Is (Visual) Anthropology Possible? Nuba Images: From Colonial Fantasies to Fascinating Fascism

 (Visual Anthropology Diaries #2)

 

“Within anthropology, despite a long history of self-consciousopposition to racism, a fast-growing, self-critical literature on anthropology's links to colonialism […], and experimentation with techniques of ethnography to relieve a discomfort with the power of anthropologists over anthropological subject, the fundamental issues of domination keep being skirted .”
(Abu-Lughod, 1996, 469)

 

In the previous week of my Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic Filmmaking class at CEU, we began by watching Nanook of the North, using it as a lens to discuss how both early anthropology and early documentary filmmaking claimed a privileged relationship to “reality”. While the focus was on politics of representation – the ways images reproduce relations of power, hierarchy, and coloniality, even when they present themselves as merely descriptive, this week we pushed this question further by asking how visual imaginations travel: how early colonial gazes migrate across ethnography, cinema, and later postcards, popular culture and even theoretical frameworks. How visual forms circulate and reappear out of their original context, often long after colonialism is supposedly “over.”

As Abu-Lughod (1996) shows in her influential essay “Writing against culture”, anthropology is built on the historically constructed division between self and other, and more specifically, the “non-Western other by the Western self” (ibid: 467). Despite the twentieth-century emphasis on promoting cultural relativism over evaluation, these positions have consistently rested on the recognition and explication of certain differences between “cultures”. Yet, the idea of differences has always been related to the problem of power and historically the relationship between the West and the non-West has been characterized by Western dominance. Even in its postmodern and contemporary manifestations, where it explicitly aims to amplify “the voices of the Other” or facilitate a dialogue between the self and “other”/observed, this indicates that somebody “superior” lets another one “inferior” speak. This is not only a problem of anthropology, but a problem of representation in general, which inevitably comes with the power of the observer over the observed.

Read my thoughts on the debates about power relations and the concept of culture in anthropology here.

This raises a broader question that stayed with me throughout this week’s materials: is it actually possible to go beyond the colonial gaze, or, more broadly, beyond a gaze embedded in unequal power relations – without reinscribing the authority of the observer over the observed? (Also, is it needed?) Or does visual anthropology inevitably reproduce the very structures it tries to critique?  (Sahlins would probably roll his eyes here…)

In this blogpost, I will fragmentarily approach that question through one recurring visual object we engaged with in class: Nuba images – as anthropological documentation, as postcards, and as aestheticised bodies entangled with fascist visual regimes, but also as an anti-image: as an experiment that tries to go beyond this gaze, or at least to expose the difficulty of doing so.

Nuba Images and Anthropology: Performing Culture

Anthropological images were long used as documentation of  “traditional cultures.” In his essay on photography and the Southern Nuba, James C. Faris foregrounds the power relations embedded in photographic practice, analysing six photographs depicting the Southern Nuba of Kordofan Province taken in 1929. He draws attention the authority of the camera and to the social arrangements required to produce photographs. (Faris, 1992, pp. 211–217).

The photographs, which focus on his attention, are selected from a larger collection of twenty nitrate negatives deposited at the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) in 1982 by F. S. G. Whitfield – a British colonial official, government entomologist stationed at Talodi, in the southern Nuba Mountains, during the late period of Anglo-Egyptian colonial rule. He took the photographs on February 3, 1929, on the occasion of an official colonial visit to the region – that og visit of Lord Lloyd, the British High Commissioner of Egypt and Sudan, to the Southern Nuba area.

Faris frames the visit as a “colonial spectacle” drawn up in semi-military parade with clear political stakes, linked to the projection of authority in the “recently pacified” Nuba Mountains and to showcasing colonial enterprise (including cotton schemes and new roads). The images also reflect this atmosphere, where, as if on a theatrical stage, on the one hand, we have the British officials posed and seated – the audience, performing a role, one of authority, neutrality, and interpretive control. They appear clothed, mobile and confident. On the other side, literally, as if on a stage, are the performers –  long processions of Nuba men organised into lines, scenes of wrestling and spear-throwing, and groups of young Nuba men standing naked or semi-naked, holding spears, facing the camera in disciplined formation. While these activities draw on local practices, Faris stresses that they were reorganised and reframed to fit the expectations of colonial spectacle. Agricultural rituals, for instance, were transformed into what he calls a “staged military control spectacle”, aligning bodily display with order, discipline, and governability rather than with local meanings (Faris, 1992, pp. 213–216).  

Similarly to how Nannok of the North was made, this resonates with a specific expectation that the Nuba appear “authentically”, dressed in particular ways, performing certain rituals, offering their bodies to the camera as signs of “culture” oriented toward external audiences. This logic certainly echoes similar earlier traditions in ethnographic and documentary photography, most notably the work of Edward Curtis, who in the long spirit of the “innocent eye” (Grimsaw) framed his images as acts of preservation, as if the camera were saving a disappearing world.

See my blogpost about Nannok of the North.

By Edward Sheriff Curtis, 19 Feb 1868 - 19 Oct 1952

The privilege of the camera

Here, as Farris argues, the camera occupies a privileged position: once present, everything can become a stage, while culture, shorthand for power, itself becomes a performance enacted in front of its lens. The anthropologist’s authority, the camera’s fixed privileged position, and the expectation of authenticity together transform social life into a theatre. The camera itself becomes a stage on which power relations are enacted.

In fact, Faris insists that these photographs are exemplary of broader patterns of how photography works, revealing three overlapping “projects” at work:

1. Colonial authority over the subject (who is seen, how, and under what conditions),
2. The power of the photographic apparatus itself, which structures visibility and attention,
3. The intellectual constitution of the Other as an object of Western knowledge and consumption

Photography, Faris then argues, inevitably participates in the constitution of the Other, as certain bodies and practices are pulled into visibility while others are displaced or excluded (Faris, 1992). Importantly, he pessimistically continues, although anthropological photography has changed stylistically over time, the underlying power relations have remained remarkably stable. What shifts is not the project itself, but its form: from overt colonial display to more subtle, documentary realism.

But what about the violence of observing the observation?

What follows in this text are examples illustrating this claim. Yet I want to take a moment to linger on what his pessimism risks flattening. If representation is always already entangled in unequal power relations, then we can assume every image is domination; every gaze is violence (Barthes, 1981); every scene is already decided.

Should we assume the Nuba appear here only as passive signifiers? That would reproduce a different kind of reduction, turning people into effects of colonial optics, without attending to what participation, refusal, calculation, or improvisation might have meant in that moment.

If we take Erwin Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective in sociology seriously (1959), everything is performance, everyone is an actor, and staging can also be what actors do, strategically, in situations shaped by constraint. Performance can reproduce authority, yes, but it can also complicate it through irony, withholding, exaggeration, negotiation, or the careful management of what is shown.

In the same line of thought, if images travel, if power travels with them, so do our expectations. Beyond what Whitfield or Lord Lloyd saw, the question is also what we are trained to see when we encounter these photographs today. Do we consume them as proof of colonial violence and thereby close the case? Or do we also examine the way the image recruits our attention, how easily “critique” becomes another mode of mastery?

So I’m left asking: what does it mean to look at these photographs when looking itself is historically structured? Is it possible to see without repeating the hierarchy that made the image  in the first place?

The Postcard: Circulation, Commodification and Afterlives of the Gaze

One of the most visible ways in which the earlier ethnographic claim of the “innocent eye” (Grimsaw) travelled beyond the colonial period is through the postcard.

Postcards are peculiar objects. At least initially, their purpose was not the image itself, but the message. Over time, however, postcards and ethnographic photography merged into popular culture and mass reproduction, and the image, mostly through its form (not content), slowly took over. The postcard became something to look at as much as something to send.

Of course, postcards also had a very practical function. In a time when words and images travelled slowly, they offered a quick and affordable way to communicate across distance. In many places, sending a postcard was cheaper than sending a letter, which partly explains why they became so widespread in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were easy, accessible, and fast.

Yet it is not a coincidence that postcard production blossomed precisely during the high colonial period, when travel, particularly colonial and touristic travel, was becoming more common. Much like early documentaries and ethnographic snapshots, postcards exceeded their communicative function to capture events, document environments, and offer visual fragments of “societies” for distant audiences.  Early expeditions brought cameras not only for scientific documentation but to send images “back home.” These images were collected, classified, displayed, and later mass-produced.

A postcard of a Nuba girl I found on the Internet

 

Over time, ethnographic photography slid into popular culture as central as the proof of exploration, encounter, and possession. The Nuba body became an object that could travel across contexts, detached from lived social realities and reinserted into new economies of meaning. Postcards commodified bodies, rituals, and landscapes into consumable images, feeding modern tourist fantasies of authenticity.

As Derrida (1987) suggests through the figure of the postcard, representation is never sealed or sovereign. Once sent, it becomes readable by unintended audiences, vulnerable to delay, misdirection, and reinterpretation. Meaning is no longer guaranteed by its author. In this sense, postcards crystallise a central tension of visual anthropology itself: they can be instruments of capturing “social realities”, but also objects whose circulation exceeds the control of the author. 

Instagram simulacra and images of late capitalism

Seen from today, in conditions of late (platform) capitalism and late (platform) tourism, the fascination with “authenticity” and capturing the moment, embedded in postcards, is something that we can still see widely, for example, in Instagram images and travel feeds.

The difference is that the “captured moment” has become something that is endlessly reproduced, where the destination is often known before it is visited, while the image of the place precedes the experience, and has become a repetition of something-already-seen. In this sense, the contemporary “Instagram postcards” increasingly operate as a simulacrum, where the image becomes a reference not to the place itself, but to other images of that place. At this point, it is no longer about the message, nor even about the image itself. It is not really about discovery anymore, and not even about verification. It is about standing inside an image that already exists, inhabiting a visual template. Difference becomes flattened into recognisable visual cues, endlessly repeated and circulated. Thus, although images and visual motives have always been reproduced in time (e.g. ‘workers going home from the factory’, ‘beekeeping scenes’, etc.), Instagram has accelerated this reproduction.

This makes me think that if early postcards trained viewers to see “authentic cultures,” late-capitalist tourism increasingly trains us to consume familiarity as experience.

 

Let’s place the historical photograph analysed by Faris next to a contemporary Instagram image, to see the continuity (and differences) at the level of visual structure. In the earlier photograph, bodies are arranged in a long horizontal procession, movement is organised, directional, and collective. As Faris shows, these images were produced during a highly choreographed colonial visit, in which local practices were reorganised to become legible as spectacle. The Instagram image shows a similar collective movement toward the camera. The emphasis is on reproducing the kind of scene that is already known to read as “authentic.”

At the level of the narrative, if we look at the caption, similarly, almost a hundred years after the first Nuba photographs circulated, the Nuba people are imagined and narrated within the very-well known terms. The Nuba Mountains are sold as “remote,” “secluded,” “not easily accessible” and therefore worth it. The Nuba are described as living “in harmony” with an “untouched” landscape, preserving “ancient traditions” that “few outsiders have seen.” You are promised a “rare opportunity” to “witness” a “unique culture” up close, to “immerse yourself” in a world time has “forgotten.”  The place becomes a bubble outside history: “virgin” and “forgotten”…

What is happening here, however, goes much beyond what Fabian (1983) has called “denial of coevalness” – imagining the Other to be inhabiting a different temporality. The temporal othering has become commodified, where the fantasy of the untouched Other time and its remoteness has been turned into value, produced through distance. In this sense, the Nuba are transformed into what I would call an Instagram simulacrum-commodity: a repeatable, recognisable image of “culture” that can be briefly entered, photographed, posted, and then left behind, while the feed moves on to the next “untouched” place. The colonial fantasy now no longer requires colonial administration to operate, but is sustained instead by algorithms, platforms, and desire itself. It feeds on, and is fed by, the continuous production of images and data by others.

Fascinating Fascism: The (Last) Nobel Savage in a Coffee Table Book

The problem deepens when we consider the aesthetic affinities between anthropological images of the “primitives”, and certain modern visual regimes, for example, fascist ones, most notably in the work of Leni Riefenstahl.

If you’ve never heard of Leni Riefenstahl, she was a German filmmaker who became internationally infamous for making some of the most powerful visual propaganda of the Nazi Party, especially Triumph of the Will (the Nuremberg rally, 1935) and Olympia (the 1936 Olympics). Decades later, she reinvented herself as a photographer and published books of photographs of the Nuba in Sudan in her coffee table book The Last of the Nuba (1973). This is the work that Susan Sontag takes on in her influential essay “Fascinating Fascism” (1975), where she draws parallels between the images she produced there, the nobel savage image in anthropology, and her earlier fascist aesthetics.

Sontag starts by describing The Last of the Nuba as a “ravishing” book of photographs. The beauty is part of the danger, she warns. And it is true: the images are compelling, fascinating, even before we think about what they do. The Nuba, as Riefenstahl constructs them, are “a tribe of aesthetes”,  framed through physical magnificence of nudity, symmetry, strength, offered as a kind of purity, “untouched,” timeless, almost outside history. There is a focus on the formalist aesthetics, where the body itself becomes the point. As Sontag interprets it, Last of the Nuba is “about a primitivist ideal: a portrait of a people subsisting untouched by ‘civilization,’ in a pure harmony with their environment” (Sontag, 1975, para. 32).

 

 

Does this already sound familiar? Yes, it reminds us of a very familiar anthropological reading, what Sontag calls “one more lament for vanishing primitives” and she links that lament to a canonical scene of ethnographic melancholy, invoking Claude Lévi-Strauss and Tristes Tropiques (Sontag, 1975, para. 33).

Yet, the same visual language, Sontag famously noted, is also characteristic of the broader fascist aesthetics, which includes “a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, and extravagant effort.” (Sontag, 1975, para. 53);  “the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things,” a choreography that “alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, ‘virile’ posing.” (Sontag, 1975, para. 53). 

Sontag is reading the Nuba book as the “third” piece in this larger fascist visual repertoire, present in her earliest films, such as Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) two of Riefenstahl’s renowned propagandist films. And I find that convincing.

Here is a nice excerpt of her essay: “The Last of the Nuba, an elegy for the soon-to-be-extinguished beauty and mystic powers of primitives, can be seen as the third in Riefenstahl’s triptych of fascist visuals. [...]. In Olympiad, the richest visually of all her films, one straining scantily clad figure after another seeks the ecstasy of victory, cheered on by ranks of compatriots in the stands, all under the still gaze of the benign Super-Spectator, Hitler, whose presence in the stadium consecrates this effort. (Olympiad, which could as well have been entitled Triumph of the Will, emphasizes that there are no easy victories.) In the third panel, The Last of the Nuba, the stripped-down primitives, awaiting the final ordeal of their proud heroic community, their imminent extinction, frolic and pose in the hot clean desert.” (Sontag, 1975, para. 31) 

“Although the Nuba are black, not Aryan, Riefenstahl’s portrait of them is consistent with some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental, the joyful and the critical. A principal accusation against the Jews within Nazi Germany was that they were urban, intellectual, bearers of a destructive, corrupting “critical spirit.”  she further outlines. (Sontag, 1975, para. 38)

And then there is the object: the coffee-table book, which itself is interesting. Similarly to the postcard, it is built on a paradox. The images lament a “vanishing people,” yet they are designed to circulate as commodity, to be owned, displayed, leafed through, admired. The act of photographing, publishing, and consuming the images undermines the fantasy of untouchedness that the images are selling. The book produces voyeurism while pretending to mourn it.

                  One of the most circulated images of "Nuba" by Riefenstahl

I feel this discomfort sharply when it comes to reproducing particular images. Re-circulating them can feel like repeating the capture. Especially photographs of women - her body and her identity have been fixed inside Riefenstahl’s frame; the image belongs more to the archive than to her. At the same time, as I earlier outlined, I don’t want to suggest that the Nuba were simply acted upon, because we don’t know what kinds of negotiation, consent, refusal, or participation shaped these encounters. That question is important, and it also opens a whole other set of complications that I can’t do justice to here.

Crisis of representation. The end, again.

While Sontag follows aesthetic parallels across different visual regimes, Faris is far more sceptical - he insists on continuity – anthropological photography may change stylistically, become more reflexive, more cautious, more self-aware, and yet the relations it produces can remain stable. He notes that much of what changes does so “only in form” (Faris, 1992, p. 215). Explicit propaganda is, thus, not required for the body to become the privileged site through which difference is produced. The camera/the ethnographic notebook already always does this.  

Abu-Lughod’s criticism in Writing Against Culture, with which I began this text, has a similar pessimistic overtone. “Within anthropology, despite a long history of self-consciousopposition to racism, a fast-growing, self-critical literature on anthropology's links to colonialism […] and experimentation with techniques ofethnography to relieve a discomfort with the power of anthropologist over anthropological subject, the fundamental issues of domination keep being skirted.”, she writes (1996, p. 470).

And she writes this in the 90s. After the “Writing Culture” moment, often described as a rupture, when in the context of the postcolonial critique and deconstructive literature since the 1960s and 1970, which critically reshaped anthropology and became one of the first and its major crisis of knowledge. Examples include Edward Said’s critique of representation, Johannes Fabian’s critique of temporal distancing, the unease with speaking for others – all of this produces a kind of ethnographic hesitation, where representation itself becomes suspect.

And yet another pressure appears in parallel, one that is less about epistemology and more about history. As Ortner, has argued, “demise of the savage” is not simply an achievement of disciplinary self-critique, it is also the result of an empirical history in which “the differences between Western and non-Western societies” had by the 1980s become “blurrier than ever before” (2003: 9, as cited in Robbins 2013: 449). In that sense, the waning interest in the “savage” can read as a crisis in Western intellectual life itself, because the loss of an ontological space for difference also destabilises the figure of the radically Other through which Western identity had long been constructed.

This raises a question that stays uneasy across anthropology and documentary practice. The disciplines becomes aware of the problem, turns critique inward. What follows from that over time? What does it actually change in how images and films are made, how they circulate, what relations they install?

In her review of the BBC documentary The South-East Nuba Deborah Mack’s shows a genuine attempt to shift the frame. The film positions itself against Riefenstahl’s legacy, embedding the visually striking elements (scarification, fighting, body painting, dance) inside longer sequences, conversation, subtitles. As the filmmakers argue, this is an effort to move away from spectacle and allow the Nuba to appear as subjects rather than as museum objects, to be “given voice”. But when watching it you still feel some kind of discomfort…

Because, again, as Abu-Lughod reminds us, “giving voice” doesn’t dissolve asymmetry. Even in its postmodern and contemporary forms, when anthropology explicitly aims to amplify “the voices of the Other” or stage dialogue between self and other, the gesture still imply that someone positioned as more authoritative is the one who allows someone positioned as less authoritative to speak.

Is then representation inevitably structured in unequal power relations? How can we break the gaze of the anthropologist or the filmmaker???

Trinh T. Minh-ha — Reassemblage (1983). A Film About What?

Many question marks. The question itself has begins reproducing itself.

It is also the question with which Trinh T. Minh-ha has been dealing with thoughout her work.

In Woman, Native, Other, similarly refusing to comfort of “giving voice” as a solution, she insists that “speaking nearby or together with certainly differs from speaking for and about” (Minh-ha, 1989, p. 105). The difference is about form, address, and the kinds of relations a text (or film) sets up. “Speaking for and about” aims at closure with fixed oppositions and stable objects, while “speaking nearby” tries to keep meaning from being sealed too easily. But meaning, for her, should remain partial, unsettled, resistant to closure.

Her later experimental movie Reassemblage (1983), a work that critiques the "authoritative" Western ethnographic gaze documenting rural Senegalese women (a direct reference to anthropologist's and Leni's work), builts on this refusal to speak about, choosing instead to speak nearby. It feels, at the same time, like a commentary on the impossibility of producing a film or an anthropological text outside power, and like a serious attempt to not only to question the authority of the author and their habit to “impose meaning to every single sign”, but to work differently with form and actually go beyond this practise.

The film breaks the contract of ethnographic cinema, omitting everything from the explainotary voice-over, stable narrative, the promise that images will add up to “understanding.” We see instead fragments of everyday life in Senegal: hands, feet, work, gestures, pauses, repetitions. Cuts are abrupt. The camera lingers and then withdraws. Sound slips between ambient noise, silence, repetition, and Minh-ha’s own voice – sometimes questioning, reflective, sometimes ironic, sometimes sharply critical. “A film about what”, she asks quietly throughout the movie. Nothing is explained, there is no meaning attached to any sign.

This becomes typical for later experimental documentary or ethnographic filmmaking, where some experimental visual works attempt to refuse coherence to interrupt narrative, to foreground repetition, to expose the mechanics of representation. By refusing to translate everything, by resisting explanatory closure, these works try to destabilise the authority of the image. Knowledge does not disappear, but it loses its claim to mastery.

Yet even in such critical practise, someone can argue, the image of the Other often remains central, still mobilised to illustrate the filmmaker’s self-reflexivity (I’m referring to Kasia’s comment in class again). The image becomes the site where the filmmaker’s ethics, hesitation, and self-awareness are staged.

But then there is also a point where the whole conversation risks becoming a new ritual. Power is everywhere, yes, we know; I can almost hear Marshall Sahlins (2000) rolling his eyes somewhere in the background, who, with a certain sharp humour, warned against turning power into an all-explanatory fog. His critique of what he saw as a Foucauldian tendency to find power everywhere in every gesture, every silence, every symbol, was a reminder that culture also has its own logics, ironies, and excesse, and everything is reduced to power, nothing is explained.

Furthermore, ironically, I am sometimes afraid that the critical conversation itself can start producing its own simulacrum. Postcolonial critique can become a formative aesthetics itself, a hypernormalised discours, to borrow from Alexei Yurchak, where the right terms, build on the right gestures, the right suspicion, the right refusal...

Is (Visual) Anthropology then Possible???

So when I return to the question Is visual anthropology possible?, I don’t expect an answer anymore.

Nuba photographs become a site where anthropology’s noble savage fantasies, (post)modern tourism desire, and fascist aesthetics meet clearly. If images inevitably carry histories of power, circulation, and domination, then visual anthropology cannot claim innocence. At best, it can become a space of tension and quiet question.

Perhaps the task is not to escape the gaze entirely, butto keep asking what images do, how they travel, and whom they serve.

And maybe this is where visual anthropology ends up, at least for now. Not beyond representation, not outside power or its own history, but inside a field of constraints that must be continuously negotiated.

And maybe this is what the Jean Comaroff 's “end of anthropology again” mood captures - that anthropology periodically discovers its own impossibility, writes about it brilliantly, and then carries on.

 

References

Abu-Lughod, L. (1996). Writing Against Culture. In Richard G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. School of American Research Press. pp. 137-162.

Barthes, R. (1981). Camera lucida: Reflections on photography (R. Howard, Trans.). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1980)

Derrida, J. (1987). The post card: From Socrates to Freud and beyond (A. Bass, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1980)

Faris, J. C. (1992). Photography, power and the Southern Nuba. In E. Edwards (Ed.), Anthropology and photography 1860–1920 (pp. 211–217). Yale University Press.

Fabian, J. (1983). Time and the other: How anthropology makes its object. Columbia University Press.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.

Ortner, S. B. (2003). New Jersey dreaming: Capital, culture, and the Class of ’58. Duke University Press.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1973). Tristes tropiques (J. & D. Weightman, Trans.). Penguin Books

Mack, D. L. (1986). Review of The South-East Nuba (BBC; directed by Melissa Llewellyn-Davies, 1982). American Anthropologist, 88(2), 528–529.

Minh-ha, T. T. (1989). Woman, native, other: Writing postcoloniality and feminism. Indiana University Press.

Robbins, J. (2013). Beyond the suffering subject: Toward an anthropology of the good. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19(3), 447–462.

Sahlins, M. (2000). The sadness of sweetness: The native anthropology of Western cosmology. Current Anthropology, 37(3), 395–428.

Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.
(If you meant a different Said text, tell me which one; Orientalism fits your use.)

Sontag, S. (1975, February 6). Fascinating fascism. The New York Review of Books

Yurchak, A. (2006). Everything was forever, until it was no more: The last Soviet generation. Princeton University Press.

Movies and media

Curtis, E. S. (Photographer). (1907–1930). The North American Indian [Photographic project].
(Only if you actually discuss Curtis beyond a passing mention.)

Flaherty, R. J. (Director). (1922). Nanook of the North [Film]. Pathé Exchange.
(Distributor varies by edition; this is fine for a blog bibliography.)

Llewellyn-Davies, M. (Director). (1982). The South-East Nuba [Television documentary]. BBC.

Minh-ha, T. T. (Director). (1982). Reassemblage: From the firelight to the screen [Film]. Women Make Movies.

Riefenstahl, L. (Director). (1935). Triumph of the will [Film]. UFA.

Riefenstahl, L. (Director). (1938). Olympia [Film]. Olympia-Film.

Riefenstahl, L. (1973). The last of the Nuba. Harper & Row.