Experimental Film and Anthropology ed. by Arnd Schneider and Caterina Pasqualino (review)

EXPERIMENTAL FILM AND ANTHROPOLOGY Edited by Arnd Schneider and Caterina Pasqualino New York: Bloomsbury, 2014, 208 pp.REVIEWED BY JULIA YEZBICKExperimental Film and Anthropology seeks to find common ground between a genre and an academic discipline. In their introductory chapter, editors Arnd Schneider and Caterina Pasqualino state their aim to challenge and overcome a broad realist-narrative paradigm that-with few exceptions-has dominated visual anthropology so far. They do not define or explain this premise, but take it as a given. The foil of visual anthropology becomes vantage point from which they address readers who might share their interest with discipline's uses of visual and auditory media. Their approach is deliberately impure and eclectic, defining film as moving image products in broadest sense and using to refer to genealogy of experiments with films' form and material in several pre- and post-avant-garde movements. In this endeavor, they bring together filmmakers, and cinema studies scholars, and anthropologists who write on topics ranging from altered states of consciousness to asynchronous audio-image relationships. These varied viewpoints presuppose-and at times subvert or recuperate-an interminable anxiety about representation and expression within anthropological practice. While editors' central aim is one of dialogue and provocation, their lack of a more precise stance or argumentative armature toward presumed of visual anthropology paradoxically reinforces paradigms they seek to overcome. If political-aesthetic infrastructures that have historically undergirded discipline had been contextualized and interrogated, rather than taken as given, contributors' varied interventions would have benefitted significantly.One theme that emerges from this polyphonous volume is a tendency for authors to situate themselves in relation to a vague notion of the real-a concern that belies a lingering tension within anthropology surrounding efforts to reconcile acknowledgement of artifice inherent in anthropological project with its expressed aims of descriptive or figurative accuracy (an anthropological premise alluded to by Nicole Brenez in her chapter on Robert Fenz). While some of contributors' work engages with these debates about representation, others unequivocally move away from re-presentation as an evaluative category and argue for other measures of assessment and analysis. Jennifer L. Heuson and Kevin T. Allen summarily express this tension stating: We attempt to produce documents that evoke 'being here' but that also explicitly signal that a (or other type of recording) is an artifact, not a representation, of experience. For Heuson and Allen, this tension is eased by proclaimed transparency and self-reflexivity of experimental film. Indeed, many of authors valorize formal qualities of films that bear marks or traces of their making, asserting that this formal reflexivity does not hide illusory nature of representation under chimera of feigned observational totality. However, pointing to constructed nature of an artifact neither absolves maker of responsibility for aesthetic choices made nor challenges disciplinary rubrics that uncritically hold realism in higher regard than abstraction.In their chapter Our Favorite Film Shocks, Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr discuss how a is received or experienced to argue for a revision of anthropological rubrics and notions of validity in favor of efficacy of cinematic shock rather than perceived correspondence between cinema and real. For Barbara Glowczewski, an experimental filmmakerturned-anthropologist who investigates Australian Aboriginal ritual performance, the real is unequivocally located in subjects' perceptions and expressions of their cultural phenomena. …

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