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 Social Anthropology

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University of Manchester

M13 9PL 

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The origins of observational cinema: conversations with Colin Young.1 [To appear in Beate Engelbrecht, ed. Memories of the Origins of Visual Anthropology. Frankfurt, New York, Bern, Brussels: Peter Lang]

Paul Henley, Department of Social Anthropology/Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester

paul.henley@manchester.ac.uk No one can say for certain exactly when the term 'observational cinema' became a regular part of the film-makers' standard vocabulary. An early use in print is said to be an article by Roger Sandall in Sight and Sound in the early 1970s. However, by general consent the term was already by then in circulation amongst practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, by whomever, or whenever the term 'observational cinema' was first coined, it will be forever associated with the name of Colin Young and the ethnographic film programme which he played the leading role in establishing at UCLA in 1966. But if there is some doubt about when and how the term 'observational cinema' originated, there is also, some thirty or so years later, some continuing doubt about what it actually means. Today the term 'observational cinema' has become a Humpty Dumpty sort of word which can mean just about anything its user wants it to mean. To my dismay, despite all my efforts to the contrary, some of my students managed to reach the end of my introductory course on Visual Anthropology this year believing that Margaret Mead, with her eccentric vision of a static 360 degree camera on a pole in the middle of a village, was an early proponent of 'observational cinema'! But if some of these novices remained confused, this is not surprising because a wide range of different documentary approaches have, at various times and places, become associated with the term. Observational cinema is assumed by some authors to be merely synonymous with those two other approaches which also emerged, albeit a few years previously, on the back of the new lightweight synchronous                                                  1 This article grew out of a presentation given at Putting the Past Together: the Origins of Visual Anthropology, a conference organised by Beate Engelbrecht and her colleagues at the IWF Göttingen

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technology, namely, cinéma-vérité as practised by Jean Rouch and his associates in France and West Africa, and Direct Cinema, as exemplified by the work of Richard Leacock, D.A.Pennebaker, the Maysles and others in North America. But there are other commentators, amongst whom I would include myself, who think that there are significant differences between all these various approaches, or at least there were, when all of them were new. By the mid-1970s, the term 'observational cinema' had become associated with certain forms of documentary on British television. Initially it was used to describe the work of directors such as Roger Graef, whose approach certainly bears strong affinities to that advocated by Colin and his associates. But gradually it came to be applied to the work of other documentarists who might have cut in a few hand-held sequences here and there, but whose films were essentially structured around a series of interviews, a device which was regarded as anathema by the early observational fundamentalists trained at UCLA. Nowadays, in television circles, the term can be used of almost any documentary that is not entirely based on either dramatic reconstruction or self-conscious performance. If truth be told, even those close to the fountainhead use the term in a somewhat ambiguous way. David and Judith MacDougall are routinely identified, even by themselves, as observational film-makers. Indeed, many would regard them as the most distinguished exponents of the approach. And yet, over twenty five years ago, David was distancing himself from observational cinema in print and urging us to go beyond it.2 What then is observational cinema, exactly? If the spirit of a thing is best captured at its origins, then surely there is no one better placed to tell us than Colin Young himself. This was therefore one of the main themes of the conversation - I'm carefully avoiding the term 'interview' here - that I recorded with Colin at his home in Kent in April 2001. How did observational cinema define itself in relation to other approaches developing in the ferment of the 1960s and 1970s? What cross-fertilization was there, what points of difference? This was not the first such conversation we had had, formal or informal: there had been many unrecorded informal conversations with Colin whilst I was learning documentary film-making at the National Film and                                                   2 See David MacDougall, 'Beyond Observational Cinema' in Paul Hockings, ed., The Principles of Visual Anthropology, pp.109-124. The Hague: Mouton.

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Television School at Beaconsfield in the mid-1980s. In January 1988, shortly after I had been appointed as Director of the Granada Centre, I recorded my first formal conversation with Colin. Confronted with a similar prospect of growing an oak from an acorn, I wanted to know how he had managed to build up such an ambitious programme at UCLA. "By theft" was his succinct reply. By theft? "By stealing people, resources and time from wherever we could across the campus". It has proved most useful advice - though I'm not saying how - but now in this second recorded conversation, some thirteen years later, I wanted to know more precisely whom he had co-opted to the task and in what way. To help in this enquiry, Colin kindly allowed me to copy some documents from his personal archive relating to those early days at UCLA. The first part of this report on our conversation will therefore be a sort of historical synopsis, based on a synthesis of those documents and Colin's own comments. This will provide us with a temporal framework within which to locate the steady stream of people and projects which whirled around Colin at UCLA in the late 1960s and whose names will crop up again in the more verbatim second part of the report. Background to a conversation Even before entering into this historical background, there is a particularly enigmatic puzzle to be considered, that is, why has Colin dedicated so much time and energy to the marriage of film and anthropology? After all, he had never studied anthropology nor carried out fieldwork in some culturally exotic location. He was not even an engineer, which by custom and practice was one of best preparations for anthropological film-makers in the early days. How was it then that Colin, neither anthropologist nor documentarist, came to write the essay that is surely the locus classicus for those seeking a formulation of the precepts of observational cinema, i.e. his contribution to Principles of Visual Anthropology?3

As Colin relates it, his first involvement with anthropology was entirely fortuitous. He studied philosophy at the ancient university of St. Andrews on the eastern seaboard of Scotland, and would have continued to a

                                                  3 See Paul Hockings, ed., op.cit. pp.65-79. Also reproduced in Roger Crittenden & Cherry Potters, eds., Confronting Reality: some perspectives on documentary, a special edition of the CILECT Review, vol.2, no. 1, pp.69-79.

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doctorate there but for a disenchanting encounter with academic chicanery. After a short spell reviewing films for, of all things, The Farmers' Weekly in Aberdeen, he set sail for the States. Following a mid-Atlantic revelation, he abandoned all further plans to study philosophy and enrolled instead on the MA in Theatre Arts at UCLA for the years 1952-1954. He worked in a various capacities in the film industry after graduation, but mostly in feature film production, before returning to UCLA to take up an academic post in the late 1950s. By 1965, he had not only become a full Professor of Theatre Arts, but had even become - at the dauntingly young age of 38 - Dean of the whole Department, which comprised Television and Theatre, as well as Film. Amongst those whom he was supposed to direct were many of his former teachers. It was shortly afterwards that Colin had his damascene encounter with anthropology. This took the form of meeting Edmund Carpenter, along with a number of other colleagues in the social sciences departments. In early 1966, he was invited by UNESCO to collaborate with Carpenter in the production of a report on North American ethnographic films about the Pacific region. How he came to be invited to do this, given that he had no anthropology track-record, Colin does not remember. But the invitation emanated from Enrico Fulchignoni, friend and interlocutor of Jean Rouch. Colin thinks that he had probably met Rouch a couple of years before at a Flaherty seminar, and he imagines that it was Rouch who had recommended him to Fulchignoni. This encounter with ethnographic film allowed Colin to explore an interest in people in a way that had simply not been possible in his previous work, either as philosopher or film-maker. It is this that seems to be the key as to why Colin should have laboured so mightily to bring film and anthropology together: I suspect that there was a gap somewhere in my own mind and in my character which I was having to confront. That's part of an answer. But the other is that I found these colleagues in the social sciences extremely attractive. Ted Carpenter was a real cowboy at a very high level of intellectual adventurism. He was publishing at the time We are What We Behold, which I found extraordinarily engaging. But he also seemed to have serious reservations about anthropology, which intrigued me. Certainly, he was not well regarded by many UCLA anthropology colleagues. But I found all these colleagues good company, good to explore ideas with. I found it rewarding both intellectually and emotionally.

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His fascination with the world of ethnographic film and its denizens took another turn when Colin attended the UNESCO conference in Sydney in 1966 at which he presented the report he had prepared with Carpenter. It was there that he became aware how diverse the inhabitants of this world were. There was Rouch for whom the history of ethnographic film was Flaherty and a succession of francophone film-makers whom no one else there had ever heard of. There was also Robert Gardner, whose Dead Birds excited admiration amongst some but questions about its authenticity amongst others, especially when certain "dead" warriors were seen by some to be breathing4. There too were Ian Dunlop and Roger Sandall, both engaged in forms of salvage ethnographic film-making amongst Australian Aborigines. As Colin recalls it, there were a number of dominant themes at the conference. One of them had to do with the autonomy of the subject. What rights did they have? The issue was given a particular piquancy by the fact that the conference was taking place at a time when the political movement for the recognition of Aboriginal rights over land and other resources was just beginning. This assertion of Aboriginal identity also extended to a claim to control the images taken of them, and the use to which they were put. Although there were no Aborigines present at the UNESCO conference, this led to a request that all the European women present be excluded from the screening of a number of films about certain rites which according to Aboriginal custom should be witnessed by men alone. This caused what Colin refers to as a "kerfuffle" because it conflicted with an emergent European gender politics, but in the end, the women all left. Another theme that was the subject of lively debate was the question as to what extent the aesthetic requirements of cinema should be allowed to impact on the film-making of anthropologists. Did such cinematic conventions distort or enhance the anthropological film? The anthropologists present were very "huffy" about that in Colin's view, particularly in relation to Dead Birds. "Gardner", he recalls, "came under a lot of pressure. But he's very patrician, and nothing if not suave. It was water off a duck's back. He defended himself very energetically". Stimulated by the debate between the various different parties at Sydney, Colin returned home via the Bishop Price Museum in Honolulu. Once back at UCLA, he started thieving. That is, he entered into alliances with a number of gate-keepers in other departments and with their support                                                  4 At  the Origins conference,  that  this perception had any  foundation  in  fact was vigorously rejected by Karl Heider who acted as consultant anthropologist on Dead Birds. 

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assembled the resources to put on an ethnographic film programme. These allies included the directors of African Studies and of Latin American Studies, the latter being Johannes Wilbert, the distinguished cultural anthropologist who had been working with the Warao of the Orinoco Delta since the 1950s. They also included Mantle Hood, who headed up the ethnomusicology and ethnic dance programme in the Department of Music. But perhaps most importantly of all, Colin managed to co-opt Walter Goldschmidt, then head of the Anthropology Department. Together they devised a pilot interdisciplinary training programme in ethnographic film to begin in the Fall of 1966. It was to be taught by themselves and Richard Hawkins, one of Colin's colleagues in Theatre Arts. The general idea was that the film-makers would teach anthropologists about film-making and anthropologists would teach film-makers about anthropology. In a letter to the University Chancellor, Franklin D. Murphy, written the following August, Colin reports back on the experience. The seminar was attended by 25 graduate students, as well as several faculty members including Harold Garfinkel of Sociology and Paul Hockings from Anthropology. Visiting film-makers included Robert Gardner, John Adair (who had only recently carried out his ground-breaking work with Sol Worth amongst the Navajo) and Edmund Carpenter. At the end of the seminar, six students were selected (three from Motion Pictures, two from Ethnomusicology, one from Anthropology) to be given technical training based around a number of local projects on ethnographic subjects. At the end of the academic year, in the summer vacation, two more substantial projects, involving both staff and students had been launched. One of these was the project that would produce The Village, directed by Mark McCarty from Motion Pictures and Paul Hockings with the assistance of two students from the ethnographic film training programme. In the letter to Chancellor Murphy, Colin describes this as being a project about "an interesting example of acculturation - the attempt of Irish officials to transform the last ten tenants of a tiny island called Blaskett into mainland peasants". Originally, it was budgeted at $19,000 for half hour black and white film. The other project, budgeted at $35,000 was to produce an hour long film in colour about the annual pilgrimage associated with the La Tirana Virgin Mary cult in the town of Iquique, northern Chile. This project involved close collaboration with a Chilean ethnomusicology institute. The UCLA team comprised Donn Borcherdt, a doctoral candidate from ethnomusicology as well as three students from the training programme. The producer was Richard Hawkins, but the film director was a Chilean

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associated with the ethnomusicology institute. Colin himself went to Chile to negotiate the relationship with the institute, though he never went on location in Iquique. Both the nature of the subject matter and the approach of the respective directors would account for significant differences in the results between the two projects. In his letter to Chancellor Murphy, Colin explains that the Irish project, still on-going at the time of writing, would be "in the style of so-called direct cinema, or cinema verite, where the director interferes as little as possible with the material, disciplining himself to record as accurately as possible a small, intimate situation". In contrast, the La Tirana project, which would record a procession of 50,000 people, would be a grand spectacle. The filming would be closely controlled by the director, and would involve co-ordination between a number of different film crews, each recording a distinctive aspect of the event. The two projects had very different outcomes. The Village, with an eventual running time of 70 minutes has become a classic of anthropological cinema. For a while, Colin now recalls, he also had hopes that La Tirana could also make an original contribution to the canon, albeit in a very different way. He had visited Expo 67 in Montreal and had seen early examples of split-screen technology. He had the idea that this could be used for the La Tirana film, with the different parts of the screen representing different aspects of the cult as recorded by the various different camera crews. Colin thought that this could be an interesting way to explore the idea that a film need not have a single, unitary meaning as relayed from the perspective imposed by the director, but rather could have a variety of meanings depending on which of the various perspectives presented on the split-screen that an audience might wish to pursue. However this ambitious project was never properly completed and exists only in what Colin now refers to as "a highly bowdlerized version". However, the pilot project having been deemed a success, it was proposed that the ethnographic film-training programme should run again in the academic year 1967-68. Richard Hawkins would again take on one of the teaching roles, but this time around, Paul Hockings and Mark McCarty, fresh from their experience in Ireland, would replace Walter Goldschmidt and Colin himself as the other two principal teachers. In his letter to Chancellor Murphy, Colin expresses the hope that in the second instalment of the programme there would be "better connection between film training and the special anthropological training which was, quite frankly, missing this year".

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In fact, it seems that right from the beginning there was a certain tension between Colin's views about the programme and those of the anthropologists. Even whilst collecting data for the UNESCO project, Colin had been struck by what he saw as a curious paradox about anthropologists' general attitudes to film. On the one hand, he found that they were, as he put it, "over-optimistic about what film could do for them", i.e. that it could be used as sort of scientifically objective recording medium. On the other hand, they didn't actually seem to be all that interested in using this medium despite its supposed virtues. Reading the documents of the time, one cannot help but feel a certain mismatch of epistemologies, even if both parties conspired to ignore this fact in the interest of promoting what they had in common. For example, both agreed that the new technology was a great asset to the kind of film-making that they sought to promote because it minimized the degree of intrusion that the act of making films normally entailed. For Colin and his associates, the advantage of this lack of disturbance was that it permitted a greater degree of subjective engagement on the part of the film-maker with his or her subject. For the anthropologists, on the other hand, the advantage was rather that it enabled a more objective, supposedly scientific form of film-making. As Walter Goldschmidt himself was wont to put it, this new technology would allow films to be made of people acting exactly as they would have been had the camera not been there. This view is routinely quoted by Colin's protegées as exemplifying an approach that they regarded as the antithesis of what they were trying to do.5 A similar mismatch is evident in their respective attitudes towards issues of authenticity. The pre-announcement for the programme states that "there is general agreement that recording primitive cultures will be possible only for another decade at most". Indeed this supposed fact provides one of the rationales for the establishment of the programme as a whole because the document goes on to add that "UCLA hopes to do some of this work". It is difficult to see that the film-makers would have been responsible for such "salvage" attitudes. Certainly it is quite different to the strategy that would later be employed in The Village when McCarty and Hockings quite self-consciously chose not to "shoot around" the English tourists who might have been thought to have undermined some authentic ideal typical vision of traditional life on the Dingle peninsula.                                                   5 See, for example, David MacDougall in his essay, 'Beyond Observational Cinema', cited above.

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Later these tensions would erupt in a tumultuous screening of The Village at the American Anthropological Association meeting at Seattle in 1968. But as the second instalment of the programme started in autumn of 1967, they remained latent. Instead the minds of Colin and his associates were focused on the major film colloquium which was due to take place in April. Initially, a major feature of the colloquium was to be the screening of films about Australian Aborigines, an 11-hour selection of which were then being toured around the States by Ian Dunlop and his "scientific adviser" on Desert People, Robert Tonkinson, who was teaching at the University of Oregon at the time. It also happened that the early Australian ethnographic film pioneer, Norman Tindale, who had been Curator of the South Australian Museum from 1928 until his retirement in 1965 was due to be on a visiting fellowship in Los Angeles. But in the event, Tindale did not take part and although Ian Dunlop showed material from Baldwin Spencer's time to the present day, the Australian component was more than matched by contributions of other kinds. In fact, the catalogue of participants reads like of a roll-call of the founding figures of post-war ethnographic film-making. They included Asen Balikci who showed Netsilik material, John Collier and David Peri who showed The Sucking Doctor; John Adair presented material on the Navajo, Jean Rouch and Monique Salzman showed Jaguar and La Goumbé des Jeunes Noceurs, both then only recently completed; Karl Heider showed his film on Dani housebuilding; Tim Asch and John Marshall showed a number of the Bushmen films including Argument about a Marriage and Joking Relationship; Alan Lomax presented his choreometrics; Hawkins and also McCarty and Hockings promised "multi-screen presentations" based on their work in Chile and Ireland respectively; Michel Brault showed Pour la suite du monde. The colloquium also included a seminar on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Ethnographic Film at which Richard Leacock's Happy Mothers' Day was shown along with the version re-edited by ABC to sell baby food. Other films included Titticut Folies, Holy Ghost People, Song of Ceylon, and Pierre Gaisseau's material on the Masai. Edmund Carpenter showed material shot by patients of a Swiss mental hospital. The colloquium ended with a session on training and the screening of UCLA student work. Amongst these students were David and Judith MacDougall who screened a film that they had made about Native Americans in Los Angeles. The colloquium not only gave great impetus to the film programme, but also generated a series of ambitious ideas for future development. First of all, the colloquium would become a biennial event, and a movable feast,

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passing from one film-friendly institution to another around the States. There was talk of establishing an inter-institutional Ethnographic Film Center, with four principal collaborators: UCLA, Harvard, Montréal and the Smithsonian, which would provide archival support. Johannes Wilbert and the Latin American Studies Center came up with the idea of an experimental text-book involving a filmic component about the indigenous cultures of South America, all supposedly threatened with disappearance. Meanwhile, in collaboration with colleagues in the African Studies Center, Colin proposed the establishment of five regional ethnographic film centres. In the first year, the UCLA programme would send a mixed team of faculty and students to Uganda where they would work in collaboration with local students and staff at Makerere University for a year, and provide training to the latter as appropriate. Then the following year, the progamme would move on to Nigeria, and develop a similar project there, and so on with three other countries in Africa over a total period of five years. In the event, only the first and last of these projects would see the light of day, and then only partially and only for a limited period. Even by the standards of the time, the budgets involved were very large - the African regional centres idea was budgeted at an annual rate of $100,000, for example - and not surprisingly perhaps, they proved difficult to raise. A second colloquium was indeed held and it took place at New York University in 1970 under the general direction of the distinguished British Africanist, John Middleton. Thereafter it was taken over by Jay Ruby at Temple, where it flourished for a number of years but eventually proved impossible to sustain on a permanent basis. Similarly, the African regional centres idea did indeed get going in the very same year as the colloquium itself when, in the summer vacation of 1968, Richard Hawkins went to Uganda with David and Judith MacDougall, and a third student, Jack Reed. Together they made a film with the British anthropologist Suzette Heald, then affiliated to Makerere. This was Imbalu, and concerned initiation amongst the Gisu with whom Heald had carried out extended fieldwork. It was directed by Hawkins, with the MacDougalls each shooting a part and Reed acting as the sound recordist.6 But although the MacDougalls stayed on in East Africa to carry out their work amongst the Jie and later amongst the Turkana, the idea of the regional centre itself never took root in Makerere, nor indeed anywhere else in Africa.                                                   6 See Anna Grimshaw & Nikos Papastergiadis, Conversations with Film-Makers: David MacDougall, Prickly Pear Press Pamphlet no.9, p.19.

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Back in Los Angeles, the film training programme entered its third year in the academic year 1968-69. Herb di Gioia and David Hancock were students of Theatre Arts around this time, but they made ethnographic films in Vermont, di Gioia's own home patch, without an anthropologist. Another satellite of the programme around this time was Jorge Preloran, who made a film about the Warao with the support of Johannes Wilbert. However, as Colin recalls it, Preloran was not deeply involved in the ethnographic film training programme itself. He did not like working in the observational manner, being more attracted to Robert Gardner's approach.

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There was also "a whole travelling circus of people", to use Colin's phrase, developing at Rice University in Houston around this time. The leading light was James Blue who had trained at the University of Oregon and at IDHEC in Paris and had later taught at UCLA. He began to direct the programme at Rice from 1969 when a wealthy French family, the De Menils, put up the funds to start a Media Centre. The specific aim of the programme was to teach people in other fields how film could be useful to them - architects, teachers and so on. Blue persuaded Colin to come and teach there as a commuter from Los Angeles. Later David MacDougall would also teach there, and when he left, his place was taken by Roger Sandall. Mark McCarty also taught there for a period. In 1970, Colin left Los Angeles and came to Britain to set up the National Film (and later, Television) School. Without his hand on the tiller, the ethnographic film training programme back at UCLA died a quiet death. The Masters progamme in ethnographic film towards which he had been working never happened. But from his new position at Beaconsfield, he continued to promote ethnographic film, and to keep in contact with his former associates in Los Angeles. David MacDougall came to Britain to seek Colin's advice on the final cut of To Live with Herds, which was the film that MacDougall presented for his Master of Fine Arts degree. Colin continued to commute back to Houston to teach at Rice for a week at a time. Students he met at Rice were later recruited to Beaconsfield. Not long after he arrived at Beaconsfield, the American Universities Field Staffs progamme provided an institutional vehicle to keep these States-side connections going. Colin persuaded Norman Miller, the producer whose brainchild it was, to produce the whole series out of Beaconsfield. As Miller was also being courted very powerfully by the Canadian National Film Board at the time, this was a remarkable coup. The AUFS project hired a number of people associated with the UCLA programme: MacDougall and Blue went to film the Kenya Boran with the Manchester anthropologist Paul Baxter, di Gioia and Hancock went to Afghanistan with Louis Dupree. Two films on Chinese subjects were made by Richard Chan. He had also been at UCLA, though being more of a feature film director, he had not been directly involved in the ethnographic film training programme. As he became more established at Beaconsfield, Colin started thieving again, using the NFTS's resources to support European ethnographic film-making activities. For example, in the early 1980s, he supported French anthropologist Colette Piault, and her perambulating seminar, the Regards sur les Sociétés Européennes. He also arranged for her to work with a

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talented young student cameraman from the NFTS, Graham Johnson, with whom she made a number of films in her fieldwork area in northern Greece. Colin also became a regular visitor to the Musée de l'Homme, participating in Rouch's Bilan Ethnographique and in his Regards Comparés. He also participated in the Nordic Anthropological Film Association seminars. But perhaps the most systematic project he was involved in was the training programme he developed in conjunction with the Film Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute with the aid of funding from the Leverhulme Trust. This was a sort of reprise of the UCLA initiative, bringing anthropologists and film-makers together as students under the guidance of Herb di Gioia whom he had by then appointed to run the documentary department. The scheme ran from 1984 to 1987, and I was one of four very fortunate beneficiaries of it7. And that was how this conversation first began. A Conversation PH: Some 35 years after the Sydney meeting, most anthropologists who have thought seriously about the matter would probably now recognise that film cannot be absolutely objective, but they would still have reservations about surrendering entirely to cinematic conventions and, say, using Hollywood narrative devices. CY: I think they are right to have those reservations. Yet there are some film-makers, such as Robert Gardner, who revel in them, as in Forest of Bliss, for example. There is not the slightest doubt in his mind that his strategy is the right one. He may change the detail, but he's not worried because he thinks he's making a film that is truthful in a much more interesting way. PH: You wouldn't agree with that?                                                   7 The others were the ethnomusicologist John Baily, who now teaches at Goldsmith's College, University of London, Marcus Banks who teaches at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and Felicia Hughes-Freeland who teaches at the University of Swansea. As a sort of further extension of the scheme, we were able to arrange with Colin and Herb di Gioia for my then newly-appointed colleague at the Granada Centre, Anna Grimshaw, to attend the School for two terms in the academic year 1991-1992. However she was actually funded by the Granada Centre and the University of Manchester rather than by the RAI/Leverhulme Trust.

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CY: I find it resistible because I also find the ordinary everyday event fascinating. I have an enormous patience for detail, provided I believe what I'm seeing or hearing. PH: This immediately raises one of the main issues I would like to address, namely, how you would situate observational cinema in relation to what the Direct Cinema group were doing, on the one hand, and, on the other, what Rouch was doing. When the Direct Cinema people were working for Drew Associates and producing films for television, they got round the problem of how to structure their material by choosing topics that had the so-called ‘crisis structure’ within them: elections, court cases, political crises and so on. So they didn't have to worry about dramatic shaping of the material, because the events themselves already had it. And apart from Chronicle of a Summer, which is a sort of hybrid work, involving a number of different authors, Rouch doesn't generally make films about everyday life. His films are dominated by issues of performance, either by himself, and/or by the people in front of the lens. In contrast, this interest in detail, and in everyday life seems to be absolutely central to your conception of observational cinema. CY: It's not just that everyone deserves their fifteen minutes of fame, as Warhol suggested. Rather there is a grandeur to the images that Flaherty produced of everyday life, from Nanook on. There's a grandeur about the images that Balikci produced of the Netsilik. It's difficult to replicate this in the context of urban society but it's still there. It is wonderfully demonstrated in Gary Kildea's film Celso and Cora. These are people whose lives are close to being sordid, but when sympathetically treated, as in that film, they can be shown to be grand. This is one of the things that cinema can celebrate, which you can't find in a newspaper or in a scholarly treatment. You can only appreciate this grandeur by being a witness to it. And, properly employed, film can make that possible. I don't mean by making another life exotic but by knowing how to be close to what is actually happening in that other person's life. Not by romancing it. My difficulty with Gardner is that he romances his subjects' lives. PH: But wasn't Flaherty also romancing them? CY: But that pointed us in a certain direction. He did oversimplify the crises in people's lives. There are all sorts of stories about how truthful that walrus hunt is. Not very, probably. But he allowed us to see that if you take a person like Nanook and turn him into a character, you don't have to do too much work to make that as interesting as something in a John Ford

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movie. The difference is not that huge. What conventional cinema leaves out is the ordinary behaviour of so-called ‘ordinary’ people. PH: But what do you think it was about your personal vision or the people around you that encouraged you to take an interest in the everyday? I'm trying to make the case that it's different in this regard from both Rouch and the North American Direct Cinema people. One of the people who pops up in the accounts of your early days at UCLA is Harold Garfinkel. To me, there's a seeming sympathy between his kind of sociology, as the study of the minute processes of everyday life, and your approach to cinema. Was it just a coincidence of kindred spirits, or was there some mutual intellectual fertilization going on there? CY: Well, Harold had no interest at all in the technical side of what we were doing. What he was absolutely focused on was the fact that we would show things through our films that traditional anthropologists would be maddened by because their methodologies weren't capable of achieving these outcomes. So when he was advising us around the time of the making of The Village, he confirmed in our mind that if we were careful in how we approached subject matter and people, and if we trusted them in regard to what other people would find interesting, the amount of manipulation that we would have to do with the material was very little. So that was an aesthetic or a methodological issue which had to do with procedure and process. That became a new discipline for us. We had to discard old tools and develop new ones if we wanted to share our interest with an audience who would otherwise not find it interesting. The methodology itself would deliver our shared interest. PH: But how did you go about advocating this methodology to your students at the time they were choosing their film subjects? Direct Cinema chose subjects that lent themselves to narrative forms. Perhaps as many as eighty or ninety percent of the films that have ever been made in the name of anthropology have been about rituals, or ceremonials which have their own intrinsic structure. If they have not been about rituals or ceremonial, they have been about technical processes or journeys that also have a beginning, a middle and an end. Were you conscious of the sense that it's all very well to film everyday life, but where do you begin and where do you end? Isn't there a way in which you've got to conceive of a film having a narrative shape even before you begin to film it? CY: We were discouraged by thinking about it like that ourselves by the whole propaganda being put up by Frances Flaherty about her husband's work. She called it "non-preconceptualism". We bought that hook, line and

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sinker before asking Ricky Leacock what actually went on in the making of Louisiana Story.8 Then we had to be much more modest in the way that we talked about that. Frances was ‘cuckoo’ to some extent by that time and made her husband even more romantic by denying any manipulation whatsoever. So we didn't say, ‘Let's get the picture together first’. Instead we said, ‘Let's be sure we understand the predicaments that the protagonists find themselves in’. Everyone has predicaments, so it's a question of discovering what they are. That's to do with building up trust and intimacy with people. We were giving ourselves assignments on the assumption that everyone was interesting. But you had to find out what that interesting thing was. That was an exercise in human relations, not in film-making as such. In terms of my philosophical studies, I suspect that the origins of this approach had something to do with my one-time interest in behaviourism, which is posited on the assumption that you can understand what motivates people by observing the way they are behaving externally. I certainly found that assumption to be a permanent part of the conversation we were having about film making at that time. We were looking for what Steve Morrison would later call soap opera rather than soap box ways of exploring everyday lives.9 The soap opera phenomenon demonstrated that everyday lives, if properly explored, represented and distributed could be meaningful and interesting to large numbers of people. PH: There is a view with regard to philosophical currents of the time - and here I should add that I'm completely out of my depth - that the interest in the 1950s developing around language and its use in everyday life as a means of creating a meaningful world had a kind of resonance with the ideas of Direct Cinema. Until you had synch sound, there was no way in which film could show how language and its everyday usage actually created social worlds. In this view, Direct Cinema wasn't something that suddenly emerged due to the fortuitous invention of a new technology.

                                                  8 Leacock acted as cameraman on this, Flaherty's last major film. See his account, 'The making of Louisiana Story' in Crittenden and Potter, eds., op.cit. pp.5-9.

9 Steve Morrison trained at the National Film and Television School in the early 1970s, later becoming a senior executive of the Granada Media Group until he was ousted in a recent ‘boardroom coup’

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Rather the technology came into existence in order to meet a need for this way of understanding the world.10 Do you have a view on that? CY: I would tend to agree with most of that. But it doesn't take me quite far enough in remembering why we did it. We were all film buffs, who knew and loved the history of cinema and the way that it had developed. I can imagine that one day we had a conversation to the effect that wouldn't it have been fascinating if the Lumière brothers had had synch sound when they were photographing their workers coming out of the factory. One of the images to ourselves was that we were taking cinema back to that early point with this new capability and seeing where it led us. And one of things that we discovered was that it took us closer and closer to Lumière and further and further away from Méliès. There was that clear demarcation in our minds from the very beginning. We didn't direct people, therefore we didn't manipulate the subject in that obvious way to explore it. We just allowed it to evolve. When the MacDougalls first came to me with their cut of To Live with Herds, it still depended on narration read in the wonderful voice of James Blue. We realised that this was interfering with learning who the Jie were. It told us things about them that were interesting to know, but we were not actually learning who they were. So the decision was taken to drop James Blue's wonderful narration. We then went up to the Hebrides for a few days armed with file cards with all the different scenes outlined on them and began re-arranging the structure. We were looking for ways of communicating who these people were without using narration. It was that which led to the first use of subtitles.11

PH: But what was this narration actually saying? Was it ethnographic explanation?

                                                  10 Though he approaches the matter from a somewhat different angle, I had in mind here the arguments of William Rothman in his Documentary Film Classics, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp.109-111.

11  Colin appears to be mistaken on the primacy of this use of subtitles. To Live with Herds was not released until 1971 whereas subtitles had been used in ethnographic films at least as far back as John Marshall’s film A Joking Relationship, released in 1962. 

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CY: It was stuff that was hard to lose often because it was things the MacDougalls knew to be the case. There were a couple of times when some very interesting things were being said, such as how the newly-dug water wells were actually destroying the grazing habits of the cattle. And how the introduction of taxation put the Jie in a dilemma because the only way that they could come up with the money was to sell some of their cows. One man couldn't decide which cow of two to sell, but then whilst he was deciding one of them died. It was very difficult when they knew something about a character not to include it in the film. So on a couple of occasions, they put the narration back in again. There was one sequence very late in the film where they decided they just had to use narration. Then it came in as quite a shock. So they decided to go back and put a bit of narration in earlier so that the rules of the game didn't change. These were early attempts to do without the voice of the third party. This didn't change until we realized that there was something called participant-observation. Then we became aware that if the filmmaker could be introduced to the audience as being a participant, then there would be a way, stylistically, of including the film-maker's voice in the film. PH: This was quite different from the Leacock-Maysles-Pennebaker approach. As I understand it, they made it an article of faith that you didn't interfere in any way. You didn't speak unless spoken to. In fact, I suspect it was an article of faith more honoured in the breach than honoured. But it must have marked you out as being distinctive. CY: The question of the invisible observer behind the camera was always dodgy because he's not invisible to the people being filmed. The reason why the expression 'fly on the wall' was sneered at by us was because there ain't no fly on the wall that is capable of holding an Éclair (16mm camera). It's also deceitful to suggest that being observed does not change you. So it was much more useful to admit to being there right from the start. If that changed you into a dummy that was probably also deceitful because when the camera wasn't running you were probably chatting away. There was a kind of 'holier than thou' side to cinema-vérité which we were very suspicious of. Just in its title. I'm going right back to kinopravda now. That term 'pravda' was bullshit. It led to a misguided discussion about what was being attempted. Direct Cinema avoided that by its choice of language. Rouch could escape it by saying that he was producing cinéma-direct.

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PH: There is a whole confused history about those terms which perhaps we had better avoid. Everybody seems to be using cinema-vérité in his or her own way. CY: We used the word 'observational' because we wanted to describe a process rather than a promise. PH: When did this word actually become a matter of common currency amongst you? CY: In the middle of an argument with Roger Sandall at Rice University because he thought he had invented the word, and we said, ‘No, no, we had invented it’. Sometime after that, after my return to Britain, people such as Leslie Woodhead and his mates at Granada Television were also very happy to use this word, because it also described one of their ambitions. They were looking closely at something. So through that television population, it became more and more general. PH: Now it seems to have lost its specificity: all sorts of people are claiming to do observational cinema. It's become more or less any kind of documentary that doesn't have a commentary on it, or interviews that are not too prominent. But I'm interested in the original circumstances in which you phrased it. It's interesting that you took the most celebrated oxymoron in anthropology, participant-observation, and chose the observation rather than the participation side. Yet you had always stressed the importance of the subjectivity of the film-maker in engaging in human relation terms with the subjects, you were always going on about the importance of participation in that sense. So why did you opt for the observation? CY: I personally didn't encounter the ‘participation’ part until much later. That became a useful term to deflect arguments against observational filming on the grounds that we were apparently claiming more than we could deliver. But we didn't make these promises in our teaching or in the films that we actually made. The word ‘participant’ came in as a useful instrument in that discussion. The time when the language of observational cinema came in for the most severe criticisms was probably in the colloquium that David and Judith organized in Canberra some ten years after the UCLA one in 1978. The writer James Roy McBean took the view that the films we were making were deceitful by promising that ‘this is how it really was, folks’. In comparison, he thought that something that was clearly manipulated was

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more honest. It astonished me, as it astonished James Blue, that anyone could say that. Participation became a useful means of defence against that kind of criticism. In Peter and Jane Flint, that lovely film that di Gioia and Hancock made in Vermont, they were having conversations with that young couple all the time. If you want to call that ‘participant-observation’, you can do so. In the Turkana material, where David and Judith are having conversations, it's another way of telling an audience how the film was made. They also showed how these conversations could be used as a source of information, which was something which we found more and more necessary as observational cinema progressed. It wasn't a change of film-making strategy as such, but more a change of tactics in dealing with the enemy. But we still held firmly to the view that the total fictionalisation of material was not necessary to make it interesting. PH: There's a point you've made before that's relevant here, which is to do with the disparity between filming observationally and remaining faithful to it when you get back in the edit suite. Why is it so important? CY: It occurred to us that if you tried to approach the subject matter differently in the shooting, it was a pity to depart from that in the editing. It would conceal your methods from the audience. Here's where Garfinkel feeds back in: he made us aware that however we did things, there was a methodology involved. What were trying to do was reveal our methodology to an audience, so that it could evaluate the film without having to be experts in the subject matter. I found that a very useful contribution to our discussions. It encouraged us to choose our subjects in such a way that they didn't have to be betrayed in the edit suite. PH: Can you tell me as a matter of record, what kind of relationships you had with the Direct Cinema group? CY: Leacock and Pennebaker became friends, so we were with each other whenever we could be. I thought their films were wonderful. I admired their agility and their energy. But also the high morality in their films. They were also extremely entertaining customers. Pleasure was an important part of the relationship. I'm not sure what they thought we were up to in UCLA. But they came to visit us there, also in Beaconsfield. Not quite yet in this house, though occasionally I get these wild 'phone calls. PH: Were there any dissonances that helped to define what you were about as opposed to what they were doing?

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CY: We were aware of the crisis structure aspect of Direct Cinema, which we accepted as one way of dealing with the problem of how you construct a film. One of the films of that period that was crucial was Petey and Johnny, about some rather delinquent characters, edited by another friend called Patricia Jaffe, who later went on to edit The Thomas Crown Affair. Right at the end, Robert Drew, the producer, wanted commentary on the film. It fell to Pat to find a way of constructing the material so that commentary was not necessary. I was inspired by their resilience under pressure. That encouraged us to be more resilient about what we were doing. What I noticed about Leacock was that whenever he wrote or spoke about what he was doing, the word ‘observation’ was constantly being used. That's partly where we got the word from. Although he wasn't doing what we thought he ought to be doing, we were aware that what he was working from was observation. But it wasn't simply a question of being influenced by other kinds of documentary. It was also a question of being more influenced by Jean Renoir than by Hitchcock. In Canberra, I remember that Blue showed bits of La Règle du Jeu to illustrate his own approach to film-making. Whenever I see Hitchcock's use of dramatic irony illustrated, my skin bristles with the complete hokey-pokey side of it. You feel that if the camera were only a few degrees either side, then you'd stop believing it. But that would never be the same with Renoir, because his style of narration was built around the expectation that the camera could be anywhere. So one felt as if there was a life going on regardless of whether his camera was recording it or not. PH: you say in your well-known "Observational Cinema" article that the Italian Neo-realists were your godfathers. I can see that the mise en scène of Neo-realism is based on a kind of aesthetic in which one would like to locate observational cinema as well, but isn't their planning of everything down to the last detail antithetical to what you were trying to do? CY: But if you take Bicycle Thieves, there is a wonderful sequence near the beginning where the protagonists have to pawn some sheets to get some money. So they take them to a warehouse where they will be given some money for themselves and their family. And then this package is taken from them and put high up on a shelf. But it has to be passed through a whole series of people to get up to the place where it has to be stored. And you suddenly realize how universal the problem is. It's a problem that

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affects not just this particular family, but thousands of people who are in the same predicament. That is an invented sequence, but it is the sort of sequence that an observational film-maker would give his eye-teeth for. It is the moment that acts as metaphor for the whole subject. This is something that we allowed ourselves to be influenced by in selecting what to shoot and what not to shoot. But it wasn't something that came easily at all. David and Judith made a film about American Indians who lived in Los Angeles. But that was a horrifying experience because they kept on cutting the camera off just as it was getting interesting because they were short of money. In order to try and learn what was going wrong, I asked them to put spacer in every time they cut picture because they had kept running on the sound as that was much cheaper. We tried to figure out what it was that made them turn the camera off. In brief, it was because fictional conventions had determined what made things interesting to us and that was now interfering with the observation of ordinary behaviour. There was a time when I was guilty of it myself, when we went out to film the opening of a supermarket far out in the sticks in East Los Angeles. I took a whole bunch of students with Super8 to film, not the opening, but the Indians who would perform for the crowd of people who would be assembled there. They had also invited a group of handicapped people to observe it - an act of complete opportunism! A large black limousine arrived, out of which stepped an Indian who was going to dance. I filmed the dance but the moment that the dance was finished, I turned the camera off, instead of continuing to run and get him back into the limousine. So I missed the most important bit of information, namely that he collapsed because he was completely shagged at the end. But I had stopped at the end of the theatrical moment. We were all learning that sort of thing as we went along. The neo-realist films were particularly useful to us in helping us to sharpen our powers of observation. PH: These ideas were developing in UCLA in the late 1960s, and then you came to Britain in 1970 where you advised on the cutting of To Live with Herds. Could it be argued that this was the first fully realized work of observational cinema? CY: It probably was the first, but that was only because Hawkins was such a terrible procrastinator that he didn't get La Tirana out first. PH: I suppose The Village might count as the first fully realized work of observational cinema?

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CY: I think the Jie film was much closer to what we were trying to achieve. The Village precedes it in time, but it's got its share of editing in it. For example, the sequence of people leaving Ireland has a heavy hand of editing in it. PH: But even in To Live with Herds, as has been commented before, that final scene has a very classical end of film feel to it.12 The main character is walking along in late afternoon, as I recall it, with the salutation 'May you live with herds' being repeated in voice-over. It's one of the few moments in the film when you don't have synch sound. Even observational film-makers have to tell stories don't they? CY: This is the thing that we explored in the discussion in Canberra in 1978. We had no less a compulsion to tell a story than anybody else ever had. But it always comes back to how you tell that story. When I grew up and left the NFTS, and began to work for ACE in Paris, we were still talking about how the subject should be treated. The Americans in their cinema are so much better on this than we are, on the whole, in Europe. They've trained an audience to expect the kind of film that they are capable of making. Our audiences are trained by seeing other films, but there's always a bridge to be built. Ethnographic film cannot escape the need to tell a story because that's what audiences expect. You can't reinvent cinema for this one purpose, at least I don't think you can. But you can modify it. Not all films have to end like Chaplin marching off towards the sunset. But you look for some way of resolving the issues in the life that has been represented using the narrative conventions that your audience will expect. The narrative conventions should be adapted to the life rather than vice versa. But they're not something that can be invented anew for every film that is made. PH: In ethnographic film-making, the whole question of narrative conventions seems to be something of a guilty secret. Everybody is using them, but somehow we never seem to discuss them very much, with the

                                                  12, I am referring here to Brian Winston's view, as expressed in his book, Claiming the Real, British Film Institute, 1995, that the final scene in To Live with Herds proves that structure always wins out in the end: "Chaplin danced down no sunset-lit road to greater effect" (p.191).

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notable exception of Toni de Bromhead, who has written a whole book on this matter.13

CY: They are a guilty secret. But I don't think we should be ashamed of them. As long as we are using film, we must take into account the films that people are accustomed to seeing before they see our ‘master works’. If these films are narrative-based, then tant pis, that's what film is because that's what audiences expect. It's always been interesting to me that when we made The Village, back then Hockings thought that he would be crucified for falling under the influence of Hollywood and McCarty thought he would be crucified for making a boring movie. When the film was shown in Seattle at the AAA meeting, it was crucified by the anthropologists for using a methodology that attacked the ones that they had just graduated with. The critics did everything they could to prevent the filim from being shown, including trying to unplug the projector and so on. Both Hockings and McCarty were in despair. Hockings was more resigned to it than McCarty who felt completely crushed by the reaction to the film. He was tearing this hair, I was protecting the projector, Hockings was sitting looking quite bemused by it all, saying what idiots they were. But in the end, McCarty got a promotion and Hockings didn't. McCarty's colleagues realised that he had done something, but Hockings got no respect whatsoever for what he had done from his colleagues. PH: What was the methodology that the anthropological critics thought was so threatened? CY: Gathering information into baskets and only when you had all the baskets filled would you be entitled to draw conclusions from your research. When we limped back to UCLA from Seattle, it was Garfinkel who came to our rescue by making us realize that what we were doing was telling these recent PhD graduates that they had wasted their time. "Don't worry," he said, "they'll get used to it and they'll start to want to use your tools".

                                                  13 Toni de Bromhead (1996) Looking Two Ways: documentary film's relationship with reality and cinema. Hojbjerg/ Intervention Press. See also my article "Narratives: the guilty secret of ethnographic documentary?", which is due to appear in the festschrift volume offered in honour of the Dutch visual anthropologist Dirk Nijland and currently being edited for publication by Metje Postma.

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And the future? So was Garfinkel right? Perhaps the most honest answer is that, even thirty years later, the jury is still out. In the States particularly, it seems that there are some who are prepared to declare not only that observational cinema is dead, but so too is the whole genus of documentary.14 Within anthropology, even some of the best appear to lack all conviction, considering film to have no more than a role as a pedagogical medium or as a means of popularising the discipline. But this pessimism contrasts with our experience at the Granada Centre where we were still actively promote the virtues of observational cinema for particular purposes, even if we also expose our students to other styles and approaches. The flow of applicants from students with the highest first degree qualifications in anthropology has been running strongly for more than a decade. True, many of our graduates chose to take their anthropological training and apply it in the television industry or other film-making contexts outside academic institutions. But every year, a certain proportion take their film-making skills with them as they go on to doctoral work. In the long run, it will be these students who will create a place for film-making within the anthropological project as a whole. Even on the same glorious May afternoon that Colin and I were ruminating on these matters in his garden, revising the earlier interview, he received a 'phone call from Donn Pennebaker. Pennebaker was full of good news: the recent film he made with his partner Chris Hegedus, Startup.com had been very successful in the States and was now being distributed on DVD. He had a new commission from Miramax, the Disney-owned production company responsible for many Oscar-winning films. A number of his early works were being re-issued in a boxed, three-film DVD set. These included Monterey Pop, which he had even been able to expand and re-integrate some of the musical performance sequences that he had reluctantly been obliged to exclude in the 16mm version. "These are exciting times", Colin reported him as saying,"and the best of times to be working as a documentarist, better even than the 1960s". In my view, there are good grounds for optimism about documentary-making for anthropological purposes too. The technology is cheaper and                                                   14 See for example the remarks of Lucien Taylor in his Introduction to David MacDougall's Transcultural Cinema, Princeton University Press, pp. 3-21.

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easier to use than ever before, and the intellectual climate of anthropology more favourable to the notion of using film, not just as a means of record, but as a means of representing the experience of cultural difference.15 However, there is a dismaying tendency for discussions about this matter to get lost between the celebration of a glorious past, such as we shall be engaging in during this symposium, and prophecies about a utopian future when new technology will somehow solve all our problems, both intellectual and practical. But to get from the one to the other, it is necessary to build a bridge between them through the present. Surely the best way to do that is by filmic practice, rather than by hoping, by power of thought alone, to hit upon a respectable theoretical rationale for film-making in anthropology. By virtue of a powerful imagination and a determination to overcome institutional obstacles, coupled with some artful thieving, Colin Young created the infrastructure in 1960s UCLA for a filmic practice whose influence continues to expand across the world, like ripples in pond, both inside and outside the academy. Those of us who have been enriched by his vision of an observational cinema now have the responsibility to find new institutional means to put its precepts into practice.  

                                                  15 I have offered a much more extended argument for this view in a recent article: "Ethnographic film: technology, practice and anthropological theory" Visual Anthropology 13: 207-228.