American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ live with her husband. It’s like smoothing the grindstone with a piece of quartz. The quartz is his hand, his whip, and you are beaten and beaten.” We see and hear women at work grinding millet as a motif throughout the film, and in each instance, we are reminded of what Gardner sees as its larger implications. A second, related motif is the ritual whipping of women, which we get hints of early in Rivers and then see in some detail during the ceremonies that conclude the film. From what Gardner shows us, a woman ritually requests a man to whip her, and when she is struck, she is expected to act as if the whipping, which is powerful enough to create open wounds, has not fazed her.²⁵ A third, related motif is the decoration of women with ankle and wrist bracelets: seen as status symbols of beauty by the Hamar, they evoke the shackles of slaves.

      In many ways, the gender relations Omali describes echo those Gardner would have been familiar with from his own society, and from his own life. As he told Ilisa Barbash:

      

      Indeed, Rivers of Sand does owe something to the climate of thought about the situation of women in the late 60s, but it also owes something to what was happening in my own life as a father and husband. Here I would like to say I think this film is not just about how women feel or behave but also about what happens to men as they make their lives with women. I made the film at a time when my own long-standing marriage was coming to an end and when there were accusations, if not good evidence, of certain kinds of abuses—I don’t mean physical abuses—I mean troubling circumstances which were distorting our life together. I would go off for a long time to make a film. For example, I left everyone at home for six or seven months when I went to do the shooting for Dead Birds. And that’s not fair. It caught up with me and it seemed quite natural and helpful to be going about the making of Rivers of Sand at that particular time.²⁶

      It seems clear that for Gardner, shooting and editing Rivers was both an experience in itself and a way of using the film production process as a way of coming to terms with the transformations occurring within his personal life. As an audience, our experience of Rivers occurs on both levels: we explore Omali’s version of her own experiences as a Hamar woman, as contextualized by Gardner; and we experience Gardner’s wrestle with the question of how fully what seem to be the gender experiences of Hamar women and men match the experiences of American women and men, including his own.

      For much of Rivers of Sand Omali seems to echo the American feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s—indeed, her testimony evokes the many feminist films of the 1970s and 1980s in which women testified about their cultural oppression—but near the conclusion of the film, her narration takes what feels like a surprising turn. Omali describes to us, and speaks to Hamar girls about, the ritual of removing the two central incisors from the lower jaws of girls—theoretically to demonstrate Hamar girls’ courage and provide what the Hamar consider a beautiful look. Omali indicates that removal of the teeth is not required, but it is clearly preferred, and her comments are supportive of the ritual. Omali’s apparent approval of what seems to us still another form of oppression is confirmed at the conclusion of Rivers of Sand when she says, “Beating is our custom; we were born with it. . . . So how can it be bad?” Although on one level, this seeming acceptance of oppression as normal—something to be complained about, perhaps, but not eliminated—is reminiscent of a similar pattern of self-abnegation and acceptance of lower status that feminists have challenged in many Western countries in recent decades, it is also an instance of what Gardner sees as a larger reality, and not just for the Hamar.

      All organized social life seems to involve strange combinations of logic and absurdity. This is clear in Dead Birds, where ritual war seems to have no particular function other than to provide an organizational framework for two Dani groups; it is clear in Rivers of Sand, where women seem to accept forms of oppression that seem to do little but provide a form of social continuity; and it is clear in American society, where we build ever-more-expensive new forms of weaponry to maintain peace and where each generation seems to find new ways of colonizing the body in order to create societal standards of “beauty.” In Rivers Gardner frequently shows several male elders spraying coffee with their lips, seemingly in order to maintain the spiritual health of their community. As presented in Rivers, this ritual is rather comic, though when it is juxtaposed with the continual labor of women, which it always is in the film, this all-male “spiritual” activity seems a further confirmation of the gender inequity of Hamar society. The coffee ritual is also representative of religious rituals around the world that depend on what seem (at least to nonbelievers, and perhaps even to some of those who profess their faith in these religions) to be utterly absurd activities—eating a wafer and drinking a bit of grape juice and “believing” it’s the body and blood of Jesus Christ; wearing a beard and a particular form of payot (sidelock) in order to conform to a book of the Old Testament; refusing to use electricity or automobile transportation in a culture where they are ubiquitous—as a means of maintaining a sense of community and continuity. Indeed, the more obvious the apparent absurdity of these activities, the more commitment they require, the more faith they seem to demonstrate, and the more respect they demand, both from believers and nonbelievers. This strange surreality of social life has been explored by a number of filmmakers over the decades: Buñuel, most obviously of course, but Gardner too, especially in Dead Birds, Rivers of Sand, and Deep Hearts (1981).

      Like Rivers of Sand, Deep Hearts seems, at least to current audiences, focused on the issue of gender—though in a different sense. During the 1970s the feminist project of rethinking gender relations between men and women was increasingly interwoven with what we have come to understand as “Queer,” and particularly the Queer understanding of gender as a form of performance, a set of distinctions and practices not determined by sex (or not entirely by sex), but largely by cultural assumptions and societal expectations, and reflective of the complexity and contradictions of personal identity. Few scenes in any motion picture demonstrate this idea more effectively than the opening moments of Deep Hearts, when a large group of men is seen in a long line, moving sensuously in unison and chanting a dirge, outfitted in facial makeup and dress that, from our perspective, seem obviously feminine (fig. 10). These are the Bororo Fulani, a nomadic society located in the central Niger Republic, at “the Gerewol, an occasion during the rainy season when two competing lineages come together to choose the most ‘perfect’ Borroro male. It is something of a physical and moral beauty contest in which the winner, selected by a maiden of the opposing lineage, is acclaimed the ‘bull.’”²⁷

      It seems clear that in both Dead Birds and Rivers of Sand Gardner chose the Dani and the Hamar as subjects because the nature of these cultures resonated with issues he himself was working through; making these films was his way of personally coming to terms with warfare and with gender relations between the sexes. The opening of Deep Hearts foregrounds Gardner’s fascination with the “cross-dressing” Fulani men and presumably his interest in coming to terms with a deeper cultural questioning of gender assumptions. While this theme does not seem to have been foremost in his consciousness during the month he spent shooting in the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa—a month that, judging from Gardner’s journal entries, was almost entirely unpleasant—Gardner’s journal does make clear that what most powerfully caught his eye about the Gerewol was seeing “accomplished males applying rouge and lipstick under a full moon.”²⁸ And like other cinematic contributions to the evolution of Queerness—Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’amour (1952), Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963)—the finished film destabilizes gender, in this case by revealing that these men, who live in a nomadic culture that faces considerable challenges from its desert environment, define themselves in part by competing to see which of them can be the supreme exemplar of sensual beauty. For an American filmgoer, it is difficult not to think of Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1991)—despite the obvious differences in cultural contexts of the Black and Latino transgender ball culture documented in the Livingston film and the Gerewol—or the Gerewol’s surreal inverse in American culture: the Miss America pageant.

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