The photo in the Ffilm: public and private collections in video-portrait

DOSSIER: VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The photo in the film: public and private collections in video-portrait

Clarice E. Peixoto

PPCIS-INARRA/UERJ

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the inclusion of photographs in ethnographic films, particularly in the genre video portrait. In the reconstitution of an individual's history, photographic images play an important role in the evocation of past facts that often remain only as fragments of memory. When examining personal collections and public archives, we prospect for photographic and iconographic images that allow usto construct possible relationships between collective and individual memories.

Keywords: video portrait, photography and ethnographic film, visual anthropology

RESUMO

Este artigo discute a inserção de fotografias nos filmes etnográficos, particularmente no gênero vídeo portrait, que entendo como o percurso de um indivíduo em seu universo social e profissional. Na reconstituição da trajetória desse personagem, a imagem fotográfica desempenha um papel importante na evocação dos fatos do passado, e dos quais muitas vezes restam apenas fragmentos de memória. Na garimpagem desses acervos pessoais, e arquivos públicos, buscamos imagens fotográficas e iconográficas que possibilitem a construção das relações possíveis entre a memória individual e a memória coletiva. As fotografias inseridas no filme apontam para a questão da linguagem e a complexidade da relação entre imagens em movimento (contínuas) que englobam imagens fixas (fragmentadas).

Palavras-chave: vídeo portrait, fotografia e filme etnográfico, antropologia audiovisual

Pense avant la prise de vue,

pendant la prise de vue et après la prise de vue.

Alexandre Rodtchenko¹

In an ethnographic film, the use of personal photographic collectionsor public archives allows us to accelerate processes of remembering and recreating the past. There is a close connection between memory and photography thatdenotes the situation, public or private, tied to the image, showing the special relationship between them. Thus, the insertion of images from photographic collections in a film establishes a definitive relationship with time, because the images create a pause that refers to the past that was photographed, and they compete with the present of the film. In this process, photographic collections change their status when they are removed from storage: they are transformed from simple photographs into images of information, of memories, and may even act as historical artifacts, revealing events and the cultural practices of a particular social group in a given time.

A photograph allows us to discuss the relationship between seeing, looking, remembering, forgetting, appearing and disappearing. As F. Laplantine (2007: 48) affirms, each picture "is inscribed in a social and cultural history and has an image of its own and, finally, maintains a unique relationship with one who sees it: there is no picture without the act of looking." This is also inherent to cinematic images. So a picture we see in a photograph or an ethnographic film is only a fragment of a social reality, recorded in a particular place at a precise time. That is, photography andfilm reflect a dual relationship between time and place.

I intend to discuss here the inclusion of photographs in ethnographic films, particularly in the genre video portrait, which allows depicting the trajectory of an individual in his social and professional universe. In this case it is an "attempt to present, through images, the person's trajectory, expose his thought and the context of his intellectual journey". (Fiéloux & Lombard 2006: 27). I think that in the reconstitution of an individual's history, a photographic image plays an important role in the evocation ofhis past, reconstructing fragments of his memory. By panning through personal collections and public archives, we search for images that can help us construct possible relationships between individual memory and collective memory, as suggested by M. Halbwachs (1997).

Thus, one of the new fields of interpretation that presents rich analytical resources for the social sciences establishes connections between intellectual pathways and the development of theoretical frameworks. It is no coincidence that we have recently seen in Brazil a significant increase in the use of the video portrait genre to reconstruct the trajectories of anthropologists and their fields of study. The series Trajetórias² producedby the Laboratoryof Image and Soundin Anthropology (LISA/USP) is devoted mainly to Brazilian and foreign visual anthropologists, and the series Narradores Urbanos. Antropologia Urbana e Etnografia nas Cidades Brasileiras³, produced by the Images and Visual Effects Database (BIEV/UFRGS) declares its purpose in the title. Thus, a video portrait understands that biographies can be extremely effective methodological sources for understanding the process of building intellectual and social memory.

As stated by M. Halbwachs, "if collective memory is strengthened and maintained, thisis because it is supported by a group of men who are actually individuals who remember as members of groups. From this set of common memories, which support each other, they do not always appear with the same intensity. However, each individual memory represents a point of view of thecollective memory." (1997: 94). Thus, it is through the rebuilding of individual memories, understood as plausible versions of historical processes and cultural traits, that social memory is constituted. Moreover, "memory is an essential element of what is called identity, whether individual or collective, the quest for which is one of the fundamental activities of individuals and societies, and is conducted feverishly and anxiously." (Le Goff 2003: 469).

Thus, reviving memory creates a thread of time, a permanent tension between the particular and the universal and it is a way of understanding and or discovering the silence of a generation, a place, or a social group. The exercise of remembering results in a partial and subjective report, because memory refers to the past in an emotional way, and to remember the past, one must have lived it. Because the narrative of an individual talking about his own experiences is delivered in the present - I remember - it is distinct from once upon a time - which has, in general, an argument detached from the eventsbecause it is presented in the past (Peixoto 2011). In this sense, as H. Rousso says: "I remember is necessarily in the present tense since the operation of memory is to relate the past to the present, while the historic operation is to try to think as people thought at the time, and so the principle is the past tense ..." (2003: 63). This principle can be seen in the video thatI made about my grandmother and the participation of Gaucho women in the Revolution of 1923. In thisplunge in time I looked through the living memory of Bebela, as N. Lapierre affirmed, "to breakthe silentmemoryin which the past was hidden" (2001: 20). If on one hand the official history, through its records, discloses the performancesof men involved in Brazilian political events, on the other, it relegates to a distant background or even denies women's role in the same political and social events. In the conflict between the Gaucho "liberators" or "revolutionaries," who challenged the result of the polls in the government elections of 1922, and the pro-government supporters that backed Borges de Medeiros⁴ for another term as governor of Rio Grande do Sul state, women worked actively behind the scenes, caring for the wounded in battles and collecting food, clothing and money.

The video Bebela e a revolução gaúcha de 1923⁵ records our conversations, mediated by her son. It also registers the expressions of her emotions associated with the events. The video depicts the various artifacts that reveal the unfolding of history, and also stimulate calls to bring back memories. These artifacts include photographs and newspaper articles found in her personal collection and in public libraries. This visual memory appears here as a visual reference, as suggested by B. Stiegler: [photos] "are used here in contrast to the subjective camera, and aim to overcome the hesitations, to translate them into suggestive images to provoke, in turn, a destabilization in the spectator" (2009). I would not say that, in this film, the photos cause much impact on viewers, but undoubtedly, they stimulated my grandmother's memory, which enriched her narrative.

Documentary films that reveal a page of history through individual biographies present verbal and visual evidence that provides us with memories of a story in which we did not participate directly, and help us to understand what happened. In addition, through the use of archival footage in these films, we look at the places and the events with the feeling that somehow we took part in them, and we (re)live the moments through the experiences of the real actors. It is much more than an attempt to represent memory in film. It is actually another kind of knowledge or another way of recalling the story, which begins to be revived by the viewer, because during the projection, these images and sounds cross through "different cognitive registers in a way that we find strikingly familiar, so that even people who have never seen the films before quickly find them comprehensible, despite culturally specific codes of narration and editing,"as D. MacDougall affirmed (1994:266).

The presentation of memory through images has been widely explored in anthropology, particularly in visual anthropology, through the feedback procedure. Many authors (Collier 1967, 1973; Deshayes 1992, 1996; Peixoto 1995) have written about this tool that encourages people being filmed to talk about images: images of themselves, and images of others. Films are visual images, but they are also sonorous and verbal images. They are narratives, and especially representations. Thus, the researcher-filmmaker highlights the social universe of the film and develops the central argument through the historical agents, while constantly working with the relationship between time and history, the history of time, time and memory (Peixoto 2001). Thus, "knowing that [images] cannot precisely inform all aspects of the past, filmmakers reorganize them, associating them with sounds and voices, comparing them to other documents, highlighting the contradictions, all in an attempt to give them historical consistency. So they develop their subject from elements found in the archives." (Véray 2003: 71-83). The photographs included in the film point to the question of language, and the complex relationship between moving images (continuous images) that also include still images (fragmented). Therefore, according to E. Pedon, "the production of a heterogeneous visual set could signify a different way for us to relate to memory, more variable and dynamic: if each image type requires a specific level of memory (linked to the method of representation of a reference in a given space-time), the alternation of organized images can show the complex work involved in the constitution and reconstitution of memory" (1997:106).

Thus, the insertion of photographs and journals in the video Bebela e a revolução gaúcha de 1923 is conducted for much more than a need to illustrate the filmed interviews. Besides being historical documents, they prompt her to evoke this important part of her life, revealing that her memory was clearly linked to the photographic images. That is, the photographs and clippings of this period hold information that add to the filmed discourse and enrich the construction of the video narrative. For example, consider the scene where Bebela's son shows her some pictures of a revolutionary group kept inher box of memories of that period:

Film available at http://youtu.be/IDShdIa8dx8

In this film, the pictures are a privileged support for the interview because they direct the conversation towards the issues that I wanted to explore more deeply, avoiding the distraction of the subjects to other topics that were not the central theme of the film - Bebela's experience and the participation of Gaucho women in the Revolution of 1923. This is that J. Collier defined as a photo-interview because "the photographs stimulate the memory and give the interview a sense of proximity with the objects" (Collier 1973: 70).

In the video portrait Etienne Samain: de um caminho a outro,⁶ less than reworking memory in an attempt to remember the past, the photographs created an opportunity to reinterpret moments of his life. For example, by showing a photograph of when he was a boy, sitting in kindergarten, E. Samain analyzes his expression, trying to remember his behavior in this phase of his life: whether he was a pesky or an obedient child. "I think I was very obedient," he concludes. This was a still picture, and like any photograph it tries to show that the subject pictured has attributes that Samain expects to be revealed in that image. However, as I. Jonas states, "the impression to be given, and that of those who see this photo, evolves over time, and poses from the past produce just smiles today", as those elicited in our anthropologist. (Jonas 2010: 132).

In this scene, in which he talks about his education, the photographs become a thread with which his story is woven. The actor-anthropologist removes from the picture box only those photos he considerscould represent the most significant periods of his life, and does this according to a chronological order. Thus, shortly after the kindergarten photo, taken in Belgium, he shows one taken on the day he was admitted to a Belgian seminary, to pursue religious life. At this moment, we realized his discomfort and that he blushed from this revelation, and the photo-proof, that he had been a seminarian before embarking on the path of anthropology:

Going out the next day, through the streets of this town (...), I was a little embarrassed to be so strangely dressed [in clerical clothing]. I'm smiling here, but I was very sad. I was suffering from something that I still could not fully understand.

Consider the images in http://youtu.be/cs2-1fZGNWg

This is how, through these photographs, he revisits and reinterprets his past, and his memory of images is a curious combination of the sensorial and the verbal. D. MacDougall reinforces the idea that films and photographs "offer us the past in flashes and fragments, and in what seems a hodge-podge of mental 'media'. We seem to glimpse images, hear sounds, use unspoken words and re-experience such physical sensations as pressure and movement". (1994: 261).

In this video portrait, photographs also serve as research documents and illustrations. E. Samain picked up some photographs during his research with the Kamaiurá and Urubu-Kapoor indigenous communities. They were presented to us to display the indigenous body painting and the feathers they used in their rituals, but also as possible images to illustrate their myths. To strengthen his account, we used some of his own sound recordings of Tupi "Flute songs."

In the case of the portrait of a visual anthropologist, who is an expert in photographic images, at a given moment the photograph becomes the subject of the film, taking a central role when he speaks about anthropology & photography. He says:

The image is at the foundation of human understanding. We will not understand writings or the spoken word without going back to the origin of human communication, which is the image.

Look at this scene in http://youtu.be/ASHHSjhVYbg

Here, E. Samain confers to the photographs the main role in the film, when he discusses the place of image in the thought of those who most inspired him: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jack Goody and Anne Marie Christin: "Writing is a double image" - he says in voice over while his drawings fill the screen - "For me, drawings are the basis of all human communication." Photographs and drawings leave the scene, and he concludes his speech introducing the third important element of his life: the guitar.

Two others films are part of this reflection about photography in film.

The film Gisèle Omindarewa⁷ presents the life of a Candomblé priestess: an old French woman⁸ living in a Rio de Janeiro suburb. This film deals with memories of her childhood and youth in one of the best neighborhoods in Paris, her participation with her father in the French Resistance, her marriage to a French diplomat, her experiences in several African countries and Brazil, and finally of her initiation in Candomblé in Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s.

Unlike the previous two films, here photography is not a tool for remembering or reinterpreting, because when we did the first filming in 1998 she had only three or four family photographs - of her father, mother, and the family house in Paris - and a small photo album of her last trip to Benin, Africa. Her personal collection of photo albums was in a friend's barn in Normandy. But by 2009, when we started the editing, Gisèle Omindarewa Cossard had recovered her picture collection: photographs from her family life during the African and Brazilian diplomatic experiences.

To avoid presenting a lengthy filmed interview, we developed a film narrative that alternated between an account of the past (with photographic illustrations) and current images. Thus, her speech aimed to break the silence of memory in which the past was hidden and the record of rituals and activities of her terreiro⁹ show the daily routine.

This film was made with many pauses and silences which had distinct purposes when using photographs. The first three photographs - of her parents and her family home - came up spontaneously in the course of filming, as she started to tell her story, and this introduced us right away to her family. The photographs are thus fully integrated into her story and her scenic movements, as we can see in this scene:

[ Film available at http://youtu.be/Ot13y0UUTuU ]

The second moment is in her description of her African experiences. The insertion of photographs can be interpreted as a narrative of still images within the film narrative, as the photo series without her commentaries turns out to be a visual narrative by itself: the photographs present some moments of her life in Africa, and the drums of the rituals of her terreiro create the background sound. The scene was mounted ad hoc to help express her account, but also to break the inertia of the frame from the filmed interview.

It should be noted that the photographs fragment moments, and their ordering in series (or in an album or archive, as stated by A. Rouillé 2005:125)rearranges the groups reorganizing the event.

Note the construction of narrative in http://youtu.be/8p7AKnbDyhU

The fact that this film was edited many years after it was shot, prevented the realization of new takes to replace those parts that were out of focus and blurry. Therefore, the photographs serve to cover poorly filmed images, andto illustrate a long story.

Consider the scene in http://youtu.be/KFJOdl1RmGw

Finally, we have the photo-glorification that express exaltation: Pierre Verger was an important personage in Gisèle Omindarewa's private and religious life:

I had a very deep friendship with Verger, he taught me many things! I went to every place he researched in Africa: Pobé, Sakété, Aketu. So I was in Verger's footsteps!

Verger introduced her to Balbino Daniel de Paula, who would be her second pai-de-santo¹⁰ after the death of Joãosinho da Goméia, who initiated her in Candomblé. Since she had no pictures of these people or this period, we resorted to the Pierre Verger Foundation collection, where we found photographs of Omindarewa in the rituals of the Ile Axé Opo Afonja's terreiro in Salvador, and many others of her pai-de-santo Balbino. It was impossible not to fall into the temptation of praising Pierre Verger's photographs. Without a doubt, the photos used here serve as "illustration"! But they are very expressive and metaphorical images, helping to enrich and give meaning to the film narrative, as we see in this scene:

[ Available at http://youtu.be/j9A-Rx_q5i0 ]

The photographs incorporated in these three films belong, mainly, to the family collections of the filmed persons. As suggested by I. Jonas, "at the intersection of many logics - social, aesthetic and familiar - the family photo album is a visual testimony about how families represented themselves symbolically." (1996: 105).

In the fourth film used as an example, Ilha Grande em outros tempos¹¹ the use of photography in a video-portrait occurred in a very different manner than in the first three films. This film seeks to reconstruct some elements from the history of this island prison: events, people, and physical artifacts. The idea, was to recover the fragments of memory of some people who had lived in the prison on Ilha Grande, in Rio de Janeiro, and are still living there. The main narrator of the story is Julio, a former inmate. He leads us through these places of memory¹², telling his prison stories. His reports are interlaced by the testimony of a teacher who worked at the prison, and some former prison guards and policemen.

The people in the film do not have photos of this place marked by imprisonment and violence that remains alive in their collective memory. They keep objects (for example knives and makeshift shields made by the inmates, charts and maps, newspaper clippings, magazines, etc.) and, remarkably, the memory of certain events. There are the statements from these individuals, their objects and the ruins of the prison, which are signifiers of their experiences and offer certain representations of the past, which evoke some moments in the history of the Rio de Janeiro state prison. Thus, by means of individual memories, stirred by photographs taken by professional photographers and by material traces we reconstructed the social memory of this place. But that is not all. Film footage found at the National Archives reinforces the testimonies of the past, and brings to the present the history in images. These are short films, without sound, produced by the National Broadcasting Agency, intended for public diffusion. In this film they are used not only to provide visual options to the fixed frame of the interviews, but as image sthat portray the reality that emanates from the account of the narrators.

As A. Farge affirms, archival documents are "pieces of truth embedded in that moment that expand our eyes: with blinding clarity and credibility. No doubt, the discoveryof the archive is a godsend, fully justifying its name: a source." (1989: 15).

In this film we employed different types of still and moving images to evoke fragments of the history of the prison. Here are two excerpts from archival films¹³ that we use not only to alternate the reports of the characters, but mainly to plunge deeper, if only for a few seconds, into this time of imprisonment. See these footages:

[ Available at http://youtu.be/nw78lOc-7oI ]

[ Available http://youtu.be/4rRG7_3tL_E ]

***

Whereas biographies can be efficient methodological sources for understanding the processes of construction of social memory, because they reveal the past through the memory of its protagonists, video portraits can be seen as a productive resource for the reconstitution of the times and places of memory. This is because they allow a more complete composition, and complex relationship between visual texts (photographs, iconography, archival footage, etc.) and written texts (newspapers, letters, other documents, etc.) when they are ordered in keeping with the gestures, emotions and statements of individuals, who became the central characters of these video portraits. In this sense, the insertion of these other images into the films mentioned above is also" a metaphoric invitation to sit beside him on the bench and contemplate them," as B. Stiegler summoned us to do. (2009: 15).

Finally, while acting as an artifact of memory, all miscellaneous images trigger the mechanisms of remembrance, and elicit the expression of feelings. It is the emotion-laden memory of the past fixed on images that we see manifest on the screen. Moreover, "memory, in which history develops and which in turn sustains it, seeks to save the past to serve the present and future. We must work so that collective memory serves liberty and not the servitude of men". (Le Goff 2003: 471).

Received April 30, 2012.

Approved, 30 June, 2012.

About the author

Clarice Ehlers Peixoto is a PhD in Social and Visual Anthropology by the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris; Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ); Director of the Research Group Images, Narratives and Cultural Practices (INARRA/UERJ - CNPq), and of the Group of Studies on Contemporary Family (GREFAC/ UERJ - CNPq). She is the author, among others, of the books: Envelhecimento e Imagem: as fronteiras entre Paris e Rio de Janeiro (São Paulo: Annablume, 2000), Envelhecimento, políticas sociais e novas tecnologias (Rio de Janeiro: FGV, 2005); and organized the books: Família e Envelhecimento (Rio de Janeiro: FGV, 2004); Antropologia & Imagem: narrativas diversas (vol.1) e Antropologia & Imagem: os bastidores do filme etnográfico (vol. 2). (Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2011); Família em Imagens (com B. Copque e G. Mattos, Rio de Janeiro: FGV, 2012). She is Director of thefilms: Em busca do pequeno paraíso (1993) ; Bebela e a Revolução Gaúcha de 1923 (2004) ; Etienne Samain de um caminho a outro (2008); Gisele Omindarewa (2009) ; Ilha Grande em outros tempos (2010). Email: [e-mail] ; [e-mail]

Translated by Antônio João Peixoto

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• FARGE, Arlette. 1989. Le goût de l'archive Paris: Points-Seuil.
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• JONAS, Irène. 2010. La mort de la photo de famille? De l'argentique au numérique. Paris: L'Harmattan. Coll. "Logiques sociales".
• JONAS, Irène. 1996. "Mentira e verdade do álbum de fotos de família". Cadernos de Antropologia e Imagem, 2: 105-114.
• LAPIERRE, Nicole. 2001. Le silence de la mémoire. A la recherche des juifs of Plock. Paris: Le Livre de Poche.
• LAPLANTINE, François. 2007. « Penser en images ». Ethnologie Française, XXXVII (1): 47-56.
• LE GOFF, Jacques. 2003. História e memória. Campinas: Editora da UNICAMP.
• MACDOUGALL, David. 1994. « Films of memory ». In: Lucien Taylor (org.), Visualizing theory. Selected essays from V. A. R 1990-1994. New York & London: Routledge. pp. 260-270.
• PEDON, Eric. 1997. "Image photographique et mémoire dans le film documentaire". Champs Visuels. Revue Interdisciplinaire de Recherches sur l'Image, 4: 101-108.
• PEIXOTO, Clarice E. 2011. «Filme e vídeo de família: das imagens familiares ao registro histórico». In: Clarice Peixoto (org.), Antropologia & imagem: narrativas diversas (vol. 1). Rio de Janeiro: Garamond. pp. 11-26.
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• ROUILLE, André. 2005. La photographie Paris: Gallimard.
• ROUSSO, Henri. 2003. «La dernière trace». In : Pierre Beuchot et al. (orgs.), Filmer le passé dans le cinéma documentaire. Paris: Harmattan. pp. 9-73.
• STIEGLER, Bernd. 2009. «Quand une vue d'arbres est presque un crime: Rodtchenko, Vertov, Kalatozov». Etudes Photographiques, 23: 6-20. http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/index2668.html
• VERAY, Laurent. 2003. «L'histoire peut-elle se faire avec des archives filmiques?». 1895. Mille Huit Cent Quatre-Vingt-Quinze, 41: 71-83. Accessed on June 7, 2012. http://1895.revues.org/266

1

STIEGLER (2009) refers to this Rodtchenko's manuscript - 'Fragment d'une leçon sur la photographie' - cited by Aleksandr LAVRENTJEV (IN "Die neue Art, die Welt zusehen"), which article is published in the book of Hubertus GASSNER,

RodtchenkoFotografien. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1982, p. 7-11.

4

Antônio Augusto Borges de Medeiros governed Rio Grande do Sul State for 25 years, during the Old Republic, from 1898 to 1908, and from 1913 to 1928.

8

In 1998, when the film was shot Gisèle was 76.

9

The yard where the celebrations of the Afro-Brazilian's religion take place.

10

A candomblé priest who addresses the deities and receives instructions from them to transmit to the believers.

12

I borrowed this idea of "places of memory" from historians. As they say, they can't be reduced to physical spaces, since they are also symbolic and imaginary (Rousso 2003: 21).

13

D. Armogathe defines archival film,

stricto sensu, as "an iconographic feature more or less rude. Namely, that at first it does not have a homogeneous corporeality, but escaped the ravages of time or the destruction of men, and has been preserved and restored in institutions/specialized structures and available for documentation, research or creation" (2003: 145-156).

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  21 Jan 2013
• Date of issue
  Dec 2012

History

• Received
  30 Apr 2012
• Accepted
  30 June 2012