American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

served by independent cinemas—the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, the Harvard Film Archive, the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline—as well as independent film series offered by colleges and universities: Fred Camper’s MIT film series in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, and Saul Levine’s ongoing series at Massachusetts College of Art, and the nomadic Balagan Film Series initiated and curated by Alla Kovgan and Jeff Silva.¹⁰ The estimable work done by these and many other individuals and institutions has kept a vital film culture alive in the Boston area.

      And how might one account for the particular emergence of ethnographic filmmaking and personal documentary in Cambridge? Here, conjecture is a bit foolhardy: so many factors are at play in urban environments. However, one intellectual tradition that seems as fully identified with Cambridge as ethnographic filmmaking and personal documentary may at least offer a way of thinking about this phenomenon. For Charles Peirce and William James, the creators of Pragmatism, coming to know the truth, or what truth there is, involves looking carefully at lived experience in order to become aware of its process and its principles. In the minds of the Pragmatists, a priori reasoning may produce intellectual ideas of remarkable complexity and brilliance, but firsthand experience of real events produces knowledge and the ground for reasoning itself.

      Early documentary film, including much of American documentary from Robert Flaherty through the 1950s, was focused on explaining ideology and providing information conditioned by ideology: that is, on applying ideas already arrived at to a variety of social realities, from the nature of the Inuit struggle for survival in northern Canada to the reasons why Americans needed to fight the Nazis. The advent of new filmmaking technologies during the 1950s and 1960s made it possible for filmmakers to make different kinds of documentaries. The emergence of cinema verite shooting transformed ethnographic filmmaking and made personal documentary possible—in both cases, allowing filmmakers to record lived experience as it unfolded and to provide cinematic experiences from which audiences must draw their own conclusions. The types of documentary most fully identified with Cambridge do not primarily report findings or offer polemics; rather, they attempt to cinematically observe and reconstitute real experience so that the filmmakers and their audiences can come to understand the process of human life more completely.

      In Art as Experience, his landmark Pragmatist treatise on aesthetics (based on lectures he delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932), John Dewey explores the relationship between works of art and lived experience in considerable detail. For Dewey, “an experience” is distinct from “experience” in general by virtue of the fact that an experience is understood by the experiencer as having a shape: a beginning, middle, and end. An aesthetic experience is a particular instance of this shaped experience. For Dewey, “That which distinguishes an experience as esthetic is conversion of resistance and tensions, of excitations that in themselves are temptations to diversion, into a movement toward an inclusive and fulfilling close”; an aesthetic experience occurs only “when the factors that determine anything which can be called an experience are lifted high above the threshold of perception and are made manifest for their own sake.”¹¹ Works of cinema, and in particular, the forms of cinema produced by the filmmakers explored in this book, are manifestations of the process of transforming the experiences witnessed and lived by the filmmakers, experiences full of tensions and resistance, into particular cinematic experiences that are, if not conclusive (no one film, or set of films, can be entirely conclusive about any particular or general experience), at least fulfilling, in Dewey’s sense of the term.

      Dewey distinguishes between the delivery of intellectual conclusions and the perception of lived reality in a manner that is relevant for this discussion:

      An intellectual statement is valuable in the degree in which it conducts the mind to many things all of the same kind. It is effective in the extent to which, like an even pavement, it transports us easily to many places. The meaning of an expressive object, on the contrary, is individualized. The diagrammatic drawing that suggests grief does not convey the grief of an individual person; it exhibits the kind of facial “expression” persons in general manifest when suffering grief. The esthetic portrayal of grief manifests the grief of a particular individual in connection with a particular event. It is that state of sorrow which is depicted, not depression unattached. It has a local habitation.¹²

      In general, the tradition of documentary up until the late 1950s and early 1960s was intellectual, in the sense Dewey describes, or at least “intellectual” (I’m thinking here of the jingoistic logic used in most war propaganda). Even if the conclusions early documentaries presented to viewers were based on lived experience, they were presented primarily as facts that viewers needed to understand and affirm, not in a form that can be called experiential in any sense beyond the basic fact that all films are experienced perceptually.

      What distinguishes the forms of observational and interactive cinema made possible by cinema verite shooting, and ethnographic film and personal documentary in particular, from the earlier tradition of documentary is the filmmakers’ commitment to lived experience, on several levels. Most obviously, these films reveal how things happened to certain people at a particular time. This experience occurs on two levels simultaneously: we understand that the subjects in the film are going through specific experiences that we are in some measure witness to, and we, as members of an audience, are experiencing these cinematic versions of the subjects’ experiences. Whatever conclusions the subjects might draw from what has happened to them, we, as spectators, must decide not only what their experiences, as rendered through cinema, might have meant to them and to the filmmakers, but what they do mean to us.

      In ethnographic film and personal documentary, we also become aware of the experience of the filmmaker as he or she develops the experience of the film we are seeing. Sometimes the filmmaker’s experiences are implicit (as they are in many of Marshall’s and Gardner’s films); at other times they’re explicit, as they usually are in personal documentaries and as they are in some of the films coming out of the Sensory Ethnography Lab. But always, in the films that are discussed in the following chapters, there are three levels of experience that must be taken into account: the experiences of the subjects as rendered in film, the experiences of the filmmakers who have created the cinematic links between their subjects and audiences, and the experiences of the individuals in the audiences that assemble for these films.¹³

      As this introduction is written (summer–winter 2011–12), I am unaware of any specific evidence that directly connects Pragmatism with the emergence of Harvard’s Film Study Center or MIT’s Film Section. It does seem clear, however, that the formation of the Film Study Center grew out of the decision of J.O. Brew of the Peabody Museum to support the work of the Marshall family, and John Marshall in particular, in their attempt to record the lived experience of the nomadic peoples of the Kalahari Desert. According to John Marshall, when Laurence Marshall went to the Peabody Museum to see whether a planned expedition to the Kalahari might be useful to the museum, Brew suggested they look for “wild Bushmen,” and made it clear that “if you could [find them] in the plains of Africa, you had a window on the Pleistocene that nobody ever dreamed of.”¹⁴ Presumably, Brew’s hope was that cinematic records of the lived experience of the !Kung might offer clues to the nature of human history and of the human experience in our own time. The MIT Film Section was established by then-MIT provost (later president) Jerome Wiesner as part of the School of Architecture and Planning, again presumably as a means of adding cinema’s ability to record and present lived experience to the university’s academic mission: Wiesner’s original hires were Ed Pincus and Ricky Leacock, both, at the time, accomplished observational filmmakers.¹⁵

      Each of the following chapters explores different dimensions of how particular filmmakers have learned from their experiences and of how we can learn from the experiences of their films, but I’m sure it will be obvious to readers who find their way into American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn that I am less interested in defending an argument that these filmmakers and films are “Pragmatic” than I am in demonstrating the richness of the experiences made available in the work I explore. Particular “themes” will be evident—most obviously, the ways in which the personal lives of filmmakers factor into the ethnographic films and personal documentaries they’ve created—but here too, I am less concerned with