewhere. The attempt to find a philosophic rationale for this preference in Henri Bergson is more ingenious than convincing: what phrases like ‘a cinema of duration’ boil down to is little more than strict adherence to the old unities of time and space, and where these ancient considerations genuinely belong is not in fiction, not even the fiction of neo-realism, but in the observational documentaries of the present day.

In John Marshall’s Three Domestics three police officers visit a woman who says she fears for her life. There has been a lot of drinking: in a small and squalid room a man lies on a couch ignoring police, camera, even the woman herself. The scene would be hard for most cameramen to handle, an irregular three-sided pattern of enquiry and complaint—‘he had his foot here, on my throat’—and to see the way Marshall’s viewfinder effortlessly squares this triangle, inside the cramped cube of the room, is to see the skill and prescience of a man who leads all others in his mastery of the structural integrity of events.

David MacDougall’s film To Live With Herds shows the tribal life of the Jie in Uganda. Here also the camera does indeed ‘watch’, and the scenes have a length which the advocate of durational cinema would surely have admired. Within a fenced enclosure a family is talking, and as their words criss-cross the dusty yard, defining relationships and personalities, the pictorial structure of each image—the surface structure—is reinforced by the deep invisible structure of thought and belief on which tribal society ultimately rests.

Chester Grimes, by David Hancock and Herb Di Gioia, shows the life of an elderly woodsman in Vermont. He knows personally every fold in the hills and every abandoned habitation, and he talks continuously—the talk of a man thinking out loud. Duration of a kind is found here too: the film is built on a series of complete and rounded episodes in which single camera takes often encapsulate whole events. The art of ellipsis is nowhere evident; what one perceives is a series of unities in time and space, and if a comparison with painting were made it would be less with the apples of Cézanne than with the Six Persimmons of Mu Ch’i, a row of intact organic forms embodied within the form of art.

Yet art is a word from which observational film-makers nervously fight shy. ‘The beautiful shot takes away from the subject … it’s the worst trap one can fall into.’ Thus Jean Rouch, a pioneer of modem techniques. Rouch’s work is sometimes pretty rough at the edges, and he could be accused of special pleading. David MacDougall’s is very smooth, yet his attitude is broadly similar: the ethnographic film-maker ‘does not set out to make “art” … art is a by-product rather than a goal.’ According to the American still photographer Garry Winogrand, ‘Photography deals with facts . . . I have nothing to say. I believe the event is better than any ideas I could have about it.’

The evidence suggests that Winogrand has plenty of ideas. So why does be speak like this? In denying an interpretative or anecdotal intention he’s expressing a general weariness both with the cult of personal expression and conventional story-telling. So much photography consists of nonentity snapping a shutter on entity and trying to raise its status by this act. The self-effacement involved in asserting that ‘the event is better’ is a way of drawing attention to the ‘self’ before the lens. At bottom a distaste for smothering the photographed object with the photographer’s interpretative ideas or with an arbitrary style derives from a sense that too often interpretation leads only to a loss of identity, the very thing photography above all else can preserve. For modem documentary photographers, the camera is an instrument for recording evidence of enduring idiosyncrasies of place and person. To get that evidence they have trained themselves to observe.

As a critical term ‘observation’ has distinct advantages compared with terms like realism or naturalism. The latter only describe the after-effects of certain narrative or dramatic techniques, but when we think of observation we’re bound to consider the prior and practical matter of how cameras record what they see. Were two scenes in an actuality film consecutive or not? How were they shot? Have they been edited? To writers this emphasis on technique may seem peculiar; but film differs from literature in that the criteria we use to judge it are continuously updated by technological change.

Realism as expressed in words on paper has changed little over the last 2,000 years: literature stands at a fixed and irreducible distance from reality, the distance of language from whatever it describes. By contrast, photography has a natural affinity for the concrete, and realism in the cinema has been steadily modified by technical developments which have all tended to enlarge the possibilities of observation, to bring the capabilities of cameras and sound-recorders ever closer to the human eye and ear. The result is not just that the ‘effect’ is more ‘naturalistic’. It is that fact can be distinguished from fiction, and true from false.

A zoom, for example, is more than an elastic telescope. It has logical implications as well. While filming in central Australia recently, it was necessary to make plain the relation of the Aboriginal ceremony I was recording to the modem transport which made it possible: in a single sweep I zoomed from a 35-seat Bedford bus to some men on a ceremonial dance ground a hundred yards away. In the past lens changes would have broken this observation in time—a critical disjunction. For an audience can never tell what happened, in camera or cutting-room, when one part of the scene ended and the next began. The inclusiveness of a scene shot with a zoom lens removes all doubt. Watching it on the screen an audience shares with the cameraman one continuous observation which coheres. In such a scene the relation of dements is not merely suggested or implied: it is proved.

To allow others to share observations one has made oneself. This is fundamental to science. And in important respects the aims and procedures of both science and observa­tional film-making are similar. Each admires the habit of truth. Each tries to keep an open mind. This does not imply the priority of observation to theories or goals. On the contrary: observation refines theories and helps to define goals. It is empirical. It helps to identify mistakes and put them right. It has a passion for the specific.

Two

The Island shows the life of Japanese peasants on an island in the Inland Sea. Their lot is miserable. Toil is the order of each relentless day. But what’s chiefly of interest about Shindo’s film is a combination of three things: a difficult location, a low budget, and the absence of all spoken dialogue, so that the peasants seem preternaturally dour. It’s pure conjecture, but it could be that the near impossibility of dragging a ton of 35 nun. equipment about steep hillsides accounts for the lack of any direct location sound; and that the low budget discouraged post-synchronised dialogue.

Desert People also lacks native speech. Between passages of spare and subdued narration general silence prevails. A notable film of primitive life, this hour-long study of the Aboriginals of the Australian Western Desert is a testament to human dignity and endurance, and there’s no doubt that director Ian Dunlop wants to humanise a subject not noted for humanity in the past.

Pictorially he is largely successful; in many scenes the Aborigines ‘live of themselves’. But they do not speak for themselves, and some audiences find the net effect almost surrealistic. Amidst landscapes of lunar desolation a remote and unknown people move voicelessly about, and though there’s strong evidence to the contrary—scenes of children happily at play—the general impression the film leaves is that not only the desert but its inhabitants are bleak, emotionless, and austere.

Ramparts of Clay tells us a story about Algerian villagers. A number of stonecutters rise in protest against low wages, the army is called in, the rudiments of revolt are quickly quelled. Again, except for an indefinite mumble of Arabic ‘rhubarb, rhubarb’, nobody speaks. Reviews of Bertucelli’s film have gravely noted the ‘sombre existence of the desert dwellers’ and the ‘long burning silence of their lives’.

Speech maketh man, so why are these men mute? What evidence is there that Japanese peasants and Arabs and Aboriginals are so silent? Very little. What they have in common is a social order held together by oral tradition, one in which not only daily life but the whole memory of a people is carried along on an unending current of talk. The reason for the pervasive silence appears to be a combination of directorial method and 35 mm techniques. In Desert People a noisy unblimped 35 mm. camera was used which ruled out speech— the only kind of 35 mm. machine then available and manoeuvrable enough for the job. In Ramparts of Clay a blimped and silent camera may have been used, in which case the recording of speech might theoretically have been possible.

But it would in any case have been pointless to try and do so, because the resolutely authoritarian camera style would have stifled every word. Repeated tracking shots sweeping along passages and walls, through doors, shots which always end on people miraculously poised as if waiting for us to arrive, shots which smoothly circumambulate the heroes and heroines on steel tracks, these all mean only one thing: that the wretched ‘desert dwellers’ who appear in them have been virtually nailed down to keep them in place while the cameras roll and pan and pirouette, and long before the day is over even the most talkative Arab will hardly utter a word. Direction inhibits: observation frees.

So the message of all these speechless people is fairly simple. It’s that realism in ethnographic and quasi-ethnographic films —a genre in which there’s always a wide cultural gap between those before the cameras and those behind—is a direct reflection of specific machinery and techniques. This connection is something ethnographic film-makers have been aware of from the beginning. Thus in 1901 we find Sir Baldwin Spencer yearning for a panning mechanism so that he could follow Aboriginal dancers when they danced out the side of his frame. And we find Flaherty making early use of just such a device on his Akeley camera only a few years later.

These men made a remarkable start; but despite their work the observational film advanced little in the following years. This was partly because no radically new equipment was developed. But no one was interested in developing it, for in the 1920s and 1930s observation was held to be less important and certainly less worthy than imaginative interpretation. Not the identity of the subject but its hidden meaning as discerned and expressed by the film-maker: this was what mattered.

The results were more or less didactic or reportorial if British or American (Song of Ceylon, The River) propagandist if German or Russian (Triumph of the Will, The Sixth Part of the World). You don’t turn to such films to discover a unique personal or cultural self as you do with Nanook of the North. You turn to them to find how gifted journalists used film to express the issues and ideologies of the day. The development which marked a reviving concern with seeing rather than assertion did not derive from documentary: it came with the exploration of deep focus photography found in Citizen Kane.

This was a reaction against the photography of the day in which focus was more often soft than deep. Scene complexity or richness, anything which approached the richness of reality itself, this only hampered the telling of the tale. And if the conventions were romantic the formulas were reductionist. They reduced the complex to the simple, the complete to the incomplete, the whole to a series of fragmentary parts called dose-ups whose chief function was to flatteringly display the star. The Hollywood film itself was largely a vehicle for the star, and the essence of stardom was that the complexity of a whole being was reduced to something simple and idealised, an iconic image seen always at a certain angle to the camera and the lights. Whole sequences could be composed from fragments, close-ups of faces, hands and feet, with the result that acting technique became superfluous. ‘I don’t know how to act,’ complains Sergius in Mailer’s novel The Deer Park, only to be quickly reassured by Lulu the movie star:

‘There’s nothing to learn If you’re wooden he (the director) will make it seem like sincerity. If you’re self-conscious, he’ll know tricks to make you look like a small town boy. And if you ruin a scene. . . Well, you know, they always shoot protection. With the way they work you could walk through the part.

And many did. Such a way of working saved the day for the likes of Sergius, but it could sabotage the good actor and in special cases might even destroy his art. Louise Brooks has explained why she prefers the stage W. C. Fields she knew to the man the world knows from the screen: ‘On stage the audience saw all of him all the time. Whereas in the cinema they saw him piece by piece’ Fields was dismembered by medium shots, two-shots and dose-ups. ‘Every time the camera drew closer it cut off another piece and deprived him of some comic effect. Fields could only ‘curse the finished film, seeing his timing ruined by haphazard cuts’.

In the late 19505 and early 1960s the use of wide-angle lenses and the newly introduced zoom was combined with light-weight 16 mm. cameras: at this point the real revolution in observational filming began. Those who had in fact pioneered the development of the new machinery, Richard Leacock and the people at the Canadian Film Board, led the way, but it was where the gap was widest between observer and subject—in ethnographic film—that the new techniques were most needed. Jean Rouch saw his chance and made the most of his opportunities: in his work the gap is very nearly dosed. And it is in the tradition established by Rouch that the finest ethnographic work is still being done.

When discussing technique, the stress has so far been on cameras. But whatever pains are taken photographically to honour the integrity of events, all is lost unless editors observe the same rules as cameramen. To ensure this happens most ethnographic film-makers edit their work themselves, and in this respect the recent To Live With Herds offers an admirable harmony of photographic and editorial styles. It is built up of substantial intact events and coherent units of conversation. The conversations often take us into an inner world of memory and feeling: in few other films do tribal people speak so naturally and informally about themselves. In such work there can be no ‘haphazard cuts’. The cuts follow the continuity revealed by the camerawork, and there’s very little haphazard about that.

Wide and inclusive views, long scenes, editorial integrity: all of these give continuity to action and context to events. That is why they have become a feature not only of modern social documentary but of social drama as well. For the critic of social drama, the more that can be seen of each character’s behaviour within a group the more credible the dramatic relationship. For the observational film-maker, the more social data packed within the frame the more valid the generalisations to be derived.

The dramatist seeks to persuade in order to justify the suspension of disbelief. The observational film-maker seeks to prove in order to validate belief. Both have found the illusive tendencies of old-style fi1m structure unsatisfactory, and though the one is concerned with persuasion and the other with proof, they have arrived at similar rules for testing each.

Three

Animals observe, but only men interpret—if by interpretation we mean the organisation of meaning into language. And if one sides with the rest of the animal kingdom and dares question the transformation of matter into symbolic meaning, it’s because there’s so much evidence of the interpreter’s ambiguous role. Susan Sontag had this in mind when she declared: ‘Interpretation is the revenge of intellect upon the world.’ And long before this ringing judgment we had been quietly warned, traduire est trahir.

This adage also suggests that the central problem is that of language and its conventions, highly relevant in that the common failing of the films discussed below is their impatience to forgo reality in an enthusiasm for verbal and literary forms. Besides, criticism has for so long lopsidedly favoured interpretation that some correction is due. In The Technique of Film Editing (1953) Karel Reisz spoke for a generation when he said: ‘The high esteem in which documentary films as a genre are generally held is due mainly to the films which have probed beneath the surface of mere observation and have tried to convey something of the emotional overtones and significance of natural themes, Dovzhenko, Flaherty, Ivens and Wright spring to mind immediately as examples of this more profound approach to reality. (My italics.)

We’ve seen that the style of Ramparts of Clay is intrinsically hostile to observation. But this style has its raison d’être; it’s the chosen instrument of a man anxious to express a more profound approach to reality of a special kind. A clue to the kind itself appears in the form of an introductory quotation from Fanon telling us that the main problem in underdeveloped countries is the parasitic, neo-colonial bourgeoisie.

After digesting this we’re introduced to Rima, the 17-year-old girl through whose eyes we are supposed to see Algerian life. But there’s a jarring disconnection, What has the quotation to do with Rima? What has this abstract analysis to do with the consciousness of a young girl? Fanon’s words baldly state what the film itself should attempt to prove. But proof requires evidence, evidence requires observation, and direct observation of even the most innocent act is excluded by the very way Ramparts of Clay has been made.

If we concede that the film never intended to present direct evidence, that all it hoped to offer was an interpretation, we are led to ask on what its interpretation rests. This brings us to Duvignaud’s script, derived from a book about his sociological work in a Tunisian (not Algerian) village, Change at Shebika. Both his work and the book are unusual. In a sympathetic review by Clifford Geertz in The New York Review of Books we are told that Duvignaud’s goal in setting out to study Shebika ‘was not social description as such’. Instead it was the ‘total Utopian reconstruction’ of village life. The author himself is described as ‘a Parisian intellectual struggling to reconcile ideas from Levi-Strauss, Sartre and Jacques Bergue . . . without more than a superficial knowledge of Islam, Arab culture, or North African history.’

So what we have is the following: a sociologist disdainful of observation; a novelistic book he produced (nodding modest acknowledgments to such other creative spirits as Flaubert, Joyce, Dickens and Balzac); the film script derived from that book; and a film director who transfers the whole enterprise to Algeria and drafts a peasant community to act it out. As we trace these origins back to their source, we find not the living story of the living scene, but the labyrinthine confusions of the Paris intelligentsia.

If Ramparts of Clay is vitiated by Duvignaud’s need to get a load of notions off his chest, Dead Birds shows that even the simple wish to tell a story can cause trouble. This explicitly ethnographic opus takes us into the mountains of West Irian, where a dozen tribes in unstable alliances are intermittently at war. The photography is exceptional, the scenes of primitive warfare unexcelled, and the film as a whole offers an astonishing view of a world already past.

But the director is not content simply to show us such things. He wants to tell the story of the tribesman Weiak as well. We’re told that Weiak is engaged in some of the battle scenes, and at other times we see shots of him walking along paths or dose-ups of him gazing into the distance. At such moments the narrator informs us that Weiak is on his way from A to B or is meditating his next move. And perhaps he is. It’s hard to tell. The shots could have been taken any time, anywhere. When a close-up is entirely bare of contextual evidence you can make it say anything at all. As the film progresses, it becomes dear that such scenes are merely continuity devices required by a story form into which the material does not naturally fit.

We might ignore this but for a curious declaration at the start of the film claiming that ‘no scene has been directed’. This seems odd because no one would for a moment imagine that the scenes of tribal warfare could have been directed. It must have been added to try to influence our response to other scenes whose validity is less self-evident, to try to make us believe that if the narrator says truthfully of a battle scene ‘a fight took place’ he is being equally truthful when he says ‘Weiak is thinking of his son.’

This ill-concealed strain between the exigencies of reality and the needs of the story-teller is a common enough documentary fault. One welcomes by contrast the openness with which an imaginative fictional treatment like Louisiana Story declares its hand. The script tells us that this is an account ‘of certain adventures of a Cajun (Acadian) boy who lives in the marshlands of Petit Anse Bayou in Louisiana. It is the high water time of the year. The country is half drowned. We move through a forest of bearded trees. There are wildfowl everywhere, in flight and swimming in the water. We are spellbound by all this wild life and the mystery of the wilderness that lies ahead.’

Thus, in Flaherty’s words, the artist’s vision. More to the point is the fact that while Flaherty as cameraman wrote and told us how that early classic of observational film-making, Nanook, was made, it is his editor Helen Van Dongen who tells about the making of Louisiana Story. The change is fitting. Imaginative documentaries are concerned with meaning, meaning is the province of words, and it was Miss Van Dongen’s task to arrange the images of the camera in patterns like the words of a sentence.

In brief, the artistic endeavour was here semantic, and whereas the test of observational cinema is the strength of its evidence, the test of any semantic enterprise is whether it makes sense. Sense for whom ? And about what ? We can of course dodge the question entirely by saying with a contemporary reviewer, ‘Flaherty has pitched away the last mechanics of prose, the result is pure poetry … This is elegy.’ In exactly the same way John Grierson tells us that by juxtaposing the face of Martha and a milk separator in The General Line Eisenstein ‘uses the art of montage, and the assembling of images, to express untold joy; and his achievement is pure poetry.’ (It’s worth noting that ‘pure poetry’ is exclusively an achievement of the cinema. The phrase is rarely found outside the hyperbolical vocabulary of film criticism.)

It would be ridiculous to deny the pleasures of Louisiana Story or The General Line. What’s at issue is the profundity and vision which is to justify the pleasures. It is surely as hard to become excited by a work made in the Russia of the 1920s in which peasants are made to show ‘untold joy’ as it is to enthuse about the operations of Standard Oil in Louisiana. And the main point is this: the cultural meaning of the scenes in a film like Nanook can never date. Their strength is that of the irreducible identity of Nanook the man himself.

The scenes in the highly interpretative Louisiana Story and The General Line have dated. What sort of sense do they make now? What sort of sense did they ever make? It is not merely the hindsight of ecological knowledge and political revelation which makes both these works seem to glamorise ways of life or political policies (the exploitation of resources, the ‘modernisation’ of a conservative peasantry) which had little relation to the felt interests of the people they portrayed.

As for the semantic issue, when we turn to films more closely resembling tracts the results are just as illuminating. In the American documentaries of the 1930s which adopted a free-wheeling editorial approach message and style were often fatally at odds. In The City it’s those fast-cut downtown traffic sequences which excite us—the suburban arcadia of lawns and trees is a bore.

In The River it’s the wild mountain torrents which carry us along—when we reach all those admirable TVA dams our interest settles heavily into the mud. In part this only illustrates the gratuitous kinetic appeal of ‘clever’ editing. But in terms of the contrasting values of observational and interpretative cinema the lesson of these films is this: when film-makers use images of reality as mere words, symbols emptied of specific associations, they easily end up either talking nonsense or saying the very opposite of what they mean.

Four

The relation of a film-maker’s attitudes to specific procedures and techniques has been a theme developed here from the first. So has the notion of photography’s affinity for the concrete. Taken together they imply a responsibility to whatever is before the lens, not merely because of the tactical expedience of such an attitude—that only leads back to the ethics of exploitative use—but because the mutual claims of the identities on either side of the camera must be brought more nearly into balance if either is in the long run to survive.

By this criterion many of the richest images to have come down to us intact are precisely those displaying an equilibrium of trust and respect. One of them hangs on the wall of my office, a snapshot of an Aboriginal family made about fifty years ago. It seems to show some kind of ceremonial occasion in which a woman dressed all in white is flanked by two men. One of them is playing a violin and another rests his hands on the muzzles of two guns. Before the violinist a child holds sheet music on a stand against a buffeting wind. A face peers from a shack behind. No paintings of the period or consciously artistic photographic ‘studies’ are so rich in the idiosyncratic details of Aboriginal life. Such a document only exists because two things came happily together: a geographer with an innocent eye and a camera with its ability unblinkingly to render the concrete.

I wouldn’t go as far as John Fraser in his essay on Atget in the Cambridge Quarterly when he says: ‘If I had to choose between saving the works of Atget and those of Picasso from oblivion, I would without any hesitation choose Atget’s.’ But we see the point. The French photographer has given us a world lucidly seen and respected for what it is, and his perceptions are quite as culturally significant as any paintings transfused with an impressionist’s emotions or transfigured by a cubist’s designs.

Atget’s aim was to reveal the unique identities of his own time and place, Paris in the early years of the century, an aim and an activity which was the natural extension of his own pure self-respect. He must have understood what Cézanne was up to. He would have recognised why the geographer photographed the Aboriginal family. And he would have seen at once what Bazin meant by ‘the singular individuality of things’.