Filming Fore, Shooting Scientists: Medical Research, Experimental Filmmaking, and Documentary Cinema

Abstract

After World War II the research film increasingly became instrumental in medical science and cultural anthropology, especially in the recording and analysis of non-recurring events in isolated or “primitive” communities. Ambitiously, Carleton Gajdusek and Richard Sorenson in the 1960s sought to accumulate a global film archive of such communities, focusing on clinical disorders, such as kuru among the Fore people of New Guinea, and patterns of child health and development. Ostensibly objective, and certainly distancing, the camera also was for them a desiring machine, thus relating their archival project to the contemporary experimental films of Warhol in New York. Comparison with associated documentary film, with its emphasis on editorial selection, thematic coherence and narrative closure, reveals differences in how filmic investigators engage with their subjects, as well as discordances in valuation and ethics.

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For advice on earlier versions of this essay, I am grateful to Judith Farquhar, Peter Galison, Branden Joseph, Nathaniel Kahn, Don Kulick, Shirley Lindenbaum, Laura Lindgren, Jane Lydon, Lisa O’Sullivan, Hans Pols, Charles Rosenberg, Simon Schaffer, P. Adams Sitney, and Mark Veitch. Adrianna Link talked to me about her interest in Sorenson’s films. James Dunk and Sam Widin provided research assistance. Librarians at the American Philosophical Society and the Library of Congress helped to track down additional archival materials, and Michael Alpers gave me access to the Melanesian Film Archive.

Notes

1 Peter Galison defends documentary film as method in science studies (2014).

2 For recent studies of the materiality and historicity of visual practices in anthropology, see Edwards (1992; 2001), Rony (1996), Grimshaw (2001), Ballard (2013), and Geismar (2014).

3 For example, Fejos’s Yagua (1941) and Rouch’s Les maîtres fous (1955). Cf. de Brigard (1975), Marks (1995), Amad (2001; 2010), Staples (2005), Durington and Ruby (2011). On related expeditionary film, see Mitman (1999; 2016) and Griffiths (2011; 2013).

4 This trend continued with the artful, subjective films—more about “truth” than facts—of John Marshall (The Hunters 1957); Robert Gardner (Dead Birds 1965); and Napoleon Chagnon and Timothy Asch (The Ax Fight 1971); cf. Loizos (1993).

5 As Mary Ann Doane points out, the long take is co-extensive with the events it documents, inviting us to become lost in the shot (2002).

6 It was never simply a matter of leaving a camera to watch—at the very least one had to change the film in a Bolex every ten minutes and in an Auricon every 30 minutes.

7 Warhol would have been familiar with ethnographic film through viewings at Cinema 16, the Film Forum, and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative (later the Anthology Film Archives). He also might have seen Bateson and Mead’s edited film Trance and Dance in Bali on CBS television in 1951; cf. Koch (1973), Russell (1999) and Sitney (2002).

8 Mekas was another experimental filmmaker and founder of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and the journal Film Culture.

9 E-mail to author, 7 May 2015. Sitney suggests pornographic film was more likely a model than ethnographic film. For more on the connection of Warhol’s early films to the underground gay porn industry, cf. Waugh (1996). Warhol also claimed to admire Jack Smith for “the way he used anyone who happened to be around that day and also how he just kept shooting till the actors got bored” (Warhol and Hackett (1980) 2007:40). Some experimental filmmakers at the time, such as Maya Deren and Harry Smith, were loosely associated with anthropology, but their films contain little of the reticence and reserve of research film, unlike Warhol’s early efforts. There was, however, a similar tendency to use a single frame and an aversion to editing.

10 While Cartwright (1995) stresses “the use of cinema in medical science to analyze, regulate, and reconfigure the transient, uncontrollable field of the body” (xiii), my concern here is less disciplinary: I am more interested in archival desire than the “physiological gaze” (idem.).

11 Gajdusek also was familiar with Michaelis (1955), especially his emphasis on “the detailed analysis of the unique event” (ix). Michaelis was based at the University of Sydney when he wrote this book, but he left the year before Gajdusek arrived in Australia. See too Landecker (2005), Bonah and Laukötter (2009) and Wellmann (2011).

12 E. Richard Sorenson (1967:444) noted that Gesell undertook “by far the most elaborate and comprehensive use of cinema samplings to study human development.”

13 Journal, 4 Sept. 1957, in Gajdusek (1963a:2). Around this time, Mead’s second husband Reo Fortune was loitering in the Fore region, making desultory efforts to investigate kuru.

14 Michael Alpers recalled that Fore became convinced that the flash camera, in particular, could counter kuru sorcery, which they assumed was the real cause of the disease (Anderson 2008).

15 Journal, 14 Oct. 1957, in Gajdusek (1963a:114).

16 Gajdusek to Marion (Poms), Barry (Adels), and Miki (Revelle), 31 July 1959, in Gajdusek (1963b:137). (It was standard in those days to open the lens two stops when a subject was very dark.)

17 As a youth Sorenson was inspired by Gajdusek’s “propensity to go galumphing around in off beat unknown type areas with little but a somewhat erratic abstruse confidence” (Sorenson to Gajdusek, 1 March 1957; D.C. Gajdusek papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.] In the early 1960s, Gajdusek recommended Sorenson for a job at the progressive Wiltwyk School north of Manhattan, for emotionally needy and delinquent African-American teenagers, which served as a prelude to his later “adoption” and education of boys from New Guinea and Micronesia. Both of them admired Sidney Meyers’ 1948 Flaherty-style documentary about the school, The Quiet One.

18 Later, they said “the compete film record was more useful if preserved in the original chronological sequence, as are hospital clinical observations and examinations” (“Research Use of Ethnographic Research Films” [typescript], paper delivered at the 67th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, 21–24 Nov. 1968, Seattle, p. 4). Mead wrote the foreword for E. Richard Sorenson (1976) in which Sorenson referred to her “profound influence” (11).

19 Ekman had met Bateson in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1960s. Mead however was dismayed at the biological universalism on which this research was predicated.

20 See also Jablonko (2001–02). Marek Jablonko, her husband, shot 63,000 feet of silent film in New Guinea in the early 1960s, using a 16mm 3-lens turret Bolex, which he sent to Gajdusek. He later filmed there for Maurice Godelier.

21 Since the last victim of kuru died in 2003 the only way to see the disease now is to watch film.

22 Journal, 31 Oct. 1963, in Sorenson (n.d.:69).

23 Journal, 7 Dec. and 27 Dec. 1963, in Sorenson (n.d.:103, 148).

24 Sorenson to Gajdusek, 10 March 1966; Sorenson correspondence file, D.C. Gajdusek papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

25 Judith Farquhar, pers. comm., 4 March 2015.

26 Sorenson to Gajdusek, 23 Feb. 1965, Gajdusek papers.

27 Judith Farquhar, pers. comm., 4 March 2015.

28 E-mail to author, 15 Feb. 2015. Lindenbaum had just returned from emotionally demanding long-term fieldwork in what was then East Pakistan.

29 Sorenson to Gajdusek, 12 March 1966; Gajdusek papers.

30 Durington and Ruby (2011:193) describe Sorenson as having been “the leading advocate in the U.S. for research film.”

31 See, for example, Sorenson (1996). Much of his research focuses on the “erotic” elements of child development.

32 As Bruno Latour (1986) suggests, such a cascade of inscriptions enhances credibility and disciplines viewers.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Australian Research Council (FL110100243).

Notes on contributors

Warwick Anderson

WARWICK ANDERSON is the Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics at the University of Sydney, and the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University (2018–19). He has published extensively in the history of science and medicine, postcolonial studies, and science studies. E-mail: [email protected]