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Shooting ValidatesShooting a rite can amount to a declaration: "This event is really important; this is real." Think about weddings. Video documentation and portrait shooting not only disrupt them but also validate them. Norma Joseph, a friend, and a religious studies scholar at Concordia University, once described a scene from a Jewish wedding in Detroit. The videographer was shooting the photographer shooting the wedding party, all of whom were carrying throw-away cameras which had been handed out so everyone could help capture the fleeting, "precious moments." The reflexivity, she observed, was three layers deep. "Capturing" sounds less violent than "shooting." The dancing, marrying human animals in Detroit were not quite shot like game. Shots fired by a videographer are not like bullets that kill, but like tranquilizer darts. They are for our own good, right? Most rites of passage require witnesses. A fleshy, merely human pair of eyes is a fallible witness, but the eye, amplified through a lens and dramatically followed up by a distinctive click or a telling whir, creates "evidence"; it makes "memories." The act of shooting renders the one who holds the machine godlike, a manufacturer of eternity. Documenting a performance is no longer an act imposed on a rite by an outsider. Rather, it is part of the ceremony itself. Like Kabuki theater performances, the scenarios of contemporary Japanese weddings are laced with dramatic pauses built into processions so that viewers, including those with cameras, can take in the costumes and postures, the whole scene, without being distracted by the mere busyness of bodily movement. To the Japanese eye the stilled photographic moment is more sacred than the moving cinematic one. The Japanese wedding performance is constructed to facilitate the shooting, and the shooting validates the ritual act.3 Of course, it is not only in Japan that photos and videos have come to possess the validating power usually ascribed to marriage licenses and tombstones. Because shooting itself can become ritualized, the co-opting of scholarly visual materials is always a danger. Shooting PublicizesDid you watch Princess Diana's funeral? The day of Diana's funeral I was in the Bay, a Montreal department store. There, for all the word to see, was a bag lady surrounded by a circle of big-screen TVs. She was weeping shamelessly. Not to have shot the ceremony would have deprived royalty of an opportunity to be publicly contemplated; not to have shot the ceremony would have deprived the world of a moment of togetherness. Not to have shot and then disseminated Diana's funeral would have been to cheat that lady and the rest of us of a chance to grieve, and, yes, to gawk. Without the shooting, the funeral rite would have lost most of its public accessibility. Without the shooting we fathers would have lost an opportunity to discuss dying princesses with our daughters. A Ghanaian graduate student conducting field research on his countrymen's funeral rites in Toronto discovered that they were regularly shot, and that the videos were shipped back to Ghana.4 Why? Because tradition requires inheritors to participate in funerals, and video participation is one way of discharging that duty across an ocean. Like Kodak, Microsoft now capitalizes on the fact that even in ritually inept cultures rites of passage must be shared. The "share this folder on the network" command now provided by Windows XP enables you to discharge your kinship duties. No sooner do we return from a wedding or funeral, having shot it on a digital camera, than we can share the entire folder with all the distant relatives, and even the entire web-watching world, if we are so inclined. Why? Because shooting validates. Shooting MystifiesA shooter looks through a viewfinder, screen, or lens, and by doing so focuses on some things while cutting others out. The power to define which things are out of bounds and which things are central is an enormous, mystifying power. Since I work more often with artists than with advertisers or scientists, most of the photographers of my acquaintance regard their instruments as aids for contemplation. When they walk the streets or hunt the woods with the intention of shooting, they slow down, attending to the details of things. They contemplate what most of us hurry past. For them, shooting is an act of selection, and selectivity helps them attend to what appears—to attend fully, as one does in meditation practice. But selectivity and focus cut both ways. They also blind the beholder. Shooting hides countervailing activities and disguises blemishes. With digital editing one can now disguise and manipulate right down to the pixel level. Consequently most of us are unable to tell which things were "really there" and which things are edited in, or out. Rites, like photos, enable participants to contemplate what is really real, to encounter mystery, but they also mystify. Rites, like photos and film, cloud the sources of authority, shielding them from criticism. Ritualizing, like shooting, is one of the primary ways of constituting authority. Those with ritual and photographic know-how have more authority; those lacking such knowledge have less. Authority is not only constructed in ritual and by means of ritual but also about ritual. In A&E's Ancient Mysteries series on television there was an installment called "Sacred Rites and Rituals."5 Leonard Nimoy, the narrator, exudes the cool Vulcan rationality that he embodied as Spock on Star Trek. He frames rites as examples of exotic violence. In addition, the ritualists have no names. These rites, the script has him say, "challenge logic." Ritualists' actions are made weird by the process of cinematic decontextualization. As a person interviewed in the series, with the albatross of attributed expertise around my neck, I was sucked into the vortex along with Nimoy. I was shot into complicity with the script's interpretive strategy, even though I would have dissented vigorously from much that Nimoy said. For the last decade I have been involved, as on-screen "expert" and behind-the-scenes advisor, in the production of films and plays dealing with ritual. My protests notwithstanding, I am presented in television documentaries as knowing everything about rites, ancient and modern, Eastern and Western. Behind the scenes, my job, as two producers put it, is to keep them honest. Often when I see the results I think I have failed my task. The "honor" of becoming an authority for documentary television is itself a kind of ritual dismemberment. Hours of interview, and pages of notes, research, and advice, are sliced paper thin, becoming salami for fast-food visual consumption, and are then used to warrant producers' and advertisers' values. Producers may listen dutifully, even enthusiastically, but when the interviewing and editing start, almost all the advice is ignored. In the end, the genre—television documentary—falling prey to the prevailing cultural images of ritual, determines the outcome, the presentation that the public watches. The genre and the cultural prejudices exert canonical force. Almost none of this made-for-TV shooting leaves me proud of the final product. So, inevitably, I follow up the supposedly creative film-making task with a critical, scholarly one. An airing usually necessitates an article—just to protect myself, if nothing else. Being shot into the stratosphere of expertise, one is forced to ask questions that neither theology nor ethnography prepares one to ask: As public intellectuals, are we responsible for the pap that airs in our names? Are we morally obliged to traffic with TV image-makers? Should we not lock ourselves instead into ivory towers and write responsible books? |
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