Third Text

5 June 2024

Leonor Veiga

The principal characteristic of Third Cinema is really not so much where it is made, or even who makes it but, rather, the ideology it espouses and the consciousness it displays.

Jim Pines and Paul Willemen,
in Questions of Third Cinema  ^[1]

I use this quote by Jim Pines and Paul Willemen to introduce this review of the German anthropologist Arnd Schneider’s 2021 book, Expanded Visions: A New Anthropology of the Moving Image. In it, Schneider espouses the productive relationship between the moving image and the discipline of anthropology. Like Pines and Willemen, Schneider recurs to the zeitgeist to entitle his oeuvre: if they were making reference to Homi K Bhabha’s influential theory of the Third Space, ^[2] Schneider uses the appellation moving image to speak of a multiplicity of formats relating to video. By updating the terminology, he answers – as pointed out by the Dutch film historian Helen Westgeest – to the fact that video is more than a medium; it is, rather, ‘a means of communication’. ^[3]  Moreover, like Pines and Willemen, Schneider shows that these moving images situated in the interstices of art and anthropology do not conform to who makes them or where they are made, but instead challenge an inherited taxonomy that still divides the two disciplines. Throughout the book, Schneider aptly responds to this polarity by historicising the narrative whilst showcasing a growing ideology and consciousness of their meeting. Through Expanded Visions we learn not only that these considerations are historical but also that they have been the exclusive territory of one or other of the two disciplines (art history or anthropology). Schneider’s book allows for their meeting.

An attentive anthropologist, Schneider effectively expands his discipline’s regard onto moving images situated in the interstices of art and anthropology. His choice of chronology is not neutral; it can be considered subversive. I say this because he dedicates the entirety of Chapter 8 (the last chapter of the book) to the oldest example in his repertoire, Statues Also Die – a film produced by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais in 1953 (pp 148–151). Yet, while Statues Also Die is the earliest example, it can also be considered the most contemporary one as it refers to the subjects of restitution and repatriation and the film’s evident decolonial critique reveals the historicity of Schneider’s analysis. This coeval of opposing forces – of antiquity and contemporaneity – is unexpected but it permeates the entire manuscript, making it a relevant reference book for anthropologists, art historians and moving image scholars alike. Another example of Schneider’s critical analysis pertains to the themes that he chooses to explore. As with Chapter 8, the entirety of Chapter 5 is also dedicated to a movie set, this time of El Camino, a road movie shot in a Mapuche reservation in 2000. The author himself is the observing anthropologist doing fieldwork, yet his choice of regard is not the Mapuche people but, rather, the film crew. Viewing the crew of El Camino as an ethnographic subject is an unusual twist that demonstrates Schneider’s intention to decolonise anthropology and its regard towards the other.

The book intends to ‘open a third space of practice and theoretical reflection between art and anthropology’ (p 1) (my emphasis), while looking at the artistic diversity of formats that have emerged since the beginning of ‘experimental cinema’ in the 1920s, or the ‘ethnographic turn’ from the 1970s onwards, both of which were led by artists. ^[4]  In my opinion, Schneider opens the spectrum of analysis to multiple considerations (many of which he reinterprets and revaluates), including the constant challenge of who owns the discourse – art historians or anthropologists. Films such as Statues Also Die and El Camino show that the relationship between moving image and anthropology must be expanded so that ‘new frontiers of thinking, representing the moving image with and on the Other’ are opened (p 166). Nevertheless, Schneider alerts, such perspectives ‘can only be developed in respectful collaboration of an inevitably uneven hermeneutics, an approach which acknowledges the principal possibilities of dialogues with the Other, but accounting for difference’ (p 166). For this reason, Schneider’s regard focuses principally on works that remain outside of anthropology’s interpretation – an exclusion that contrasts with the attention garnered from other branches of scholarship, namely film studies, literature or art history. ^[5]  And even if this segregation originates in inherited taxonomies, these considerations have been gaining ground since the 1980s, as is demonstrated by the volume’s extensive bibliography. ^[6]

Through the variety of examples with which Schneider furnishes the book, ^[7] the resulting oeuvre is a historical reflection that nears cultural universalism, from 1953 until today. The universal character of the analysis is relevant, since moving images were invented in Paris, from where they spread around the world. The universal character of the book’s contents – which pertains to technical, disciplinary and thematical domains – is woven with the temporal timeline of the moving image’s own sequence of developments. As such (with the exception of Statues Also Die), the monograph focuses on a timeline from the 1960s (when video art began gaining artistic traction) and advances chronologically to the present day, discussing contemporary topics such as decolonisation, cultural (re)appropriation and the agency of societies studied by anthropology. For this reason, the chosen chronological distribution is appropriate, since technical evolution, artistic discursivity, socio-cultural concerns and methods of ethnographic observation and research intersect in all the chapters. For the reader, the book presents a concise and structured history of the relationship between moving image, anthropology and art history.

Chapter 1, ‘Expanded Visions’, offers a historical narrative of ethnographic film from the viewpoint of practice and philosophical considerations. Schneider situates the book in a ‘third space’ of analysis across disciplines (p 15) – he speaks of a ‘consilience’ (p 1) of branches of knowledge – and advances that the examples chosen, ‘have a radical, perhaps even explosive potential for epistemological innovation’ (p 1). He observes that recent anthropological considerations on the moving image have recaptured ‘interest in materiality, ruins, rubble and the archive’ (p 1), territories more attuned with art history and archaeology. From here, he introduces those concepts that are covered throughout the book, by means of establishing a ‘productive dialogue’ with the moving image (p 3). Among these are the notions of sculpture (p 2), of the matte technique (a tool to manipulate images by blocking some aspects while revealing others) (pp 3–4), of time (pp 5–7), of (re)making (p 7), of real and hyperreal (pp 8–9), but also of memory (pp 5–6 and 12–13), of dream (pp 10–11) and the interpretative potential of curation (pp 15–17). The chapter ends with the argument that significant changes in today’s research, with the focus on the viewer (p 17), the expansion of the moving image into digital formats, including increased miniaturisation and digitisation (p 19), and the democratisation we experiment with in our daily lives, are so pervasive and have changed the panorama so dramatically, that not only are the artistic wanderings of the past no longer possible but they will lead to ‘decolonial thinking and decolonization’ (p 19).

Chapter 2, ‘Experimenting with Film, Art and Ethnography’, focuses on the work of artists Juan Downey and Sharon Lockhart, and the anthropologist Michael Oppitz. During the 1970s and 1980s, their cinematographic productions crossed over between the two disciplines of art and anthropology. Schneider recalls their pioneering place in history, one which resulted from ‘a sense of experimentation’ (p 23) and the rarity (until then) of options they performed – for example, using the philosophical current of structuralism as an aesthetic option (pp 25–30), handing over the camera to the Yanomamö indigenous people (pp 30–36), or advancing ‘action anthropology’ (pp 31–37). He concludes by pointing out that these ‘three modes of experimentation with ethnography and art’ (p 39) question the privilege of the (ethnographic) gaze – a recurrent theme today, both in anthropology and in art history. ^[8]

In Chapter 3, ‘Rethinking Anthropological Research and Representation through Experimental Film’, the author reviews experimental cinema practices since the 1970s, particularly ‘so-called “structuralist” or “materialist” film’ (p 47). He takes a close look at the pre-digital era, when artists could reflect on the conditions of the filmmaking process and thus manipulated images and made montages to ‘break with technical routines’ (p 48). Implicitly critical of the status quo, these gestures made spectators ‘look at [film strips] from both sides’ (p 50), while artists used multiple cameras and observers (pp 52–53) to create ‘a new “object”’ (p 56). The issue pertaining to the ethnographic gaze extends from the personification and presence of the observer to the materiality of film production. Admitting the difficulty that anthropology has in dealing with these possibilities, Schneider advances the need and demands for new viewpoints as important contributions leading ‘to question both what we are seeing, and what we are seeing with’ (p 61).

Chapter 4, ‘Stills that Move’, shows how the singular image, the photograph, when animated in sequence, ‘is the underlying principle of photofilm’ (p 65). In this chapter, the author revisits the work of Leonore Mau and Hubert Fichte in the Americas, Africa and Europe in the mid-1960s, John Haviland in Australia in the 1970s, and Dick Blau in the US in the twenty-first century. These authors manipulate photographic sequences and sounds, which they then combine to reveal the ‘aura’ of the images through filmic projection (pp 78–79). These are works of particular importance for museum contexts, which are filled with research archives that remain to be analysed from an artistic standpoint (p 74). Thus, these three artists can be considered pioneers for future deliberations pertaining to ‘the common roots of animation – if not animism – for both film and photography’ (p 78).

In Chapter 5, ‘On the Set of a Cinema Movie in a Mapuche Reservation’, Schneider explains his fieldwork for the movie set of El Camino, a road movie that incorporated elements of popular culture and experimental cinema (pp 83–102). Following several renowned cinematographic productions in various locations (pp 80–81), the chosen object of study for El Camino was the film crew that was shooting among an indigenous population, the Mapuche (pp 86–87). In this way, Schneider shows how anthropology penetrates new issues without compromising the ethnographic component that characterises the discipline. His stance surprised both the team and the Mapuche population, but led to what ‘Jean Fisher has called “dramatized ethnography”’ (p 100). ^[9]

Chapter 6, ‘A Black Box for Participatory Cinema’, shows how television productions change life in society. Using the organisation ‘Cine com Vecinos’, or CCV, as a backdrop, the chapter reveals ‘new forms of social agency and affects’, and ‘an expanded sociality of cinema’ (p 105). The chapter discusses how a community based in the provincial town of Saladillo, ‘about 180 km west of Buenos Aires’ (p 104), used visual media power to appear on Canal 5, ‘which is mainly a news channel’ (p 109). By having its productions appear on broadcast television, the community recuperated a lost space, both economic and societal, within contemporary Argentinian urban society. Meanwhile, they created ‘a parallel contradistinction [to the] urbanite elitist and professional cinema’ from ‘“metropolitan” Buenos Aires’ who remain alienated from the ‘artisanal, popular cinema of CCV’ (p 115). CCV, the author concludes, introduces a distinct type ‘of community cinema’, modelled in ‘commercial film-making’, and presenting itself as an appropriate model to restore cinematic spaces both temporarily and materially, in a ‘more fluid and egalitarian’ way (pp 125–126).

Chapter 7, ‘An Anthropology of Abandon’, addresses the disdain that places of cinematographic production are subjected to after shooting ends (p 129). Similar to the ‘ruinopolis’ resulting from sites deserted after nuclear accidents (or tests), or which effects mass production towns like Detroit, abandoned film sets are restituted a certain visibility by experimental ethnography (pp 129–132). In this chapter, Schneider shows how some communities, especially the indigenous Paiute and Shoshone in Nevada – victims of the incorrect use of large areas of land due to ongoing historical cultural indifference – have regained a ‘sense-of-being-in-the-landscape’ through ‘reflective immersion’ (pp 135–136). Temporarily closer to the present, this chapter also covers the agency of African Americans, when film subjects (pp 135–139) and creates ties to histories of European migration waves to the US (pp 139–140). The author concludes that these histories of destruction and abandon are universal – as multinational corporations and state agencies keep extracting natural riches needed for the survival of these communities – and advocates for ‘artistic expression… [as a] reflection of ethnographic knowledge’ because artistic research itself ‘produces knowledge’ (p 145). These films, situated in the interstices of art and ethnography, are borne out of ‘what art historians have termed the “ethnographic turn”’ (p 144). Today, they constitute an archive of this convoluted history while transforming abandonment into ‘relinquishment’ (p 145).

The final chapter, ‘Can Film Restitute?’, asks whether the (re)reading of films and museum collections can help cultural restitution (p 147). To Schneider, decolonisation dates back to 1953, when Marker and Resnais’s Statues Also Die – with its fierce decolonial critique through the notion of the gaze – was released (pp 148–152). Schneider recognises that discourses on decolonisation and restitution have largely remained alien to anthropologists up until the end of the twentieth century, but he notes Statues Also Die’s ‘considerable scholarly reception in subjects such as film studies, film criticism, art history and criticism, curatorial studies and French cultural and literature studies’ (p 151). The film’s protagonist, ‘an African woman’, shows how gaze and agency interchange and further expound the film’s ‘strong anticolonial message, as it criticizes the colonial impact on African cultures, art in particular, and focuses on forms of resistance to racial and social oppression’ (pp 152–153). Schneider’s validation of Statues Also Die is symptomatic of a discipline in transformation and self-questioning. The chapter progresses with a listing of contemporary films resulting from anthropological fieldwork (pp 156–165) to potentially open ‘for a wider discussion the discussion beyond the confines of the white cube gallery and the museum… [while] problematizing authorship and positionality, and unresolved tensions and positions of power’ (p 166).

In Expanded Visions, Schneider chronologically explores the changeable ground where questions of art and questions of anthropology have always met. Through this, we learn that the common territory of these two disciplines of knowledge of antagonistic roots has been affirming itself artistically and theoretically since the 1960s. So, revisionisms such as that presented in Expanded Visions advance their commonality, where knowledges touch, intersect and mutually enrich each other. Viewed from the prism of my own discipline, that of art history, Expanded Visions is a reference book that discloses the evolution of art and anthropology through the history of the moving image of an ethnographic approach.

Arnd Schneider, Expanded Visions: A New Anthropology of the Moving Image is published by Routledge, 2021, 212 pp, 58 coloured images and 19 BW images, ISBN 978-0-367-25368-4

^[1]    Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, eds, Questions of Third Cinema, BFI Publishing, London, 1989, p vii

^[2]    Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London and New York, 1994

^[3]     See Helen Westgeest, Video Art Theory: A Comparative Approach, Wiley Blackwell, Oxford, 2016, p 2; Westgeest’s ‘Introduction’ (pp 1–19) includes a review of many considerations, including the particularities of video as art, as medium, and as a contributor to contemporary life

^[4]    For considerations of experimentation with ethnography through photography (and film) see, for example, James Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Surrealism’, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988, pp 117–151; for an historicisation of the ethnographic turn, see Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996, pp 171–203

^[5]    The author introduces Chapter 2 mentioning that the examples he explores have been belittled by anthropologists (p 23); in Chapter 8, he declares that Statues Also Die was never addressed by anthropology until the end of the twentieth century (pp 150–151), and reiterates that anthropology stayed detached from the various questions the movie raised

^[6]    While the author refers to several oeuvres throughout his text, Third Text (launched in 1987) remains, to this day, the main journal publication that advocates for the possibility of being in the interstices of what was regarded as opposing models of making, interpreting and seeing art and culture

^[7]    From a technical standpoint, he presents celluloid film strips, still frames, installations, documentaries, photographs, etc; from a disciplinary perspective, he covers the relationships between moving image and performance, moving image and collections, moving image and art history, moving image and anthropology, etc; from a thematical point of view, Schneider’s text comprises notions of transmigration, restitution, cultural resistance, cultural agency, and others

^[8]    In art history, the question of the gaze is mainly related to the hegemony of the male gaze over the female body. It was originally introduced by art historian Laura Mulvey in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, vol 16, no 3, 1975, pp 6–18. In anthropology, the question of the gaze concerns above all the superiority of the western ethnographer over all other cultures, which ‘he’ has had the privilege of examining. This question has been addressed by, among others, James Clifford in The Predicament of Culture, op cit, and Nicholas Thomas in ‘The Curiosity of the Gaze: Imperial and Anthropological Postmodernism’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology, no 30, December 1991, pp 20–31.

^[9]  Schneider references Jean Fisher’s article ‘Dancing with Words and Speaking with Forked Tongues’ in Third Text, no 14, 1991, pp 27–40, about the 1990 film Dances With Wolves and the representation of Native Americans in film as well as the real issues of theft of land, resources and the denial of rights

Leonor Veiga, currently a Guest Researcher at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS), is an art historian and curator based in Montpellier, France. She was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Fine Arts School of the University of Lisbon from 2020–2023. She obtained her PhD from Leiden University in 2018 with her dissertation ‘The Third Avant-garde: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia Recalling Tradition’.