Ethnography

Films: Louisiana Story, High School
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop (Louisiana Story); VHS from Northern Illinois University library on big ol’ television (High School).

There are certainly films on this list that I think shouldn’t be there. When I come across one of these, I really try my best to understand the rationale behind the film’s inclusion. Even if I don’t like the film or don’t find much of value in it, I want to try to remain open minded enough that I can spot someone else’s reasons for finding the film important.


However, there are also times when I get a film like Louisiana Story. I watch, I watch more, and when the film ends, I look at the screen with the expression my dog makes when it hears a noise it doesn’t understand.

Robert Flaherty specialized in ethnographic, documentary-style films. In fact, it was Flaherty who essentially created the documentary genre with Nanook of the North. Louisiana Story was his last film, and he never really strayed too far from where he started. While this film is fiction, it’s also very much done in the documentary style (enough so that it’s usually recorded as a documentary) and used local actors instead of experienced thespians.

He also never strayed too far from his silent film roots. Louisiana Story plays very much like a silent film throughout despite the sound effects, occasional dialogue, and the tremendous score, of which I will speak in a few minutes. Frequently we are treated to panoramas of the Louisiana bayou country, swamps, alligators, birds, trees, and as the film goes on, a large oil derrick.

We follow a young boy with the hellaciously awesome name of Alexander Napoleon Ulysses LaTour (Joseph Boudreaux), called officially “the Boy,” and his pet raccoon as they live an idyllic life in the middle of a swamp. The Boy fishes, avoids gators, and believes in a variety of mystical creatures inhabiting his world, like mermaids that swim up from the ocean and werewolves that hunt among the trees. The Boy keeps a small sack of salt tied to his belt as a method of protection, and catches massive catfish by baiting his hook with his own saliva.

At the start of the film, the Boy’s father (Lionel Le Blanc) deeds over a part of the swamp to an oil company so they can wildcat a drill rig to see if there’s anything under the swamp worth getting. The boy is fascinated by the oil well and frequently spends his time there, becoming a sort of informal mascot of the drillers. As the drill bores deeper and deeper into the swamp, it hits a gas pocket, which threatens to stop the drilling. The Boy, looking to help his friends on the rig, pours his salt down the shaft and hocks a lung cookie into it as well, and suddenly, the drill works fine and the well starts producing the crude. The moral of the story is, essentially, don’t mock the magical spit of a Cajun.

Except for a part in the middle where the kid watches gator eggs hatch, believes his pet raccoon is eaten by a gator, and then catches the gator for revenge, that’s really all there is here. Guys dig into the ground, the kid spits in the hole, and everyone gets rich. We’re treated at the end to a scene of the “riches” the poor bayou family gets as a result of the well—it consists of some cookware, a rifle, and a bag of sugar. Happy days are here again, evidently.

If the film has one redeeming quality, it is the score that plays through most of it. Virgil Thompson’s music is incredibly good, and the score won a freakin’ Pulitzer. Somehow, this film was also nominated for an Oscar for, of all things, Best Writing. Go figure that. The cinematography is also pretty.

But seriously, this isn’t a movie. There isn’t really a plot or a story, or anything beyond the scenery and the music to hold anyone’s attention. It would have been better without the dialogue and the oil well. At one point, I was actually hoping that a slowly approaching ‘gator might take a bite out of the kid.

It comes as no surprise in retrospect that this film was financed by Standard Oil, but it does raise an interesting question. What did Standard want from this film? On what planet did this film make any sense at all? Is this a promotional piece to show that the oil derricks bring little ecological damage and greater prosperity to the locals? Are they trying to assure us that every tank of gas from Standard is blessed with magical Cajun loogies? I’m completely flummoxed. I actually went back to the tome of reference here to make sure I was watching the right film, so confused was I that this made the list. Seriously, if it’s the soundtrack that does it, I’ll happily listen to it, but don’t force me to watch a kid paddling a canoe and spitting into a well.


Frederick Wiseman’s High School is a chilling portrayal of a fairly typical school in Pennsylvania during the late 1960s. Essentially a piece of direct cinema, this short documentary shows a typical day in the life of this high school and all of the soul crushing events that happen in the name of conformity, unity, and social cohesiveness. I remember my own high school years with a good deal of distaste in general; the environment was fairly oppressive and I didn’t like being there very much. I don’t have a bundle of happy memories. Is there a reason I haven’t attended any of my high school reunions but one? Yep. I can’t really be arsed to go. There’s no real reason for me to dredge up a bunch of memories that I find unpleasant or reopen issues and events from my past that have been buried since the mid-1980s and belong buried. My high school years were oppressive and painful, stupid, pointless, aggravating, and ultimately best left in the past.

Essentially, this film is a sequence of events that happen during the day. We see classes in progress, students being disciplined, and meetings between the school administration and parents. I’m not sure how many days the film was created over, but it plays like a single day in general, even if it did go over the course of a week, a month, or a semester.

Wiseman does the right thing here by offering these scenes of the high school environment without comment, voice over, or narration of any kind. We’re not instructed on what is happening at any time, but are instead allowed to draw our own conclusions on the events of the day.

And some of these events are, with a little thought, really disturbing. A young man, for instance, is given a detention when he claims he didn’t deserve one. He’s told that rather than stand up for himself and fight for himself, that a real man takes the punishment he’s given and (essentially) knuckles under to authority. Girls are shown in short gym shorts and are then one is taken to task for wearing a skirt too short for the prom. Other girls walk on stage showing off outfits that they created and are rather painfully criticized by their instructor (“You can see this girl has a weight problem.”) We are “treated” along with a class to a complete reading of “Casey at the Bat,” a poem that isn’t nearly as great as it’s assumed to be. No one in the room (or really, the audience) wants to hear that whole thing—which is exactly the point here. As the audience, we at least have the choice to turn the film off or walk away; the students can’t.

It’s almost impossible not to feel the waves of both oppression and repression coming off the screen as the film plays. Naturally, the high school itself would claim that it is functioning as a way to mold students into proper ladies and gentlemen. The reality appears to be much more severe though—the kids aren’t so much being molded as being crushed into new shapes by forces beyond their control and comprehension. There seems to be, at least to the minds of the kids, no reason for the many things they are told—they are merely told that they must comply, and that essentially, complying is its own reward.

The final scene is perhaps the most interesting, and also the most darkly comic. A teacher from the school reads a letter she has received from a former student who is now serving in Vietnam and about to be dropped behind the DMZ. He mentions that he has willed his insurance money to the school if he is killed in action so that they can benefit other people the way he benefitted from the school. More tellingly, he also comments that he no longer thinks of himself as a person, but merely as something there to obey orders. This segment concludes with the teacher congratulating herself and the rest of the staff for doing “a good job.”

Ultimately, Wiseman’s High School shows how contrary, arbitrary, and ultimately dehumanizing the high school environment is. That it does so without comment makes the statement all the stronger.

As a final note, it’s worth mentioning that in one way at least the high schools in Pennsylvania in 1968 were more enlightened than many today is in terms of discussion of birth control. In one scene, a gentleman addressing a group of boys specifically tells them that “proper protection” should always be used, a phrase and concept that is being protested by far too many people in this day and age.

Why to watch Louisiana Story: The closest thing “commercial” film got to ethnographic video was Flaherty’s work.
Why not to watch: Because nothing happens.

Why to watch High School: A reminder that “the best years of your life” actually sucked, were mind-numbingly boring, and probably smelled like vomit, sawdust, and chalk dust.
Why not to watch: Flashbacks to gym class.

A Pearl of Great Price

Film: Tabu
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

Is there a story more common, more well-known than that of the star-crossed, doomed lovers? Probably not. It’s a tale oft told and loved. Harlequin Romances have made more than a cottage industry on the idea of pairing the frail, idealistic woman with the dangerous, romantic hero. At least I think that’s true. That’s what the movies have taught me, at least. Having never read a Harlequin Romance, I’m basing this off what I remember from Romancing the Stone.

But hey, Romeo and Juliet has been kicked around in various fashion since long before Billy the Shake (Shakespeare’s MC name) crafted the version with those particular lovers. The Greeks and Romans had their share of doomed couples, and almost certainly the Sumerians and Babylonians before them did as well.

Tabu is such a tale set on the South Seas island of Bora Bora, demonstrating that awesome tendency toward reduplication so common in many Austronesian languages. The film concerns, of course, a pair of young lovers. The boy (yes, that’s his name in the credits; he’s played by Matahi, who has only one name, and is generally referred to in the film as Matahi) is a good hunter and fisherman, two important skills in this community. The girl (credited in a piece of fake ethnology as Reri, but actually played by Anne Chevalier) is of shocking beauty. Matahi meets her and falls for her instantly, and the two are happy.

The problem occurs when the chief of all of the islands arrives with news. The maid of the gods has died, and the successor to her must come from this island. The old warrior (Hitu) announces that the girl Reri has been selected to become the new maiden of the gods. It’s a great honor, but it comes with a substantial downside. Betrothed to the gods, Reri immediately becomes taboo; no one can touch her or even look upon her with desire or will suffer immediate death. And thus we have our doomed lovers and a plot for the final hour of the film.

What happens next will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever seen any film involving this plot, or indeed read a single story that involves this idea. The boy sneaks onto the boat holding the girl and preparing to send her away from him forever, absconds with her, and sails off away from the rest of his people to find a place where the two of them can live together, regardless of the taboo against touching her. Naturally, they are pursued by the man charged with her retrieval.

Additionally, the pair is also taken advantage of by those more aware of the workings of the world than they are. Unused to the concept of money, the boy frequently gives away valuables, and then must risk his life to pay off huge debts he didn’t know he’d acquired and wasn’t aware that he’d have to pay. It’s almost impossible to avoid some level of stereotyping in a film like this on one level or another. The boy and girl are shown as being hopelessly naïve and backward, and are cheated by not a white man, but a Chinese one.

F.W. Murnau is credited with the direction this film, and he did do most of it except for the opening sequence. But the film is helped in no small part by the work of Robert Flaherty, best known for Nanook of the North. Tabu is not an ethnography and doesn’t purport itself to be anything other than a love story, but there is a sense of the people in the film being portrayed in more or less a realistic fashion. Of course, Flaherty wasn’t above staging things for his other films, and thus the reality here needs to be questioned.

While nothing here is particularly shocking, for the time it almost certainly was. Not the story, nor the characters, but the clothing. More specifically, the lack thereof. Tabu is from 1931, and for at least a portion of the film, many of the young, nubile Bora Boran (that’s a guess, but if it’s wrong, it shouldn’t be) girls are topless, adorned from the waist up only with a lei that covers nothing. This film was also likely the introduction for many people to the hula, or similar dances, and it is certainly suggestive for the cultural standards of the early 1930s. All that pelvic thrusting and such.

A couple of things are worth noting, both about the film in general and the version that I watched. First is that this was the final film of the great F.W. Murnau. My age when he died, Murnau was killed in a car accident just a week before the premiere of this film in New York. While not my favorite of his movies, it’s a fitting end to a career cut far too short.

Second, while the transfer I watched was a good one in terms of the film quality, this version from Milestone has a terrible soundtrack in places. For the most part, the music is unremarkable and relatively appropriate, but some of it is flat terrible. The instrumental pieces are good, but several of the songs also have vocals, and these are borderline embarrassing. Several of the songs sound like Alpine yodeling while others are closer to what it would sound like if very very white people who have never been closer to the South Seas than Des Moines tried to get funky.

Silent films are often very stylized and overacted. It was a function of the time and a function of not having sound. Surprisingly, from the guy who created the hyper-stylized Nosferatu that this film does not really come across as overacted in the style common for silent dramas. Because of that, to modern eyes, the film comes across as more honest than it otherwise might.

Unusual for the time, unusual by some standards even today, the film does not condescend regarding the natives. A particularly rich pearl bed, for instance, is considered taboo because of native superstition according to the police on the island our couple goes to after fleeing. When one diver breaks the taboo and dives there, he is killed by a huge shark, demonstrating that there might be something to the taboo after all. Of course, just as he has broken the taboo by stealing the girl, Matahi will eventually break this taboo as well.

Is this a great movie? Probably. Silent films, or at least silent dramas, always lose something in the translation to a modern audience. But Murnau was nothing if not ahead of his time. The shocks still work, and the scenery is beautiful, especially when considering the equipment available at the time.

Why to watch Tabu: Exotic locales, exotic people.
Why not to watch: Same old story.

Reality and Unreality in the Frozen North

Film: Nanook of the North
Format: DVD from Moline Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.


Any documentary filmmaker, amateur or professional, will deal with certain questions and concerns about his or her film. Predominant of these questions is how closely the film tracks with reality. It’s a question still being asked of documentarians today, just as it was asked about the very first people who tried to depict real life on a big screen. Certainly this is the case with Robert Flaherty, the man behind what is considered in many ways to be the first ever documentary, Nanook of the North.

Flaherty had been sent into the Canadian northlands to scout for the possibility of rail lines and for minerals. Through these trips, he came into contact with many of the native people who lived in this region of the Canadian wilderness, the Inuit, more commonly referred to as Eskimo. Realizing that the way of live for these people was changing and changing rapidly—and that he was a major part of the reason for that change, Flaherty took it upon himself to document the lifestyle of these people.

When Flaherty started, there were no conventions for how to properly create a documentary, thus he did what he thought was right. He was, and in fact still is in many cases, criticized for the more romantic elements of his film that have little to do with the reality of the lives of his subjects. While the film tells the story of Nanook, an Inuit hunter, and his family, the reality is that his “family” as depicted on the screen are not really his. Nyla, his wife, is merely another Inuit who looked good on camera.

Other changes brought in by Flaherty include such aspects as the way Nanook and others dress and hunt. By the time Flaherty worked in the sub-Arctic, guns had become a much more common way of hunting than harpooning; building materials more traditional for the southern climates were used in place of snow and ice igloos. Even Western clothing had made inroads into the north, and the costumes worn by Nanook and his “family” were more idealized views of a primitive time. For these changes, Flaherty can be forgiven—his goal was to document a lifestyle before it disappeared completely, and to do so, he needed to Inuit to act, look, and dress in more traditional ways.

As this is a documentary, there is no actual plot. Instead, the film attempts to show the day-to-day struggle of the people who live in one of the most unforgiving and terrible environments on the planet. Nanook, as the man the film is named for, is obviously the main focus of virtually every inch of film. The film, with at least some level of accuracy, shows what he must go through simply to survive, from hunting walrus and spearing salmon to building a traditional igloo out of the raw materials on the ground.

Nanook of the North is, admittedly, far less than it would be if such an ethnography were to be created with modern standards by modern filmmakers. But working from essentially nothing, with no one to guide his hand or his direction, Robert Flaherty created an entire style and genre of film that continues to be used, developed, and built upon today. Flaherty created a new way to look at the world around us, and a new way to view the reality of our world.

Is Nanook of the North worth your time? That’s a valid question. It may be that you have absolutely no interest in the way other people live or lived, in which case you will find nothing here to engage you. On the other hand, what are movies but the depictions of the lives of others? The influence of this film is still being felt, and will continue to be for as long as a filmmaker decides to show reality rather than a piece of fiction.

Why to watch Nanook of the North: It’s where documentaries came from.
Why not to watch: You don’t care.