Paper short abstract:

Montage collides at the core of anthropological inquiry raising cultural positioning in a complex register. Examining third world avant-garde cinema this paper exposits montage as a critical practice entwining etic and emic perspectives. It is argued this stresses ethnographic documentation’s scope.

Paper long abstract:

Mobilizing the possibility of juxtaposition, montage editing collides at the core of anthropological inquiry raising the subject of cultural positioning in its most complex equations. In this paper, Montage and Ethnicity — conversations in documenting culture, I will argue how this form-based intervention contributes in furthering an understanding of ethnic subjectivities and the ramifications this has for ethnographic documentation. For this I will examine occupations from third world avant-garde cinema, where montage has served in fulfilling complex constructions. At the first instance, the montage principle of dialectical confliction has been evoked as a mode of 'critical juxtaposition' — a means to problematise discourses surrounding subjects such as the nation and gender. Further, editing dynamics privileging qualities of rhythm, movement, tone, interval and insistent upon framing, whose foremost exemplar are the experiments of Dziga Vertov, one finds get evoked in a gesture for articulating a more perceptual stance that muddies the disparity between cinema and its audiences, despite their cultural location/s.

By tracing a line of communication between modern Indian thinker and poet Rabindranath Tagore and the avant-garde interventions of filmmakers, Ritwik Ghatak and Kumar Shahani, the paper will discuss particular montage principles transacted and situated in relation to classical Indian aesthetics including tantric iconography to attend particular political concerns. It will exposit the implication of a principally haptic and movement oriented dynamic within the constructions as the spiritual stance evoking an ancient aesthetic tradition along with a more urgent occupation, which I argue likens as the implication between the etic and emic anthropological perspectives respectively. This entwining of the etic and emic positions allows in resituating the scope of documentation in relation to ethnic subjects beyond conventional aspirations for cultural exposition towards a more argumentative and culturally conversant stance that complicates subject positions and deemphasises conformist categories such as those surrounding colonialism.