Grimshaw takes us through many rises and falls of the visual from a standpoint of anthropology, here I highlight two chapters:
In the chapter “Cinema and anthropology in the postwar world,” Grimshaw explores cinema’s various responses to a changing world. A world situated between two hegemonic forces (think Cold War), but also a world where “popular democratic movements” (71) were taking shape across much of Africa, Asia and Latin America. The focus on the individual, then, in its various forms became the centerpiece of modern cinema. “Locating humaniy” (71) becomes a central theme. Meaning the director or film maker is less concerned with the various landscapes and rather with the people themselves. Grimshaw explains how this focus on humanity was displayed in several different forms: neorealism, cinema verite, and direct cinema. Italian Neorealism tried to insert the filmmaker as least as possible. People were at the center. Humanity was at the center (questions of individual and society), but the film was portrayed as a set of observations (76). Cinema verite, most closely connected with the work of Jean Rouch is about “capturing life as lived” (80). This type of cinema is rooted in a reflexivity. It’s subject went beyond the physical level in the sense that it was trying to capture human subjectivities, this complex web that these filmmakers often thought couldn’t be described just on a page or in writing. Direct cinema offered an alternative to the Hollywood “fake” cinema. In this cinema “nothing was staged or repeated” (83) During this time cinema had some rapid changes which included a lot of questioning its epistemology, but we don’t necessarily see these same questions asked in the discipline of anthropology at the time. So, in some ways this type of filmaking was a precursor to the reflesive turn in anthropolgy that later came.
In the chapter “The Anthropological Cinema of Jean Rouch,” Grimshaw engages with the works of French anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch. Her analysis engages the works intertextuality. She gives an individual overview of each of his major films, but draws from each film to discuss the major themes and styles of Rouch’s filmmaking overall. She mostly does this to explore how Rouch moved beyond the either/or dichotomy, such as (rational/irrational; light vs. dark; truth vs. fiction) (102). For Rouch, life as reflected in his projects “contains both darkness and light.” He contrasted certain themes to show they can exist simultaneously, much like when Grimshaw contrasted his works Jaguar and Les Maistres Fous. The latter focusing more on the “force of the main” (102), while Jaguar explored more issues of human and individual agency. By showcasing these differences, we see how the ethnographic can be
For Grimsahw, various “ways of seeing” have structured anthropological thought and practice. She argues that vision operates differently in anthropology depending on conversations of technique or knowledge production. Ultimately, Grimsahw asks what’s the relationship of vision to ethnographic methods/techniques and epistemological inquires?
In the early European projects of ethnography, seeing was the central mode of the practice. Grimshaw states there was an ocularcentric bias. Ethnographers were encouraged to go “see” for themselves (7). Grimshaw wishes to show how the ethnographer’s eye is always “partial” (8). In this book, we’re encouraged to “see anthropology as a project of visualization rather than read it as a particular kind of literature” (9).
Throughout the book, Grimshaw traces the rise and fall of various moments in the visualization of anthropology moving from British to where visual anthropology really developed in American Anthropology, especially with the work and photography of Margaret Mead.
Visualization in anthropology, our seeing, is much like the lens of a camera, we must zoom in and out-- “the movement of ethnographer's eye, always tracking between panorama and close-up in much the same way as the camera itself” (12).