This week we explored Jean Rouch’s Cinema-verité. I’m not going to focus on that topic explicitly (though I may link to it a bit at the end), but instead reflect on my own response process so far, and why I’m not convinced it has been productive.
I also recognize the irony of my response the week before last (or two posts ago—week 5). That week, our focus was “the limits of representation”—whether, according to the course summary, visual language could “stand on its own through its expressive and sensuous powers.” In my response to that debate, I, for the first time, typed my responses. At first, I justified this to myself by pointing to the fact that the main film of the week had been screened in class. I didn’t get the chance to sketch particular scenes or reflect with my usual scattering of phrases and drawings. However, the contrast—between a week focused on images, sounds, and sensations, with no text, and my own far-more-textual-than-usual response—gave me pause. I went back to my attempts at incorporating images into my responses, but I had begun to think more critically about how/why I was forcing myself to respond in this way.
I am no longer convinced that drawing scenes from the films we watch is a good way to document my reflections on the course. My initial thought had been that writing reflections each week, at least in a fairly “normally” structured and formal way, somehow cut against the grain of the course (which, of course, itself intends to cut against the textual grain of the discipline).
As Lucien Taylor wrote in “Iconophobia,” which we read in the very first week of class, “[t]he filmic detachment of words and things (if indeed that is what films do) is characterized in a quasi-religious idiom as sinful” (67). Though I have by no means fully eschewed words—writing and playing with language seems, for me, to be an unavoidable response to nearly any experience, for better or for worse—I have sometimes forced images to fit into my responses. Perhaps I am buying into the dichotomy upon which Taylor implicitly casts doubt (with his parenthetical). The difference between me and those who view the image as sinful is that I opted in to this course. In an almost comical reaction to my natural affinity for words and writing, I have, for some time, become convinced that there is a great deal of meaning that is outside of language (at least as far as language is understood strictly, in terms of text and speech). As such, I wanted to use this course to push myself outside the comfortable space of words. Of course, unsure of what this escape would reveal—or what it meant at all, really—I picked a rather random strategy. I chose to try and incorporate images, more than structured language, into my responses. The lesson I have learned is, more or less, that I may have gone too far in the other direction. While the filmic might not be sinful, neither is the textual—and perhaps I forgot this at times.
Of course, it should also be noted that a reason this approach hasn’t been wholly satisfying to me might be a function not of the theoretical, but rather of the practical: I’m not an excellent artist, and what small abilities I have are not best showcased in realistic re-creations of scenes; furthermore, I’ve worked with black-and-white exclusively, which often fails to capture some of the most important dimensions of a given scene.
The remainder of my responses will probably focus on my film project anyway, but I just wanted to ‘formally’ consider my semi-failed attempt at using images to respond to visual anthropology.
Visual Anthropology, Reflections 