Arkipel - International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival 2013

Flaherty was able to capture the Eskimos as individuals whom were dealing with nature. Flaherty’s prowess in revealing human struggle with nature because he presupposes the camera as the “third party”.

The third party modality allows participant observation and feedback.

In the language of Luc de Heusch “participant observation” is a form of “participatory camera”, which plays an important role in dialogic opportunities between the camera and the subject in the picture. Rouch developed “participatory camera” as a method of mutual reflection between shots and role of the subject in constructing the image.

The camera as the third party necessarily showed its presence reflecting Rouch’s role as a director whom deliberately present directly in the shooting process. It actually had an impact on the interaction amongst the actors when responding to the environment around them.

The presence of a camera for Jean Rouch became a sort of stimuli, accelerator and even as catalyst, so that the camera is equal with the presence of ethnographer himself. The camera became a momentum for self-disclosure of the native African about their experiences of colonial repression, and culture clash. Rouch played this disclosuring process as a form of cinematic narrative, in which he was free to choose the ‘thematic’ subject-matter or discursively regarding his subjects’ actual experiences.

“Participatory camera” is basically a form of ethnographic approach that relies on ethical moment in the process of representation.

Rouch develops the approach into an Anthropologie partagee; shared anthropology (anthropology egalitarian), or it could be called as reflective anthropology. Egalitarian anthropology is ethical moment, for it assumes the existence of effort represented by his subject (the African) to engage with the process of self-representation. Methodically, egalitarian anthropology is a reciprocal relationship (feedback), between the represented and representing. Rouch himself also considers this egalitarian anthropology as contre-don audiovisuel (audiovisual reciprocity).

During its development, the model of the subject’s involvement in the process of making the film was an attempt to get some sort of ‘totality’ of image, or the spirit to capture ‘the totality of social facts’. The reciprocal method of this representation process is a reminiscent of an anthropological discourse indirectly. The discourse is by Marcel Mauss 87