Moving Images by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Libbey Publishing
Published: 2016-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Moving bodies in space: film and the vicissitudes of sight

Over three days in September 1898, Alfred Cort Haddon shot five brief films of Torres Strait Islanders and Australian Aborigines on Mer Island during a nine month expedition to the Torres Strait in 1898.17 Haddon had very little confidence in the cinématograph and no experience using film, although he was, as I have pointed out, an accomplished photographer. Rather than discuss all of Haddon’s films, I would instead like to focus exclusively on Haddon’s film of the climax of the Malu-Bomai ceremony (the zogo-le dance)18 and consider the challenges this film presented to traditional ways of seeing within anthropology.19 At stake here is an enduring paradox in the history of visual anthropology, a tension between the apparent sufficiency of the ethnographic image, its excess of visual detail on the one hand, versus its discursive insufficiency, the fact that while on the surface it may appear to tell us a great deal about a particular social or cultural practice, it nevertheless remains ‘annoyingly mute’, in David MacDougall’s words, about what these cultural forms and symbols might actually mean in broader anthropological terms.20

Haddon had been interested in the Malu ceremonies since his first trip to the Torres Strait in 1888, but it was not until the second trip ten years later that he persuaded two Mer Islanders, Wan and Enter, to reconstruct the Malu-Bomai ceremony for the motion picture camera.21 Making models of the elaborate masks worn during the ceremony out of card-board used for packing supplies was a symbolically charged act for the Islanders, since these re-enactments entailed rekindling ritual beliefs and practices that had been suppressed through missionary activities and the Islanders’ conversion to Christianity some thirty years prior to Haddon’s second visit to the Islands in 1898. The intercultural negotiations involved in preparing for the ceremony to be recorded on wax cylinders as well as film were complex. For example, Wan and Enter wanted to donate the 10 shillings Haddon paid them for making models of the masks to the annual missionary meeting and ended up concealing them from church officials when they brought the masks to show Haddon at the weekly prayer meeting.22 Traditional Islander beliefs, Christian faith, and salvage ethnography all collided around the Malu-Bomai ceremony, a fact not lost on Haddon who, according to curator and anthropologist Anita Herle, was ‘acutely aware of the contrast between traditional Island Custom and the realities of Islander life, which was strongly influenced by traders, colonialists, and missionaries’.23

But Haddon had another set of issues to contend with besides the logistical arrangements involved with the Malu ceremony reconstructions, namely the ambiguous status of the dances in relation to popular ethnographic spectacle and neutral scientific demonstration. As visual anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards argues, this tension is played out in the contrast between Haddon’s suppression of the lyricism and exoticism of the Malu-Bomai film in his description of the ceremony in his Expedition volumes intended for a professional readership24 (the six-volume Reports of the Cambridge

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