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Shooting (Dis)embodiesWhat shooting seizes upon is bodilyness, and if ritual studies is about anything, it is about embodiment in social contexts. The study of ritual is not primarily the study of ideas in people's heads or feelings in their hearts; it is about meanings embodied in posturing and gesturing. Video, or film, is a methodological key to studying postures and gestures. Shooting the surfaces of things, bodies included, has analytical and not merely expressive or entertainment value. I will not labor the point since I have made it so repeatedly in the past. Another side to photography's peculiar way of embodying exists. A while back my wife and I were studying Spanish, and boarding in a local home in Salamanca, Spain. One afternoon we noticed on the mantle several pictures of people, their mouths wide open. Something—we did not know what—was being deposited on their tongues. Later, when we inquired, we were instructed in a mixture of Spanish and English, "Pan," they said, then, "sagrado, sagrada..." They were trying to teach us the language we'd come to learn. Eventually, we pieced the meaning together. They were talking about bread, holy bread. Communicants had been photographically frozen in the act of consuming a communion wafer. Like a bloody sheet at a Moroccan wedding,14 the framed photo was proof that the definitive act had been truly committed. Friends and relatives relished such photos. We saw them everywhere, so Spanish clergy had to have been complicit with the practice. Such scenes give one pause. Many of the reigning theories of ritual, religion, and liturgy ill equip us to deal with such practices. The first impulse of many who study religious rites is to object to shooting rites; doing so is either in bad taste or a violation of sanctity. If we ask ourselves what reputable liturgical theologians might say about the act of shooting a host as it greets the tongue, the answer is not difficult to imagine.15 What could be less dignified, or more crassly literalistic, than bared teeth and salivating tongues? The Spanish photos could be used in seminary liturgy courses as illustrations of the evils of popular religion and photographic imperialism. Why? Because shooting disembodies in the very moment that it creates a tactile or visual surface that the senses can grasp. Shooting ComplicatesThe shooting mind can be a deeply contemplative one, but the shooting consciousness—that of the photojournalist, the film editor, the theater director, the camera operator—can also be a profoundly suspended, if not disbelieving, one. Theologians and liturgists sometimes complain that the detachment attendant to the act of shooting is a prophylactic to faith. Several years ago I was shooting the Toronto Towneley Cycle of mystery plays. It was raining, and most of the audience, not up to the ordeal of redemptive suffering, had gone home for supper. A bedraggled, college-age Jesus was lugging a cross down the via crucis, which is to say, across the quadrangle of Victoria College. A few dogged photojournalists were still weathering the scene, so cameras were trained on the bedraggled savior. A photographer in a yellow poncho boldly approached the dripping Jesus on his way to Golgotha, which is to say, toward Bloor Street. The photographer drew surprisingly close to Jesus' face. A few non-journalists gasped. The shooter snapped a shot. Then, suddenly, he fell to one knee and began to weep as he clapped his hand over his mouth. At that moment I, having stepped back rather than in, shot him. What is one to conclude from the photojournalist's actions? Certainly not that shooting obviates the possibility of faith. And certainly not that being deeply moved requires one to believe. Just as Huichol shamans can swallow hundreds of peyote buttons and still organize pilgrimages and know where baskets and bows should be placed, so one can simultaneously shoot and revere. Just as Hopi children learn to hold simultaneously the knowledge that kachinas are spirits as well as their relatives dressed up in masks and costumes, so one can ritualize in a fictive, or even ironic, mode. Clearly it is possible, simultaneously, to shoot and to revere, to embrace fictionality and to have faith. The only caveat is that you have to practice. The social complexity of a feature film can be staggering. Titanic, for example, lists fourteen hundred names in its credits; the number of hands stirring the batter was enormous. Socially, cinema is the most complex of contemporary artistic acts. If for no other reason than this social complexity, cinematic art remains largely intractable to the few religious-studies scholars and theologians who try to analyze it. What I enjoy about field research and visual documentation is how they challenge assumptions about ritual and demand more nuanced theories of it. Conceptually, the relationship between shooting and rites is not as simple as it may seem. We cannot, for example, merely equate the profane with what a culture shoots, or the sacred with what it will not shoot. Nor can we unequivocally claim, for instance, that shooting desecrates funerals but sanctifies weddings. The conceptual conundrum faced by students of ritual is not merely the result of machines, of digital cameras and such, but also of faulty theorizing. With only one or two exceptions, theories of ritual have not attended very fully to the seam between the subjunctive and the declarative, between fictive and ordinary reality. Too easily we have accepted a polarized cluster: on the one hand, we clump ritual with the sacred, believing, and not-acting; on the other, we cluster the profane, performance, acting, and shooting. But the fence that generates this easy methodological dualism is, in practice, breached coming and going, from both directions. Since both insiders and outsiders now have cameras, since ethnographic outsiders now participate, and since participating insiders quickly learn how to observe, the conceptual Berlin wall between ritualizing and dramatizing, two utterly constitutive kinds of human interaction, is crumbling.16 Even in contemporary Christianity, where the relationship between ritual and theater is fairly non-integral, the boundaries can bleed. The film The Apostle has two important behind-the-scenes out-takes.17 In both of them we see how the insider/outsider, actor/non-actor boundary is breached. Not only are real preachers and a real congregation involved, but an actor and a technician, both members of the director Robert Duvall's crew, are caught undergoing conversion experiences during the making of the film. Duvall not only has to direct and act the part of Sonny, who is leaving his fictive congregation; he also has to negotiate with church members to keep the real congregation from dividing over the issue of being shot by "Hollywood." They worry that "Hollywood" will reduce them to caricatures. Meanwhile, real pastors must not only preach and court the spirit, they must perform their preaching and spirit-courting for the cameras. So everyone, it seems, is crossing and re-crossing the seam between fictionality and ultimacy. Whereas Duvall, the director-actor, has to perform toward believing, the evangelists believe toward performing. In the last analysis perhaps the difference makes less difference than our theoretical postures would have led us to believe. |
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