Seen as a reconciliation between the subjective positionings of artistic representation and the responsibilities of scientific documentation, the history of ethnographic cinema is filled with figures, usually holding cameras and developing new ways of seeing, whose innovations, either technological or methodological, cause the accepted practice of documentary filmmaking to shift irrevocably. See Figure 10-27 on page 299 of Meyer’s book. Usually, innovation is a marker of exceptionalism, an explorer forging ahead into the unknown world of technological experimentation, alone in the wilderness. But in the case of David and Judith MacDougall’s 1970s work with Turkana communities in Eastern Africa, techniques of filming, sound recording, and editing challenge established notions of the primacy and authority of the filmmaker and reveal the limited, privileged and often colonialistic position of the filmmaker in ethnographic cinema.

The MacDougalls, at the time perhaps the best known and most influential ethnographic filmmakers with prior academic training in cinema, having studied at the Ethnographic Film Program at UCLA with Colin Young, knew of previous practices in documentary film. Like Young and his colleague Walter Goldschmitt, who “started out with the hypothesis that we should experiment with different models of ethnographic film, to see if we could learn which were more effective under which conditions,” they sought to integrate the styles of observational cinema, which owed much to the work of previous American filmmakers such as Tim Asch and Robert Gardner, and the interactive work of French cinematographer Jean Rouch, to create a new model of ethnographic film that abandons the authoritative position of the filmmaker and anthropologist in favor of a more participatory process of documentation. This new participatory model allows the subjects, previously generic bodies with which Western specialists illustrated their theories, to have a say in their own representation, and presents information in such a way as to demand an engaged mode of reception from the audience.

In his book, Transcultural Cinema, David MacDougall points out the distinction between Francophone and Anglophone filmmakers, in terms of their willingness to make the presence of the filmmaker known on screen. Whereas Rouch sought to interact with his subjects, using the camera not as “a ‘passive recording instrument,’ but… [as] an active agent of investigation,” a technique Peter Loizos calls “probing-through-interaction,” many English and American filmmakers, much more ingrained in a scientific process of analysis, saw the camera as a recording device, often positioned in one place offering the potential of panopticism. This can be seen in Tim Asch’s film, The Ax Fight, filmed among the Yanomamo of southern Venezuela in the 1960s. Asch places the camera on a tripod, panning and zooming in order to capture the action unfolding in the Yanomamo camp. The final edited version of the film, which shows the footage repeatedly, once with stop-action pauses and explanations from anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, and once in its entirety with no commentary, provides an apparently objective, fly-on-the-wall perspective on the behavior of a community that would exist even if the camera were not there.

We can see traces of Rouch’s interactive style and the observational techniques of Asch and his contemporaries in the work of David and Judith MacDougall, specifically in the Turkana Conversations trilogy. David MacDougall has written on his use of the “unprivileged camera,” Like Asch, David MacDougall employs long takes, meant to capture events in their entirety, without the manipulation of audience perception through camera movement or editing. MacDougall has criticized active cinematographic styles, “making the camera respond to what is before it,” which for the audience “induces a certain passivity from which it is difficult to rouse oneself.” Preferring long shots with minimal camera movement, much like diachronous photography, over this “vacuum-cleaner” style, MacDougall shot most of the Turkana trilogy in extended shots, filming individuals and groups in conversation, with periodic montages and edited sections in between thematic sections.

This filming to conversation follows the work of Jean Rouch, who saw the camera as a tool of investigation, employed in interviews and dialogue with those on screen. Like Rouch, the MacDougalls allow the subjects of the film to speak their own mind, and this speech is the centerpiece of the films; the meaning and significance of cultural behavior among the Turkana is explained by its actors. Colin Young described three types of conversation present in the Turkana Conversations trilogy. The first, conversation among the Turkana for their own benefit, can be found in most ethnographic film, usually presented as human behavior. But the MacDougalls, through subtitles and faithful shots that follow conversations until their end, give this first category of conversation equal importance to that of previous films’ narrators. But it is the second and third types of conversation, taking place between the Turkana but for the benefit of the film, and between the Turkana and the MacDougalls, that mark the methodological innovation in these films. It is in these conversations that the MacDougalls located the primary narrative force of the film. Because most shots feature regular, everyday events, unlike the ritual ceremonies often populating earlier ethnographic cinema, the MacDougalls shaped the developing meaning of the film around what people were saying, rather than what they were doing.

The ability to film to conversation and give so much weight to the sonic aspect of cinema came at a historically prescient time. Before the 1960s sound recordings and film were wed, with much difficulty, only in the post-editing process. The invention of synchronous sound shooting, and early work testing its possibilities by Richard Leacock, the Maysles brothers, Rouch, and others in the 1960s, created the setting in which the MacDougalls applied simultaneous recording of sound and sight toward the problems of representation in the critical discourse on documentary film. The MacDougalls understood the power of the non-visual elements of documentary cinema, as David expressed in an interview with Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor in 1996: “I’ve always felt that ethnographic film was principally about the nonvisible, and that it’s only a very narrow conception of ethnographic film that assumes it stops at the visible record…. Film is more than a visual medium. It’s a medium combining the visual, aural, and verbal.” The MacDougalls incorporated the aural and – related but more importantly – the verbal into their films in a way that the meaning of the film owed as much to their presence as to the images captured on film.

The addition of multiple voices to the narrative mix of the Turkana Conversations trilogy, along with the use of an unprivileged camera position, diminishes the authority of the filmmaker and anthropologist, and elevates the position of the subjects to a more equal participant in the production of the film. Faye Ginsburg has written on the complication of meaning when multiple voices, perspectives, and cultural meaning interact in film. The polysemous and contested meanings that the MacDougalls seek in their work provide for the viewer the term, “parallax effect,” a term “used to describe the illusory perception of displacement of an object observed due to a change in the position of the observer.” For Ginsburg, a parallax effect “offer[s the viewer] a fuller sense of the complexity of perspectives on what we have come to call culture, but only if we have the analytic tools to put these perspectives together into a larger meaningful framework.” The Turkana Conversations films offer a complex mixture of perspectives, and audiences familiar with conventions of ethnographic cinema were greatly impressed with the MacDougalls’ result. With their work in Africa, ethnographic cinema itself entered a larger meaningful framework.

The use of long takes, minimal camera movement, and extended scenes of conversation translated through subtitles, creates a challenging situation for the viewer where meaning is not reified through cinematography and editing, as is often the case in fictional films, but is rather left open for interpretation. This intentional complication of meaning on the part of the MacDougalls reflects a conscious desire to problematize imperialistic and scientific notions of transcultural filmmaking. The ideas and practices of the MacDougalls precede the work of later critics of scientism, most notably Donna Haraway. In her book, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Haraway calls for the insistence “on the embodied nature of all vision,” reclaiming “the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere.” This insistence on the situation of knowledge, and the de-universalization of the gaze, either ocular or technologically mediated through film, echoes the intentions of the MacDougalls, who sought to situate the unprivileged position of the camera and emphasize other modes of perception, most notably hearing, that synch-sound enabled. David MacDougall has expressed his frustration with earlier, fly-on-the-wall attempts at observational ethnographic film and his interest in the encounter of ethnographic film: “The camera is there, and it is held by a representative of one culture encountering another. Beside such an extraordinary event, the search for isolation and invisibility seems a curiously irrelevant ambition. No ethnographic film is merely a record of another society; it is always a record of the meeting between a filmmaker and that society.” His camera work, employing unprivileged positions, attempts to situate the knowledge of the filmmaker.

The MacDougalls acknowledge and seek to capture on film the extraordinary event of transcultural encounter. The constant self-critique of the position of ethnographer has continued in their later work. Later films, in Australia in particular, revealed limitations of filming to conversation as a universal technique of ethnographic filmmaking. The reflexivity and willingness to sacrifice self-importance for the sake of a more sincere and accurate representation of their subjects, along with the ability to critique previous methodology and abandon models for new ideas, are what make the work of the MacDougalls innovative.