Research in Sociology

LINK TO FILM: https://boap.uib.no/index.php/jaf/article/view/1316/1234

 

PART II - Reality, Aesthetics, and Representations

 

One of your interlocutors suggested that people faked their own trance. You made clear from the start that, unlike your interlocutors, you do not believe in spirits — whatever ‘believing’ means. Could you elaborate on the role of doubt and disbelief in your film? 

 

Well, I would nuance that a bit. It is true that I have been brought up not to believe in spirits, but as the film moves on, I discuss instances – ‘fleeting moments’ — where all of a sudden I no longer doubted the reality of spirits and their agency. For reasons explained above [see Part I of the interview], I have noticed that these fleeting moments are usually followed by attempts to restore my world-view. Faking trance is indeed something that is widely discussed (and probably practiced) in the candomblé community, and it plays an important role in the production of what I call — following Michael Taussig — ‘epistemic murk’. The fact that people may be faking it throws doubt on certainties, and opens a space where not-knowing and mystery can come into being.

 

What feedback did you get from participants about the ways in which they are represented? And was this feedback considered throughout the production process or retrospectively? 

 

I got very different responses from the people who figure in the film. Ever since the priest saw the film he keeps sending me videos made on his iPhone of the spirits that come visit his temple, telling me that I can use them ‘for my next film’. Strikingly, he films the spirits from head to toe — a big contrast with my preference for close ups. He now also tells me how to film (something he had never done), urging me to pay far more attention to the visitors that come to his ceremonies. One of the participants, Marcello, had first seen the English version of the film, but because he does not speak English, he missed out on the voice-over narration. He told me he wanted to be cut out of the film, which he felt was exoticizing, much like a film by performance artist Marina Abramovic on Brazilian religions he had just seen. But when he watched the Portuguese version of the film, he completely changed his mind, and urged his friends to watch it. What spoke to him in the voice-over narration was the absence of an all-knowing narrator. The old blacksmith was present at the premiere in Salvador. He had been sitting next to a friend, who told me later that he had been laughing all through the film. I’m not sure what that means.

 

We thought that your attention to forms and patterns was extremely interesting, resulting in images and sequences that were particularly pleasing. You selected forms and patterns from sharply different social situations and juxtaposed them in quick sequences, associating, for instance, the rhythmic movements of washing machines to those of ritual dances. What is this idiosyncratic montage aiming to achieve?

 

Part of what I have been trying to do is to break into established modes of (ethnographic) documentaries. I borrow from Bertold Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt — a theater technique aimed at producing a critical and alert audience, who will not be ‘carried away’ by the magic of film, or ‘tele transported’ to a tropical elsewhere, but who will be constantly reminded that what they are watching is an assemblage of footage, a ‘construction’, which seeks to provoke the viewer’s thoughts. Surrealism is another source of inspiration: the washing machines are an example of the surrealist collage technique, bringing seemingly random, unrelated elements in a single frame to explore how these elements might actually ‘speak’ to each other, or evoke hitherto unseen connections.

 

TPOS probes the boundary between the visible and the invisible from a variety of angles, inviting the viewers to think more deeply about what they are seeing on screen. What do you think are the limits of the cinematic medium in representing something that is unseen and yet real, at least for the majority of your interlocutors?

 

In the beginning of the film I am quite clear in saying that ‘my camera won’t make spirits available to you’. This goes against the promise that photographic images give us access to the world, capture ‘the way things really are’ (a promise rooted in what Michel de Certeau once called ‘the contract between the seen and the real’, and which we discuss as ‘ocularcentrism’). Seeing the body of a possessed person is not knowing what a spirit is. And, more generally, ‘seeing’ is not ‘knowing’. 

 

We were captivated by your beautiful images of the urban and rural landscape and the people moving across them going about their daily tasks. The atmosphere produced was, with a few exceptions, kind of dreamy, pervaded by an unsettling sense of tranquillity. But we also felt the need to know more about the material hardship that people might experience in your field-site. While we are wary that this focus on hardship and exclusion — which often dominates stereotyped narratives about Brazil — risks obscuring other relevant dimensions and local understandings of social life, we were wondering what a closer look at the roughest surfaces of the everyday would add to our understanding of Candomblé. 

 

Ah! That is a nice question, because it is the topic of my new film (The Body Won’t Close: Bahian Tales about Men, Sex and Violence), in which I focus on magical and religious practices to ‘close the body’, which I relate to the violent and precarious life world my interlocutors inhabit! What this new film has taught me is how much of Candomblé practices — including the interactions with spirits — try to give adherents a sense of protection. 

 

Are there any aspects of the film that viewers have understood differently from your intentions?

 

Frankly, I think that is inevitable. Filmmaking is accepting that people may interpret scenes and images differently (actually, all my students in visual anthropology have to read Wolgang Iser’s text on the phenomenology of the act of reading, which shows that reading, too, transforms the text of the writer in radical ways). Voice over narration gives me some control, but I try to avoid that my words ‘colonize’ the image; if anything, I think my words ask questions about the images, hint at possible readings of them, just as the words are being questioned by the images and sounds in whose co-presence they appear. I think this is what Trinh Minh-Ha meant when she said that one should not speak ‘about’ images, but speak ‘nearby’ them – hinting at a far more open relationship between these different channels of communication.  

 

To read Part I of the interview [again] please click here.

 

---

First published: 17 November 2020