Transcript From documentary to ethnographic film

From documentary/ethnographic film to creative transformation:
Some examples
Dr. Linda C.H. LAI
SM4134
Berlin, a symphony of a big city (1927)
Night Mail (1936)｜Song of Ceylon (1934)
A Song of Ceylon (1985)
Divine Horsemen, the Living God of Haiti (1985)
Berlin, a sympony of a big city
(Germany 1927)
Walter Ruttmann
...an ordinary day in 1927
Organization – narrative – journey
Collecting – categorization – typification
Representation
CASE STUDY:
Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)
Production:
GPO Film Unit for Ceylon Tea Marketing Board
…begun as an Empire Marketing Board film
CASE STUDY:
Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)
Background of production:
Producer: John Grierson
Screenplay: John Grierson, Basil Wright …,
based partly on a book about Ceylon written by traveler
Robert Knox in 1680
Music: Walter Leigh
Cast: Lionel Wendt (Narrator)
……
CASE STUDY:
Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)
Basil Wright was sent to Ceylon to film four one-reel travelogues as
publicity for the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board.
When he was actually there, he was driven by his own “inner impulse”
which made him shoot other sites and themes. The idea of Song of
Ceylon was not in his mind when he was there until after he returned
to London to edit the footage.
• There was no shooting script, but a screenplay afterwards, also with
reference to an existing book.
• The editing and sound in the film were done in England. Eight tracks
of recorded sound and music and images were combined.
• The film’s narration was taken from Robert Knox’s book (1680),
which Wright discovered by chance in a store window.
CASE STUDY:
Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)
I. the Buddha
• Pilgrims up a mountainside to pray…
II. the Virgin Island (10:54)
• Daily life of the people…
III. the Voices of Commerce (~23:00)
• Two systems of labors juxtaposed: sound track of British stock
market prices and the arrival and departure times for ships // natives
of Ceylon gathering coconuts ad tea leaves by hand
IV. the Apparel of the Gods (29:43)
• Religious and cultural life of Ceylon as lived before the arrival of the
British colonizers
The four titles were inserted afterwards.
CASE STUDY:
Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)
• The film is often called the world’s finest example of
“lyrical documentary.”
• Grierson described the theme of the work,
“Buddhism and the art of life it has to offer, set upon by a Western
metropolitan civilization which, in spite of all our skills, has no art of
life to offer.”
CASE STUDY:
Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)
Keywords…
Interpretation /
narrative composition /
sight and sound craftsmanship /
experimentation of sound /
anthropology and power structure
CASE STUDY:
Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)
Bibliography:
http://www.filmreference.com/Film-So-St/Song-of-Ceylon.html
Screen online:
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/442428/index.html
Cecil Starr
CASE STUDY:
Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)
Comparison:
Laleen Jayamanne
A Song of Ceylon (1985, 51 minutes, color)
CASE STUDY:
Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon
A Song of Ceylon (Laleen Jayamanne, 1985, Australia, 51 minutes)
Her work is NOT an ethnographic film, but it engages in issues of
ethnography and anthropology in general, critically.
CASE STUDY:
Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon
Jayamanne is a Srilankan working overseas.
• The work focuses on gender and the body.
• Trinh T. Minh-ha remarks on the work,
“The anthropological text is performed both like a musical score and
a theatrical ritual… The film engages the viewer in the cinematic
body as spectacles…”
(in journal Discourse)
CASE STUDY:
Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon
Jayamanne’s own Song is based on an anthropological text that
deals with the experience of “possession” – “of a body being
possessed by other bodies, of the voice being multiplied.”
•
•
•
•
Ethnography of class
Cultural hybridization
Found anthropological text
Daily rituals
Bibliography:
“Anna Rodrigo Interviews Laleen Jayamanne on A Song of Ceylon”
in Toward Cinema and Its Double: cross-cultural. (pp. 65-66)
Visual anthropology: the case of Maya Deren
(Avant-garde filmmaker/experimentation in visual
anthropology)
•
Apparatus: exploring the material possibilities of the
camera
•
Reflexivity
•
Ritual: union of cultural FORM and CONTENT
 Moral commitment to aesthetic sensibility
Visual anthropology: the case of Maya Deren
Filmmaker’s artistic sensibility
“The problem of the filmmaker then becomes not how to
make a thing look like itself, so much as how to make it
look like what he wants the audience to feel about it. He
must discover how to translate his emotion about
something into a visual film expression.”
[Legend of Maya Deren, 1942-47, p. 300]