The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle

by Fatimah Tobing Rony

Charting the intersection of technology and ideology, cultural production and social science, Fatimah Tobing Rony explores early-twentieth-century representations of non-Western indigenous peoples in films ranging from the documentary to the spectacular to the scientific. Turning the gaze of the ethnographic camera back onto itself, bringing the perspective of a third eye to bear on the invention of the primitive other, Rony reveals the collaboration of anthropology and popular culture in Western constructions of race, gender, nation, and empire. Her work demonstrates the significance of these constructions—and, more generally, of ethnographic cinema—for understanding issues of identity.
In films as seemingly dissimilar as Nanook of the North , King Kong , and research footage of West Africans from an 1895 Paris ethnographic exposition, Rony exposes a shared fascination with—and anxiety over—race. She shows how photographic “realism” contributed to popular and scientific notions of evolution, race, and civilization, and how, in turn, anthropology understood and critiqued its own use of photographic technology. Looking beyond negative Western images of the Other, Rony considers performance strategies that disrupt these images—for example, the use of open resistance, recontextualization, and parody in the films of Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston, or the performances of Josephine Baker. She also draws on the work of contemporary artists such as Lorna Simpson and Victor Masayesva Jr., and writers such as Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin, who unveil the language of racialization in ethnographic cinema.
Elegantly written and richly illustrated, innovative in theory and original in method, The Third Eye is a remarkable interdisciplinary contribution to critical thought in film studies, anthropology, cultural studies, art history, postcolonial studies, and women’s studies.

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology, History, Philosophy, School, Cultural Studies, Academic

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 13, 1996

Reviews

[Cody M · Rating 3 out of 5]

Leans quite heavily on anthropology and ethnography with superficial film theory at work. Although the points on early movies like Nanook of the North and the first King Kong were interesting to read because they were somewhat original.

[Tim Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

This may require a second reading. The author illustrates many points that resonate on the nature of the anthropological/ethnographic eye in early cinema. What pushed me to give this only three stars (albeit upgraded from two) is that I believe that she ventures from analysis to hyperanalysis often, her connections feel forced and flowing from within her, not the material. One of her points is that visual anthropologists treat the "primitive" as if two dimensional and unthinking. My reading of her point of view is that she too treats the non white subjects explored in these films add monolithic, though sympathetically. That strikes me as equally hypocritical. I thought I would absorb this book and finally get it off my shelf but another reading may be in order because of this dichotomy of understanding I am left with.

[Lauren]

It was difficult for me not to view Rony as a resentful little reactionary when reading this work, but then I had to remember that other than womanhood I have little experience with what it feels like to be subjugated. Her blanket theory that visual ethnography has a gripping historical tie with racism strikes me to this day as unfair, especially since she only spent a paragraph noting the contemporary ethnographers she actually "approves" of, but I would be a lily-faced liar if I denied that films like King Kong, Nanook of the North, Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico, as well as the entire filmography of Felix Louis Regnault, were blatantly ethnocentric. I watched the aforementioned titles while reading The Third Eye and felt rather uncomfortable about Nanook because of Rony's investigation of how much of the film was "directed" by Flaherty to make Inuits appear comical, nature-bound and childlike. Because, besides those evil traits, the film has a cinematographic brilliance. Making it a struggle to release oneself from the magnetic pull of visual beauty when faced with the corrosive realization that it's all a farce designed to belittle those we don't understand and, consequently, posit as 'others.'

[James Zwierzynski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rony completes a nice case study of a multitude of ethnographic films and anthropological history, with snippets of critical texts and interludes woven throughout. The book's discussion centered summarization and shallow critical discussion over thorough analysis. While the book was written in '96 (a fact I failed to realize until I was almost done with it), it seems there were plenty of strands of theoretical discourse in contemporary cultural theory that could've been used in Rony's analysis to make it more endearing. Nonetheless, I think the book is important in the canon of cinema and cultural studies, it just shows its age reading it currently, as more current monographs seem to have done more in the same realm.

[CORSAK fan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tobing Rony takes us on an excellent journey which examines the relationship between and interdependence of race, how people are racialized, film, and the practice and varying forms of ethnography.

My favorite part of the book is the one in which she discusses ethnographic taxidermy and ethnographic ventriloquism, the concepts stating that native indigenous people first must be viewed as dead in order for their lives and practices to be viewed as alive and observable. An interesting concept, indeed.

Thanks to Matt's Little Free Library for sponsoring this read.