The Ethnomusicological Documentary: Some Principles and Guidelines

I have never understood what constitute the canons of “visual anthropology,” at least when it is simply understood as a tool for describing and distributing various kinds of research or for understanding events by making visual recordings of them (through either photography or film) and mounting, editing and publishing these recordings: in other words, when it does not take into account native strategies of visualization or the function and structure of images within the culture being investigated. Contemporary “visual anthropology” (or a specific field of “musical iconography”) might tailor its own codes in relation to the techniques and objects it investigates, at least in contexts where photographic and filmic recording tools are widely used. Images do not provide an abstract and absolute account of the documented events; rather, they refer to specific moments of a particular event: that procession, that feast, that moment of everyday life. In these images, the participants’ individual characteristics and the role they play in constructing the rite and articulating the relationships between the rite and the system underlying it (between rite and myth, between action and formalization) are always present and unavoidable. While an ethnographic documentary has certain specific characteristics (in that its expressive codes must take into account the expressive codes of the action or rite being staged and documented), an ethnomusicological documentary has certain restrictions and additional peculiarities based on the fact that the musical content unfolds through its own temporal progression, a progression that has a powerful affect on the editing process. Furthermore, ethnomusicological work has certain specific characteristics in relation to the pertinence and significance of documentary material and its editing. Like any ethnological investigation of ritual and representative actions, ethnomusicology essentially deals with actions that have been deliberately staged in more or less conscious and explicit ways. Any documentation of an event involving the production of organized sound is necessarily a representation that essentially stages a staging. It thus involves methodological and ethical implications that are quite different than those arising from efforts to observe and document non-performative actions.