"The Difference Between a Photo and an X-Ray"

David MacDougall's self assessment of his work in the burgeoning field of visual anthropology is a great self reflexive tool of evaluating what he has "broadly defined 'anthropology of consciousness." (Macdougall 272) He really managed to think about his own style and write it very well.

He displays many of the points he writes about in Transcultural Cinema, his book about the methods he used in visual anthropology, in his film Lorang's Way. This movie chronicled the life of one African animal trader through interviews with Lorang, those who knew him, and candid tracking shots of what seems like banal conversation. However, as Macdougall shows, these small seeming conversations blossom into very telling aspects of a foreign culture. It is through these very exotic exchanges that we can see the parallels to our lives and relationships.

MacDougall writes on page 261, "Visual representation, it is worth noting, has intercultural as well as transcultrual implications. Images, by standing outside the system of 'cultures' and nation-states, create new links based on points of recognition among otherwise separated social groups." This is writing about the universality of the visual image and how it can convey many ideas just through its visage and help in a more thorough way.

One more point on the act of seeing vs. "seeing" in the film, Lorang's Way: "At a more basic level, visual media produce intercultural documents simply in their co-inscription of filmmakers and their subjects in the same work (assuming they do not come from identical backgrounds). The filmmaker's acts of looking are encoded in the film in much the same way as the subjects physical presence." (MacDougall 261) Here he is referencing the importance of the relationship between the camera, the subject, and the filmmaker. The mingling of these three factors completely shapes a piece of ethnographic film. He is asserting that the filmmaker needs to be aware of his/her presence in the field, and that he should acknowledge the subject's role in the project. We see this in Lorang's Way when they ask Lorang what the most important or basic component of the film should be, to which he responds, "Life..."

Personally I liked the slow, temporally conscious nature of the film. It was nice to have a seeming picture of a small slice of village life blossom into a larger understanding. The visual composition of the film was also very pleasing to the eye.