Emilia: "I spent weeks trying to come up with a catchy and meaningful introduction for this article. I tried to tell a personal story that would immediately draw the reader in, or an intriguing quotation that could summarise this work. I failed and just lost a lot of time, so I’ll just start as I usually start all of my academic papers.
Let’s dive in!"
Shot of the mermaid scene from the film It Was Tomorrow.
This essay will discuss the use of animation in visual anthropology and general documentary filmmaking and the possibilities and contributions that animation, as a methodological and representational form, can bring to this field.
The discussion will delve into the following four contributions of animation. First, its potentiality to visualise aspects or episodes of people’s experience that would not be otherwise accessible visually, for instance through traditional forms of documentary. In turn, this also enhances the possibility to empathize with people’s experiences and putting ourselves in their shoes. Second, I will discuss its facilitation of a collaborative process between researchers and the protagonists of the visual piece of ethnography. This leads to two further points: The potential for creating a mutually agreed aesthetic, also rooted in local forms of representation; And the enhanced possibility to represent subjects and stories in a way that eludes potentially damaging representations , thanks to the creation of new images free from heavy baggage and sticky webs of -negative- associations and prejudices. Lastly, I will shortly discuss how these potentiality of animation strongly contribute to the decolonisation of ethnographic filmmaking and the overall discipline of anthropology. Each point will be supported by examples from three films, either wholly animated or featuring animations. Respectively, It Was Tomorrow (D’Onofrio 2018), Tanko Bole Chee (Sabnani 2010) and The Torture Letters (Ralph 2020).
The first, and maybe the most fundamental feature of animation is that it allows to bring into visibility, render visible and visualisable aspects or episodes of human experiences that would not be accessible visually.
Two different possibilities can be distinguished here: visualising the imaginative side of what people are experiencing and, secondly, past events that have no visual records or events that would be hardly recordable.
In an article about the possibilities of animation, Italian anthropologist and documentary film director Alexandra D’Onofrio writes: “The realm of the imaginative constitutes an unfixable and unreachable projection of people’s minds. Its very nature poses a challenge to conventional anthropological methodologies, which heavily rely on observation, interviews and text and ‘are often too static and not fit to capture the unfinished, transitory, and ever-changing character of people’s interior experiences and expressions’”(D’Onofrio 2017: 192). She then proposes that, in exploring the intangible dimensions of people’s everyday lives, as researchers, we should perhaps engage in a more ‘adventurous relationship to the real’ (Ibid). Animation provides a precious tool towards such a mission. It allows us to visualise the imaginative, the perceived. Animation opens up to visual anthropology and documentary the possibility to represent visually and explore the otherwise invisible realm of the imaginative, the imaginative side of what people are experiencing, what’s going on in people’s interiority. It allows us to make greater room for people’s subjective experience of things, their perception, and through making visible it allows us to express and render more easily graspable ours and others’ truest and most accurate emotional reaction to a lived experience or particular stimulus (Ibid: 193). In turn, and very importantly, this also leaves greater room for putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, and empathising with them and their lived experience. Moreover, as also argued by D'Onofrio, the imaginative is also important for a deeper -ethnographic- understanding of subjects since “imaginings are not merely abstract products of people’s consciousness but are embodied and embedded in people’s present actions'' (2017, 190), guiding our everyday actions and our ways of looking and relating to the world. In these terms, animation provides a potentially very insightful and expressive methodological tool, since the realities that surround us and the events that structure our present are not always visualizable, and documentary evidence is not always possible, revealing or clarifying’ (Ibid: 193). I will summarise this whole point through a last quotation from D’Onofrio: “I argue that animation brings an innovative contribution to ordinary ethnographic practises and representations as it creatively engages with people’s imaginative possibilities that often lie beyond our grasp” (Ibid).
Animation is used with this purpose on several occasions in D’Onofrio’s documentary film It Was Tomorrow (2018). The film is the result of a deeply collaborative process between the researcher and the protagonists, and tells the migration stories of three Egyptian men -Ali, Mahmoud and Mohamed-, who migrated from Egypt to Italy, where after 10 years they are finally accorded legal residence. The documentary follows the three men as they travel again through the stages and places of their journeys -as the harbour where they first disembarked or their appointment at the VISA office-, both physically and imaginatively. Throughout the film, footage of them walking through these places while they retell their stories is combined with brief animated clips where they are able to recall and reconstruct visually their personal perception of different moments of their journeys, or envision alternative turns of events. Through this method, the film really brings us into protagonists’ subjectivity, allowing us to closely re-live with them their physical and emotional journeys.
An example is found in the first two minutes of the film. Here the fascination exercised by migrating to Italy in the hope of a better future is envisioned as mermaids whispering alluring promises of wealth and happiness awaiting on the other side of the sea. Here animation is used to highlight and disclose the role of imagination in the life choices and trajectories of the protagonists. The animated scene sheds light on the mental processes of Ali, Mahmoud and Mohamed, visualising the thoughts that concurred to their decision of migrating. The dream moving them.
This use of animation is embedded throughout the whole film, as further illustrated by Figures 2 and 3.
For instance, in this other scene from the film It was Tomorrow Mohamed and D’Onofrio visually recreate and explore his perception of the difficulties of getting legal settlement as an Egyptian migrant in Italy. The long, hostile bureaucratic process is represented as a human barrier of white people actively standing in front of Ali, drawn in red, to prevent him access to what lies behind them.
Similarly, in this scene from the film Mohamed and D’Onofrio recreate his inner experience of his appointment at the VISA centre. In this sequence, footage of the actual interview with the officer is combined with the upper brief animated clip. Here the protagonist and researcher broaden the visual account of the moment, by exploring and representing Mohamed’s perception of being figuratively searched as he is asked a long list of questions and required documents for his application.
Additionally, and similarly to ethnofiction, animation allows to recreate a visual account of past moments lacking an audio-visual archival- record or scenes that could hardly be caught on camera. In It was Tomorrow, animation is also largely used with this purpose to recreate several moments of the protagonist's journey and arrival in Italy. Examples are brief animations of their boat journey through the Mediterranean, of the moments they disembarked at the respective harbours, to the moment Ali recalls calling his family once arrived in Lampedusa to tell them he made it through the sea.
In this shot of It Was Tomorrow Ali recreates the moment he called his brother once arrived in Lampedusa, to tell him he is still alive and he’ll join him soon in Milan, where he lives.
Animation is also largely used this way in Tanko Bole Chee (2010) (The Stitches Speak), a 12 minutes textile animation by visual storyteller Nina Sabnani. In the film, which will be reviewed in greater details later on, protagonists are able to visually recreate several stages and episodes from their biographies and stories of displacement and migration to India, episodes otherwise impossible to show, if not through fiction or animation.
For example, in this shot from Tanko Bole Chee one of the protagonists recounts her community’s arrival at the border of India from Pakistan, after they had to flee due to war, and their relocation to a refugee camp in the district of Kutch, in western India.
A further advantage of animation is its facilitation, if not indispensability, of a collaborative process between ethnographers and protagonists of the research. For its very nature, animation has a tendency to facilitate the development of collaborative working methods (D’Onofrio 2017: 205), a beneficial if not -arguably- necessary characteristic for ethnographic filmmaking and all anthropological research. The process of animation, since it more evidently implies a complete creation of the images of subjects and places, leaves more room for participatory forms of ethnography, where protagonists of the research can be involved in the creation of their portrayal, to the point of being themselves the drawers, leading their own representation. Moreover, as she remarks, since the major topics of animated documentaries “are precisely the supposedly incommunicable thoughts and concepts, belonging to people’s experiences and perceptions”, these films could not exist without the direct involvement of the people they ‘are about’ (Ibid). Reflecting about the making of It was Tomorrow, D’Onofrio writes that “during the animation stage, we (her and the protagonists) went through a learning process together, where we saw memories and imaginings taking forms totally unexpected to us, and where knowledge was negotiated and collaboratively created” (Ibid: 206).
Importantly, this enhancement of collaboration underlies a range of further intertwined possibilities of animation: co-aesthetic, better and more humanising representations and decolonisation of the field.
A further addition that animation can bring to visual anthropology and documentary filmmaking is an enhanced possibility for co-aesthetic, or the development of a mutually agreed and co-created aesthetic of representation. Indeed, the creation of images from scratch and the endless creative representational possibilities of animation also leave greater room for the development of a shared aesthetic of representation amongst protagonists and researchers. This opens several possibilities. First, the chance to be leaders in one’s visual representation, which will be further reviewed in the next section. Secondly, the possibility for the employment of an aesthetic rooted and feeding into local and traditional forms of representation, which by turn contributes to their preservation and vitality.
The documentary textile animation Tanko Bole Chhe (The Stitches Speak) (2010) by Indian visual researcher Nina Sabnani represents a perfect example of this point. The film focuses on a celebration of the art of the Kutch artisans working with Kala Raksha, a grassroots social enterprise dedicated to preservation of the traditional textile art of embroidery and patch-sewing (Kala Raksha). The film traces the journeys made by the four protagonists towards defining their identities and towards forming the Kala Raksha Trust and the School for Design.
A shot from the animation Tanko Bole Chhe.
The film is realised through an animation of participants’ traditional art of applique and embroideries, pieces of cloth on which they embroidered their memories of significant life episodes and steps towards their craft. The history of their craft is visually reconstructed through pieces of the very artistic form that the film focuses on and celebrates. Here the use of animation proves to be incredibly suited since it enables a preservation and liveliness of this artistic form and puts protagonists centre stage in the process of their own representation. Two goals harder to reach through traditional forms of ethnographic filmmaking.
Breaking free from potentially damaging and marginalising representations towards more humanising ones
A further point related to collaboration and co-aesthetic I want to address is the possibility of representing in a way that eludes potentially damaging representations of the subjects of the visual piece. Due to its innerly creative nature and to the possibility of having subjects as authors of their own representation, animation allows to represent otherwise often marginalised subjects in a way that breaks with potentially harmful and othering representations. I’ll try to elaborate on this. The issue with footage is that when we see an image, we spectators don’t confront the image being blank papers, as a tabula rasa. When we witness an image, when our eyes capture it as a camera obscura would, we make sense of that image, we interpret it, and think it through the complex cultural web of associations that has been building within each of us through time, through the exposure to other media, images and narratives around them. Therefore, when we see images in footage, we come to these images carrying with us these sticky pre-built webs of associations, that will lead us to frame the subjects we see within a particular web of understandings. By contrast, animation allows for the creation of new images, that do not carry with them heavy baggage of -negative- associations and prejudices, and that thus break free more easily from -often damaging- pre-existing representations.
The Torture Letters (Ralph 2020) is an example of this point. In this 12 minutes long animation, Black US anthropologist Laurence Ralph explores the theme of police brutality against African American youth in Chicago. He explores the topic through a series of fictional letters, each addressing victims of different episodes of police violence, ranging from unjustified stops of black teenagers, to excessive use of force resulting in murder of a young man responsible of shoplifitng, to deliberate torture of people in custody. As we listen to his voice telling these stories, at the beginning of each letter, two white papers float through the screen, wind blown, to then fragment and reassemble over and over again to form pointy and often highly stylised depictions of the narrated scenes of violence.
A series from the film The Torture Letter on the death of Dominique Franklin, a black young man killed by the police in Chicago.
The aesthetic and stylistic choices of this animation allowed for a visual discussion of instances of police violence that eluded pornographic, potentially re-traumatising and dehumanising representations of these scene, as it could have been with footage of police brutality episodes. The stylistic possibilities of animation allow to create a visual representation of these traumatic episodes in a way that allows for an elaboration of trauma and that highlights the humanity of the subjects, more likely obscured through an explicit depiction of violence.
In The Stitches Speak we find another example of this. In the film the protagonists recreate in embroidery traumatic episodes from their lives, from having to flee their homeland due to war, to life in refugee camps, two major earthquakes and poverty. However, through animation protagonists are able to visually retell their stories of suffering in a way that eludes a pietistic and marginalising portrait of them as poor refugees, a higher risk with footage, that could have made the existing differences appear stark, and easily create distance between spectators and protagonists. Rather, through animation protagonists are able to re-elaborate traumatic experiences in an emancipating and empowering way that also avoids overshadowing the celebration of their craft. The chosen aesthetic and the possibility to be the literal designers of their own representation allowed for this. For instance, discussing the collaborative making of the film, Sabnani recounts that by recreating a visual embroidered representation of the lands they had to flee, protagonists felt they had a way to reclaim their land, and keep it close (Junoon, A Stage for Theatre 2019).
Decolonisation
This facilitation of collaboration (and consequently of co-aesthetic) holds important possibilities for ethnographic filmmaking, since it highlights and potentially overcomes some of the ‘traps’ of traditional documentary forms. Indeed, due to its potential for substantive collaboration with participants in the making of a film, animation constitutes an important tool for the project of decolonisation of documentary filmmaking and visual anthropology (Ginsbourg 2018: 39), towards Jean Rouch’s idea of a shared anthropology (Ibid: 43). Importantly, this is for several reasons, related to the previously described aspects of animation. First, the process behind the making of animation is a process of co-creation of knowledge rather than a colonialist process of knowledge extraction. Consequently, subjects also have a say on how they are represented, and are active participants in these choices, if not the actual designers, as in the case of Tanko Bole Chhe and It Was Tomorrow. This close collaboration challenges and collapses another highly debated issue of traditional documentary (and anthropology), being the problematic divide and distance between researcher and protagonists of research, and the consequent power imbalance between these two groups (Ibid). Moreover, the greater communicative potential of animation offers spectators an access to people’s internal emotional and imaginative worlds, enhancing empathy, and reducing the distance between protagonists and spectators too. And so does the chance to lead their representation by adopting stylistic and aesthetic choices that allow to get past representations that would maintain the existing distance between spectators and often othered and marginalised others. Additionally, the possibility to adopt local and traditional artistic forms also contributes towards this process, since it produces visual ethnographies creatively engaging with local forms of representation and aesthetics, rather than imposing an external notion of documentary reality. Finally, since images are evidently created, animation challenges the notion of documentary objective knowledge, accessible and captured through pointing a camera at pro-filmic events. As argued by D’Onofrio, “being completely constructed, this genre of films also indicates the limits of other methods and forms that claim to be more ‘objective’ and neutral, but whose truth claims have been highly criticised and contested in post-colonial and postmodern theory” (2017: 193).
Conclusion
In this paper I have explored some of the main contributions that animation can bring to the field and practice of documentary filmmaking and visual anthropology. Animation allows to shed light on and bring into visibility people’s inner experience of the world, the working of their mind, creating new forms of negotiated ethnographic knowledge. It allows us to recreate past events that could not be shown. It facilitates a collaborative ethnography, co-aesthetic, and subjects’ leadership in their own representation, all points contributing to the decolonisation of this field. In light of this, animation appears to be a refreshing form of ethnographic filmmaking and visual ethnography, allowing us to perhaps engage in a more adventurous and conscious relationship to the real (D’Onofrio 2017: 192).
Bibliography
D’Onofrio, Alexandra. (2018). It Was Tomorrow. Vimeo, 8 Jun 2019. https://vimeo.com/341083501
Ginsbourg, Faye. (2018). “Decolonising Documentary on-screen and off: sensory ethnography and the aesthetics of accountability”. Film quarterly 72, n. 1: 39-49. University of California Press.
Junoon, A Stage for Theatre. (2019). “Mumbai Local with Nina Sabnani : Art As Ethnographic Practice”. Youtube video, April 5, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJJtu3884l0
Kala Raksha. Home page, http://www.kala-raksha.org.
Ralph, Laurence. (2020). “The Torture Letters”. The New York Times, June 30, 2020.
Emilia: "I spent weeks trying to come up with a catchy and meaningful introduction for this article. I tried to tell a personal story that would immediately draw the reader in, or an intriguing quotation that could summarise this work. I failed and just lost a lot of time, so I’ll just start as I usually start all of my academic papers.
Let’s dive in!"
Shot of the mermaid scene from the film It Was Tomorrow.
This essay will discuss the use of animation in visual anthropology and general documentary filmmaking and the possibilities and contributions that animation, as a methodological and representational form, can bring to this field.
The discussion will delve into the following four contributions of animation. First, its potentiality to visualise aspects or episodes of people’s experience that would not be otherwise accessible visually, for instance through traditional forms of documentary. In turn, this also enhances the possibility to empathize with people’s experiences and putting ourselves in their shoes. Second, I will discuss its facilitation of a collaborative process between researchers and the protagonists of the visual piece of ethnography. This leads to two further points: The potential for creating a mutually agreed aesthetic, also rooted in local forms of representation; And the enhanced possibility to represent subjects and stories in a way that eludes potentially damaging representations , thanks to the creation of new images free from heavy baggage and sticky webs of -negative- associations and prejudices. Lastly, I will shortly discuss how these potentiality of animation strongly contribute to the decolonisation of ethnographic filmmaking and the overall discipline of anthropology. Each point will be supported by examples from three films, either wholly animated or featuring animations. Respectively, It Was Tomorrow (D’Onofrio 2018), Tanko Bole Chee (Sabnani 2010) and The Torture Letters (Ralph 2020).
The first, and maybe the most fundamental feature of animation is that it allows to bring into visibility, render visible and visualisable aspects or episodes of human experiences that would not be accessible visually.
Two different possibilities can be distinguished here: visualising the imaginative side of what people are experiencing and, secondly, past events that have no visual records or events that would be hardly recordable.
In an article about the possibilities of animation, Italian anthropologist and documentary film director Alexandra D’Onofrio writes: “The realm of the imaginative constitutes an unfixable and unreachable projection of people’s minds. Its very nature poses a challenge to conventional anthropological methodologies, which heavily rely on observation, interviews and text and ‘are often too static and not fit to capture the unfinished, transitory, and ever-changing character of people’s interior experiences and expressions’”(D’Onofrio 2017: 192). She then proposes that, in exploring the intangible dimensions of people’s everyday lives, as researchers, we should perhaps engage in a more ‘adventurous relationship to the real’ (Ibid). Animation provides a precious tool towards such a mission. It allows us to visualise the imaginative, the perceived. Animation opens up to visual anthropology and documentary the possibility to represent visually and explore the otherwise invisible realm of the imaginative, the imaginative side of what people are experiencing, what’s going on in people’s interiority. It allows us to make greater room for people’s subjective experience of things, their perception, and through making visible it allows us to express and render more easily graspable ours and others’ truest and most accurate emotional reaction to a lived experience or particular stimulus (Ibid: 193). In turn, and very importantly, this also leaves greater room for putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, and empathising with them and their lived experience. Moreover, as also argued by D'Onofrio, the imaginative is also important for a deeper -ethnographic- understanding of subjects since “imaginings are not merely abstract products of people’s consciousness but are embodied and embedded in people’s present actions'' (2017, 190), guiding our everyday actions and our ways of looking and relating to the world. In these terms, animation provides a potentially very insightful and expressive methodological tool, since the realities that surround us and the events that structure our present are not always visualizable, and documentary evidence is not always possible, revealing or clarifying’ (Ibid: 193). I will summarise this whole point through a last quotation from D’Onofrio: “I argue that animation brings an innovative contribution to ordinary ethnographic practises and representations as it creatively engages with people’s imaginative possibilities that often lie beyond our grasp” (Ibid).
Animation is used with this purpose on several occasions in D’Onofrio’s documentary film It Was Tomorrow (2018). The film is the result of a deeply collaborative process between the researcher and the protagonists, and tells the migration stories of three Egyptian men -Ali, Mahmoud and Mohamed-, who migrated from Egypt to Italy, where after 10 years they are finally accorded legal residence. The documentary follows the three men as they travel again through the stages and places of their journeys -as the harbour where they first disembarked or their appointment at the VISA office-, both physically and imaginatively. Throughout the film, footage of them walking through these places while they retell their stories is combined with brief animated clips where they are able to recall and reconstruct visually their personal perception of different moments of their journeys, or envision alternative turns of events. Through this method, the film really brings us into protagonists’ subjectivity, allowing us to closely re-live with them their physical and emotional journeys.
An example is found in the first two minutes of the film. Here the fascination exercised by migrating to Italy in the hope of a better future is envisioned as mermaids whispering alluring promises of wealth and happiness awaiting on the other side of the sea. Here animation is used to highlight and disclose the role of imagination in the life choices and trajectories of the protagonists. The animated scene sheds light on the mental processes of Ali, Mahmoud and Mohamed, visualising the thoughts that concurred to their decision of migrating. The dream moving them.
This use of animation is embedded throughout the whole film, as further illustrated by Figures 2 and 3.
For instance, in this other scene from the film It was Tomorrow Mohamed and D’Onofrio visually recreate and explore his perception of the difficulties of getting legal settlement as an Egyptian migrant in Italy. The long, hostile bureaucratic process is represented as a human barrier of white people actively standing in front of Ali, drawn in red, to prevent him access to what lies behind them.
Similarly, in this scene from the film Mohamed and D’Onofrio recreate his inner experience of his appointment at the VISA centre. In this sequence, footage of the actual interview with the officer is combined with the upper brief animated clip. Here the protagonist and researcher broaden the visual account of the moment, by exploring and representing Mohamed’s perception of being figuratively searched as he is asked a long list of questions and required documents for his application.
Additionally, and similarly to ethnofiction, animation allows to recreate a visual account of past moments lacking an audio-visual archival- record or scenes that could hardly be caught on camera. In It was Tomorrow, animation is also largely used with this purpose to recreate several moments of the protagonist's journey and arrival in Italy. Examples are brief animations of their boat journey through the Mediterranean, of the moments they disembarked at the respective harbours, to the moment Ali recalls calling his family once arrived in Lampedusa to tell them he made it through the sea.
In this shot of It Was Tomorrow Ali recreates the moment he called his brother once arrived in Lampedusa, to tell him he is still alive and he’ll join him soon in Milan, where he lives.
Animation is also largely used this way in Tanko Bole Chee (2010) (The Stitches Speak), a 12 minutes textile animation by visual storyteller Nina Sabnani. In the film, which will be reviewed in greater details later on, protagonists are able to visually recreate several stages and episodes from their biographies and stories of displacement and migration to India, episodes otherwise impossible to show, if not through fiction or animation.
For example, in this shot from Tanko Bole Chee one of the protagonists recounts her community’s arrival at the border of India from Pakistan, after they had to flee due to war, and their relocation to a refugee camp in the district of Kutch, in western India.
A further advantage of animation is its facilitation, if not indispensability, of a collaborative process between ethnographers and protagonists of the research. For its very nature, animation has a tendency to facilitate the development of collaborative working methods (D’Onofrio 2017: 205), a beneficial if not -arguably- necessary characteristic for ethnographic filmmaking and all anthropological research. The process of animation, since it more evidently implies a complete creation of the images of subjects and places, leaves more room for participatory forms of ethnography, where protagonists of the research can be involved in the creation of their portrayal, to the point of being themselves the drawers, leading their own representation. Moreover, as she remarks, since the major topics of animated documentaries “are precisely the supposedly incommunicable thoughts and concepts, belonging to people’s experiences and perceptions”, these films could not exist without the direct involvement of the people they ‘are about’ (Ibid). Reflecting about the making of It was Tomorrow, D’Onofrio writes that “during the animation stage, we (her and the protagonists) went through a learning process together, where we saw memories and imaginings taking forms totally unexpected to us, and where knowledge was negotiated and collaboratively created” (Ibid: 206).
Importantly, this enhancement of collaboration underlies a range of further intertwined possibilities of animation: co-aesthetic, better and more humanising representations and decolonisation of the field.
A further addition that animation can bring to visual anthropology and documentary filmmaking is an enhanced possibility for co-aesthetic, or the development of a mutually agreed and co-created aesthetic of representation. Indeed, the creation of images from scratch and the endless creative representational possibilities of animation also leave greater room for the development of a shared aesthetic of representation amongst protagonists and researchers. This opens several possibilities. First, the chance to be leaders in one’s visual representation, which will be further reviewed in the next section. Secondly, the possibility for the employment of an aesthetic rooted and feeding into local and traditional forms of representation, which by turn contributes to their preservation and vitality.
The documentary textile animation Tanko Bole Chhe (The Stitches Speak) (2010) by Indian visual researcher Nina Sabnani represents a perfect example of this point. The film focuses on a celebration of the art of the Kutch artisans working with Kala Raksha, a grassroots social enterprise dedicated to preservation of the traditional textile art of embroidery and patch-sewing (Kala Raksha). The film traces the journeys made by the four protagonists towards defining their identities and towards forming the Kala Raksha Trust and the School for Design.
A shot from the animation Tanko Bole Chhe.
The film is realised through an animation of participants’ traditional art of applique and embroideries, pieces of cloth on which they embroidered their memories of significant life episodes and steps towards their craft. The history of their craft is visually reconstructed through pieces of the very artistic form that the film focuses on and celebrates. Here the use of animation proves to be incredibly suited since it enables a preservation and liveliness of this artistic form and puts protagonists centre stage in the process of their own representation. Two goals harder to reach through traditional forms of ethnographic filmmaking.
Breaking free from potentially damaging and marginalising representations towards more humanising ones
A further point related to collaboration and co-aesthetic I want to address is the possibility of representing in a way that eludes potentially damaging representations of the subjects of the visual piece. Due to its innerly creative nature and to the possibility of having subjects as authors of their own representation, animation allows to represent otherwise often marginalised subjects in a way that breaks with potentially harmful and othering representations. I’ll try to elaborate on this. The issue with footage is that when we see an image, we spectators don’t confront the image being blank papers, as a tabula rasa. When we witness an image, when our eyes capture it as a camera obscura would, we make sense of that image, we interpret it, and think it through the complex cultural web of associations that has been building within each of us through time, through the exposure to other media, images and narratives around them. Therefore, when we see images in footage, we come to these images carrying with us these sticky pre-built webs of associations, that will lead us to frame the subjects we see within a particular web of understandings. By contrast, animation allows for the creation of new images, that do not carry with them heavy baggage of -negative- associations and prejudices, and that thus break free more easily from -often damaging- pre-existing representations.
The Torture Letters (Ralph 2020) is an example of this point. In this 12 minutes long animation, Black US anthropologist Laurence Ralph explores the theme of police brutality against African American youth in Chicago. He explores the topic through a series of fictional letters, each addressing victims of different episodes of police violence, ranging from unjustified stops of black teenagers, to excessive use of force resulting in murder of a young man responsible of shoplifitng, to deliberate torture of people in custody. As we listen to his voice telling these stories, at the beginning of each letter, two white papers float through the screen, wind blown, to then fragment and reassemble over and over again to form pointy and often highly stylised depictions of the narrated scenes of violence.
A series from the film The Torture Letter on the death of Dominique Franklin, a black young man killed by the police in Chicago.
The aesthetic and stylistic choices of this animation allowed for a visual discussion of instances of police violence that eluded pornographic, potentially re-traumatising and dehumanising representations of these scene, as it could have been with footage of police brutality episodes. The stylistic possibilities of animation allow to create a visual representation of these traumatic episodes in a way that allows for an elaboration of trauma and that highlights the humanity of the subjects, more likely obscured through an explicit depiction of violence.
In The Stitches Speak we find another example of this. In the film the protagonists recreate in embroidery traumatic episodes from their lives, from having to flee their homeland due to war, to life in refugee camps, two major earthquakes and poverty. However, through animation protagonists are able to visually retell their stories of suffering in a way that eludes a pietistic and marginalising portrait of them as poor refugees, a higher risk with footage, that could have made the existing differences appear stark, and easily create distance between spectators and protagonists. Rather, through animation protagonists are able to re-elaborate traumatic experiences in an emancipating and empowering way that also avoids overshadowing the celebration of their craft. The chosen aesthetic and the possibility to be the literal designers of their own representation allowed for this. For instance, discussing the collaborative making of the film, Sabnani recounts that by recreating a visual embroidered representation of the lands they had to flee, protagonists felt they had a way to reclaim their land, and keep it close (Junoon, A Stage for Theatre 2019).
Decolonisation
This facilitation of collaboration (and consequently of co-aesthetic) holds important possibilities for ethnographic filmmaking, since it highlights and potentially overcomes some of the ‘traps’ of traditional documentary forms. Indeed, due to its potential for substantive collaboration with participants in the making of a film, animation constitutes an important tool for the project of decolonisation of documentary filmmaking and visual anthropology (Ginsbourg 2018: 39), towards Jean Rouch’s idea of a shared anthropology (Ibid: 43). Importantly, this is for several reasons, related to the previously described aspects of animation. First, the process behind the making of animation is a process of co-creation of knowledge rather than a colonialist process of knowledge extraction. Consequently, subjects also have a say on how they are represented, and are active participants in these choices, if not the actual designers, as in the case of Tanko Bole Chhe and It Was Tomorrow. This close collaboration challenges and collapses another highly debated issue of traditional documentary (and anthropology), being the problematic divide and distance between researcher and protagonists of research, and the consequent power imbalance between these two groups (Ibid). Moreover, the greater communicative potential of animation offers spectators an access to people’s internal emotional and imaginative worlds, enhancing empathy, and reducing the distance between protagonists and spectators too. And so does the chance to lead their representation by adopting stylistic and aesthetic choices that allow to get past representations that would maintain the existing distance between spectators and often othered and marginalised others. Additionally, the possibility to adopt local and traditional artistic forms also contributes towards this process, since it produces visual ethnographies creatively engaging with local forms of representation and aesthetics, rather than imposing an external notion of documentary reality. Finally, since images are evidently created, animation challenges the notion of documentary objective knowledge, accessible and captured through pointing a camera at pro-filmic events. As argued by D’Onofrio, “being completely constructed, this genre of films also indicates the limits of other methods and forms that claim to be more ‘objective’ and neutral, but whose truth claims have been highly criticised and contested in post-colonial and postmodern theory” (2017: 193).
Conclusion
In this paper I have explored some of the main contributions that animation can bring to the field and practice of documentary filmmaking and visual anthropology. Animation allows to shed light on and bring into visibility people’s inner experience of the world, the working of their mind, creating new forms of negotiated ethnographic knowledge. It allows us to recreate past events that could not be shown. It facilitates a collaborative ethnography, co-aesthetic, and subjects’ leadership in their own representation, all points contributing to the decolonisation of this field. In light of this, animation appears to be a refreshing form of ethnographic filmmaking and visual ethnography, allowing us to perhaps engage in a more adventurous and conscious relationship to the real (D’Onofrio 2017: 192).
Bibliography
D’Onofrio, Alexandra. (2018). It Was Tomorrow. Vimeo, 8 Jun 2019. https://vimeo.com/341083501
Ginsbourg, Faye. (2018). “Decolonising Documentary on-screen and off: sensory ethnography and the aesthetics of accountability”. Film quarterly 72, n. 1: 39-49. University of California Press.
Junoon, A Stage for Theatre. (2019). “Mumbai Local with Nina Sabnani : Art As Ethnographic Practice”. Youtube video, April 5, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJJtu3884l0
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Ralph, Laurence. (2020). “The Torture Letters”. The New York Times, June 30, 2020.
