ABSTRACT
That’s what’s exciting about teaching some students: they’re willing to suspend preconceived ideas about the world and themselves and concentrate on what it is you’re trying to lead them towards … and they’re putting that into their mind, that good mind, with the other things that are there, and they will make some individual mix out of all of this. And out of that will develop something unique of their own, but I’ll have had a part in the educational process they’re going through … not shaping their mind but in providing a resource for their own potential to work on, and that’s valuable. And film helps a lot, it inspires me to teach the subject in a more exciting way …
(Tim Asch quoted in Martínez 1995: 56)
In his magisterial survey of developments in ethnographic film from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, Peter Loizos (1993: 23-9, 39-42) restricts his consideration of Tim Asch’s contribution to ethnographic film largely to the project of documentation, the production of films of record. Loizos notes the innovations of “sequence filming”, single-event films, and intensive collaboration with anthropologists, but refers to the products of the two seasons of filming with the Yanomamö merely as “documentation films” similar to the “direct cinema” of Leacock and others.2 Even in presenting Tim Asch’s subsequent work, in collaboration with sound recordist and film editor Patsy Asch and anthropologist Linda Connor, and, most importantly, the Balinese medium Jero Tapakan, Loizos (1993: 39) still highlighted the aspect of “documentation filming”, treating even the film Jero on Jero as a “metadocument … ‘documenting’ a process of exogenously-produced change” (Loizos 1993: 41). Loizos assiduously catalogues a number of changes in emphasis that the Jero Tapakan films effected relative to the Yanomamö oeuvre, in part echoing aims, such as the depiction of conversation, displaying reactions of the subjects to their own filmic depictions, and the provision of accompanying written materials (such as Connor et al. 1986, 1996) that Asch (1996: 34 ff.) himself enunciated. Yet, Loizos’s reiteration of the documentation aim emphasizes the continuities of this
project with the Yanomamö films – “the goals which Asch took from Venezuela to Bali ” (Loizos 1993: 41) – rather than the Bali project’s innovations. Even his noting some of the tensions between Patsy Asch’s disclaimers of any direct filmic mirroring of reality and the devotion to ethnographic detail in the films associates the films themselves with the naïveté of a past filmic epistemology rather than with the sophisticated self-consciousness and explicit concern with textuality of the films Loizos treats later in his book.
