I went to the Dochouse preview of Ben Hopkins' latest film last night at the ICA. What a treat. On top of a screening of a film that I've been dying to see for a while now, there was a great Q&A with Ben and Andre Singer, producer, filmmaker and anthropologist who worked on strand called Disappearing World, which I loved very much until it joined the disappeared.
The film tells the story of the Pamir Kurghiz, an ethnically Turkish tribe from the Pamir mountain range that borders Afghanistan, China and the old Soviet Union to the north. Their tumultuous 20th Century history is told via reconstruction, dramatisation and straightforward (?) reminiscence by the older members of the tribe, now living in Turkey.
Hopkins introduced it as a 'comic ethnographic' film and it's certainly funny. He plays around with filmic conventions, probing the limits of ethnographic filmmaking by creating a mish mash of styles: observational documentary, interviews and, well, Soviet cinema! The history sequences detailing the tribe's fight against the Soviets in the 20s and 30s are a fantastic pastiche of Eisenstein et al, with all parts played by members of the tribe or a local theatre company. The beauty of the film for me was that none of the stylistic cleverness detracted from the extremely strong and moving story of a people battered by the larger forces at play in world history.
The discussion that followed centred mainly around notions of truth, with many asking Hopkins to justify his stylistic choices. Dochouse showed a clip from a film about the Kurghiz that Singer had worked on for Disappearing World, and which had had a great influence on Hopkins. In fact, the clip that they showed was the direct inspiration for a sequence in 37 Uses..., where the devastating impact of Opium on the tribe is shown via a specific story of a man who offers his daughter in marriage to redeem his opium debts. Without wanting to give it away now (you really should see the film) the original film offers a rather different version of events to Hopkins' dramatisation, which certainly raised some eyebrows in the audience. However, as Elizabeth Wood of Dochouse, who was chairing the debate, pointed out - there is truth and there is truth. Firstly, the Singer film had been edited, and as an audience we have no way of knowing what was manipulated and what was omitted. Secondly, on checking we found out that what had happened (and wasn't shown in Singer's film) was remarkably similar to what Hopkins depicted.
I think devices such as the one Hopkins used are great: my problem with so much of ethnographic filmmaking is that it feels two-dimensional; scientifically distanced at the expense of a human engagement with other humans. He throws any attempt at disengagement into the wind and instead creates a portrait of a very specific group of people, WITH those people. Of course there are holes (what film doesn't have them?) but he makes no attempt to hide these - for me, that's what the jumble of styles and threads does.
It's playing at the ICA for 2 weeks from Friday. Go and see it!