Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses observational cinema in relation to Kant's disinterested perspective in 'high' art and ocular-centrism, using comparatively extracts from Herb di Gioia and Flaherty, Gardner, Mulvey, and the MacDougalls.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the pure gaze of observational cinema and the notion of disinterestedness as the higher moral mean of recording and reflecting upon a subjective reconstruction of reality. As an ideal, the pure gaze is rooted to Kant's writings on judgement and the a priori feeling of beauty. However, as Bourdieu has noted, the pure gaze is in itself a product of history, rooted to an 'ethos of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world' (1984). In this context, its 'innocence' (as in Grimshaw 2001) and invisibility cover its historical, ideological, and economic condition. This paper argues that the paradoxical perspective of the pure gaze echoes the historical predicament of anthropology and the ethnographic practice in the colonial and post-colonial context. It further raises questions over 'modernity' and 'science', particularly in respect to ocular-centrism as a form of ethnocentrism. By comparing the various appropriations of the Camera Eye in a number of ethnographic films, the paper returns to Kant's Copernican vision (Hart 2003) as the means of re-evaluating observational cinema in respect to the loss of an anthropological vision in a highly professionalized and indifferent academic world.