Lawrence of Arabia: A Film's Anthropology

by Steven C. Caton

Combining ethnography, film criticism, and his extensive knowledge of the Middle East, Steven C. Caton presents an innovative and fascinating examination of the classic film, Lawrence of Arabia . Caton is interested in why this epic film has been so compelling for so many people for more than three decades. In seeking an answer he draws from situations in his own life, biographies of the film's key participants, and analyses of issues relating to class, gender, colonialism, and cultural differences. The result is a many-prismed book that poses important questions of ethnographic representation and the discourse of power.

Caton's approach is dialectical, and his readings of the film are situated within different historical periods, from the early 1960s to the present. Among the subjects he highlights are travel and colonialism in fieldwork and filmmaking, orientalism in the representation of the Other, and the film's ambiguous handling of masculinity and homosexuality. Caton looks at his own reactions to the film at various stages in his life and offers a thought-provoking account of the film's reception by today's high school and college students.

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology, Film, History

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 3 out of 5]

Revisiting this book years removed from my abortive film school experience reminds me why I left that field of study. Caton's solid detailing the film's political and visual motifs: in particular, his screenplay analysis is nearly as effective as Joel Hodson or Adrian Turner. When he analyzes Lawrence's sexuality and "Orientalism" Caton bogs down in tedious intertextuality (Edward Said in particular) and tiresome theoretical pondering. I've always found straightforward textual analysis of movies/plays/books more fruitful than a critical framework with predetermined answers. Using one's personal experience as a basis for analysis is bothersome too.

[Jenny · Rating 1 out of 5]

Abandoned after many attempts to penetrate the academic prose. Lawrence's Seven Pillars is notoriously dense, pretentious and inaccessible, but this makes it seem positively slight and readable.

[Luis Garrido · Rating 3 out of 5]

Steven Caton is a great professor because he's a great story teller. He's taken a classic movie and explored it in a way that few would have thought to do. Of particular interest are the correlations he makes to the T.E. Lawrence as proxy for the romanticized image of the Anthropologist and the use of the movie as a dialectical critique of the discipline.