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ZBIGNIEW
BENEDYKTOWICZ
Anthropology
of Film.
Introduction
I
n the wake of a special monographic issue about
the theatre going back to its sources, the “theatre
contaminated with ethnology”, and texts focused
on the anthropology of the theatre (cf. “Polska Sztuka
Ludowa. Konteksty” no. 3-4/1991) we present a fa
scicle on the anthropology of film and photography.
It seems that there is no need to justify this topic (or
its selection). For some time the encounter of anth
ropology and film, the anthropology of culture and
scientific, critical and humanistic reflection on the
cinema has been quite natural. Multiple sources, re
asons, and testimonies of such meetings can be cited.
Suffice to mention the remarks made by Yuri Lotman
in an introduction to the Polish edition of his Semiotics
of Cinema, where in an astonishing comparison of the
Athenian rite and myth with Roman Polanski’s Knife
in Water the author spoke laconically (and such could
have been the response and justification in the case
of every ethnographer and anthropologist of culture
concentrating his attention on the cinema) that even
the most contemporary film can be decoded with the
assistance of the myth deeply concealed within. There
comes to the fore, Lotman wrote, one of the most cha
racteristic features of the cinema, which elevated it to the
rank of avant-garde art of the second half of the twentieth
century. True, the inclination towards neo-mythologism,
the process of stirring the deep strata of culture are a phe
nomenon characteristic for art of the last decades. None
theless, nowhere outside the cinema do assorted types of
the organisation of the material —from genre forms totally
absorbed with a credible recreation of daily existence to
the form of the generalised structure of the myth - blend
so organically while penetrating each other. Further on,
Lotman drew attention to the specific duality of the
film: In this fashion, the language of the film unites extre
me logical rungs —from the sensual experiencing of the ac
tual perception of things (a feeling of a direct reality of the
world shown on screen) to extreme illusionariness. At the
same time, there takes place a merge of historical stages —
from the most archaic forms of artistic consciousness to the
most contemporary ones. Such unification does not by any
228
means obliterate extremity; on the contrary, it accentuates
it as much as possible.
This duality of film corresponds to the specific bi
polar nature of anthropological perception simultane
ously focused on the archaics, the structure of long
duration, and the contemporary. In this case too we
are not dealing with the blurring of differences and
extremities, just as in the equally concise definition of
ethnography: Ethnography is a science about that, which
connects people of different societies, cultures and epochs.
We may come across this dialogical perspective
of ethnography also in the admission made by LeviStrauss, who described it as history whose two extrem
ities touch the history of the world and personal his
tory, and which at the same time discloses their joint
rationale by considering differences and transforma
tions of importance to all concerned.
Within this context a similarly laconic definition
of ethnography as a way of reaching a different world
should not come as a surprise; the same holds true for
the declaration that ethnography is predominantly a
rendition of the topical, an expression of vitality. This
is the way in which the natural, obvious, and multifac
eted interest in the film on the part of the anthology of
culture becomes understandable. The anthropologist
is absorbed with the film, first and foremost, as a myth,
an expression of currently emergent mythology, and a
domain of the occurrence (frequently in a concealed
manner) of eternal mythological motifs and deep sym
bolic structures. It is precisely the film in its capacity
as a myth-creating carrier (a domain of the continu
ation, transformation, and “revival of meanings”) and
as a record of contemporaneity (the film registers cus
toms, gestures, motions, models of beauty, fashions,
thematic tendencies, the mental structures of a given
period, etc.) as well as owing to the reflection of differ
ences, rendered indelible within it or the mixture (or
levelling) of cultural diversity, that matches a specific
sensorium moulded within the range of the anthropol
ogy of culture.
Characteristically, we may find theses about the
inclination of contemporary art towards neo-mythologism also amongst many researchers studying culture.
In this instance, film is not alone but is accompanied
by the experiences of the theatre and literature, as
Mircae Eliade mentioned in his conversations with
Claude-Henri Rocquet in Ordeal by Labyrinth.
It is a well-known fact that literature transmit
ted orally or written is the offspring of mythology and
inherits the latter’s functions: to recount adventures
and to tell about important global occurrences. Why
is something that takes place so important, why do
we want to find out what happened to the marquise
drinking her five o’clock tea? All narration, even if it
describes the most commonplace facts, continues the
traditions of the grand narratives presented in myths
Zbigniew Benedyktowicz • ANTHROPOLOGY OF FILM. INTRODUCTION
and explaining the beginning of the world and the
origin of man. Interest in narration and the story is
an element of human condition and existence in the
world. Man wants to find out what people have accom
plished and of what they are capable: risk, adventures,
assorted trials. Our existence is not that of motionless
stones, flowers or insects whose life follows a precisely
delineated track. o u r existence is an adventure. Man
will never cease listening to stories.
Nevertheless, it is also highly characteristic that
Eliade was ready to grant special place and signifi
cance to film and its capability of bringing us closer to
the myth. He gave a determined answer to a question
posed by his interlocutor, suggesting that by turning
away from the novel avant-garde literature had also
rejected something that appears to be an essential ele
ment of mankind, and that the myth could have sur
vived in the cinema. Eliade claimed that the cinema
preserved the ability to tell myths and to camouflage
them not only in the secular but also in areas of degra
dation and decline. Cinematographic art makes excel
lent use of the symbol, and even if the latter remains
invisible it continues to affect emotions.
The leaning towards neo-mythologism, the process
of coming closer to the myth, the attainment by the
cinema and film of the dimensions and functions of
a myth appear to be part (just as fascinating for the
anthropology of culture) of a wider process of contem
porary remythisation, described by Gilbert Durand, a
researcher studying symbolic imagination and drawing
attention to a certain paradox. The same iconoclastic
and scientistically oriented civilisation that often mix
es demystification and demythisation at the same time
proposes a huge demythisation procedure to be car
ried out on a planetary scale, and with such means at
its disposal, which no society has enjoyed throughout
the entire history of mankind. It is to Andre Malraux’s
great credit that he demonstrated that rapid means
of communication, a mass-scale distribution of the
masterpieces of art via photographs of prints, cinema
tography, books, colour reproductions, gramophone
records, telecommunication and the press, made pos
sible a global confrontation of culture and a gathering
of themes, works, and images in some sort of a Mu
seum of the imagination, focused on all symptoms of
cultural life. Faced with the enormous activity of a sci
entistic and iconoclastic society, the same society pro
poses means for restoring equilibrium. The inclination
towards neo-mythologism appears to be still topical
despite the proclaimed (or actual) crisis of the cinema
as an institution, as evidenced at the very least by the
film-television version of Brooke’s Mahabharata, the
worldwide success of Kieslowski’s Decalogue, and, ear
lier, the “mythology of Town and World” contained in
Fellini’s works, the "mythology of childhood” in Fanny
and Alexander and the whole Bergman oeuvre, the
229
works of Tarkovsky, Pasolini, Paradzhanov, Herzog,
Kurosava, Bunuel, Wajda and many others.
The cinema recreates and revives the myth. But
there are some areas in which the anthropology of cul
ture and the cinema meet in an equally natural man
ner. Keep in mind that their beginnings belong to an
almost identical epoch (the origin of scientific anthro
pology is dated differently and spans from 1851 - the
publication of League of the Iroquois by Morgan, 1877
- his Ancient Society, and 1871 - Taylor’s Primitive Cul
ture, to 1895 - the establishment of “L ’Année Soci
ologique”; its worthwhile recalling within this context
that when Bronislaw Malinowski was conducting his
studies on the Trobriand Islands, Robert Flaherty,
known as the father of the documentary film, made his
first film in the Far North (1917), while his second film
- Nanook of the North - originated in 1922, the same
year as Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific).
These natural connections between anthropology and
the cinema, the initial impact exerted by photography
on the shaping of anthropology and, in time, the cin
ema, which today bears fruit in the truly distinct do
main of Visual Anthropology, have been vividly out
lined by James Clifford in his book The Predicament of
Culture, discussing ethnography against the backdrop
of twentieth-century literature and art, and compar
ing the title page of the Argonauts of the Western Pa
cific with the frontispiece of Father Lafitau’s work on
the American Indians. The frontispiece of Moeurs des
Sauvages Amériquains from 1724 portrays ethnography
as a young woman at a writing pulpit surrounded by
works of art from the New World, classical Greece and
ancient Egypt. She is accompanied by two cherubs as
sisting her in the task of making comparisons, while
a bearded figure representing Time points to a table
featuring the ultimate fount of truth flowing from the
writer’s pen. The image at which the young woman is
gazing shows the edge of clouds amidst which there
appear Adam, Eve, and the serpent; above, a second
human couple - man and woman free of sin and men
tioned in the Book of Revelation, flank a radiant trian
gle carrying the inscribed Hebrew name of Jehovah.
The title page of Argonauts of the Western Pacific
displays a photograph capturing A Ceremonial Act of
the Kula, with a shell necklace being offered to a Trobriander chief standing in the doorway of his dwelling.
Behind the man presenting the necklace there is a row
of six young men, bowing and one holding a conch.
Shown from the profile they are clearly concentrating
on the exchange ritual, an actual event from Mela
nesian life. A closer look, however, discloses that one
of the men is staring at the camera. Clifford proposed
the following commentary: the Lafitau allegory seems
to be more distant and its author conducted a tran
scription - he moulded and created. In contrast to
Malinowski’s photograph, the illustration does not
Zbigniew Benedyktowicz • ANTHROPOLOGY OF FILM. INTRODUCTION
make any references or evoke ethnographic experi
ence although five years of studies conducted among
the Mohawk tribe ensured esteemed rank among field
researchers of all generations. The description does
not appear to be the outcome of first-hand observa
tion but the result of writing in a cramped study. The
title page of Argonauts - similarly as all photographs
- proves presence and assures about the existence of
that, which had been captured by the camera lens;
it also suggests a different presence, that of an eth
nographer actively composing this particular frag
ment of Trobriand reality. The Kula exchange ritual
- the topic of Malinowski’s book - is described with
perfect visuality and shown in discernible takes, and
the above-mentioned glance of the participant of
the ritual draws our attention once again towards
the viewpoint of an observer in which we, the read
ers, co-participate, towards the ethnographer and his
camera. Emphasis is placed on the dominating course
of contemporary field studies and their authority: You
are there... because I was there.
There exists yet another feature of anthropology,
which in a special manner makes it possible to link
it with film. Alongside the specific sensorium of the
archaic, the primeval, and the fundamental and that,
which is contemporary, anthropology is linked with
film the strongest by a penchant and interest for the
concrete. An anthropologist reaching for the camera,
in various ways dealing with films, and asking: ’’Why
Anthropology of film?” might, just as we could, seek
help in Wim Wenders’ reply to a questionnaire (Why
do you make films?). I take the liberty of citing copious
fragments:
Ever since this terrible question was put to me, I’ve done
nothing but think of how to answer it. I have one answer
in the morning and one at night, one at the editing-table,
one when I’m looking at stills of earlier films of mine, an
other when I’m speaking to my accountant and yet another
when I think of the team I’ve been working with for years
now. Every one of these different answers, these reasons
for making films, is sincere and genuine, but I keep saying
to myself there must be something “more fundamental”,
some “commitment”, or even a “compulsion”.
I was twelve years old when I made my very first film,
with an 8 mm camera. I stood by a window and filmed the
street below, the cars and pedestrians. My father saw me
and asked: “What are you doing with your camera?" And
I said: “Can’t you see? I’m filming the street”. “What for?"
he asked. I had no answer. Ten or twelve years later, I was
making my first short film in 16 mm. A reel of film lasted
three minutes. I filmed a crossroads from the sixth floor,
without moving the camera until the reel was finished. It
didn’t occur to me to pull away or stop shooting any ear
lier. With hindsight, I suppose it would have seemed like
sacrilege to me.
Why sacrilege?
230
I’m no great theorist. I tend not to remember things
I’ve read in books. So I can’t give you Béla Baldzs’s exact
words, but they affected me profoundly all the same. He
talks about the ability {and the responsibility) of cinema
“to show things as they are". And he says cinema can “res
cue the existence of things".
That’s precisely it.
I have another quote, from Cézanne, where he says:
“Things are disappearing. If you want to see anything, you
have to hurry".
So back to the awful question: why do I make films?
Well, because ... Something happens, you see it happening,
you film it as it happens, the camera sees it and records it,
and you can look at it again, afterwards. The thing itself
may no longer be there, but you can still see it, the fact of
its existence hasn’t been lost. The act of filming is a heroic
act (not always, not often, but sometimes). For a moment,
the gradual destruction of the world of appearances is held
up. The camera is a weapon against the tragedy of things,
against their disappearing. Why make films? Bloody stupid
question! (The Logic of Images).
Myth - Literature - Film - Photography - these
are the cardinal themes of this issue of “Konteksty”.
We present essay by Clifford. His study compares two
“Polish refugees” (whom he described as the fathers of
contemporary anthropological reflection) penetrating
a different world and offering dramatic testimony of
the confused meeting of representatives of European
civilisation and primal culture - Joseph Conrad (Heart
of Darkness) and Bronislaw Malinowski (Argonauts of
the Western Pacific); in doing so, it deliberates on false
hood and truth in the cultural meaning of those terms,
the question of the “saving lie” protecting values and
a cohesive image of culture. Clifford also revealed the
literary aspects of ethnography creating cultural fic
tions (it does not mean: that they are untrue) and in
dicated the great role played by the biographical and
subjective element as well as the creative dimension
present in scientific work pursued by the anthropolo
gist. The essay by Teresa Rutkowska about Fellini’s
“journeys” analyses the motif of wandering and the
road in his films, interpreted in reference to the deep
symbolic structures and stylistic traditions of the Ba
roque; such “journeys” also provide evidence of an
awareness of the absence of the continuum in the con
temporary world. Reflections on the symbol and the
film (Dariusz Czaja) precede a whole series of analyses
tracing the presence of profound symbolic contents
in film. The series contains translations (Don Frederickson; T. Jefferson Kline - an excellent example
of a psychoanalytical-mythographic analysis perceiv
ing The Last Tango in Paris as a contemporary version
of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice) accompanied
by texts by Polish authors presented at a “Seminar of
the anthropology of film” established and conducted
by Professor Aleksander Jackiewicz and today contin
Zbigniew Benedyktowicz • ANTHROPOLOGY OF FILM. INTRODUCTION
ued by anthropologists of culture at the Department
of Cultural Anthropology, Film and Audiovisual Arts
- in the Institute of Art at the Polish Academy (i.a.
an essay by Wojciech Michera tracking the presence
and significance of the alchemical symbolic in works
by Herzog; essays on the Don Quixote motif in litera
ture and film, and the cultural-literary-film myth of
Venice).
Dzieło a “granica sensu" (The Work and the
"Boundary of Meaning”) by Wiesław Juszczak, author
of a translation into the Polish of stories by Karen
Blixen, initiates analyses of Babette’s Feast. In an es
say about the author of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
Janusz Gazda portrayed works and movies by Sergei
Parajanov an artist salvaging the memory of the rich
cultural tradition from which the film director drew
his creative force. Ryszard Ciarka considered the es
sence of film quests and experiences in reference to
the Renaissance aesthetics of res simulacra, choosing
as the object of his analysis Innocent Magicians by A n
drzej Wajda and The Last Day of Summer by Tadeusz
Konwicki. Małgorzata Baranowska discussed the
phenomenon of the postcard, and Anna Sobolewska
interpreted, via the categories of the sacrum, the ex
perience of time and space in Orchestra, a video by
Zbigniew Rybczyński. A register of culture in contem
porary film shaped within the climate of the postmod
ern game played with cultural texts is another theme.
A separate current consists of fragments of auto
biographies, recollections. and excerpts of diaries. We
include fragments of an autobiography by Aleksander
Jackiewicz, recording his first experiences with the
cinema and a further path towards literature, and the
anthropology of film. Other texts are parts of Fotodziennik (Photo-Journal) kept for years by Anna Boh
dziewicz and the autobiography of Józef Szymańczyk,
a small-town photographer. A separate pull-out
contains a drawing from a sketchbook-diary kept for
years by Andrzej Wajda. This time, the author of the
memorable film version of Wesele (The Wedding),
congenial in relation to Wyspiański’s play but also a
highly auteur work, offered a drawing-note made dur
ing a staging of a German-language theatrical version
featured at the Salzburg festival. (Only a few of our
younger readers are aware that this is not the first time
that Andrzej Wajda has appeared in our periodical he is the author of a documentation of the vanishing
world of street photographers. Cf. article Screens and
Backgrounds of Street Photographers in: "Konteksty. Pol
ska Sztuka Ludowa" no. 1/1956). The presented issue
includes texts on the ethnographic film, focusing on
the participation of the creative, subjective element
in the production of the ethnographic film and pho
tographic documentation (cf., e.g. a conversation held
with Jacek Olędzki, author of numerous ethnographic
studies carried out in Poland, Asia and Africa). All
231
texts collected in this film-photography issue, dealing
more closely either with literature, film or anthropol
ogy, come together within the range of joint problems
and intentions that could be encompassed by Conrad’s
formula: To do justice to the visible world.*
*
This is a preface to a special issue of „Konteksty”
(no. 3-4/1992) about the anthropology of film. Naturally,
not all mentioned texts were included into the anthology.
We maintain the preface in order to to acquaint the
reader with the profile of the gathered essays and material.
(Cf: Contents and Summaries, „Konteksty” no. 3-4/1992).