Evoking physical sensations, although a vital element of cinema, can easily become insular and coercive, forcing viewers into fixed responses, much as the manipulative music and authoritarian spoken commentaries of documentaries did in the past. That tendency is still with us today in varied forms – in the elaborate packaging, spectacular imagery and multi-track sound designs of many forms, employed in some cases simply to hold the wavering attention of television audiences. We should welcome films that deepen our sensory experience, but not at the cost of our independence as viewers.

(MacDougall 2019: 3)

Radical Empiricism and Non-linear Strategies in Visual Anthropology

1In recent visual anthropology, specific points regarding the central cognitive questions and the methodologies to be applied in research have been widely shared, despite the discipline’s fluid, continually evolving state. These included all the implications of the interpretative and reflective path of mainstream cultural anthropology from the 1970s onwards, with the revaluation of the idiographic dimension in research and the relevance of the plurality of positions in the social game of ethnographic encounter. In my opinion, the seminal collection of texts in Principles of Visual Anthropology (Hockings 1975) already clearly indicated that, beyond any naivety about cinema as a universal metalanguage for rendering reality, the path for future ethnographic filmmakers was to make the visual a point of access for different audiences to the complexity of cultural co-presence, participation, and the coexistence of different ways of communicating, acting, and representing. In other words, it was a precise orientation in a context in which film became the site of a unique and unrepeatable social exchange, within which David MacDougall’s work seemed to us from the outset to be among the most precise and most insightful, thanks to the uncommon balance between an intense and legible documentary production and an essayistic production that was equally coherent in its assumptions and development.

3The problem addressed here lies precisely, as explained in more detail below, in the feeling that the current trend in film ethnography is moving towards an apparent inexorable overcoming of these canons, towards a series of outcomes that seem to be influenced both by a technological landscape radically transformed by digital domination and by expectations and balances that, within the scientific community itself and also in the international academic world, lead to new, paradoxically canonised definitions of what should be understood today as a ‘good’ ethnographic film (see in particular the contribution by Greca Meloni in this collection).

4On the one hand, it is crucial to question whether this vocation for participation and commensality can dialogue with current research on technological and conceptual enlargement.

6The problem arises because the terms and methods of participation are articulated today in ways that are no longer tied to the conception of film as a linear communicative device.

7Multi-situated and polyphonic ethnographies, often hosted in complex digital structures that are open to new contributions and articulations, are now shifting the exploration of the sensory realm of ethnography beyond the rigid confines of film.

9MacDougall’s radical empiricism is based on a total dependence on the unpredictability (or rather, unchangeability) of what occurs in front of the camera, that is, on a responsible choice of positioning regarding the pro-filmic experience. From this perspective, the construction of each character is not programmatic and abusive, but rather the result – for example, in Tempus de Baristas – of a sort of progressive densification of the film, its characters and the actions they perform, achieved through strategies of resonance, implication, identification and shift of perspective, which will be discussed later (MacDougall 1997: 286)

Non-linear Experiences

10The results of MacDougall’s work lead to a second question. Can this process of participation and densification occur in perspectives other than film, such as 360°, VR, AR, and non-linear artefacts? And in what form?

11Before answering, it is helpful to summarise the recent development of interactive hypermedia practices in the social sciences. Peter Biella cites the four modes of interactivity proposed by Sandra Gaudenzi (2013: 37-70): ‘immersive, which enhances the sensory, emotional, or intellectual understanding of a situation; hypertextual, which develops awareness by juxtaposing quantities of data in unfamiliar ways; participatory, which collects and shares data from many contributors; and experiential, which enhances other interactive effects through instant feedback in the real world’ (Biella 2020: 143). In turn, the immersive mode is divided into three subcategories: a) virtual reality (VR) (first-person role-playing games on screen); b) VR (computer screen) (such as Google Street View); VR 360° (headphones) (applications that elicit intense emotions); c) augmented reality (AR) applications (such as Google Traffic). In hypertext mode, applications offer alternative paths and multiple juxtapositions of digital resources, often in extensive collections. The resources stored in the first anthropological hypertext applications, written on CDs and laserdiscs, were ‘closed’: they could not be modified after release. In participatory mode, applications provide ‘open’ or evolving multimedia resources, collected from around the world, such as Wikipedia. In experiential mode, technologies enable real-time interaction among mobile users, often distant from one another, whose digital interactions change the world. The most significant examples of these technologies are mobile messaging apps–particularly WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat (Biella 2020: 147). Biella also notes, in conclusion, the rapid obsolescence of non-linear technologies, from laserdiscs and CDs to ever-changing and often incompatible standards: ‘...interactive media produced before 2005 can no longer be played on computers, let alone promote the goals of anthropology. The digital revolution of the 1990s created very useful tools for film analysis. Thirty years later, the revolution has begun to devour its own children.’ (Biella 2020: 148)

12To answer, I will draw on several case studies presented in the monographic issue of Anthrovision (February 2014), edited by Florian Walter and Cristina Grasseni, dedicated to Digital Visual Engagements. The issue proposes critical reflections on collaborative, participatory and de-hierarchical ways of understanding the construction of audiovisual and sensory ethnographic data. For this contribution, I will distinguish the papers in that issue into two categories: those that are inherently concerned with non-linearity and those that focus on specific hypotheses regarding the indexing of ethno-visual materials.

13One of the preparatory contributions to the online journal is by Florian Walter (2018), who discusses how the web enables forms of ‘collaborative remix ability’, a transformation process in which the information and media we use, and share can be rearranged or constructed to create new forms, concepts, and ideas. Walter sees a connection between collaboration between researchers and their subjects and the ‘transcultural processes of understanding’ that are so often found, particularly in the post-digital world. This context of communication allows, for example, non-linear films to be created, as in the case study presented here: his film On the Road with Maruch, which expresses a form of collaborative remix ability. In other words, an interactive, reflective, and non-linear platform enables different forms of representation by creating two montage styles. The first of these features is linear film, and the second comprises the protagonist’s filmed comments. The interactive solution overcomes the static nature of these forms by allowing the audience to press a key and leave comments while watching the film, or by creating a so-called Korsakow film, which has ‘points of contact’ linked to specific moments in the linear film.

14In the same issue, Giulia Battaglia’s essay (2014) considers the ‘collaborative’ and ‘participatory’ modes in making an ethnographic film in India. She recalls Alfred Gell’s notion of art as ‘a component of technology’ produced by a technical process in which artists are skilled. The result is an ‘art object’ that is ‘a system of action intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it’ (Gell 1998: 6). Pinney and Nicholas see art as ‘a special technology that captivates and ensnares and cages others in the intentionalities of their producers’ (Pinney and Nicholas 2001: vii). This intentionality emerged in visual anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s and later developed into reflexivity, thanks to Jean Rouch (Stoller 1992; Henley 2009; 2020; Rouch 2009). Modern anthropological practice appears interwoven among the filmmaker, the subject, and the audience. In Battaglia’s view, the film-subject relationship concerns participatory filmmaking, whereas the film-viewer relationship concerns collaboration. The field of digital multimedia technology allows the subject and viewer to become complementary agents in the craft of representing and creating documentary art. So ‘We can no longer identify a dominant view coming from an ‘outstanding’ filmmaker-anthropologist, rather we are experiencing a multitude of image-making practices’ (Battaglia 2014: 10) in which a multitude of subjective voices co-exist in different ways within the documentary artefact.

15Cristina Grasseni (2014) works on ‘ecologies of belonging’ in Boston. Her multi-layer project on the Italo-American community during Saint Anthony’s Feast shows that the reuse of Faccetta nera, the official anthem of the Fascist Regime, is a ‘sediment in a media archaeology of place’ (Grasseni 2014: 8). Quoting Michael Herzfeld (2005), Grasseni argues that here ‘Cultural intimacy may erupt into public life’. ‘This can take the form of ostentatious displays of alleged national traits ... these are the self-stereotypes that insiders express ostensibly at their own collective expense...’ (Grasseni 2014: 8). Grasseni considers the Atlas, which Aby Warburg defined as a ‘repository of the traces, lineages and poignant presences of the recurrent tropes and their recombination’. In the film Christmas in August (2011), Grasseni seeks to evoke an atmosphere of friendly chat and reminiscence, akin to the patriotic sedimentation of military songs among Italian Americans in Boston. She aims to integrate the film into an atlas that can be dynamically interrogated, as Warburg (2002) sought to map the pathways of culture to track the journey of images through collective imaginaries. For this reason, her Atlas draws on several folkloric tropes that participants systematically incorporate into a continuous, dynamic process of self-narration. In any case, we are not dealing with a detailed map but a potentially infinite repository of ‘significant cases’. Iconology is not at stake here; rather, the focus is on the social appropriation of performance and the ability to create emotional values of attachment, identification, and belonging. The film, therefore, becomes the setting for ethnographic filmmaking that goes beyond the ethnographic situation in which people assume temporary identities, self-narratives, stereotypical performances, and urban practices of constructing places and spaces.

16About the ‘Indexical turn’, Nadine Wanono and Gilles Remillet note how the acquisition of data in the digital era and the creative possibilities offered by programming languages encourage epistemological reformulations and the invention of new tools and methods of investigation and expression (Wanono and Remillet 2014).

17Vincent Puig and Yves-Marie L’Hour (2014) describe this mutation as an ‘anthropological rupture’ caused by digitisation, in the sense that it profoundly modifies what Georges Simondon (2007) called the ‘process of psychic and collective individuation’.

18Digital Studies are part of a new context of knowledge production in which amateurs play a central role and are also incorporated into scientific projects that involve a community of researchers and amateurs working together (see the notion of Open Science). For example, the Lignes de Temps software is based on digital technology initially designed to represent films visually. It was meant to reveal the film’s montage and structure simultaneously, namely its decoupage, and digital objects, such as documentary films, could thus be gradually enriched by non-linear contributions. We therefore have a mapping of a temporal object, in which each sequence can be described and analysed using text, audio, or video comments, or documented with images and links on the Internet. The artefact includes a layered and organised multitude of voices. Since this annotated (grammarised) video offers a different kind of analysis support, it follows that the digital platform can make several methodological changes: non-verbal (or rather, non-discursive) primacy; acquisition of new forms of reading (video navigation) and writing (annotation), which can only be successful with a previous indexing work. The cases studied by Puig and L’Hour suggest that indexing is an important moment of shared cognition.

How the Film Grows

19I find traces of proximity to these digital and non-linear frontiers of visual anthropological research in MacDougall’s work; for this reason, I now intend to compare them. I will turn to the analysis of the editing structure of one of the films that exemplify David MacDougall’s method and theoretical conception: Tempus de Baristas (Time of the Barmen) (1993), as inferred from viewing the film and materials on its filmmaking used during a workshop led by the author. I am to find in MacDougall’s work traces of proximity to these digital and non-linear frontiers of visual anthropological research.

21An idea is sketched out on the relationship between fathers and sons over five generations, from before World War II to the milk export boom of the 1960s and 1970s, up to the subsequent crisis. In making the film, however, everything changes. ‘If the film is to be more than a mere illustration of preconceived ideas, its creation must then take the form of an interactive process. It must respond to its subjects and activate the director’s hidden intuitions’ (MacDougall 1992: 24). The theme of the parent-child relationship remains in the film, but the theme of pastoral loneliness emerges strongly.

22Courtesy ISRE.

23In Tempus de baristas, the camera explores, with wide, slow pans in sequence shots, the daily life of Franciscu, a goat farmer from Urzulei, his teenage son Pietro, and their friend Miminu, a bachelor and fellow farmer. The premise of the work is implicitly expressed in the title itself: goat farming in Sardinia in the 1990s is an increasingly tricky and marginalizing job, not only economically but also socially. It would be better, as Miminu declares in a memorable aside, to sell all the livestock and open a bar, yet another bar on some beach. This horizon of meaning is maintained throughout the film; however, other motifs emerge within it, captured through MacDougall’s trust in his filmed observation. One of these is the relationship between Franciscu and his son, where it is the looks, attitudes, and tones of voice of Pietro and his father that draw the viewer into the world of their intimate relationships, in which we see, for example, filial love, but also Pietro’s difficulty in seeing his father as an example for his future choices. An intimate and meditative dimension of the pastoral world thus emerges here, distinct from the works examined so far. These results also appear to be motivated by the production method of Baristas, which is closer to an ethnographic research protocol based on a very long period of the filmmaker’s stay in the field and the use of minimal technical equipment, demonstrating that a project that is strong in terms of its theoretical assumptions and the consistency of the methods used to put them into practice can yield important results, despite the overall costliness of this type of film, the last of MacDougall’s films shot on 16 mm film. His work, therefore, appears to be the result of a project of singular scope and ethnographic significance, which has not been repeated to date.

24For a more organic approach to Tempus de baristas, it is necessary to consider the most important reflections on this film that have touched, on one hand, on its place in MacDougall’s oeuvre as a whole and, on the other hand, on the place of the same film within the framework of documentary cinematography on Sardinia.

25Silvio Carta noted that never before Tempus de Baristas had a documentary film made in Sardinia so distant, so divorced from treatments, scripts, and production schedules (Carta 2015: 129). Detaching the act of filming from the constraints of the foreseeable is one of the foundations of MacDougall’s work, which can define as an epistemology of indeterminacy (open-endedness), which in turn can be considered one of the most present implications in the whole epistemology of anthropological knowledge: ‘MacDougall can be understood as a radical empiricist because his films recreate the elusive and problematic experience of field research’ (Carta 2015: 132). Baristas appears as a phenomenological device for documenting the informal aspects of a culture, i.e., ‘... the fleeting fragments of ordinary (experience) life’ (Carta 2015: 132). It explores a reality rather than illustrating a theory (Carta 2015: 134). The film explains the characters’ actions through its structure, i.e., through the logic of its creation. The film thus becomes an interactive process in which social exchanges progressively develop in the interstices of filming; in fact, its structure is deliberately open-ended and indeterminate (in the end, what choice will Pietro make? Will he continue as a pastor or work in tourism?) (Carta 2015: 134).

26The shooting style that expresses this tension towards indeterminacy is, therefore, the unprivileged one, theorised by MacDougall in various writings (1998), where there is ‘a camera that recognizes the physical rootedness of the filmmaker’s body in space’ (Carta 2015: 134). Unprivileged style implies confident choices, which are also ‘radical’:

1. The use of a single camera;

2. The renunciation of counter shots and adjacent angles;

3. The privileging of long takes and a flat, fluid editing rhythm;

4. One result of the unprivileged style is that the act of filming is present in the film, while the impression of the spectator’s omnipotence vanishes.

27The long take is not widely used in contemporary documentary and television media. For a long time, it was mainly considered a source of embarrassment and an obstacle because somebody feared that it could generate boredom or impatience. The rejection of these fears and prejudices leads, in the case of Baristas, to a surprising result: the non-privileged style allows MacDougall to de-esotialise the image of Sardinia, to avoid any hint of a conventional or stereotypical idea of the ‘beauty’ of the landscape, to distance himself from any allochronic and dystopian representations (Faeta 2019). His phenomenological gaze attacks any connotation of primitivism and exoticism of the landscape and figures at the base because the shepherds’ experiences are shown ‘bodily’, linking the filmmaker’s body to that of the subjects: ‘The film bears traces of MacDougall’s body’ (Carta 2015: 155).

28This presence raises the question of how and to what extent Tempus de Baristas can be considered an autobiographical film, i.e., a film that explicitly presents its author’s biographical experience. Here, the choice to shoot the film with a single camera is decisive because the filmmaker’s subjectivity is directly involved. It is no wonder that this cinema is called ‘Radically Empirical Filmmaking’.

30The second question is: if this is possible, can the resulting experience be juxtaposed with the others proposed in the central part of this essay? If so, it would mean that MacDougall’s reinterpretation by nuclei of ‘radically empirical cinema’ draws a rather sharp line of distinction between these practices together with non-linear practices in the total sense, on the one hand, and the filmmaking ‘of the real’ and the related festival habitus on the other hand, which we wanted to dwell on.

31Our attempt at verification started from the creation of a two-dimensional synoptic table representing the linear and diachronic structure of the film in its temporal progression vertically; in it was reported the timing, i.e. the duration of the single and successive film units of Tempus de Baristas or sequences according to the author’s definition, as they were described by him in the working materials distributed to the participants of the ‘Ethnographic Film Workshop’ (Nuoro, October 17-18, 1994) which he directed. The sequences have been numbered and range from 1 to 52.

32On the other hand, in the horizontal dimension, 14 rows have been identified (from A to N), each concerning a thematic nucleus inherent to the film and capable of being, from time to time, called upon as an index of a non-linear vision of the film and as a repertoire of its fundamental connotations. It is the axis along which we can make explicit phenomena of resonance, implication, identity, and shift in perspective. These thematic units are:

1. Village

2. Landscape

3. Family - home

4. Conviviality

5. Mobility

6. Franchiscu

7. Pietro

8. School

9. Youth

10. Miminu

11. Outbursts

12. Relations

13. Humans and animals

14. Production processes

Synoptic table of film units of Tempus de Baristas

33Regarding resonance in Tempus de Baristas, several elements emerge in the vision that enters a close relationship of perceptual analogy and structural synchrony. In MacDougall’s conception, the film is an occasion of encounter and commensalism (Castaing-Taylor 1998). In the ‘Arena of inquiry’ that is the film (MacDougall 1998), the decisive step is the one in which its subjects, those who ‘accept’ to enter the network of social relations that the work implies and constructs, perform actions and choices that autonomously qualify their presence in it. These choices take place at different levels, from the implicit one of material presence and visible body in the film to the one of speech-taking and self-representation. For instance, the K-field (Outbursts) encompasses all the emergencies in the film of this self-representative use of word and body. Both Franchiscu, Miminu, and Pietro (but to a significant extent also the deuteragonists such as Costantinu and Elena) make confessions, i.e., they relate to the filmmakers (David MacDougall and Dante Olianas) but, in my opinion, even more so to the film, as the interlocutor of a somewhat definitive communication-enunciation about their social existence.

35The film reveals other dimensions in which an action filmed as the main one, in the synchronic dimension, allows access to sensory dimensions and themes that are partly hidden or in the background. Field D (Conviviality) encompasses various moments of informal and friendly sociability. Sequence 10D (Lunch and reading poems) identifies an important trait of Franchiscu’s personality, his interest in written Sardinian-language poetry (such as that of Paolo Mossa), which he loves to declaim; this sequence resonates with 48F (Franchiscu reads poems). Nevertheless, it also implies a clear sign of Pietro’s emotional rapprochement with his father, his keen interest in this passion of Franchiscu’s, which, in turn, implies a comparison and integration with the sequence 21F and 21G (Franchiscu and Pietro quarrel) in which the film reveals another aspect, conflicting but contiguous, of the father-son relationship. The chain of implication does not end here and links the reference sequence 21 with 36D (Lunch and singing in the cuile), in which Franchiscu’s poetic passion seems to extend into the form of contrasting octave singing with Elena.

36Elements of identity appear in the film’s depiction of its subjects. All sequences involving, for example, Miminu tend to provide visual insight into his social and personal situation. Overall, the film constructs a connotative portrait that starts by showcasing his evident skill and competence in cattle-breeding, as seen in sequences 19B, 19J, and 19M (Migration to high pastures) and 13M (Miminu shows goats). It then gradually uncovers Miminu’s social dimension, introduced through the words spoken about him, with consistent perspective shifts, from sequence 20L (Costantinu talks about Miminu) to Miminu’s own words about himself (32J and 33J), as well as in conversations with friends such as Ciccheddu (18L) and the butcher (40L and 41L).

37The shift in perspective lives in the film mainly through the attention paid by the author to all those moments in which the subjects externalise their vision and their perception of the other participants in the community animated by the film, according to a method that MacDougall had already developed in African films (To live with herds, 1969, and Turkana Conversations, 1977-1981). In Baristas, we witness the game of cross-eyes that Franchiscu’s friends and peers direct at Pietro as they discuss his maturation and the choices he faces, with faces that indicate whether to continue his studies or choose a job as a cattle farmer (sequences 9D, 9L, 23H, 47F). However, Pietro is, in turn, urged to discuss his friends’ and classmates’ decisions about whether to continue their studies (24G). Moreover, the problematic dimension of Miminu’s life emerges with tact and modesty in the words of his friends (20L).

38These avenues of vision of the film thus traverse its structure without disavowing it but allowing it to be broken down and recomposed to grasp its temporal framework’s discrete and reversible dimension.

Conclusion

39Antonio Marazzi proposed an enlightening interpretation of the temporal structure of the film that starts from a reflection of Andrei Tarkowskij (Marazzi 1994):

‘The rhythm of the film derives from the character of the time which flows inside the frame. That is, the film’s rhythm is determined not by the length of the edited scene, but by the degree of tension of the time that flows inside them.’ (Tarkowskij 2020: 110).

‘Thus, while following the inductive process common to all ethnographic accounts, the theme (of time) acquires a much greater breadth at a distance. By breaking the linearity inherent in each individual’s daily experience and the biological father-son continuity, Miminu, his presence, and his opinions introduce an element of three-dimensionality into the narrative’ (Marazzi 1994: 89).

41However, here a decisive element is introduced: the filmmaker’s personal temporal experience, as referred to by Carta, which exists within the story. To conclude: ‘The difference in MacDougall’s way of filming is not so much technical (however great it may be), but rather in his ability to capture the internal time of the people he films, thus giving meaning to their actions and decisions’ (Marazzi 1994: 90).

42In MacDougall’s world, the viewer’s appropriation of the film occurs through resonance, implication, identification, and shifts in perspective. These processes grow as the film progresses, but – and this is the point - they do not grow linearly according to a conceptual discursive scan. They are postponed and elicited from each other with forms of connection and sensorial synaesthesia that activate fields of ‘dwelling’, of co-presence in the filmic experience. Now, this densification appears to be compatible with an extension of access to the object of the filmic experience (‘making an experience accessible through an experience’), such as that presented in the Korsakow film hypothesis (Walter) or in those that are non-linear (Battaglia) or based on the Warburg Atlas (Grasseni). The indexing field appears to be more distant from the threshold of sensory experience. Here, word or sign images still seem to prevail in a framework in which metadata becomes helpful in the dimension of incorporation and extraction of its unity of meaning. In any case, MacDougall’s experience and those of non-linear or indexed visual ethnographies seem to constitute a barrier against those forms of exoticism that were already undetected and questioned in the contributions to that number of ‘Anthrovision’.