I will weave through a series of juxtapositions in this short essay drawn from a number of experiences which I have had in the "field" of documentary film — a kind of bricolage — or as James Clifford  has put it, an 'ethnographic surrealism'. (1)

In retrospect these fragments are linked in ways which I could not have anticipated before I made the attempt to understand the connections. This kind of reconstruction interests me because it is a combination of personal history, fieldwork and theoretical exploration, evidence of an effort to explore and map the relationships among subjectivity, cultural analysis and lived experiences.

The etymological origin of the term documentary is rooted in the notion of the lesson and is connected to doctrine, indoctrination and didacticism. Documentary as a term suggests someone willing to be taught and also someone who teaches. To be responsive, to be taught, to be open to the information which is presented — information which, if it is to function as document must reproduce in as great detail as possible the world being pictured . Truth is the foundation upon which documentary rests. Truth is also one of the foundations upon which learning of any sort, including how we learn from images, is built.

Search a bit further into the etymology of documentary and there are connections to doctrine and indoctrination which have roots not only in teaching but in notions of specialization — in the idea of a specialist able to instruct, someone whose knowledge is greater than those being taught.

I bring up this tableau of word origins because although a consensus has developed around the definition of "documentary" the debate at this stage pivots on questions of realism almost, though not completely, in opposition to questions of pedagogy. Documentaries however, exist as object lessons in themselves of a desire to teach using images, and thus to enter into a system of communication (or to create one) which links images with specific outcomes, learnings or results. The instrumental logic of the documentary is so deeply ingrained that the technology of image creation is now geared to increasing the probability of specific effects upon the viewer. The pervasive use of voice-over in documentaries is evidence of this desire to instruct and teach. These are not in and themselves negative qualities. They just need to be recognized. The pedagogical orientation of the documentary has led to a type of realism that can easily be distorted, a desire for impact that can place truth in the background.

The hybridization of light-weight video cameras, phones, and computers, has allowed the documentary genre to explode both in importance and in numbers. It has a status it never anticipated. Documentaries today are a kind of 21st century brew designed to make the experience of viewing more immersive, hence more real, with the result that more claims can be made about the efficacy and effectiveness of the images that are used in the communications process. Documentaries on television and film balance among truth, artifice, communications and information in an effort to generate the widest possible audience. Their success means they have to be examined with greater depth from an aesthetic, pedagogical and political point of view with an emphasis on how craft affects outcomes.

Eric Michaels, a documentary/ethnographic imagemaker who worked in Australia with Indigenous artists and filmmakers is an example of someone who has thought deeply about these issues. Michaels died in 1988 but the impact of his undertaking has been felt for a long time. His essays and his brilliant monograph entitled, *Aboriginal Invention of Television* (1986) reveal a sensibility closely tied to some radical innovations in documentary and ethnographic thought over the last thirty years. (2)

Michaels explored the frontiers of one of my major interests, the impact of video and television on indigenous cultures. He achieved this by rethinking the notion of "effects" — the ways in which Western cultures control and attempt to dominate other societies — and not positing anything like a linear model for what happens when new technologies are thrust upon indigenous peoples. Michaels worked on both sides of a complex process. He was aware of the need for indigenous peoples to take control of the media they were being exposed to. He was also very sensitive to the specific choices which they made with respect to images and what they wanted to communicate. His approach interests me because he questioned the roots of instrumental thinking by looking at the ways in which different cultures respond to images and to modes of storytelling and representation.

His insights in this regard are very significant. In his essay on Hollywood iconography (Michaels 1988:119) Michaels points out many of the radical differences in understanding, which the Aboriginal group, the Warlpiri have with regards to narratives and documentary in American films and television. Not only are the plots the Warlpiri create dealt with differently, but the characters in their films are reinterpreted according to the specific exigencies, history and expectations of Warlpiri culture and social life. The differences are stark. Everything from the images used to the pacing and placement of cameras points towards a radical reinterpretation of the communication of ideas through images.

The Warlpiri question the role of documentary images precisely as devices of teaching and learning that may have cross-cultural value. It is also about how to analyze the strategic choices, which different cultures make in response to the influences, which they have on each other through their use of film and video as tools of cross-cultural communications.

The question of vantage point — where and how these choices can be examined was a central concern of Michaels. He tried to draw upon the experiences of non-print media and apply them to the process through which ethnographic knowledge is transferred and transformed into visual and oral documents. He noted the specificity of indigenous approaches to images and celebrated the differences in how Indigenous peoples interpreted documentary claims of truth and realism in the cinema.

These issues are discussed and further clarified in his article entitled, "How to Look at Us Looking at the Yanomami Looking at Us," (3) in which he says: "A solution is to address the entire process of visual media as a problem of communication, more specifically in cross-cultural translation." (Michaels 1982:145)

It may be that nothing of value to indigenous cultures can be yielded in the process of translation and that the role of visual media is more important for Western cultures than for colonized ones. But this would presume, as Michaels so often pointed out, that colonized cultures themselves have somehow escaped the influences of modern media, which as anyone who has been watching the growth and development of video for example, knows is not the case. It is the decolonization movement which will be central to a shift to critical intervention and interrogation of the assumptions about how images communicate their content across different cultures at different times.

This still doesn't lessen one of the central dilemmas of ethnographic and documentary work with film and video for any culture. It may be more important to uncover both the applicability and effects of the technology than to let the technology work its way through different societies and then assume that the correct questions can be sorted out and made relevant later on. Warwick Thornton, an indigenous filmmaker in Australia recently made a film that The Beach that raises and mediates on many of these issues in a brilliant way. Thornton interrogates the assumptions that learning should be the outcome of what he shows or what he does. He lets his camera record his life in an isolated cabin on a beach in North Western Australia. The camera is at one and the same time distant and close. Everything feels like it is happening in the present tense to show how he survives, how integrated he is into the natural environment, how his knowledge of animals and vegetation, climate and time, enables him to survive with very little. The spectator works their way through every day at a rhythm similar to Thornton and learns about his culture without the need to state intent or purpose. It is a brilliant commentary on visualization in cultures saturated with declarative images intent on persuasion at all costs.

Thornton asks, can the camera capture the silences and absences of my solitary life without pedagogical intent? Can my life be witnessed without assuming an outcome to what I am saying?

Thornton asks whether what he is showing may or may not be open to external examination and without wanting to push the point too far, a process which may produce forms of internal and culturally specific images which cannot be judged, evaluated or examined from the outside. I want to be careful here because I am not suggesting that a vantage point cannot be found which might permit one culture to examine another, but there is the matter, and I consider it to be an important one, of how we go about understanding our own history with respect to the communication of meaning, let alone the history of approaches taken by other cultures that have evolved a different relationship to how images produce meaning. The Beach is, in this context, a celebration of difference and diversity.

There is a tendency, manifest in many ethnographic and documentary projects but even more so when film and video are put to use, to presume that what indigenous cultures choose as images can actually be translated, and it is this presumption which I think needs to be contested because what is inevitably involved are complex sign systems which our own culture has had difficulty in interpreting for itself let alone for others in a decolonized way.

This is a fascinating and perplexing problem and one that Michaels deals with over and over again. He suggests a kind of opaqueness, which the universalizing tendencies of modern film and television production have not grappled with. We need to celebrate the complex and rather 'different' images, which the Indigenous peoples of Australia have produced, and which Eric Michaels documented. (3) These differences will be a site of contestation and not assimilation. Michael’s recognized that there may be a need for a complete revision of what is meant by images imagined and then produced by indigenous cultures.

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(1) See Chapter Four of The Predicament of Culture (1988) in which Clifford argues for a redefinition of the history of surrealism in order to show the close if not parallel development of ethnography and surrealist thinking.

(2) I am thinking of the work of Edmund Carpenter (1970); James Clifford (1988); Jean Comaroff (1985); Vincent Crapazano (1980); Michel De Certeau (1984); Johannes Fabian (1983); Clifford Geertz (1988); George Marcus and Michael Fischer (1986); Paul Rabinow (1977).

(3) Eric Michaels (1982). This is from an essay in a superb collection edited by Jay Ruby, entitled, A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, UPenn Press (1982).