The Great Dance: The Myth of the Metaphysical

Christopher J. Wheeler 920402233

Date of Submission
Monday 17 September 2007

Lecturer:
Phyllis Dannhauser
Content
p.

1. INTRODUCTION 1

2. SYNOPSIS: THE GREAT DANCE: A HUNTER”S STORY 2

3. MYTHOLOGIES AND SOCIETY 2

3.1. Myth: Characteristics and Function 3

4. DOCUMENTARY DISCOURSE 4
4.1. Myth and Discourse 6
4.2. The Paradox of Enthographic Documentary 7
4.3.Otherness, Power, and the Enthographic Discourse 8

5. BUSHMAN AND THE PHOTOGRPAHIC INTERVENTION 9

5.1. The Colonial Image and the Bushman 9
5.2. The Myth of the Bushman 10

6. BUSHMAN CANNED HUNTING: THE MYTH OF THE METAPHYSICAL 11

6.1. The myth of Transformation 11
6.2. Hunting the Hunter 12

7. CONCLUSION 13

SOURCE LIST 15
1. INTRODUCTION

Every society has its own mythology of being, a way of understanding and sharing
experiences that would otherwise remain untold. The validity of such tales is not as important
as the means of expression. In this vein, many ethnographic films attempt to find a negotiated
means of representing cultural myths in a manner that is authentic. This authenticity,
however, is localised in the negotiated meaning between the subject, the filmmaker, and the
audience (Woodward, 1997:2). This implies a certain degree of conversion from one cultural
to another; a mythical transformation of meaning that seeks to bridge the gap between the
“other” and us. This transcendence is never neutral in its ability to assign agency, instead,
there are cultural signifiers that are in operation that no only create difference, but assign
power and knowledge.

The representation of the Bushman1 has been mythologised through film. The
commodification of the Bushman image is embedded with the discourse of film and its
ability to re-present reality, this results in the spectator’s understanding being rooted in the
filmmakers ability to convert cultural practices onto celluloid. It is this process, from the
empirical to artistic form, that allows for intervention of the part of the filmmaker. An
intervention that seeks to assert the Western tradition that the visual is synonymous with
knowledge (Fabian in Gordon, 2002).

This essay will critically discuss the representation of !Xo Bushman mythology in The Great
Dance: A Hunter’s Tale. This representation is will be analysed in terms of how documentary
discourse functions in the film to represent the metaphysical2 world-view of the Bushman
and their myth of transformation and being. This will be achieved by anaylsing how the
stylistic conventions employed in the film act as a nexus between Western understanding and
Bushman mythology.

1
“Bushman” has been used througout to denoted the !Xo San tribe of the Kalahari in South African.
2
The use of term “metaphysical” is used to describe a understanding of the world that localises meaning
inferred from the physical world to a force or power that cannot be empirically understood directly.
2. SYNOPSIS

The Great Dance is an ethnographic documentary that explores the Bushman traditional
hunting practices as it relates to their cultural belief of harmony with nature. An ethnogrpahic
film is one that attempts to “explain or describe some aspects of another culture to members
of the film maker’s own culture” (Nichols, 1981:238) It depicts the lives of the !Xo people of
the Kalahari as we follow them on the mythical and spiritual journey of hunting. The hunt, in
the documentary, is understood to be like dancing, whereby the is a sense of unison between
hunter/dancer and the natural world. The documentary attempts to depict the !Xo people’s
hunter-gather lifestyle and the provisions they make in order to survive. Their traditions and
beliefs are show to be influenced by the Western world and modernity to the extent that the
film concludes by stating that the !Xo’s hunting rights have been revoked by governmental
organisations.

The film is highly stylised and it uses various cinematic techniques to portray the bushman as
mythical beings that are at one with the world. Through the eyes of the hunter the film seeks
to reveal a world that would not have been visible to Western eyes, a world seemingly lost in
its traditions that are becoming increasingly affected by Western rationale and policy.
However, the aim of the film, primarily, is not to invoke sympathy but instead invoke a sense
of celebration of the metaphysical ways of the !Xo and their traditions. This, however, is not
without contradiction, as the film itself provides an unnatural vantage point into their lives
from which Western metaphysical understandings of the world are rehashed through the
magic of technology.

3. MYTHOLOGIES AND SOCIETY

Myths are a part of human existence; they serve as epistemological markers inferred from
personal experiences of the world that are expressed collectively. Claude Levi-Strauss, an
influential anthropologist, argues that myths “express unconscious wishes which are
somehow inconsistent with conscious experience” (in Cook & Bernink, 1999:328), the use of
the word “inconsistent” is favored over the common belief of myths being false. Falseness is
an idea invoked from the modernist paradigm, in which empiricalism is favored as a source
of meaning over the symbolic exchange of meaning found in myths. However, myths contain
their own degree of ‘truth’ embedded in the cultural used to express them. These myths find
truth in their ability to provide people with a view of the world and a set of values that can be
as important as any scientifically verifiable fact. This interpretative model of myth is the
source of cultural understanding as well as the core of many religious held beliefs about
‘being-in-the-world’ and our transcendental capacity to connect to that which can not be
perceived or measured. The collective understanding of this metaphysical presence in the
world is expressed, rather than recorded, in symbolic systems that are as arbitrarily link to the
physical world as the myths transported within them.

3.1. Myth: Characteristics and Function

According to Rollo May, a contemporary existential psychologist and theorist, myths are the
vehicle for meaning and they serve a need of “making sense in senseless world” (in
Hergenhahn, 2005:531). In this vein myths have four primary functions: (1) they provide a
sense of identity, (2) a sense of community, (3) they support moral values, and (4) provide a
means of dealing with the mysteries of creation (ibid). These are functions that cannot be
understood in terms of Western empiricalism and rationale; instead myths are humankind’s
engagement with one another on a symbolic level that functions as a means of establishing a
sense of past, present and future. May comments on this in his paper The Cry for Myth (in
Hergenhahn, 2005:532):

We awake after a sleep of many centuries to find ourselves in a new and

irrefutable sense of myth of humankind. We find ourselves in a new world
community; we cannot destroy the parts without destroying the whole…
Perhaps it will again be possible to study man scientifically and still see him as
whole.

May poetically highlights the progression of man as a social being, defined not by the
understanding of deconstructed fragments of being, but instead as man in his totality and
wholeness. Myths form part of our collective consciousness (to use Jung’s term; Hergenhahn,
2005: 511) that cannot be reduced to pre-modern tenets of human existence, progression, in
this sense, would deny the process of becoming.
Percy Cohen identifies five characteristics of myths as they pretain to their historical
functions and position within society: a myth is a narrative of events; the narrative has a
sacred quality; the sacred communication is made in symbolic form; at least some of the
events and objects which occur in the myth neither occur nor exist in the world other than
that of myth itself; and the narrative refers in dramatic form to origins or transformations
(Cohen, 1969:1). The medium through which myths are conveyed takes the form of
narrative; this story structure involves characters, settings, themes, morals, and traditional
ways of understanding the world.

The ‘sacred’ nature of these stories lies in their poetic form through which a nexus is created
that merges past, present and future. This can only be achieved though symbolic interaction,
a process that places its emphasis not on the boundaries of the symbolic form (e.g. language,
paintings, images, etc.) but in the thematic triggers that seeks to probe the collective
unconscious of the cultural. Cohen highlights an interesting issue for contemporary society in
his fourth characteristic. The meaning of myth lies not in the uses of objects and events that
occur in myths, instead Cohen isolates meaning within the discourse of the myth. In this vein,
the discourse functions as a means that naturalises the myth in its own form, this creates a
distinction between the meaning inferred from myths and their longevity as mythical and
magical stories of the past. This is interesting because the metaphysical referent, if such a
term can be used, of myths is achieved through interpretation, an interpretation that is, as
Nichols (1981:238) suggest, culturally determined. Therefore the mode of expression is only
significant to the extent that such a referent can be expressed in terms of the culturally
significant meaning attached to the series of images depicted on screen.

4. DOCUMENTARY DISCOURSE

John Grierson, a British filmmaker and producer, describes documentary as the “creative
treatment of actuality” (Grierson in Plantinga, 1997:10), this because film, by nature,
attempts to ‘re-present’ events within the conventions of the medium. In this vein
documentaries have been classified as “non-fiction”, however this doesn’t fully acknowledge
the abstraction and organizing of filmic materials within a visual text. This classification
undermines presents of a narrative within non-fiction, “narrative should not be seen as
exclusively fictional but instead should be merely contrasted to other (non-narrative) ways of
assembling and understanding data” (Branigan in Plantinga, 1997:84). And as Plantinga
(1997:85) explains, the difference between fiction and non-fiction lies not in the filmic
discourse, but the “stance taken toward the world it projects”.

The notion of a “projected world” is useful is explaining the nature of visual image and its
relationship to the physical. This projected world is only produced within the medium of
film, a medium that incorporates its own means of production and discourse: “The discourse
is the means by which the projected world or story events are communicated; its principle
strategies, at the most abstract level, are selection, order, emphasis, and voice” (Plantinga,
1997:85). This description explains that the world of film involves an intervention by the
filmmaker in some way or another, and it is this intervention, or engagement, that lends film
to be regarded as a cultural product.

The distinction between fiction films and documentary has proven to be problematic.
Although the documentary film is based on facts and actualities, the nature of film does,
however, place limitations on objectivity and truth. The labeling of documentary as ‘non-
fiction’ may be misleading in this sense because it leads us to discount documentaries fictive
elements. Rosen (in Renov, 1993:3) states that the terrain of fiction and documentary inhabit
one another. Consider how we percived a documentary film, the parameters of documentary
are clearly identified as containing a clear beginning, middle, and an end. This classic
structure presupposes some form of narrative structure, and it is this narravity that exists in
documentary that serves as a means to represent events in such a manner as to formulate a
particular portrayal of events.

Consider that in fiction films characters are presented to the viewer with certain attitudes,
beliefs, opinions, and behaviors. The viewer internalizes these character dimensions to be
naturalized within the films narrative and discourse. Although the viewer is aware that the
events portrayed are, in fact, staged, there is a degree of suspension of disbelief on the part of
the spectator (this is why viewers have emotional reactions to the events on screen). The
reason for this is that film offers a perspective on the world that is naturalized through the
very encapsulated nature of the information on screen. Any inferences made outside what is
depicted is made solely by the spectator. This is because film involves the manipulation of
symbols and signs within the conventions of film, and the meaning attached to these symbols
is culturally determined and embedded with the individual belonging to a specfic culture.

Documentary films have specific expectations around the validity of truth in documentary
films because they present themselves as factually based, or epistemically sound. It is
important to remember that although documentary films are based on ‘truths’, these truths
still need to be portrayed thought the medium of film. The reading of truth is also culturally
embedded as documentary films call upon the “regime of truth” specific to culture (Hall,
1997:49). In this vein, the ontological agency of film does not allow for the seamless
conversion of facts-to-film. Instead what films offers is a visual array of images and sound
that are received by the viewer, and it this reception that is culturally determined.

4.1. Myth and Discourse

The constructive nature of documentary discourse, as well as its narrative structure, positions
it in the realm of myth. The projected world is a symbolic construction design to promote an
argument about the nature of the events it depicts (Plantinga, 1997:85). If we consider film as
contemporary medium through which meaning may be inferred, then the cinematic
techniques implimented must serve to reveal this meaning. Although the ‘truthfulness’ of
documentary is heighly contested, like myths, the visuality of the medium is secondary to the
“knowingness”3 embedded with the discourse of the film. Like myths, documentary film
make use of a transcendental sign system that creates a disavowal of perception in exchange
for metaphysical meaning. This because the images presented are, in fact, absent as they only
exist within the cinematic apparatus and are not localised in reality.

Documentary films are mythological because of their ability to infer meaning through a
symbolic system that draws on the metaphysical connections made by the spectator. These
connections are triggered by the image, however, knoweldge and meaning are not inherent in
the representation. Instead, meaning is a negotiation between the medium, as a symbolic
system, the image, and the spectator. This triad draws on our understanding and willingness
to establish collective meaning through the stories and symbols utilised in film.
3
Refering to the epistemic process operating in film as a films discourse creates a ‘naturalised’ ontology from
which meaning and knowledge may be inferred.
Micheal Renov states that one of the tendencies of documentary is to express (Renov,
1993:32), this expression is fundamentally a mythical process because it implies a
transformational process that encourages the use of the medium as a expressive tool, rather
than one of scientific inscription. The poetic qualities of a documentary film thus act as a
trigger to draw attention to the meaning create by the image, and the belief of the image itself
is truthful to the extent that the image functions as a means of expression by the filmmaker.
Authenticity, in this sense, is not an objective and universal understanding of the phyiscal but
instead a collective process though which fragments of subjective experiences are continually
shared and re-created. This cyclic nature of meaning is a tenet of both myth and the
documentary, insofar as to suggest that film is the contemporary myth-making machine, the
‘truthfulness’ of which, is only secondary to the meaning impose by the image.

4.2. The Paradox of Enthographic Documentary

When we consider documentary to be a ‘myth-making machine’ the ethnographic film
become somewhat problematic in terms of the duality of representation at play. Bill Nichols,
one of the hallmark documentary theorists, states that ethnographic films “attempt to explain
or describe some aspect of another culture to memebers of the filmmaker’s own culture”
(Nichols, 1981: 238). When we consider that a culture’s understanding of the world, as well
as their sense of identity, is embedded within their mythological transference of meaning,
then the idea of the image, created by a member of another culture, becomes problematic.
This is because the process of representation at play in film is subject to the symbolic
conversion of the physical, as well as the interplay between absence and presence. If then we
say that ethnographic film is a product of modernism and Western empiricalism, then the
process through which the ethnographic film seeks to “explain or describe” cultural
differences must be seen to present a fallacy embedded in the very cultural differences (i.e.
norms, beliefs, world-view, practices, etc.) between the filmmaker and the subject.

If the ethnographic filmmaker is to consider a particular culture worth ‘documenting’, then

the level of difference must be great enough to encourage such a decision. And because this
usually translates into a difference of perceptions regarding the nature of reality, then
contradiction of documenting a group for their difference becomes redundant to a degree.
This is because the nature of the cinematic image does not allow for cross-cultural psycho-
social inferences, accuring as a direct result of the meaning inferred from the symbolic
systems used by a particular culture, instead the images acts as merely a tool of capturing
otherness rather than understanding it.

This goes beyond mere authenticity because the focus of Western ethnographic films is to
record a cultural that is of significant difference, rather than close proximity to that of the
filmmaker (Renov, 1993:21). This translates into a division based upon development and
Western progression. The metaphysical orientation and beliefs of the cultures being film must
then be understood through the lens of modernism, hence the ethnogrpahic film presents a
myth within a myth due to contradiction between what is culturally represented and they
actual signified, and it is this inter-textuality of myth formation that creates a paradox
between what is shown and experienced by the spectator and the actual myth upheld by the
culture in question.

4.3.Otherness, Power, and the Enthographic Discourse

Hansen, Needham and Nichols (1991) make a claim for the thematic comparison between
ethnographic film and pornography. The authors attempt to draw a simalarity between object-
subject relationship presented in ethnographic film and subsequent power ascribed to viewer
when bearing witness to the spectatacle of ethnographic film. This power is established
though a pleasure principle that is embedded in the voyeristic and fetishistic nature of film
(Nichols et al, 1991).

In ethnographic films power accurs as a result of others’ “looked-at-ness” produced as a

result of the gaze produced by the camera. The subjects of enthnographic films are in fact the
“objects of desire and spectacle” (Hansen et al, 1991:207). The power of documentary
discourse is derived from the representation of the other in such a manner as to invoke a
sense of mastery over the image. Although this is already prescribed in the nature of the
image itself, it is primarlily impacted on by filmmaker’s own societial myths of power and
pleasure. This may involve stereotyping as a means of simultaneously creating otherness and
sameness. The ‘objects’ of ethnographic film are established as “other” through their visual
representation, whilst at the same time a sense of enduring similaritiy is created in the
othering process. The result is the pleasure of cultural knowingness, this occurs primary
through cinematic identification with the camera but also though the metaphorical role of the
image in simplifying inter-cultural differences (Hansen, 1991:204).

5. BUSHMEN AND THE PHOTOGRPAHIC INTERVENTION

The concerns of the ethnographic film have largely been to record, reveal, and express the
ways of another culture (Renov, 1993:21). Ethnographers have long been interested in the
culture of Bushman as the primitive ‘other’. However the results have produced a discourse
of the Bushman through the eyes of colonialism and the Western desire for cultural
knowledge. As Gordon (In Landu & Kaspin, 2002: 214) states: “The camera has provided a
meeting place for science and fantasy, if only because the Western empirical tradition
assumes that visualizing a society is synonymous for understanding it”. This epistemological
tenacity embedded in the image has served as the premise from which Western cultural
understanding originates.

5.1. The Colonial Image and the Bushman

Issues of authenticity and objectivity have long hindered the ‘capturing’ the image of the
Bushman, since the invention of the stereoscopic picture during the 1860’s photographers
found that colonial intervention was to be an influential factor in documenting these pre-
modern natives. In 1909 Rudolf Poch made the first film on the Bushman, he found that “the
physical nature of the Bushman was absolutely different from that of all low races he had
previously seen” (Poch in Gordon, 2002:215). From Poch’s statement we can already see the
value judgment that modern filmmakers make that underpin their cultural investigations. A
perception that undoubtly affects the documentation of the Bushman and their representation
through visual media.

The result of such Western intervention is an image that serves to create a discourse of the
Bushman that is something other than the Bushman themselves, a pseudo-image of
stereotyping and colonial commodification4. The Bushman’s identity has become reduce to

4
The commodification of culture refers to the process through which the subject of ethnographic film becomes,
as a result of mass media, an object. This objectification is a direct result of the signifying practices embedded
with film as they infer from the signified to create a representation of the subject.
the series of images and films that have sought to capture these “native primitives” thought
modernist paradigms of detractive comparison. This comparison results from “othering” the
Bushman in such as way as to create a superiority continuum between the filmmakers and
their subjects. It is this difference that is the reason that the Bushman have become an
interesting culture to Western ethnographers, and it is improtant because difference “because
it is essential to meaning” (Hall, 1997: 234). In this vein the image of the Bushman serves as
a tool of Western self-fulfilling prophecy, resulting in a stream of stereotypical images that
fail to capture the essence of these “tribes” in their totality. Bester and Buntman (1999:50)
argue that it is this simplification of the Bushman’s identity, constructed by colonial “others”,
that has resulted in the image reducing individuals and communities to easily consumable
commodities.

5.2. The Myth of the Bushman

To commodify the Bushman through filmic and photographic intervention is to deny the very
metaphysical orientation of these communities that spurred ethnographic interest in the first
place. The mysticism of these pre-modern communities has resulted in a colonial gaze that
places the Bushman at the center of the spectacle. The Bushman “hunt” has become one of
the primary source of “entertainment-driven archetypes pivotal to the uninterrupted lifestyle
and survival of the people called the ‘Bushman’” (Bester & Buntman, 1999:52). This typifies
the need of the Western image to create its own mythology of the Bushman through
mythologising the symbols of the Bushman (bare-breastedness, the wearing of skins, a
“click” language, etc.) and the visual codes that authorise this mythologisation (silhouettes at
sunset, exaggerated body profiles, an emphasis on “natural” locations, distorted cinematic
landscapes), (Bester & Buntman, 1999, 53). Through this mythologising process the
Bushman’s own sense of cultural identity and mythology is comprimised because the
depiction of their culture is subject to the judgment imposed on them by the tools and
apparatus of the modern Western mindset. Bester and Buntman (1999:57-58) comment on
this myth as follows:

[The] photographic tradition, in popular, scientific, and academic

discourses, has largely been informed and overshadowed by a myth of the
“Bushman” as a unified, pre-colonial culture of “otherness,” frozen in an
ethnographic presents…While the convergence of documentary and
 aesthetic sensibility is not a problem in itself, the use of an aesthetic
sensibility that merely entrenches Bushman(ia) is problematic.

What Bester and Buntman indicate is that the intention of ethnographic documentation is
flawed, not in its theoretical purpose but in the nature of the image as it seeks to create a
projected world in which the Bushman are presented. Therefore, the discourse of
documentary presupposes a unequal power relations that creates a textual distance between
the photographer and what is being photographed. In this vein the image of Bushman is
subjectived to the signifying practices of the image of the culture in control of the production
of the image.

6. BUSHMAN CANNED HUNTING: THE MYTH OF THE METAPHYSICAL

The Great Dance attempts to resolve the paradox of ethnographic film by utlising various
cinematic techniques designed to reduce the void between cultures. The bushman are
presented as a tribal society that recognise the world as a system of transformation that is
interconnected to their own understanding of the nature and the universe. The emphasis on
the metaphysical nature of being is considered, to an extent, to be lost by modern societies
and their pragmatic values and sense of identity. In this vein, the film acts as a mythical
machine through which pre-modern being-in-the-world notions are expressed within the
narrative.
As mentioned, narratives are the channel through which myths come to be expressed and
shared. The Great Dance presents a story of the !Xo Bushman and their ability to transend
humanity in order to connected to the world in which they find themselves.

6.1. The myth of Transformation

The film presents the notion that the Bushman are able to understand the natural world to
such a degree that they are inseperable from the enviournment they inhabit. This is achieved
cinematically by imitating the hunter’s metonymic process of becoming the animal they hunt.
During the film the hunters are frequently juxtapositioned with shot of animals, this is paired
with opitical effects that distort colour and perspective. The result is a clear sense that these
Bushman undergo a transformation of spirit, whereby the distinction between animal and
Bushman is blurred, in doing so the Bushman are seen to have a deep metaphysical
understanding and connection to their world. Clelland-Stoke (in Tomaselli & Mclennan-
Dodd, 2004:235) comments on this technique in the film:

Whereas a conventional continuity sequence may involve a shot of someone

running, followed by a shot of her footprints that the audience would assume were
hers by virtue of the juxtapositioning of the two shots, The Great Dance plays off
these conventions and correlating audience assumptions to suggest that man and
animal are the same. For example… A shot of a hunter drinking from the waterhole
is followed by a shot of an animal’s reflection in the water.

This myth of transformation in the !Xo culture serves as a long standing sense of cultural
identity, through which a sense of peace and oneness with nature. The depiction of this myth
is somewhat subversive due to the films attempt to capture this culture phenomena, leading
some authors to suggest that the film dehumanises the Bushman because there is not
distinction between the !Xo and the animals they hunt (Tomaselli & Mclennan-Dodd in van
Eeden & du Preez, 2004:236). This highlights the paradox of ethnogrpahic film as it fails to
convey the metaphysical beliefs of a culture, instead ethnographic film can only make use of
the films symbolic system in conveying such a belief. This results in an interpretation that
represents the Bushman as primitive savages that lack the progressive knowledge achieved
through modernism. This may be a rather cynical view of the Bushman’s image, but it serves
as a example of how cultural myths cannot be translated through film to reproduce the same
cultural experience as that of the ethnographic subject.

Conversely, the lack of clear distinction between man and animal can be seen as a
universalising agent of the Bushman myth. Rather then stressing the de-humanising of the
Bushman, it is this one-ness with the world that highlights the modernism removal from a
seemingly premodern mindset (hence the need to document the Bushman’s culture as
something other than that of the filmmaker), a factor that is lost in the ethnographic film by
its mere form and disavowal from the mythology of such cultures.

6.2. Hunting the Hunter

Just as the !Xo Bushman undergo a mythical transformation of form in the films narrative, so
does the film’s commentary on the Bushman’s placement in the contemporary world. The
film progressively depicts the Bushman as becoming more and more influenced and affected
by modernity. As Tomaselli & Mclennan-Dodd (in Eeden & du Preez, 2004:232) state: “The
Great Dance interfaces them [the !Xo Bushman] in a direct engagement with modernity”. In
doing so the film presents a transformation of the Bushman from being natural entities in this
surreal landscape to having their hunting rights revoked by the government. This
transformation of the Bushman is presented as ‘unnnatural’ in this sense as the film sets up
the Bushman as being one with his environment throughout the film.

Throughout the film the filmmakers attempt to create a ‘man as animal’ ideal, as discussed
above. This places the Bushman as transcendental beings that are not bound by form. At one
point in the film the Bushman’s hunt is interrupted by the border of their hunting land from
government property. The viewer is shown a Antelope running against the gate trying to
break through, there is no juxtapositioned shot of the Bushman doing the same (as with the
waterhole), instead such a comparison is implied as the film makes use of the Bushman-
animal indexical relationship already firmly established. At this point in the film the spectator
is suddenly shaken out of the myth of natural purity and instead we are led to consider the
implications of such a barrier in terms of the viewer’s relation to the Bushman.
If we consider the camera as a means of capturing a subject, as the Bushan appear as
incomplete abstractions of their physical form, then surely the knowledge that what is
captured is done so under a restrictive circumstances, reducing it to the equivilent of ‘canned
bushman hunting’. This strongly reminds us that the postion of power that the spectator holds
is culturally determined, and the knoweldge of the Bushman’s culture we unquestionably
absorb is more a construction that we realise. It is this demythologising, achieved as a results
of exposing the Bushmans myth of transformation of form through film, that could promote
such remarks regarding the Bushman as an animal. It is Western modernism that has brought
about this debunking of Bushman myth, because the Bushman are very much interested in
retaining cultural traditions. The narrator goes to state that “new ways are not always better
ways”, this is in opposition to the modernist belief and faith in the new. In this vein the
resultant image, in which the Bushman’s own metaphysical beliefs are represented, triggers a
sense of nostalgia for the Western Spectator, as we have been seemingly removed from our
own metaphysical understandings of the world.

By presenting the viewer with an enclosed wilderness (as the Bushman are in fact inhabiting
a clearly marked and divided terrain), the power of the discourse in promoting a sense of
otherness is enhanced. This is because the process of “othering” involves the recognition of
social difference as well as physical difference. The image presented on screen provides the
iconic sense of difference (Iconic is the sense that the image draws attention to that which is
not there). This results in the filmmaker presenting the Bushman in a position of
powerlessness cause by a lack of cultural tenacity and landloss in the face of modernity; a
perception brought about by a physical separation between ‘them’ and ‘us’ cause by
ethnographic viewing practices. We feel powerful as we chase the Bushman through the
bushveld as they conduct their own hunt, we are the omnipresent colonialists closing in on
them, exposing, revealing, and demythologising their way of life.

7. CONCLUSION

The ethnographic film has long been concerned with scientific validity of the culture being
documented. These concerns stem from the constructivistic nature of film and the level of
require intervention/engagement on the part of the filmmaker. The result is a representation
of culture that is protrayed through the eyes of filmmaker’s culture. The idea that we come to
understand another’s culture through our own understanding of the world is problematic.
This is because the process of understanding the ‘other’ is hindered by the signifying
practices embedded in images.

The Great Dance is an interesting ethnographic film becuause it attempts to interpret and
transform the cultural myths and beliefs of the !Xo Bushman into a visual spectatcle. This
visual spectatcle is design to create a point of indentification for Western audiences in order
to promote the understanding of the Bushman’s metaphysical ontology. However it is
through this very process that the cultural integrity of the Bushman is simplified in order to
create a complete sense of understanding and meaning with Western Audiences.
The Film also comments on the impact of modernity on the Bushman’s own metaphysical
beliefs. In doing so the film creates a sense of nostalgia for the Western spectator, an effect
achieve by the very processes the filmmaker uses to convert the Bushman’s metaphysical
beliefs into a visual array of images. This presents a paradox of sorts, our own rehashed
metaphysical sympathies are trigger, not by the Bushman’s own way of life, but instead by
the films ability to convert this lost sense of spirituality into a modern form (i.e. film). Thus,
the Bushman is commodified in this sense because the ethnographic intent of the film
revolves around the Bushman as the object, rather than the subject of cultural inquiry.
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