Reflexivity in relation to anthropologicalethnographic filmmaking - Essay Example

The Ax Fight was originally created to show students the difficulty in placing a single point-of-view out of a certain field experience. The footages actualize the teaching process and problematize the translation from one cultural experience to another cultural idiom, within which the anthropologist often condenses, analyzes and-makes intellectual models (Ennis, Asch, 1). In the first unedited section of the film all the events are presented and the sound continues even after the film goes dark and the comments of Chagnon, Asch and Johnson are just heard.

In the second part, Napoleon Chagnon explains the socio-political significance of the fighter's behavior. The third part, delves more into the socio-cultural complications of the village people. The final section is an edited version. Timothy wanted his students to understand the shortcoming of a film that is has smooth editing and fibula structure like the Nanook of the North. Films like The Ax Fight show how an intellectual intervention influences an onlooker. The film is also a direct criticism of the inconsistencies of spectatorship and how the desired effect in understanding is achieved by a good filmmaker.

Contrary to pre-disposed notions in science and filmmaking, anthropological faithfulness to observation of another culture cannot ever be beyond bias, unless reflexivity is used to both question that objectivity and nurture mental exercise within the spectators. Anthropological filmmaking combines two processes together. One is the filming process and the other is social science. The balance is crucial since science and art clash headlong. The frame within the camera may help to communicate cultural conditions and also further Western knowledge of the "Other", but a culture cannot be completely understood just by introducing a non-fictional narrative as Flaherty does.

The limitations are numerous. First, a narrative forces the plot of the actual observation towards a composition of a fiction. Flaherty wanted to manipulate viewers understanding of the biography of Nanook and not further any racist understanding of the Eskimo culture. But with Timothy Asch reflexivity is the first stance to question the all-understanding nature of the anthropologist. He wanted to keep certain signs and their nature open to critical interpretation and never risk a comfortable lapse leading to an acceptance from his audience.

The conscious effort to keep the audience visually uncomfortable while watching the fight makes the confrontation of inter-cultural experience more critical. Accumulation of data, the process of accumulating it, narration, and little editing of the film may help the nature of critical viewership and gives minimum control to the maker. Timothy and Chagnon relinquish all control of their point-of-view and plunges their own spectatorship with that of the audience in such a way so that it becomes impossible to neglect the cultural and ideological subjectivity of the anthropologists.

The students are left to situate the filmed observations within the sphere of public and uniform scientific study. The anthropologists become a part of the study themselves since their psychological perspectives are of profound value in regard to the choice of the subject itself. Human recording of another human behavior is the proper subject of postmodern dialogism. The indefinite and inadequate interplay of