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Subtle narratives
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Australian ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall straddles two exciting fields
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VIEWPOINT David Mac Dougall
Ethnographic filmmaker David Mac Dougall thought he’d be a fiction writer, but soon realised he wasn’t good at it. The Australia-based, America-born documentary anthropologist and cinematic writer then enrolled in the 1960s at the University of California in Los Angeles for a course in filmmaking. It was a time when a joint programme of anthropology and filmmaking was introduced in the film school.
Golden period
“They were initiating filmmakers into the field of anthropology and anthropologists into filmmaking.” He feels it was a wonderful time — the golden period for cinema with the French new wave which introduced a range of possibilities in filmmaking.
His memories of watching ethnographic films take him further back, to when he was a child. He remembers watching “Nanook of the North”, the first ethnographic film about an Eskimo family, made in 1922.
Experiential films
David didn’t want his films to be instructional, but rather that they be made presentable to society. “Ethnographic films should not preach, but document the experiences of communities and how they see the world.”
David, who is currently an ARC Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University, Canberra, says he began to film communities quite accidentally.
Like when he made films on the prestigious Doon School for Boys in the Dehradun valley in 1997, the Rishi Valley School in Madanapalle and a shelter for homeless kids in Delhi, he met an Indian anthropologist who introduced him to these institutions.
“As an anthropologist, I tried to capture the experiences of the Doon school as an institution where, as a small society in itself, it still has its own rituals and customs.”
And when it came to documenting the Krishnamurti Foundation Rishi Valley School, it was an entirely different setting.
Last tribe
David realised children are the most marginalised part of society. “They are the last tribe to be accepted by adults. And they are the ones who suffer the most — from war, labour to poverty. We look at them as empty vessels that need to be filled with knowledge.”
However, David finds there has been a big change in the perception of children.
“They are being recognised as individuals who make key choices; give new ideas and contribute to economic decisions.”
David finds that the videographic projection of ethnography works in two ways —through journalism and documentaries.
He states that while journalism tends to be preachy and one-sided, documentaries allow the viewers to experience what is being shown, without being biased.
David and his wife Judith, who studied filmmaking together, have also collaborated on 25 to 30 films. “While she documents the stories of women, I film the men.”
After 40 years of filmmaking, David is toying with the idea of making a movie about the intellectual circuit in India.
A. M.
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