I took Tyger to the central island, left him there with a fellow bath house owner. He promised to feed Tyger and teach him everything he would need to make a living. I went straight ahead to the mountains to receive my decree. A guard, they told me. Here's where I shall spend days and nights patrolling and I shall keep in mind that if I stay around long enough and keep myself sane, the chance of finding the blue source will increase enormously. I see the whole thing as a pilgrimage, except I am circling the island the whole day instead of venturing out into the open sea. I make my landings every other week and stop by the bath house to see Tyger, who by now has accumulated his own customers, a lot of them, male, female.
Professor Streible spoke of a filmmaker W.S. Van Dyke quite a few times yesterday. It happens that I came across this guy too in my research for my final paper, which is on ethnographic film history and theory. I would like to share something I know of him here.
In the field of ethnographic film, W.S. Van Dyke (1889-1943) was known for having collaborated with Robert Flaherty but later broken off with Flaherty because they had different ideologies about making films of ethnic groups. Here's Karl G. Heider's comparison of Van Dyke and Flaherty in his book Ethnographic Film:
But while Flaherty pictures the brave-and-noble-savage in the Arctic, Samoa, and Ireland, the Polynesian films of Van Dyke and Murnau show the noble-savage-corrupted-by-civilization...It is interesting that audiences of today find Flaherty's documentary films more palatable than the Polynesian feature films. But actually the Van Dyke and Murnau films should be more appealing to anthropologists because they at least allude to real sorts of problems in real sorts of situations. Modern anthropology is much more concerned with the cultural conflicts ofTabu than with the reconstructed initiation ceremony of Moana. (Heider 26)
I underlined the last sentence of the quoted passage, for it informed my own understanding of this history of visual anthropology. To me, there are roughly three stages of development: the illustrative/exhibitive, the observational, and the reflexive. Today's ethnographic films have learned to cover all three areas. The educational documentaries that we watched class yesterday, especially the poverty films, are good examples of how we deal with visual materials in the future. I would like to think so because I agree more or less with Sarah Pink's arguments in her bookThe Future of Visual Anthropology. Basically, she argues that film can continue to be used for research, film can continue to the ever disappearing present, and film can can play an active role in public affairs.
