Samuel Holt: Framing a Pilgrimage: An Exercise in Visual Representation
In 2003, I set out to create a documentary film about Tamil pilgrims traveling down the east coast of Sri Lanka for the Kataragama Esala festival. My approach to filming became one of anti-structure, relying upon recording events that I encountered without premeditation. My hope was that the film would refract reality, becoming a visual document of a pilgrimage experience, as opposed to a film created for the purpose of furthering a specific agenda or appealing to a certain audience. Many documentary films are fully conceptualized before they are shot. Indeed, in order to obtain funding, most foundations demand a completed script written to appeal to specific audiences. Thus, filmmakers consistently manipulate the environments that they are documenting in order to represent a desired reality. The world’s first feature documentary, Nanook of the North (1922) directed by Robert Flaherty established the paradigm of “staging reality.” However, in the modern era where cameras have become compact and recording capabilities are virtually unlimited, staging reality is unnecessary.
Much like condensing and interpreting ethnographic field notes, the process of editing a film determines the impact and affect of material generated. With over 75 hours of footage and the power of voice over narration, I had the ability to represent the observed events of pilgrimage in numerous discrete ways. In this presentation, I would like to show sections of the film that were omitted for various reasons and discuss the ethical and political implications of including or excluding material. By showing these “out takes” I would like to invite discussion on the ethical and aesthetic difficulties the editing process. How is making a film different from writing an ethnography? What epistemological, temporal and visual fields restrict and challenge ethnographic representation? The presentation will highlight the inherent subject nature of crafting a film and the necessity of understanding one’s “situatedness” or “history,” while suggesting that reflexivity can be imbedded in the process of choice without becoming a narcissistic narrative of the presenter making a journey of discovery.
Biographical Statement:
Samuel Holt is a documentary filmmaker and Anthropology graduate student at the New School for Social Research in New York. Haro Hara! Pilgrimage to Kataragama, Sri Lanka (2007) is his first feature length documentary. He is currently editing his second and third films; Jesus Malverde: The Holy Bandit (2010) focusing on the cult of Jesus Malverde in Culiacan, Mexico and Okanda, a short film depicting the watercutting ceremony at Okanda in Eastern Sri Lanka. He is interested in issues of representation, political and visual culture.
