Anti-ethnography: Halimuhfack (Christopher Harris, 2016) and Obatala (Sebastian Wiedemann, 2019)
This virtual screening is inspired by a 2016 program by Indigenous filmmakers and curators Adam and Zack Khalil on the violence inherent to the ethnographic gaze, and the extent to which such gaze continues to define much of the visual codes by which Black and Brown people are represented in the mainstream imaginary. As Zimbabwean novelist, Yvonne Vera puts it, “in Africa, as in most parts of the dispossessed, the camera arrives as part of the colonial paraphernalia, together with the gun and the bible.”
We selected two films by Christopher Harris and Sebastian Wiedemann, as kindred but distinctive attempts to not merely rehearse the violence of representation, but open up possibilities for otherwise modes of cinematic encounter. Halimuhfack and Obatala Film are both experiments in rhythmic intuition and non-linear time. They gesture at a kind of incantatory cinema in which presence is necessarily trance-like, spectral, yet no less intensely felt.
Christopher Harris, 2016, Halimuhfack
Christopher Harris is a Black American moving image artist, curator and professor at the University of Iowa’s department of Cinematic Arts. His experimental films and video installations reckon with the conventions of historiography, narrative and cinematic realism, in their complicity with the forms of capture and carcerality which plague Black living. He works primarily through manually and photo-chemically altered film, collage, found footage, and staged reenactments.
Halimuhfack portrays an actress in a lush dark green dress, wooden beads necklace, red hat and black leather gloves. She lip-syncs to a 1939 archival audio of Zora Neale Hurston singing a Florida bawdy song and describing her research process. A chronicler of Black southern and Caribbean cultures, Hurston consigned them to posterity via a diverse array of forms – film, essays, novels, academic research and sound recordings. Behind the actress performing Hurston in Halimuhfack, a screen loops flickering, classically ethnographic images of Maasai people dancing or returning the camera’s gaze. Harris (re)shot these on a hand-cranked Bolex, from an educational film. The filmmaker never allows the voice of Hurston to fully sync with the lips of the actress, emphasizing the multilayered gaps between objects and technologies of capture and representation. A student of Franz Boas, but always ambivalent towards the project of ethnography, Hurston herself already practiced a kind of “sonic infidelity” (as phrased by R. Kheshti in her 2015 book, Modernity’s Ear) which refused illusions of faithful, unmediated reproduction, foregrounding instead embodied practice and improvisation. Christopher Harris’ Halimuhfack feels like a fitting homage and expansion of her project of “singing back to the people.” Hurston’s distorted and looped voice in Halimuhfack ends up producing its own kind of uncanny musicality and record of discordance, emphasizing both the violence of capture and the ways in which what matters actually elides it.
Other recordings by Zora Neale Hurston:
Courtesy of the Library of Congress audio archive
Sebastian Wiedemann, 2019, Obatala Film
Sebastian Wiedemann is an Afro-Colombian experimental filmmaker and philosopher, as well as editor and curator of Hambre, an online platform, observatory and laboratory dedicated to contemporary Latin-American avant-garde cinema. He describes himself as a “practitioner of cinematic modes of experience” in which the ecological and the cosmological take center stage. Film is envisioned as a space of becoming, radical pedagogy and experimentation with otherwise modes of being in lieu of representation.
Shot in the city of Ile-Ife on Super8 film during a Yoruba ritual and assembled in Brazil, Obatala Film is a transatlantic repertoire of light, rhythm and movement. Wiedemann eschews documentation, treating moving image and sound as matter from which something akin to a spiritual experience might emerge, rather than sites of inscription.
Read an exchange between Sebastian Wiedemann & Jenny Fonseca Tovar on Obatala Film and cinema in the time of the pandemic.
(excerpt)
“Cinema has never been out of us. And, of course, we may now miss going to a movie theater, but, luckily, cinema has no fixed address and it cannot be quarantined. When we understand it as a vital mode of experience in which we are inevitably submerged, more than a human manifestation, cinema is a cosmogenetic condition. Being in the world means to be in the immanence of a cosmic cinematograph. The coronavirus is not the enclosure or detention of a world, but the presence of a mutagenic agent that forces us to change the montage logics of a world, so it can continue to be claimed as multiple. Coming up with new modes of making life go on, of making cinema happen. (…) To continue writing and editing "Obatala Film" from Obaluaye's hand is to welcome the fact that the pregnant image can present itself as a un-editing force or if you want as a montage of impermanence. This is the counter-spell! A joyful state of catastrophe where the cosmic cinematograph makes the cuts, explicit occasions of crumbling creation. Vertigo, disfiguring, erasing, and blurring of images, for they are always beginning, starting. Re-starts, left behind ephemeral lives while others begin. Obaluaye making the beginning of the images last between the thresholds of getting sick and healing them. That is the affirmation of the pharmacological condition of the images. They like this Pharmakon that heals or kills. A whole question of dosage. The measure of the virus that asks for the writing to become delirious as potency of thought of a whole living world, of an animist pluriverse as a multidimensional montage that resists the eclipse of a pregnant image.”