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‘Every photograph is accurate. None of them is the truth.’
Richard Avedon
As a Tanzanian woman filmmaker with experience that stretches from the dissolved National Film Company (TFC) and beyond, I am conversant with the logistics of filmmaking and distribution in the country. Put simply, the profession is still male-dominated and therefore the usual difficulties of acquiring funding for documentary production are even more acute for women filmmakers wishing to be taken seriously. Tanzania being one of the most donor-dependent countries in the world has other pressing priorities and seldom offers government-support in film production. Most filmmakers routinely look to foreign NGOs for funding and the more pragmatic ones use proposal writers who know how to agreeably play the donor's tune. Either way, the stories told in such a partnership between local filmmakers and foreign money frequently treat 'actuality' rather too 'creatively', with subjects well briefed to offer testimonials to camera that support the donor's objectives. This has particularly been the case with films covering HIV/AIDS.
On the other hand, the attempts made by foreign filmmakers to represent truthfully the life and people of Africa to Western audiences have not succeeded because film and television industries driven by ‘entertainment’ have little interest in Africa, except as a backdrop for stories that exploit Otherness. They endorse stereotypical scenes of poverty and corruption, against which Western protagonists must battle. The aid and AIDS stories that do bring Africa to the Western audience are a very small part of the complex understanding of the continent that still waits to be delivered. Until it is we will not have a pluralistic view of life in Africa or balanced stories of who its people are, how they live, what are their cultural traditions and where they are heading.
In this study I have shown that the victim-hood stories, which emerge from the
frameworks of the aid industry typically endorse a set of pre-determined perspectives about Africa, which together form what I have termed the ‘donor gaze’. These
perspectives appear as ‘authentic’ because donor gaze films intended for fundraising in the West employ familiar documentary techniques which appear to ‘speak truth’,
but documentary filmmakers eager for sponsorship knowingly play the game by overriding authentic local voices which might otherwise balance the story. While the images on screen may be accurate, the context more often than not is a
configuration of reality to produce ‘helping stories’ which have no real interest in ‘normal’ Africans except as subjects needing Western help. Voices and images of the needy are routinely aestheticized to create and reinforce a version of the truth, which agrees with the boardroom analyses of donor agencies and justifies their charitable fundraising and continued intervention. The dominant narrative position used in such texts, I have argued, may be termed ‘speaking about’.
I began the thesis with two main objectives: firstly, to examine how the techniques of documentary filmmaking are used to reinforce the donor gaze; secondly, to see if and how the donor gaze can be challenged. I have shown that without expressing doubt (or perhaps exercising choice) many documentary filmmakers adopt the donor gaze in order to butter their bread, and also because their own Western cultural toolkit means they subscribe to the dominant worldview of feeling-sorry-for-Africans. Their ‘truth telling’ documentary approach (re)organises whatever reality they are asked to portray in order to fit the expectations of sponsors and audiences. In fact, ‘speaking about’ reality in this way is very simple and requires very little cultural sensitivity whatsoever. The majority of documentaries on aid and AIDS in Africa, freely available on digital platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo, take this simplistic position and employ familiar stereotypes beneath a veneer of ‘truth telling’
techniques.
These circumstances are illustrated in this study by the case of Talking About Sex [2008]. That film began and ended in the boardroom of RFSU and the subjectivity of the people filmed was of no interest for the outcome. My assignment was to help ‘visualize’ a written business report to show how successful the Swedish intervention had been: the narrative was decided in advance and the words of the villages
featured were to all intents and purposed scripted in advance, and yet the ‘documentary mode’ employed gave the film a spurious authenticity. In these circumstances it is almost impossible to challenge the donor gaze because the controlling voice will always belong to the one controlling the purse’s string.
Films about Africa that ‘speak nearby’ the situations and the Others they portray do occur, but relatively rarely because they require a lengthier stay on location and involve a form of genuine engagement with the filmed subjects, circumstances which
are not feasible for most parachute filmmaking on limited budgets. And even when the filmmaker is independently financed and able to operate freely there is no guarantee that results will be very different. I have argued that Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s much-lauded experimental documentary Reassemblage [1982]102 only exoticised black African women, even though she claimed she was ‘speaking nearby’ their reality. Her assertion resonates well with the donor gaze producers who claim that they want to empower and give a voice to those with no power, who are seldom heard. The approach is well meaning; they see Africans as victims who need a helping hand but in providing this the Otherness is over emphasized in the stylistics. For example, Minh-Ha’s repeated use of extreme close up of naked breasts: she wants to assert that this-is-how-things-are, but refuses to use the voice of the women to tell how-things-really-are. In this case, and in many others, the subjects perform as silent signifiers of meaning, completely divorced from their own voice just as in the old days when black Africans were the ‘drum beaters.’
In order to challenge the donor gaze filmmakers should aim to ‘speak with’ African voices and this can only be done by ‘real’ empowerment of the filmed subjects. Instead of asserting truth with the help of on-screen white experts or pre-determined narratives, the filmmaker should create collaborative opportunities for Africans to confirm their own truth. Trusting the interpretation of those living the reality is an attempt I experimented with for Life Goes On: Voices from Cape Town. When I arrived there I felt disoriented and unsure what I was expected to know: to me South Africa was a massive lion, and the parts of Cape Town that I was able to see in two months were just the tip of its tail, to borrow Albert Einstein’s metaphor. I cannot claim my short text as a grand narrative about ‘reality’ or suggest that one complete story of one of the ten individuals we met would do justice to such a diverse country. But this was an attempt to make a film with rather than about people, working with subjects whose daily lives were fully eventful, but not eventful enough for a more conventional mode of narrative-driven documentary.
However, while my subjects were encouraged to ‘order the gaze’ the realities of camera and editing meant there were inevitable limitations. This was a step towards a different style of filmmaking but ‘speaking with’ was not yet ‘speaking by’. In fact there is a history of participatory ‘speaking with’ filmmaking, which involves the subjects in a direct attempt ‘to give voice to the voiceless’. One of the more
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interesting experiments in using film as a way of opening a dialogue and boosting social and economic development, as mentioned in the introduction (p17), was organized by the National Film Board of Canada in the late 1960s. The inhabitants of the remote and economically depressed fishing communities on Fogo Island,
Newfoundland, became the focus of a process that was a combination of
ethnographic documentary and political engagement.103 Working with the Memorial University of Newfoundland as part of the Canadian Government’s ‘Challenge for Change’ project, Colin Low spent several months on the island in 1967, getting to know the people and then inviting them to talk on film about issues that concerned them. At that time the traditional fishing economy was in decline, around 60% of the inhabitants were out of work and young people were leaving to find work elsewhere. The various communities felt ignored by government but were unsure how to work together.
Low later explained his approach:
We began promising individuals that if they allowed us to film them, we would play the film back to them before anyone else saw it. This established
confidence more than anything else and given that assurance, people were not afraid to speak. We also began promising the separate villages that if there was not village approval of film made in the village, we would destroy the film… In all, we filmed about twenty hours of material. Back in Montreal, we edited it to six hours…
Three months after filming, we returned to the Island for playback of material. This was done in a different village every night for about a month and a half. Screenings usually included a general discussion…l have never been to more exciting film screenings. The appreciation was extensive, the discussions animated. We invited people to help edit the material, remove sections or add to it. In six hours of material, three minutes were removed because they were considered "unfair". Not all participants in discussions were in agreement with each other, but at no time did the discussions involve extreme anger. People continuously asked us to run the film off the Island - particularly to
government.104
Showing the material to government indeed became part of the whole ‘Fogo Process’, with the filmmakers becoming de facto mediators and a minister in the provincial government responding to the islanders in kind, on film. At a time when television was still a relatively undeveloped medium controlled from distant cities this was a positive achievement, but just as significant was the way Low’s documentaries
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Link to Fogo Island films: https://www.nfb.ca/playlists/fogo-island/playback. Accessed, July
2014.104
Colin Low (5 July, 1972) The Fogo Island Communication Experiment available at:
http://onf-nfb.gc.ca/medias/download/documents/pdf/1972-Fogo-Island-Communication- Experiment.pdf. Accessed, July 2014.brought the various communities together. As Carolyne Weldon noted, when
interviewing Low in 2010, ‘In his own way, Colin Low gave the people of Fogo both a voice, and an ear. And when he involved the islanders in the editing process, he also gave them a mirror to take a good long look at themselves.’105
However, for all its innovation and effect, Colin Low’s work on Fogo Island can still be seen as a more sophisticated development of ‘speaking with’, in many respects limited in time, place and technology. Can his techniques be developed for use within the digital age of the twenty-first century? A question posed by Stephen Crocker (2008: 60):
What can we learn from the Fogo Process now in the age of new super-light nomadic technologies that seem to render nearness and distance obsolescent? This successful use of film and video to address problems of `information poverty’ and help islanders `cognitively map’ their situation was not only a result of the technology made available to them but of the way that it was integrated into their lives. For this reason we still have much to learn from the Fogo Process. Because the Fogo experiments concerned the social and political uses of media, they raise a question that has become more rather than less pertinent: what are media good for? As the means of communication become more widely available, what can we do with them? Now that it
becomes possible to represent everything, why would we? For what purpose? The Fogo Process points us to the most basic problem in the politics of media. What role can media play in the formation of collective, political structures? The development and world-wide spread of the ubiquitous mobile phone, with its capacity to capture video and upload it to the internet, challenges and demystifies the business of filmmaking. Easily accessed on-line websites remove the immediate problem of distribution. We are at a point where many people now have tools of representation easily available at all times and very soon even the inhabitants of the most remote settlements on earth will be able to transmit their own images, filming their own lives and taking ‘speaking with’ onto the level of ‘speaking by’. What implications this may have for documentary as a form remain to be seen. Amateur video on YouTube rarely conforms to our established expectations of a ‘film’, however ‘authentic’ the images. Nor can the internet guarantee a specific audience or deliver a measurable impact. There will still be a need for the filmmaker’s vision and editing expertise, and, inevitably, for sources of finance. But at least there may be already a corrective at hand for some of the worst excesses of the ‘donor gaze’.
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Carolyne Weldon, Lunch with Colin Low, 27 May 2010, available at http://blog.nfb.ca/blog/2010/05/27/lunch-with-colin-low/. Accessed, July 2014.