Cutting off arms: filmic realism and visual anthropology

Abstract

Visual anthropology, from its early days on, has been persecuted by the evil spirits of the paradigm of »realism«. While in textual anthropology the writing culture debate has finally made untrustworthy the idea of an “objective” drawing up of ethnographies, the theoretical reflection and filmic practice of those anthropologists who employ images to produce and represent knowledge, continues to refer itself frequently to »realist« notions as a source of its methodology. The paper suggests a structural similitude between such »realist« ideas within visual anthropology, and the discourse of filmic »realism«, as it appears in the writings of Bazin and others. Based on this observation, a greater “artistic” liberty in the production of filmed ethnographies is proposed, enabling by this means visual anthropology as a discipline to exploit more successfully the synthetic and analytical capacities of the moving image.