Observing Observers: Voice, Encounter, and the Problem of Subjectivity

 

#VisualAnthro Diaries 7 (Week 9)

In the discussions in my visual anthropology class so far, we have been engaging with the topic of filmmaking and anthropology’s relationship to social ‘reality’ from different perspectives. Week 9 continued these discussions, focusing on the position from which reality is shown. Here, the questions were no longer only how images are constructed, but who is speaking, from where, and with what consequences. If observational cinema tried to step back, and montage revealed construction, the subjective turn, which started with cinema verité and the focus on participation (week 7), brought the filmmaker decisively back into the frame.

At first, this might seem like a solution, because if the problem of documentary was its claim to objectivity, then doesn’t making the author visible, acknowledging subjectivity, voice, and position, appear as an ethical and methodological correction? In class, we had quite a lively discussion, especially regarding the film Them and Me, which made us all reflect on that, and made it difficult to accept that too easily. The subjective voice does not resolve the problem of representation. It reorganizes it.

In MacDougall’s discussion of the subjective voice, he suggests that ethnographic film can operate through different modes of address: “I speak about them to you,” “it speaks about them to us,” “we speak about us to you.” What differs between these modes is the structure of the relationship between filmmaker, subject, and viewer. The subjective voice leaves more traces of the encounter and acknowledges that the image is not neutral. Yet it can also redirect attention toward the filmmaker’s own project – what they are trying to define, extract, or construct through that encounter.

In Stéphane Breton’s Them and Me, the movie that provoked perhaps among the liveliest discussions in class so far, the anthropological encounter itself becomes the object of the film. At first, the movie appears quite problematic –  it makes you uncomfortable immediately with its honesty about the difficulty, and I’d say often weird and exploitative nature of making a movie and doing ethnography. Its violence, in Barthes sense. It makes you ask, why would you make a movie in the first place? For whom? Who wins from this movie/ethnography? Breton positions himself neither fully inside nor outside the community. He is at once neighbour, outsider, participant, and intruder. The film makes this ambiguity visible, and at times uncomfortable. It the beginning, it made me think, is playing some kind of role to show the weirdness, the problematicness of doing anthropology and turning unknown people into objects of your interest, or is he embracing all that weirdness…

‘It’s not about liking it or not liking it’, Vlad interrupted this turn of the discussions in class... Indeed, if the movie was provoking so many questions and critiques in class, then perhaps, it has done its job. Maybe he was playing a role.

Here is an excerpt from our discussion:

Leyla: The film shows how anthropology is problematic at its core. Very often, it doesn’t give anything back to the people it studies. They don’t get anything from that.

Kasha: What do you mean ‘they don’t get anything from that’?

Leyla: You need to be more reflexive when you make movies like this. (Then a comparison with the better, in Leyla's opinion, approach in filming Nanook of the North followed)

Vlad: But that’s what he is doing, he is making us reflect on it. It’s not about liking it or not liking it.

It was for sure making us reflect on moviemaking, and anthropology, so if at first I was skeptical about it, I gradually started appreciating the film more.

When I watched Them and Me I also thought of Alyssa Grossman’s Into the Field , that we bagen the class with. Both films reflect on what it means to “be in the field,” not as a neutral space of observation, but as a structured encounter shaped by asymmetries of knowledge, language, and exchange. In Breton’s case, the fact that he speaks the “language of money” positions him differently within the community. Access is partial, relationships are negotiated, and certain forms of knowledge remain closed to him. What emerges is not a transparent representation of “another culture,” but a record of a relationship that is itself unstable. So all in all, something that we can get from these movies, is the way they show how anthropology is a lot aboyt about negotiating presence, and that negotiation is not quite inccocent, but it is a central part of the process. Maybe inevitable.

We also watched the Oscar-nominated Palestinian-Israeli-French documentary 5 Broken Cameras, where the subjective voice takes yet another form. Here, the camera becomes a witness to political violence and resistance in the West Bank village of Bil'in against Israeli settlement expansion, but also part of the event itself. It is damaged, broken, replaced. At first, it is an ordinary camera, used to make home movies and record family events. Gradually, however, it is drawn into another kind of witnessing: from filming a child’s first years to recording protest, military violence, and dispossession.

The act of filming is therefore not separate from what is being filmed. The filmmaker’s body, family, village, and everyday environment are all implicated in the image. The subjective voice here is testimonial: it speaks through the author’s body and personal experience, but also through the material vulnerability of the camera itself. In this sense, 5 Broken Cameras shifts the tension we saw in Them and Me. Subjectivity is about exposure, risk, and the impossibility of remaining outside the situation one is filming.

This is why reflexivity itself becomes ambiguous. It can function as an ethical practice, but also as a stylistic gesture. The question is how that visibility shapes the relationships within the film. This brings me back to the idea of anthropology as editing. If in our previous discussion we focused on the way ‘reality’ is assembled through montage, Week 9 suggests that relationships are also assembled through narrative and voice. If there is no neutral observation, and no innocent voice, then the task is to treat the image, and the text as a site where relationships, positions, and meanings are continuously negotiated.