Films attempt to create a trajectory of understanding, beginning with images that make certain claims upon us. These claims are typically produced through acts of disclosure which create a sense of obligation in the viewer towards the viewed, and this can be compared to a kind of submission of display of vulnerability in which the subject invites our protection or interest. (MacDougall 1992:93–4)
Narrative films acknowledge the ethnographic project as a kind of sto- rytelling, often focusing upon a single individual to develop a “portrait” of the person as a representative of a given community, group, body of knowledge, or tradition (see Young 1989; MacDougall 1991:5). We find this in films like Magical Death (“This is a film about a great [Yanomami]
shaman, Dedeheiwa . . . ”), Powerhouse for God, Born Again, Imaginero,
Eduardo the Healer, Saints and Spirits, To Find Our Lives, The Shaman and His Apprentice, or The Reincarnation of Kensur Rimpoche. Narrative film, of
course, can make use of various camera styles and modes of representa- tion that may include juxtaposing the native voice with anthropological commentary and analysis. A narrative may be more or less pronounced with respect to its focus on a specific individual or individuals. And such films may themselves be reflexive, as the film by McKenzie and Hiatt just discussed. Finally, they may take much of their narrative structure from the temporal structure of the events they portray. Pilgrimages, initiations, and large-scale rituals can be treated in this way, especially when attention is given to the stagings and aftermath of such events.
As noted above by MacDougall (1992:93–4), because such films advance one or more named individuals to tell a “story,” they tend to restore the humanity of people that anthropological science typically abstracts and turn into specimens (Ruby 1990:15; see Nichols 1981:261). In this way they make an implied claim upon the viewer for our consideration, offering up stories that are richly indigenous. But the key concerns about such films are grasping the extent to which the individuals and the events portrayed are representative of a given cultural context and to what extent indigenous voices and narratives actually have textual independence within these films. Clearly, in a strict sense, all narratives used in this way are subordi- nated to the “text” of the author/filmmaker (see MacDougall 1991:5).
One of the true strengths of this type of film is that audiences get to see specific individuals acting in the context of actual historical situations with whatever attendant vicissitudes or social supports might pertain. In the sphere of religion, this seems to have come through more in films deal- ing with subjects close at home like Born Again and Powerhouse for God. With respect to non-Western subjects, the other possible strength of the narrative format is that it often affords a view of subjects outside the con- stricted frame of ritual or performance that necessarily exaggerates their Otherness to audiences unfamiliar with the culture portrayed.
The film Eduardo the Healer recommends itself in this respect. From the outset, the film announces its intention to construct a portrait of Eduardo, a Peruvian folk healer, or curandero: “Eduardo Calderon is a fisherman, a potter, and a curandero or healer.” Early in the film we see the healer diag- nosing a female patient through a “guinea pig ceremony” (i.e., divining with the entrails of the animal) as an external narrator explains the proce- dure, as well as indicating that near the city of Trujillo (north of Lima), “curanderismo remains vital and important, drawing clients from all walks of life.”
While the film raises predictable questions (e.g., what kind of clients visit Eduardo?—only two are seen within the film; and what is the wider societal attitude toward the practice of curanderismo?), we do get a fully
rounded sense of Eduardo as a individual and, although somewhat less fully, as someone integrated into a specific community. Shots of Eduardo with his family, working at his potter’s table, and sitting with his male companions are incut with the preparations for an all-night curing cere- mony, or table. Eduardo emerges in his own voice (via subtitled speech) as a self-taught individual with native intelligence. A biographical segment constructed in montage revisits Eduardo’s life history—allowing him to tell his story growing up as a poor Peruvian boy who attended the semi- nary, departed, went to art school, learned pottery, and then became a fish- erman and curandero. This account conveys both his strength of character and individuality but at the same time leads one to wonder how typical Eduardo is of other curers. For example, a close-up pan across his book- shelf reveals not only icons of the saints but volumes on Peruvian archae- ology, Jungian psychoanalysis, and novels by Poe. In another scene witchcraft is discussed by him and his companions. After some aside ref- erences to various psychic traditions—macumba in Brazil and voodoo in Haiti—Eduardo counsels them not to believe in magic and states that “all healing takes place in the mind.” All in all he comes across as an individ- ual with a rather cosmopolitan worldview. While we may still wish to know how typical he is of other curers, the concrete example of Eduardo can provide a reference point in dealing with the potential variability of practitioners within similar folk healing traditions. This can be a healthy corrective in anthropology’s tendency to overgeneralize, particularly where negative stereotypes may be generally held toward such practices. Part of what makes this film work must be discovered within the canon- ical story form that it exploits and the way in which it makes its claims upon the attention of viewers. Eduardo’s own recounting of his life— intercut in parallel editing with various preparatory steps for a healing table—both trace a movement in his calling from God to cure. His own revelations about his life are made to bear an existential relationship to the film’s climax—the challenge to cure an intractably ill patient in an all- night healing table.
This narrative strategy bears a strong resonance with the idea of a “vir- tual performance,” something that Bill Nichols argues is inherent in film’s preference for a canonical story form (1991b:35). Here the representative moments of a lifetime are made to bear upon the (supposed) “performance of a lifetime.” The idea here, as MacDougall (1992) states, is that ethno- graphic filmmakers seek out those who naturally reveal or expose them- selves, using an individual’s “performance” to engage the curiosity and empathy of viewers, This includes “the naturalness of discovering familiar (Western, dramaturgical) codes of human expressivity among others.”
A somewhat different version of this strategy is used by Peter Furst in his film on the Huichol peyote hunt, To Find Our Life (1969). This film—
produced before the advent of subtitling—adopts a surrogate voice for the central character, Ramon Medina Silva, a shaman who leads the pilgrim- age to Wirikuta. In a voice-over spoken across Huichol yam paintings that illustrate the mythical themes of the peyote hunt, viewers are given a minimal ethnographic background and introduced to Ramon: “Each year in the first half of the dry season, small groups of Huichol leave their iso- lated farmsteads in the Sierra Madre of Western Mexico to hunt the psy- choactive peyote cactus which grows 250 miles to the Northeast in the high desert of San Luis Potosi.”
That the filmmaker wishes his audience to view this event as a cultural archetype rather than as a specific historical event is clear from his intro- duction and descriptive strategy throughout the film. We are told, “Each journey recreates anew the first peyote hunt of ancient times when the great mara’akame Tateiwari—the first shaman, our grandfather who is fire—led the ancestors to the peyote that they might find their life,” and “In a very real sense the peyote hunt is a return to origins, to an ancient desert homeland, to a preagricultural past, when animals and men and plants were one.” Furst briefly positions his own authority along with an implied claim to authenticity in his introduction when he notes: “This film records some moments of one [peyote] journey in December 1968. The music and sounds are those of the participants. The words [i.e., narration] are adapted from the native tradition dictated by Ramon Medina Silva, who led the hunt as the great mara’akame Tatiweira, our grandfather, the first shaman.”
As narrator, Furst suggests that the pilgrimage will condense a lifetime into representative moments. “For Ramon’s companions the journey was a sacred pilgrimage to insure the growth of maize, of children, of all nature. For Ramon it was the pivotal event of his life, for on this, his fifth journey to the peyote, he reached that distant goal set for him by his own shaman grandfather: to cross that final threshold to the fifth level. And through the consensus of his companions to become himself a mara’akame.” It is sig- nificant that Furst frames a solitary close up profile of the shaman against the Sierra Madre as these words are spoken. This juxtapositioning of a cul- tural event of ultimate importance and a character who realizes a life goal through this event serve to mutually heighten a sense of dramatic presen- tation. Unfortunately, the “performance” is muted, because we do not gain direct access to Ramon’s account of the event.
Seen in the context of its time, this is a commendable film. There are, however, the predictable questions that one can ask. For example, in the pilgrimage depicted in this film the Huichol do not walk the 250 miles to Wirikuta, in the traditional manner—but ride in a Volkswagen and a Chevy van. Furst, much to his credit, makes no attempt to obscure this fact. Rather, he deals with it in a mythopoetic fashion. The sacred staff nor- mally held by the mara’akame to clear the way on this sacred journey is
filmed through the front windshield of one of the vans. “One walks, one rides, it is the same,” we are told, “If one pays heed to those ancient places, it is as it should be done.”
As these are presumably the translated words of the shaman, we need not question the authenticity of the event or to assume that the Huichol are in the process of “losing their culture” because a more modem form of transportation has been appropriated. It does, however, raise pertinent questions not only about the impact of the researcher and the filmmaking process on the event, but about how this pilgrimage differs from earlier ones made by Ramon and his companions. Insofar as a sense of indebted- ness (to a divine power) lies at the heart of the religious experience, the customary ways in which individuals discharge their sense of obligation to the divine must be recognized as central to their subjective experience of the sacred, as well as how it is authenticated by their society. From this perspective, walking as opposed to riding does make a difference and one that is worth knowing about. The film’s narrative, however, encourages us to treat the event as an archetype, as timeless. We are not led to inquire into the details of the events, only its placement within an ideology and a cosmology. What might be significant about this particular journey is that it served as a model for a new type of pilgrimage, a new type of pilgrim, or a new type of mara’akame. These are concerns of subjectivity and embodiment that remain unanswered.
STYLE AND METAPHOR AS PRODUCERS OF