Ways of seeing: the fiction of reality

 

#VisualAnthro Diaries 6

You need to tell lies to tell the truth. A thought that began with last week’s discussion on observational cinema and became even clearer with this week discussion on Dziga Vertov’s legacy, among which Man with a Movie Camera (1929). If in observational cinema the problem was how to see without imposing too much, here the question becomes what if film does not simply observe reality, but actively produces it? What if the “real” on screen is always already constructed? And what if, most importantly, the camera sees better than the ethnographic gaze alone – not only in what it captures, but in how it makes reality visible.

The lie of documentaries

As Vaughan discusses, what defines documentary is a set of conventions that persuade us to accept what we see is truthful, even though its meaning is always constructed.  In "The Aesthetics of Ambiguity," (1999) he explores the fundamental tension in documentary filmmaking between film as a photographic "record" of reality and film as a "language" structured by editing and syntax. This dual nature lies in the paradox, where although documentary images serve as a "physical imprint of the world," their meaning is continually constructed through the selectivity of framing, editing choices, and cues that signal realism.

Unlike fiction films, where the significance of visual elements is entirely "exhausted" in service of the narrative, documentary images contain "excess" of reality that resists being completely absorbed into a single, predetermined meaning. Because meaning does not reside in the isolated image itself but in the cinematic structure within which it is placed, its meaning is never fixed; it is always contingent on context, sequencing, and the viewer's active interpretation. This concept connects directly to the Kuleshov effect, where the same image produces entirely different meanings depending on what surrounds it. Drawing an analogy to poetry, Vaughan suggests that the true aesthetic power of documentary lies precisely in this inherent ambiguity, which demands that the audience actively engage in deciphering the complex, untamed relationship between the real world and its cinematic representation.

Vaughan also uses the example of cutting between a midshot and a long shot during a cricket match. Because sound travels slower than light, there is a delay in hearing the ball hit the bat when filmed from a distance. If an editor were to cut immediately from a midshot to a long shot right after the batsman swings, the viewer might hear the sound of the impact twice, or not at all, due to the different recording distances. To make the scene feel natural and true to the viewer's expectations, the editor must "iron out these anomalies by laying all the sounds in apparently simultaneous synch with the pictures". By manipulating the audio, the editor creates a false technical relationship between the shots to smoothly convey the reality of the event.  In this sense, if editors relied purely on the raw, unmanipulated "record," the resulting film would often be incoherent or misrepresentative. To tell the truth of an event, the editor often has to rely on the "lies" of cinematic construction

The Superiority of the Kino-Eye

Dziga Vertov’s project Man with a Movie Camera can be understood as an extreme version of the tension Vaughan describes. On the one hand, the camera gathers fragments of unstaged life as a kind of pure record, a joy of observation. On the other hand, these fragments only become meaningful through aggressive montage. Reverse motion, superimpositions, rapid cuts.

But for Vertov, cinema is not a tool for reproducing reality. Similar to the case of MacDougalls’ Photo Wallahs, which we discussed a few classes earlier, here, the older debates of whether the camera is capable of seeing and presenting the true “reality” lose meaning, because the point is another –  to construct a new way of perceiving it. In his radical Soviet cinematic theory from the 1920s Soviet the camera is imagined as an extension "Kino-Eye" (Kino-Glaz) – and even an improvement – of the human eye. It can move differently, see differently, connect fragments across space and time and, through editing, reveal a deeper, objective truth about the world (kino-pravda or "film-truth"). Reality, in fact, emerges through the operations of filming and editing.

Interestingly, in Man with a Movie Camera, this kino-eye appears within the frame, the editing becomes visible, and the making of the film becomes part of the film. It is a film about a film, but also about how reality itself is assembled through cinematic means. What this does is collapse this longstanding distinction between representation and production, fiction and reality. If Vaughan emphasises ambiguity, however, Vertov aimed for something closer to ideological clarity. His montage sought to produce a coherent, often explicitly political vision of modern life. Yet, following Vaughan’s own argument, this ambition is never fully achieved. Documentary images always exceed the intentions of their makers. Watching Man with a Movie Camera today, it is difficult to read it only as “Soviet propaganda”. The sheer density, kinetic energy, and real-world "excess" of 1920s life captured by the Kino-Eye demands a uniquely poetic and ambiguous "mode of response". The reality Vertov recorded ultimately outstripped his ideological intentions, proving Vaughan's point that the viewer is the one who actively navigates the truth of the documentary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_with_a_Movie_Camer

Anthropology as Editing

This returns us to anthropology. Both the “camera eye” and the “anthropological eye” aim to grasp the complexity of social life, to slow it down, to make visible what usually remains unnoticed. Yet both are equally implicated in the construction of what they show – in one way a film, in the other – an ethnographic book, or a movie. There is no unmediated access to reality.

Following Marcus and the Writing Culture debates, montage, like writing, can also be understood as a methodological proposition. In this post-structural view, ethnographic writing does not have, and should not produce a single, coherent narrative. It should instead work through juxtaposition, placing fragments, voices, and situations next to each other, allowing meaning to emerge relationally. Writing, like film, becomes compositional and does not simply represent reality, but reassembles it. Moreover, similarly to documentary filmmaking (Nanook of the North, for example), in ethnographic writing, sometimes we rely on techniques that might blur the boundary between fiction and ‘reality’. Fiction can produce insights that feel more real than documentary, while documentary relies on constructed forms to sustain its claims to truth.

Thus, if last week suggested staying with the ordinary, this week we are no longer interested in how to observe without intervention, but how to work with the inevitability of construction. For me, the most productive takeaway of these materials is to think of both film and anthropology as practices of editing. This feels particularly relevant to my work as an anthropologist, where the challenge, at the end, is always to choose how to assemble what is gathered in the writing process. Not in the narrow technical sense, but as ways of arranging fragments, of producing relations, of making certain realities visible while leaving others in the background, in order to make specific claims, arguments about ‘reality’, but also without forcing them into a single, closed narrative. Both montage and ethnographic writing are thus a way of thinking, making sense of ‘reality’.