Return of The Gaze AMAD

Society for Cinema & Media Studies
Visual Riposte: Looking Back at the Return of the Gaze as Postcolonial Theory's Gift to
Film Studies
Author(s): Paula Amad
Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Spring 2013), pp. 49-74
Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media
Studies
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43653111
Accessed: 25-05-2019 08:10 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43653111?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
University of Texas Press, Society for Cinema & Media Studies are collaborating with
JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cinema Journal
This content downloaded from 46.69.213.56 on Sat, 25 May 2019 08:10:21 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
(33S&
Visual Riposte: Looking Back at the

Return of the Gaze as Postcolonial
Theory's Gift to Film Studies
by Paula Amad
Abstract: This article examines the theoretical and historical background of the return-
of-the-gaze phenomenon in film studies and in film practice, especially within the ar-
ticulation between postcolonial and visual studies, and discusses its limitations and
potentialities through a case study of films made by Father Francis Aupiais in Benin in
1929-1930.
sion of racial and, more specifically, colonial Others occurred in 1965 when
the so-called father of African cinema, Ousmane Sembène, charged Jean
One sion the Rouch,Rouch,of so-calhis counterpart
led of the iracin French
al hisethnographi
most counterpart
c film, wifather
th the foland,lowiinfamous
g more of African specifically, in indictments French cinema, colonial ethnographic of Ousmane cinema's Others role film, Sembène, occurred in with the visual in the charged 1965 following oppres- when Jean
crime: "Tu nous regardes comme des insectes" ("You look at us as though we were
insects").1 In making this accusation, Sembène pinned Rouch down as the direct
inheritor of a visual pathology whose cinematic conception dates back to the cross
between science and spectacle that characterized the chronophotographic and
cinematographic encounters with French colonial Others made by figures like
Félix-Louis Regnault and the Lumière brothers. It is not difficult to find examples
from their work in which colonized bodies were indeed filmed as entomological
or zoological specimens. The resemblance appears in the formal similarities be-
tween Regnault's 1 895 studies of West Africans walking in decontextualized pro-
file against a white backdrop (staged at the Paris Exposition Coloniale de l'Afrique
Occidentale) and Etienne -Jules Marey's contemporaneous slow-motion studies of
similarly abstracted insect movement, and it reappears in the Lumière film En-
<2
fants annamites ramassent des sapeques devant la pagode des dames (1900), in which French
ol
ro
èo
1 See Albert Cervoni, "Une confrontation historique en 1965 entre Jean Rouch et Sembène Ousmane: 'Tu nous
ai
>
'c regardes comme des insectes,'" CinémAction 17 (1982): 77-78. Ail translations from the French are by the
=>
author unless otherwise noted.
<i>
-C
Jr
m Paula Amad is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of
o
CM Iowa. She is the author of Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planète
© (Columbia Univemty Press, 2010).
www.cmstudies.org 52 ! No. 3 I Spring 2013 49
Cinema Journal 52 ! No. 3 i Spring 2013
colonial women scatter coins to children in Indochina as though they were feeding rice
2
to pigeons.
In addition to implicating the history of colonial structures of seeing, Sembène's
accusation reminds us that although postcolonial studies has been dominated by a
literary and linguistic bias (perhaps more noticeable in the Anglophone rather than
the more recent Francophone tradition), the field has also had a profound and con-
tested impact on the broader study of visual culture. Central to the legacy of postco-
lonialism and postcolonial studies in the disciplines focused on visual culture - from
film studies and visual anthropology to art history - has been a reinvestigation of the
role of a number of visual technologies (e.g., photography, postcards, advertisements,
cinema) and sites (e.g., world's fairs, zoos, natural history museums, colonial exposi-
tions) that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contributed to, reflected, or
refracted the specular antagonism underpinning diverse colonial encounters. Writing
in 1973, the literary critic Jacques Leenhardt (in a review of Alain Robbe-Grillet's co-
lonial novel La jalousie) provided a condensed rendition of the power relations embed-
ded in this antagonism when he argued that the colonial order was underpinned by
the "morbid geometrism" of "the right to look without being looked at."3 Two years
later, in Discipline and Punish , Michel Foucault would provide what has become for the
domain of visual studies one of the most influential, if also keenly debated, theories
of this system of viewing relations (applied to the carcerai domain yet subsequently
generalized to the visual regimes of modernity and modern media). At basis a visual
analysis, Foucault read the architectural panopticon as a "machine for dissociating
the see /being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring [of its structure where the prisoners
reside], one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower [reserved for
the watchman], one sees everything without ever being seen."4 Panoptic surveillance
came to stand for a form of looking without being looked at in which "the codified
power to punish turns into a disciplinary power to observe."5 Once literally applied to
the discursive networks of actual visual machines such as photography and film, the
panoptic model of disciplinary vision became debatable, in part because of the blind
spot that troubles the rigid spatial binarism of Foucault's arguably unidirectional the-
ory of vision-as-power.6 So what exactly occurs in the shadows of this critical blind
2 On Regnault, see Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1996), 21-73; for a fascinating reading of the Lumières' Enfants annamites, see Barbara
Creed and Jeanette Hoorn, "Memory and History: Early Film, Colonialism, and the French Civilizing Mission in Indo-
china," French History and Civilization A (2011): 223-236.
3 Jacques Leenhardt, quoted in Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French
Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 76.
4 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975,- Vintage Books, 1995),
202.
5 Ibid., 187, 224.
6 For one among many critiques of the Foucauldian model of visual panopticism, see Paul S. Landau, "Empires of the
Visual: Photography and Colonial Administration in Africa," in Images and Empires: Visualityin Colonial and Postco-
lonial Africa, ed. Paul S. Landau and Deborah D. Kaspin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 141-171.
50
Cinema Journal 52 I No. 3 ! Spring 2013
spot? Ironically, Foucault himself had demonstrated it all too well in his earlier analy-
sis of the "pure reciprocity" of gazes in Velasquez's painting Las meninas in The Order
of Things in which "subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles
to infinity."7 In other words, in the shadow of the blind spot cast by his later more
unidirectional model of power, the possibility still exists for the dissociated "see/being
seen dyad" to begin reassociating, resulting in the supposedly unseeing, surveyed ob-
ject morphing into subjectivity by returning the purportedly invisible gaze of the all-
seeing and controlling surveillant eye. The "return of the gaze" provides a condensed
phrase for the potential activity occurring once the relational and unstable dynamics
of that dyad are reactivated.
In the past two decades, discussions about the disciplinary role of the visual and
the question of the returned gaze within colonial regimes have been particularly in-
fluenced by new research on early cinema. The crossroads of the multifaceted, inter-
cultural, and transnational history of returned gazes and the study of representations
of race in early cinema have become critically significant for several reasons. First,
nonfiction films (e.g., travelogues, actualities, quasi-ethnographic films, scientific films,
promotionals), which were the dominant form of cinema before 1903, are undeniably
shackled by direct and indirect evidence of colonial and racist ideology. Second, there
is a radical dissimilarity of spectator-screen relations between these early nonfiction
films and the type of films most suitable to an invisible-eye model of spectatorship:
classical Hollywood narratives. It is now widely accepted that the gaze (of the specta-
tor, camera, and filmed subjects) operates differently in films whose spectatorial ad-
dress is less determined by the intratextual mechanisms of identification associated
with classical Hollywood representation than by a diffuse set of extratextual refer-
ences taking us into the realm of fairgrounds, world expositions, cartoons, and (of
central importance for an understanding of the precinematic precursors to the return
of the gaze) photographs. But perhaps the most important reason that early nonfic-
tion film has attracted so much discussion regarding the return of the gaze is the most
obvious: such films abound with evidence of the camera being acknowledged by the
subjects filmed. As Tom Gunning has argued, early nonfiction films are commonly
"marked by the returned look of the people within the film, the gaze directed out
at camera and viewer which transfixes the act of looking as central" to the descrip-
tive, exhibitionist tendencies of early cinematic representation.8 While direct address
became increasingly prohibited in fiction films during the 1910s, it continued as a
dominant stylistic feature of newsreels and documentary shorts at least until the early
1930s. Even its outright rejection by radical documentarians of the 1920s - heard for
example in Dziga Vertov's call to capture "life unawares" or Jean Vigo's directive for
a cinema in which "conscious behavior cannot be tolerated, [and] the character must
7 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1966; London: Routledge, 1974), 3-16, 4-5.
8 Tom Gunning, "Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the 'View' Aesthetic," in Uncharted Territory: Essays
on Early Nonfiction Film, ed. Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk (Amsterdam: Netherlands Filmmusueum, 1997), 18.
51
Cinema Journal 52 ! No. 3 I Spring 2013
be surprised by the camera" - indicates how pervasive and normative the look at the
camera had become in nonfiction film during this period.9
What is of particular interest to me here is the manner in which studies attentive to
looks at the camera often repeat a trope of what I call "visual riposte," which extends
beyond formal or stylistic analysis to embody the authors' ethical intent to return, or
at least to interrogate, the gaze. I began with Sembène's legendary performance of this
trope, because all the examples I invoke here exist in the shadow of that monumental
put-down. In what follows, I offer some reflections upon the origins, limits, and pos-
sibilities of this hermeneutic habit of visual riposte as it pertains to the study of early
documentary films and in particular that subset characterized by a cross-cultural relay
of gazes. I historicize the intellectual and political stakes at play in this hermeneutic by
tracing it back, in part, to the influence of early postcolonial theory on Film Studies,
whose unfinished implications I then bring to bear upon a body of French colonial
films. Ultimately, I claim that the returned gaze is a privileged figure of representa-
tional disruption whose deployment is overdue for sustained critical reconsideration,
and I ultimately suggest that, for all its drawbacks, the hermeneutic should not be
abandoned but rather needs to be reformed through a more deeply contextualized and
less deterministic mobilization.
This article's reconsideration of the beginning of postcolonial studies is addition-

ally motivated by diverse proclamations of that discourse's end, as seen, for example,
in PMLA* s 2007 roundtable "The End of Postcolonial Theory?"10 In that particular
discussion, the debate regrettably repeated the reductive criticisms that have plagued
postcolonial theory since its beginnings in the late 1970s, namely that it fails to rec-
ognize and combat continuing imperialisms, to distinguish between historically and
nationally distinct colonialisms, to legitimize its right to protest once safely ensconced
in the academy, and to do justice to the recently acquired subjecthood of decolonized
peoples by opting for the poststructuralist eradication of the subject.11 If one were
to follow the largely pessimistic terms of that debate in which theory was made to
assume the guise of history's blindfold, it would be tempting to read the hermeneu-
tic of the returned gaze as postcolonial theory's gift to film studies - an interpretive
sleight of hand which (by magically restoring sight to the previously only seen objects
of the Western imperial eye) allowed visual studies scholars to elide the historical and
contemporary oppression of neo-colonizing regimes of vision. The analogy of the
gift interests me here because of the unspoken reciprocal exchange that it demands.
In other words, what Film Studies owes or must return to postcolonial studies is, to
my mind, still to be satisfactorily negotiated. Thus, a secondary interest here is to ask,
9 Dziga Vertov, "The Birth of Kino-Eye" (1924), in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, trans. Kevin O'Brien
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 41; Jean Vigo, "Towards a Social Cinema" (1930), in French Film
Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, Volume II: 1929-1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1988), 63. For a revisionist reading that describes Vertov's preference for the hidden camera as
"the very negation of the gaze into the camera," and ultimately aligns it with the repressive associations of a police
aesthetics, see Cristina Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 85-88.
10 "The End of Postcolonial Theory?" PMLA (May 2007): 633-651.

11 Ibid., 633-634.
52
Cinema Journal 52 i No. 3 í Spring 2013
what can film studies still do for our understanding of the colonial nexus, beyond
reconfirming the camera's overgeneralized complicity in the subjugation of racial
others? Attempting to answer that question, I investigate a unique body of films made
in Dahomey (present-day Benin) between 1929 and 1930 by the Catholic missionary
Father Francis Aupiais.
Staring Down the Present. As should already be apparent, I employ the phrase "re-
turn of the gaze" in a twofold manner. It refers to evidence of the look at the camera
(and by implication the camera operator and film spectator) by filmed subjects, and
more generally it connotes the now-common interpretation of that look as a refusal
of the assumed monolithic, unidirectionality of the West's technologically mediated
structures of looking at cultural Others. There is therefore a difference in these two
deployments of the term, the first referring more to the neutral evidence of subjects
looking at the camera, and the second focusing on the now-conventional politicized
interpretation of that look as a sort of unmediated and quasi-intentional address to
the spectator. A specific photo-cinematic translation of a broader postcolonial im-
perative to decenter, decolonize, and provincialize any number of European imperial
constructs (present as early as the now-canonical The Empire Writes Back ), the return-
of-the-gaze interpretive move is aimed at recovering resistance or at least a trace of
agency for the nameless masses trapped like insects within modernity's visual archive.12
Read less sympathetically, as suggested earlier, it might be argued that analyses depen-
dent on the return of the gaze use it as leverage with which to historically unburden
the medium of film of its entomologizing and zoologizing legacy regarding the visual
representation of racial and colonial others.
The hermeneutic of visual riposte is usually aroused by unintended, momentary
evidence in the filmic text - when people look back at or toward the camera - that
purportedly has the effect of unbalancing cinema's dominant gaze, typically described
in antivisual critiques as a distanced, voyeuristic, clinical, controlling, invisible, Orien-
talizing, and dehumanizing deployment of vision. This is not to say, however, that the
meaning of these gazes is uniform. The diverse styles of direct address that we find
in early nonfiction films solicit multiple effects and interpretations, and they confirm
the profoundly ambivalent nature of this look.13 In an oppositional guise, often ac-
companied by temporal intensity (staring for a long period at the camera), spatial
evasion (running away from the camera), expressions of refusal (covering one's face
from the camera), or performances or enactments of a threat (shaking one's fist at the
camera), the returned gaze can be associated with subversion, defiance, or rebuke.
Among countless others, evidence of oppositional gazes appear in the African dancer-
performer gesturing mock threateningly toward the camera in the Lumières' Danse du
sabre (1897), or the Northern English steelworker giving an "up yours" gesture to the
12 See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (New York: Routledge, 1989).
13 For important treatments of diverse styles and meanings of looks at the camera in early nonfiction films and later
narrative cinema, see, respectively, Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-
Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 195-203; Marc Vernet, "The Look at the
Camera," trans. Dana Polan, Cinema Journal 28, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 48-63, 53-56.
53
Cinema Journal 52 i No. 3 I Spring 2013
unwelcome cameraman in a 1901 film from the Mitchell and Kenyon collection.14
Opposition turns into negation in those examples in which filmed subjects protect
their identity by shielding themselves from the prying camera eye, as in the footage of
a woman covering her face with a handbag while being filmed in a Paris soup kitchen
in 1920 for Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planète (a nonfiction, photo-cinematographic
survey of early twentieth-century everyday life).15 In a less defensive guise, the look at
the camera can refer to the brief flourishes of the "cinema of attractions" mode, the
exhibitionist's "voilà" that acknowledged the audience's presence and, more gener-
ally, exemplified early cinema's preference for modes of showing over telling, exhi-
bitionism over voyeurism, and fourth-wall transgressions over diegetically absorptive
narration.16 Along these lines, looks at the camera can also signal a meeting or play,
between humans and between human and camera eye, in those countless instances
where filmed subjects salute the cameraman or mimic the handle cranking of the
camera. And in that early nonfiction genre known as local films (of which Mitchell and
Kenyon's films are perfect examples), the look at the camera can denote the potential
mirroring or self-recognition of subjects looking into the eyes of an audience likely to
include relatives or themselves.17 Instead of an antagonistic or exhibitionist gaze, here
we have a more intimate, narcissistic look.
Whether spontaneous or posed, warning or welcoming, brief or sustained, all of
these looks at the camera reanimate Foucault's dyad of "see /being seen" by displaying
the bidirectionality or reversibility of the camera's gaze. As a result, they pluralize the
spectator's points of entry into the film's spatial and temporal circuits. Their punctur-
ing of the film text goes some way toward explaining their appeal for audiences today.
For as diverse and contradictory as returned gazes can be, they share the capacity
to tug at the historically distanced spectator-critic. Indeed, these preserved looks at
the camera have in recent years acquired the force of an unavoidable Gorgon's gaze
that has the capacity to pin and put us in our place. Resembling a handwritten note
found amid the otherwise printed official record of history, visual traces of returned
gazes seem to stare down the present, demanding a historical showdown of sorts.
The highly affective response such looks arouse in the viewer-critic often resembles a
sort of shudder (of complicity, disgust, empathy, and /or pleasure) whose frisson runs
through diverse film studies appraisals. Wheeler Winston-Dixon attributes to the re-
turned gaze (which he also configures more generally as the look from the screen) "the
14 The Lumières' Ashanti films were shot in 1897 at the Exposition Nationale de l'Enfance in Lyon. On the Mitchell
and Kenyon films, see The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film, ed. Vanessa Toulmin, Simon
Popple, and Patrick Russell (London: British Film Institute, 2004).
15 On Kahn's archive, see Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planète
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
16 See Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde," Wide Angle 8, nos.
3-4 (1986): 63-70.
17 On the effect of the look at the camera in Mitchell and Kenyon's films, see Vanessa Toulmin and Martin Loiper-
dinger, "Is It You? Recognition, Representation, and Response in Relation to the Local Film," Film History 17, no.
1 (2005): 7-18.
54
Cinema Journal 52 I No. 3 I Spring 2013
power to transform our existences, to substantially change our view of our lives, and
of the world we inhabit."18 Scott MacDonald continues the claims regarding the re-
turned gaze's capacity to change the way we view the world in an analysis of Yervant
Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi's From the Pole to the Equator (1986), a classic work
of critically recycled colonial film in which he claims that "viewers not only see the
original imagery and its original intent (to testify to the superiority of white European
civilization) but see through the imagery to the human beings looking back at the cam-
era from within their own complex cultures."19 In an analysis of two experimental
compilation films from 1995 that, like Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's work, depend
on the reassemblage of fragments of early nonfiction film (Marlon Fuentes's Bontoc
Eulogy [1995], a fake documentary about the life of an Igorot performer at the 1904
St. Louis World's Fair, and Vincent Monikendam's Mother Dao, the Turtlelike [1995], a
compilation film based on Dutch archival colonial footage), Fatimah Tobing Rony
argues that both directors' reuse of returned gazes reverses the standard relation of
viewer and viewed, thereby leading us into the world of the colonized, where "their
gaze pricks us with their pain" in part because "we are being watched with the eyes of
those who are now dead."20 In yet another treatment of Mother Dao's deferred ethical,
political, and historical import, Laura Mulvey reads those instances in Monikendam's
montage where colonial workers look at the camera as "almost like moments of defi-
ance" against the camera's otherwise imperialist gaze.21
These and other similar readings of returned gazes, including my own, often seem
to be disproportionate to the ephemeral cause of the interpretation - sometimes a
brief redirection of a look, or the flicker of a glance.22 There is, after all, as Marc
Vernet and Charles Wolfe have argued, in two of the most insightful treatments of
the topic (in narrative film and documentary photography, respectively), something
very "impressionistic" and "imaginative" about the returned-gaze encounter, mark-
ing as it does an ephemeral cross-wiring of an actual look at the camera with a desired
gaze at the film spectator.23 Blink and you might miss the brief look responsible for
animating what were previously anonymous objects of the gaze into individualized
18 Wheeler Winston Dixon, It Looks at You: The Returned Gaze of Cinema (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1995), 7.
19 Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998), 275 (original emphasis).
20 Fatimah Tobing Rony, "The Quick and the Dead: Surrealism and the Found Ethnographic Footage Films of Bontoc
Eulogy and Mother Dao: The Turtlelike," Camera Obscura 52 (2003): 142-143, 150, 152.
21 Laura Mulvey, "Compilation Film as 'Deferred Action': Vincent Monnikendam's Mother Dao, the Turtle-like," in
Projected Shadows: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Representation of Loss in European Cinema, ed. Andrew
Sabbadini (London: Routledge, 2007), 117. For further claims regarding the powerful cross-class effect of figures
looking into the camera, see Tom Gunning, "Pictures of Crowd Splendor: The Mitchell and Kenyon Factory Gate
Films," in Toulmin, Popple, and Russell, The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon, 49-58.
22 This article was written in part as a questioning of my own interpretive habits. For examples of my use of the return-
gaze move, see Amad, Counter-Archive, 114-116, 282-290.
23 Marc Vernet, "The Look at the Camera," 49; Charles Wolfe, "Direct Address and the Social Documentary Photogra-
phy: 'Annie Mae Gudger' as Negative Subject," Wide Angle 9, no. 1 (1987): 60-70.
55
Cinema Journal 52 i No. 3 i Spring 2013
subjects wielding the right to look at and judge the traditionally invisible and invio-
lable spectator.
The magnified, and no doubt exaggerated, attention given to these brief encoun-
ters occurs, of course, in the face of the nearly complete absence from the historical
record of what those eyes looking at the camera saw. In other words, claims made
on behalf of returned gazes provide a textual compensation for the lack of photo-
graphic and cinematographic records made by peoples historically victimized by the
camera. These returned gazes thus become the fetishized trace of our contempo-
rary desire for - based on the historical lack of - the irrecoverable reverse shot of
the Other's view of the world. In this sense, the hermeneutic aims to supply a vi-
sual answer to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's question, "Can the subaltern speak?"24
By offering evidence, whether empirical or textual, of subaltern scopic agency, the
interpretation ultimately performs a form of visual ventriloquism: the colonized
puppet might appear to be alive, but the strings are still being pulled by Western
discourse's (now enlightened postcolonial) expectations and desires regarding the
subject of the Other.
Visual Riposte in Film Production, Distribution, and Museum Practice.

Beyond its uptake in academic film studies, there are multiple manifestations of the
return-of-the-gaze effect in the domain of film, video, and television production. A
popular performative translation of the phenomenon appears in the documentary
The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon (BBC /British Film Institute, 2004), in which the
ghosts of newly discovered early nonfiction film are reanimated by the tracking down
of descendants of filmed subjects who are then themselves recorded watching foot-
age of their dead relatives, often in intimate, domestic surroundings. In each case,
the descendants of subjects filmed in the original footage work as intermediary props
between the present and the past, conjoined in a face-to-face relation. Intended to
build the intersubjective bridge between our own gaze and the unknown, unfamiliar
Others of archival footage, the descendant-viewers insert a lifeline and blood connec-
tion between the televisual spectator and the cinematic record where previously there
had been only the anonymous gap of history. The maneuver depends on the bridging
of spaces and collapsing of times intended to simulate the affective aura of a returned
gaze.25 The result is that we become our ancestors' contemporaries. Where there
was once a shadow on the screen, there is now a full-bodied life; where there was
once a blank gaze at the camera, there is now - to take one particular instance from
24 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988), in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A
Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66-111.
25 The maneuver has also been used in recent American popular history TV series, including NBC's Who Do You Think
You Are?, in which celebrities like Brooke Shields or Spike Lee confront the returned, often metaphorical gazes of
their ancestors through written records, photographs, or archival footage, and PBS's Faces of America, in which
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates guides celebrities on similar journeys of discovery, which climax in moments
wherein descendants come virtually face-to-face with their ancestors through archival documents or photographs.
56
The Lost World of Mitchell and

Kenyon - a great-grandfather
seeming to address his great-
grandson (Mick Judge) and
his great-great-grandson (Fig-
ure 1).
An ethics and practice of
returned gazes has also been
incorporated, perhaps to
the point of overuse, into a
range of avant-garde found
footage compilations that
employ recontextualizing
and defamiliarizing modes to Figure 1. An intergenerational mobilization of the affective potential
reveal the colonial and aes-of the returned gaze is evident in the televisual documentary The
Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon, in which a great-grandfather
thetic unconscious lurking
seems to address his great-grandson (Mick Judge) and his great-
within film archives around
great-grandson (Episode 1; BBC/British Film Institute, 2004).
the globe. These postarchi-
val films (as I broadly call them, to distinguish them from archival films - such as
Albert Kahn's, which were actually made for archives) are engaged in a general strat-
egy of rerouting and redirecting the trapped gaze within the archive, thereby releas-
ing new looks into history and, at their most progressive, new forms of memory.
Often the most climactic moments within this broader strategy of visual recycling
occur when the ragpicker-filmmaker repurposes footage distinguished by direct ad-
dress. What was once perhaps a neutral and natural convention - the look at the
camera - becomes, in the hands of these filmmakers, denaturalized and transformed
into the more politically charged return of the gaze via the aesthetically fetishizing
processes of slow motion, magnification, colorization, optical printing, and sound
effects. Classic instances of this strategy (as evidenced by the academic attention men-
tioned above that these films have aroused) occur in Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's
From the Pole to the Equator , Marlon Fuentes's Bontoc Eulogy , Vincent Monnikendam's
Mother Dao, the Turtlelike , and perhaps most innovatively in the work of Bill Morri-
son (especially Who by Water [2006], which entirely comprises returned gazes) and
Gustav Deutsch (especially World Mirror Cinema [2005]). In the latter, a postarchivai
compilation structured around three journeys through modernity - each launched
by footage of a geographically separate cinema theater - effects of magnification,
slow motion, and sound accentuation are maximized when targeting an innocent
returned gaze, mobilizing its interpersonal, auralike quality as the formal device to
connect temporally and spatially disparate fragments of footage. In the first example
of this cinema-as-mirror effect, Deutsch's hypersurveillant gaze pinpoints an anony-
mous man at a Viennese intersection in 1912 who happens to look back at the cam-
era; Deutsch enlarges and slows down the footage to the point that the figure fills the
frame, and then he superimposes another physically matched figure upon him, in this
case a soldier, who in slow motion then poses from the front and behind with his rifle
57
(Figures 2-4). Activated by an inten-

sified, almost magical returned gaze,
the passerby and the soldier combine
in a doubling that gestures toward the
ominous wartime future of the once
carefree, anonymous passerby. The

happenstance of film's arbitrary street
scan and the fated destiny of unfolding
history ignite through the spark plug
of a returned gaze.26 Focusing even
more intently on the topic of war is
Agnès de Sacy and Laurent Veray's
postarchivai film L'Héroïque cinémato-
graphe (2003), which uses World War
I footage from French and German
military archives in the service of an
antiwar message. One of the most
striking sequences in this film struc-
tured by the diary entries (based on
read documents) of two fictional news-
reel cameramen concerns a self-con-
scious reflection on the ethics of the
returned gaze. Footage featuring Ger-

man prisoners of war is commented
on just as the soldiers stare intently
into the camera while the voice-over
commentary of the French camera-
man's diary ruminates on the ethical
impact of the gazes: "In close-up, the
enemy is no longer exactly the same.
. . . [H]ow can one hate an exhausted
man who looks at you in the eye?"
Another venue for the heightened
Figures 2-4. World Mirror Cinema seizes on the re- status of the returned gaze appears in
turned gaze as the spark plug of history (Netherlands DVD compilations of footage gath-
Filmmuseum and Loop Media, 2005).
ered from archives regularly mined by
found-footage filmmakers. For example, Exotic Europe: Journey into Early Cinema (Ned-
erlands Filmmuseum, 2000), a collection of nonfiction films whose title enacts the
postcolonial gesture of turning Europe's exoticizing gaze back onto its own peoples,
actually contains a brief lecture devoted to the prevalence in early cinema of what
it labels the "direct gaze into the camera." The lecture features a visual compilation
26 For an insightful reading of Deutsch's use of dissolves in such scenes, see Michele Pierson, "Avant-Garde Re-
enactment: World Mirror Cinema, Decasia, and The Heart of the World," Cinema Journal 49, no. 1 (Fall 2009):
12-13.
58
Cinema Journal 52 í No. 3 ! Spring 2013
of returned gazes, culled from early

travelogues in the Dutch, British, and
German film archives, all featuring the
residual presence of photographic-based
posing within film's newer representa-
tional modes. Given the network among
archives, filmmakers, and academics, it is
no coincidence that the Exotic Europe DVD
was partly put together by Mark Paul-
Meyer, a curator at the EYE Film Insti-
tute Netherlands, who has written on the
return-of-the-gaze phenomenon, or that
UHéroique ànématographe was codirected
by Laurent Veray, a French film historian
and specialist in early nonfiction film.27
If the above network of film criticism,
production, and distribution practice at-
tempts to confront the implications of
Sembène's statement, perhaps the most
direct retort occurred in the controversial
Figure 5. The centrality of the gaze and visual tech-
inaugural September 2006 exhibition of nologies to a history of the West's encounter with
Paris's Musée du Quai Branly, itself thethe Other is rendered explicit in a promotional post-
card for the exhibition D'un regard l'autre (Paris:
postcolonial rebirth and merger of theMusée du Quai Branly, 2006).
Musée National des Arts d'Afrique et
d'Oceanie with Jean Rouch's much-loved Musée de l'Homme. The tide for the ex-
hibition, D'un regard Vautre , not only clearly announced the centrality of the gaze and
visual technologies to a history of the West's encounter with the Other, as visualized in
the accompanying postcard's transhistorical, transcultural, and cross-media collage of
"looks," but also cryptically condensed a complex history of philosophizing subject-
object relations (Figure 5).28 When loosely translated as "one looks at the Other," the
phrase encapsulates binary Manichaeism; read in a more existential and phenomeno-
logical tone, "from a look the Other" implies a breakdown of subject mastery and an
opening toward the other as radical alterity. And literally translated as "from one look
to the next," the phrase bypasses hierarchical dualism altogether and liberates view-
ing relations into an innovative, nonadversarial, side-by-side relation. To return to
our opening antagonists, the phrase encapsulates the opposition between Sembène's
Manichaean dualism and Rouch's humanist dialogism.
To do full justice to the exhibition's tide, one would have to enter into a discussion
of French philosophies of the look [le regard) from Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Lacan to
27 See Mark Paul-Meyer, "Moments of Poignancy: The Aesthetics of the Accidental and the Casual in Early Nonfiction
Film," in Hertogs and Klerk, Uncharted Territory, 51-60; Laurent Veray, Les films d'actualité français de la Grande
Guerre (Paris: Éditions de l'AFRHC, 1996).
28 For the catalog of the exhibition's photographic collection, see D'un regard l'autre: Photographies XIXe siècle (Paris:
Musée du Quai Branly and Actes Sud, 2006).
59
Foucault, Barthes, and Lévinas. While this article is not the place for such an ambitious
undertaking, I do want to claim that the slippery, untranslatable exhibition title (much
like the new museum it inaugurated) also unmistakably issues from a postcolonial
context.29 It is only following decolonization after World War II that the full political
import of the return-of-the-gaze hermeneutic becomes possible, inevitable, desirable,
fashionable, or fetishizable (depending on how one interprets it). Put differently, it is
very unlikely that the original predominantly white and pro-colonial audiences for
these films even noticed, let alone were as disturbed as present-day film historians by,
those fleeting moments in which the film's fabric is torn by the racially distinguished
slit of Others' eyes. However, rather than focusing on the empirical inauthenticity of
the returned gaze's affective power, I am interested here in exploring the intellectual
context of the trope's invention.
Before doing that, though, it is important to note that there are earlier historical
variations of the return-of-the-gaze discourse that do not issue from a postcolonial con-
text. For example, French film criticism of the late 1910s and 1920s evinced a fascina-
tion with the nonhuman gaze that issues from the camera itself as well as from animals
and plants; the film theory of Béla Balázs famously holds the human face in close-up
as a classic object of analysis, while Walter Benjamin understood the expectation of a
returned gaze from a human or nonhuman, inanimate Other to be a defining element
of what he meant by the "aura."30 Additionally, as recounted in Vernet's essay "The
Look at the Camera," the returned gaze has been given considerable treatment as the
"repressed of narrative cinema."31 Other important traditions of writing and think-
ing about the returned gaze that I do not investigate here include its incarnation as a
similarly disruptive representational mode in painting and photography.32 The latter
tradition demands brief mention. Manifestations of the returned gaze in photography
date back to early portrait and anthropometric photography of the mid- to late nine-
teenth century, and they can also be seen in the preponderance of direct visual address
in 1930s documentary photography.33 Modern photographic history also includes the
strikingly self-conscious convention of negating the return of the gaze, for example in
photographs of the nonreturnable gaze of the blind (by Paul Strand, Walker Evans,
Lewis Hine, André Kertész, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, and Garry Winogrand) and in
photographs of subjects with their backs turned to the camera (by Dorothea Lange
29 For an earlier variant of the phrase in a book offering a postcolonial analysis of early films of the Other, see the
preface titled "D'un regard à l'autre," in Premier Contact-Premier Regard, ed. Pierre-L. Jordan (Marseilles: Musées
de Marseille, 1992), 18-22.
30 For examples from early French film criticism, see Amad, Counter-Archive, 203, 205, 253. See Balázs, "The Close-
Up" and "The Face of Man" (1945), in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 255-264; Walter Benjamin, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Charles Baudelaire: A
Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (1939), trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1973), 107-154.
31 Vernet, "The Look at the Camera," 48.
32 For an example of a return-of-the-gaze analysis in painting, see T. J. Clark, "Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment
of 'Olympia' in 1865," Screen 28, no. 1 (1980): 38-41.
33 On nineteenth-century portrait and anthropometric photography and 1930s documentary photography, see John
Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1988); Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology, and Museums (Oxford, UK: Berg,
2001), 131-155; Wolfe, "Direct Address."
60
and Ben Shahn). It is this anti-

return-of-the-gaze tendency
that is reworked cinematically
in Gianikian and Ricci Luc-
chi's Oh! Uomo (2004), a post-

archival compilation film that
strips bare the cost of war at
the level of the human body.
One sequence particularly bent
on exposing the suturing of vi-
olence and vision is composed
of footage of blinded World
War I soldiers who dutifully
perform the pose of facingFigure
the 6. A cinematic version of the blind figure's anti-return-of-
the-gaze potential appears in Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's Oh!
camera in an eyeless mockery Uomo (Museo Storico del Trentino, 2004).
of the sacred contract of sen-
timental empathy supposedly embodied by visual exchange (Figure 6). A related, if

more Utopian, negation of the returned gaze also animates the climax of Deutsch 's
World Mirror Cinema , in which inexplicable footage of a male figure running away from
the camera in slow motion serves as a final ethical questioning of the film's prior in-
vestment in visual reciprocity.
Postcolonial Heritage. The path that interests me most in the multifaceted intel-
lectual history of this trope of belief in the radical capacities of returning the gaze is
the one that emerged from the articulation of postcolonial studies to film studies in the
late 1970s and 1980s. The return-of-the-gaze trope developed, in part, in response to
two trends. First, we saw the excesses and inflexibility of the panoptic and universal-
izing tendencies of 1970s theories of film spectatorship, in which vision's identification
with power and the camera's identification with the universal, anonymous, patriarchal
subject transformed the historical viewer into a textual effect of the film's ideological
structure while entirely evacuating the alterity (whether racial, gendered, or sexual) of
the Other.34 This position flowed into the second, related totalizing and bleak approach
to the space-power dualism opened up in the wake of widespread misappropriations
of Foucault's Discipline and Punish and Edward Said's Orientalism , in which the former
was reduced to a simplistic ontology of power and the latter simplified into a critique
of Western stereotypes of the Other.35 Perhaps emblematic of the shift away from the
impasses of 1970s ideologies of the gaze, at least from within the field of race studies,
34 For an important critique of the conjoining of apparatus theory and panopticism, see Joan Copjec, "The Delirium
of Clinical Perfection," Sexual Difference 8, nos. 1-2 (1986): 57-65. On the importance, however limited, of a
theory of the return of the gaze for feminist film theory post-Mulvey, see Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole:
Feminism and Women's Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 101.
35 For both authors' recognition of misreadings of their work, see Foucault, "Précisions sur le pouvoir: Réponses à
certains critiques" (1979), in Dits et écrits: 1954-1988, vol. 3, 1 976-1 979 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 625-635;
Edward Said, "Orientalism Reconsidered," Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2000), 198-215.
61
Cinema Journal 52 I No. 3 i Spring 2013
would be Homi Bhabha's 1987 essay "Of Mimicry and Man," in which he mobilized
a Lacanian psychoanalytic and Foucauldian genealogical approach to the "process by
which the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where
the observer becomes the observed and 'partial' representation rearticulates the whole
notion of identity and alienates it from essence."36 Given the near- total absence of dis-
cussion of the possibility of the returned gaze in 1970s apparatus film theory, this essay
announced a dramatic shift in the conception of subjectivity in the visual field. We
might characterize the return-of-the-gaze maneuver, then, as the post- 1970s product
of a reformed theory of film spectatorship transformed via new historical-theoretical
interventions of race, gender, sexuality, and the empirical viewer. Symbolizing the re-
fusal of spectatorial gaze theory, the figure of visual riposte replaced the "absolute
tyranny" of the sovereign gaze and the coherent subject with the "errant" decentered
look of a fragmented subject.37 The look at the camera thus came to assume the posi-
tion of David facing up to the Goliath of the gaze. At its most radical, the returned
gaze thus ushered in the possibility of the annihilation of the Western self while ethi-
cally intending to supplant the passive spectator of apparatus theory with an active
witness - a witness not just to history, but to a history of the gaze in cinema.
Regarding questions of race, this reform of spectator theory was wrought under the
pressure of two forces: the continuing wave of postindependence and third cinema-
aligned politicizations of filmmaking and a new, postessentialist theory of colonial
discourse that stressed ambivalence rather than totalizing control in the emergence
and reproduction of colonial subjectivities.38 Mapped over Stuart Hall's evaluation
of the politics of antiracism and the postwar black British experience, this evolution
marked a shift between the representation of politics (a postliberation, post-civil rights
approach intent on revalorizing the previously negative, reclaiming representational
agency for the oppressed, and reversing the objectifying cultural effect of stereotyping)
and the politics of representation (a poststructuralist approach intent on recognizing
the split identity of subjectivity and the discursive anonymity of power structures).39
Read in terms of my discussion of the look, the representation-of-politics position
contended that the reversal of the gaze overcomes the binary structure of domina-
tion. Conversely, the politics-of-representation move recognized that any such reversal
36 Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man" (1987), The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 89. The essay
is emblematic because Bhabha's work at this period was directly engaged with screen theory and intent on moving
beyond perceived limitations of Said's text.
37 For a comprehensive reappraisal of the psychoanalytic theoretical heritage of the gaze in film studies, see Kaja
Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World ( New York: Routledge, 1996), 155; see also Todd McGowan, The
Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).
38 Though not essentially focused on issues of race, the returned gaze was also visibly deployed as part of a broader
self-referential aesthetic in European modernist cinema. See, for example, the opening of Jean-Luc Godard's Con-
tempt {Le Mépris ■ 1963) in which a filmed camera unexpectedly swivels and faces, lens to lens, the film's gaze, or
the more racially focused example in Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975), in which an African "witch
doctor" being questioned and filmed by the reporter David Locke boldly refuses the terms of the interview by turning
the camera on the previously invisible reporter, declaring, "Now we can have an interview." Not coincidentally, The
Passenger's script was cowritten by filmmaker and theorist Peter Wollen.
39 Stuart Hall, "New Ethnicities" (1989), in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge,
1996), 441-449.
62
merely substitutes, rather than overturns, the opposition; in other words, being the
bearer rather than object of the gaze does not necessarily ensure the end of oppressive
power structures. Supporting the latter point, Hall wrote: "You can no longer conduct
black politics through the strategy of a simple set of reversals, putting in the place
of the bad old essential white subject, the new essentially good black subject."40 The
French film critic Serge Daney made the same point in more caustic terms in 1972
when he wrote that "the problems of neocolonial Africa will not be resolved when
the Dogons do ethnology in Brittany."41 Although the most recent invocations of the
returned-gaze discourse issue most directly from the politics of representation, the
discourse has oscillated between functioning as the equivalent of a positive stereotype
or an interruption to either-or binaries.
As diverse as different critics' appropriations of, or appellations for, the returned
gaze have been (Paul Willemen calls it the fourth eye; Fatimah Tobing Rony describes
it as the third eye), by the mid-1990s the phrase alone had come to signpost a specific
methodological project as seen in the titles of a variety of books, such as Himani
Bannerji's Returning the Gaze: Essays on Racism , Feminism , and Politics , Wheeler Winston
Dixon's It Looks at You: The Returned Gaze of Cinema , Olivier Barlet's African Cinemas: Decol-
onizing the Gaze , and Anna Everett's Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Cńticism ,
1909-1949 ,42 It had also become unmoored from formal or stylistic analysis of actual
examples of returned gazes to connote a broader metaphorical returning of the gaze
present in any number of attempts on the part of counterhegemonic film practices to
decolonize the Foucauldian lens of power or to "unthink Eurocentrism" (to invoke the
tide of Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's influential 1994 book).43 Coming from a differ-
ent direction, though with a similar political investment in the figure of the returned
gaze, the late Chris Marker, a director responsible for giving us one of the most iconic
returned gazes in film history - La Jetée" s famous few seconds of live action, in which
the otherwise immobile image of a woman awakens and blinks at the camera - also
devoted a photo book to the phenomenon, tided Stańng Back .44
As widespread as the return-of-the-gaze phenomenon is, it is important to avoid
flattening the cultural, historical, and disciplinary differences of the intellectual for-
mation of the trope. Likewise, I do not want to suggest that it is the fantasy of ex-
clusively Western, postcolonial, or even academic guilt. Foundational instances of a
40 Ibid., 444.
41 Daney, "The Screen and Fantasy: Bazin and Animals" (1983), trans. Mark A. Cohen, in Rites of Realism, ed. Ivone
Margulies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 38.
42 Paul Willemen, "The Fourth Look," in Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1994), 99-110; Rony, The Third Eye, 213-217; Himani Bannerji, Returning the
Gaze: Essays on Racism, Feminism, and Politics (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1993); Olivier Bariet, African Cinemas:
Decolonizing the Gaze (1996; London: Zed Books, 2001); Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black
Film Criticism, 1909-1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
43 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge,
1994). For an interesting example of the deployment of a metaphorical return-of-the-gaze interpretation, see Rey
Chow's analysis of Zhang Yimou's films in which she argues that "the 'ethnicity' of his films amounts to an exhibi-
tionism that returns the gaze of orientalist surveillance." Chow, Primitive Passions: Vision, Sexuality, Ethnography,
and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 170.
44 Chris Marker, Staring Back (Columbus, OH: Wexler Center for the Arts, 2008).
63
Cinema Journal 52 i No. 3 ! Spring 2013
return-of-the-gaze ethics emerged from the decolonizing poetics and practices of di-
verse intellectuals who had been writing, and sometimes filming, their way out of for-
merly colonized subject positions, including Frantz Fanon's traumatic train memory of
the interpellation "Look, a Negro" (itself a colonial rewriting of Sartre's neo-Hegelian
self-Other, master-slave dialectic), Assia Djebar's claim that Eugène Delacroix's paint-
ing Women of Algiers (1834) embalms a "stolen glance" that neither abandons nor re-
fuses itself "to our gaze," Malek Alloula's intention in his study of French postcards
of Algerian women to "return this immense postcard to its sender," and bell hooks's
affirmation of a knowledge held since childhood that "the slaves had looked [back]"
and "that all attempts to repress our/Black people's right to gaze had produced in us
an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, and oppositional gaze."45 All of
these variations on a theme of interracial visual riposte might share a formal relation
to a general psychosocial history of having "to meet the white man's eyes" (Fanon), but
they are also specific and irreducible moments in that history.46
As for its expression of colonial power relations, the return-of-the-gaze maneuver
arrives at the tail end of a series of methods for analyzing subject-object, self-other
relations. Put schematically, if the early twentieth-century colonial period was suppos-
edly mapped onto a hierarchy between the camera subject and the filmed object, which
then became an opposition during periods of decolonization, in the latest postcolonial
instantiation, relations embodied in the return of the gaze refer to an exchange, interac-
tion, dialogue, or relay. In other words, the return-of-the-gaze mode moved beyond a
simplistic politics of reversal, of swapping negative stereotypes for positive stereotypes,
or even of desiring, like Bronisław Malinowksi, to "grasp the native's point of view,
his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world."47 Instead, it conjures a sort of cin-
ematic contact zone, to invoke Mary Louise Pratt's phrase, that is, a "social space [in
this instance virtual] where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often
in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or
their aftermaths."48 The virtuality of this contact is, of course, crucial, as the returned
gaze never really occurs - it is a belated (and thus perhaps typically postcolonial) effect
of an actual encounter between filmed subject and camera-cameraman and a desired
encounter between filmed subject and historically and /or racially distanced spectator.
Visual Riposte as Tactic. If a politics of trading places with the oppressed does not
fully describe the heightened interpretive interest in returned gazes, what other rela-
tion might the hermeneutic embody? First, in regard to hegemonic viewing relations,
45 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin , White Masks (1952), trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Grove Press, 1967),
110-111; Assia Djebar, "Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound" (1980), in Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (Char-
lottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 133-152; Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich
and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 5, 14; bell hooks, "The Oppositional Gaze,"
in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 288-302.
46 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110.
47 Bronisław Malinowski, quoted in Anna Grimshaw, The Ethnographer's Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 47.
48 Mary Louise Pratt, "Arts of the Contact Zone" (1990), in Mass Culture and Everyday Life, ed. Peter Gibian (New
York: Routledge, 1997), 63.
64
Cinema Journal 52 i No. 3 ! Spring 2013
the returned gaze of early nonfiction film poses a spatial relation that is radically dif-
ferent from the later one of classical Hollywood cinema (dependent on the construc-
tion of an illusory space that spectators voyeuristically penetrate unseen). The earlier
look from the screen glares into the openly acknowledged space of the cinema au-
ditorium, emphasizing - rather than eliding, as it would in the classical Hollywood
structure - distinctions of this and that, here and there, then and now, self and other.
Moreover, if, as Vernet has argued, the look at the camera in Hollywood narrative film
"never truly aims at anything but a Utopian position" inhabited by the notion of an
all-seeing spectator, who is more nowhere than somewhere, then it makes sense that in
pre-Hollywood and other counterhegemonic modes of cinema in which the invisible,
untouchable spectator is not the norm, the spectator is emphatically somewhere - an
embodied, affectively susceptible viewer rooted in the place of the cinema.49 This
distinction thus might be described as a difference between the Utopian void of Hol-
lywood spectatorial positions and the heterotopian (to use Foucault's term for an ef-
fectively enacted utopia) places of alternative viewing relations such as those implied
by the returned gaze.50
The contestation of voyeuristic spatial arrangements implied by the return-of-the-
gaze interpretive move is highlighted by the insertion of a temporal rupture and a
more fluid place of reception and interpretation opened up by historical distance.
Focusing on a temporal ripple surrounding often very brief looks at the camera, inter-
pretations dealing with the returned gaze characteristically seize on evanescent slices
of time. The stories told by such readings speak to a micro-history of seconds, not
centuries, and a form of intimate, small-scale agency enacted by faces, not bodies,
and eyes, not hands. In them, the chronological causality of macro-historicist time
is broken, the positivist determinations of homogeneous space interrupted, and the
culpability of the spectator reduced.
The return-of-the-gaze trope thus may not uncover the empirical resistance of co-
lonial Others toward the camera's powers of social control, but it does hermeneutically
imagine the challenge posed by looks at the camera as urgent and necessary fictions.
In the same way, filmmakers like Marlon Fuentes and Cheryl Dunye have argued that,
as marginalized subjects, they have had to invent stories in order to tell the history of
peoples historically abused or negated by the official film record.51 Read in terms of
Michel de Certeau's theory of tactics in The Practice of Everyday Life , the returned-gaze
interpretation resembles a ruse by which the viewer - or, to use de Certeau's vocabu-
lary, "consumer" - "composes the network of an antidiscipline."52 In other words, it
49 Vernet, "The Look at the Camera," 54.
50 For Foucault's definition of the term heterotopia, which he also connects to the multispatial site of the cinema, see
Foucault, "Of Other Spaces" (1967), trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 22-27 .
51 The faked biography at the center of Fuentes's Bontoc Eulogy can thus be read as a tactical response to the absent
perspective of people like Markod, a Bontoc Igorot warrior and performer at the St. Louis World's Fair, from the
historical record. A similar tactical fabrication of speculative history appears in the film The Watermelon Woman
(Cheryl Dunye, 1996), in which a faked quest for the history of a lesbian African American actress named Fae
Richards ends with the director's admission, "Sometimes you have to create your own history."
52 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven. F. Rendali (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984), xv.
65
represents a historiographical "making do" (which I would distinguish from a more

cynical "making up") with the historical record by filmmakers and critics. De Certeau's
analysis is particularly apt because of its original relevance for colonial power: The Prac-
tice of Everyday Life was written in part as a critique of Foucault's monolithic conception
of space in Discipline and Punish and in reference to the practices of Spain's colonized
peoples.53 Contrary to its often watered-down appropriation in countless studies of the
resistant capacities of popular culture, de Certeau's analysis is not a celebration of
reversals but a bid for a poetics of tactical incursions that mark the struggle for a short-
lived victory of time (life, memory, change) over space (control, history, stasis) that is not
so different from the temporal heterogeneity central to the spaces typical of Foucault's
heterotopias. The tactician (who I am comparing here to the filmmaker or scholar
positioned in a postcolonial context) operates in a temporally stressed mode and is thus
"always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized 'on the wing'" - such as the
seemingly inconsequential, transitory evidence of returned gazes.54
Father Francis Aupiais's Films in Dahomey, 1 929-1 930. In this last section of the
article I turn to the films of Father Francis Aupiais as opportunities for interrogating
the "on the wing" interpretive appeal of returned gazes. Aupiais, a Catholic mission-
ary priest, made a unique body of films in Dahomey that nearly resulted in his ex-
communication and that were banned from the Colonial Exhibition of 1931 by none
other than the head of the African Mission of Lyon and the president of the French
Republic. His films present a challenging test case for the return-of-the-gaze thesis,
given the abundant examples of looks at the camera in the footage from Dahomey, the
unique censorship of the films, and the fact that they were made during a transitional
period in the stylistic history of cinematic direct address, when the look at the cam-
era in documentary film was increasingly becoming taboo or circumscribed. Aupiais's
films beg the following questions: Can we attribute their controversy to the presence of
returned gazes, thereby providing concrete historical evidence of the figure's opposi-
tional impact? And what does it mean for any sense of oppositional politics that these
dangerous films did not issue from the aesthetic or documentary avant-garde but from
the heart of the establishment, in the guise of a Catholic missionary priest?
Aupiais had been sent to Dahomey between 1903 and 1926 by the Société des Mis-
sions Africaines de Lyon. Although he ended up challenging the Catholic Church, there
is no doubt that he originally traveled to Africa as a faithful servant of the mission ci-
vilisatrice, , one of the central ideologies that continued to legitimate France's colonial
consolidations into the 1920s, even as the policy of assimilation (based on the idea that
the colonized must aspire to become the colonizer) was giving way to one of associa-
tion (based on the idea that the colonized should retain their own cultural differences).
During his time in Dahomey, like many other missionaries, but unlike the majority of
secular colonial administrators in West Africa, Aupiais spent long periods living in rural
communities, where he studied local languages and customs; before long, he became
an outspoken hypervalorizer of precolonial African art and culture. His vast experience
53 Ibid., xiii.
54 Ibid., xix.
66
"in the field," as it were, allowed Aupiais the Africanist to practice an amateur form of
participant observation that was just then changing the field of anthropology, as out-
lined in Malinowski's new emphasis on fieldwork and the related goal of seeing through
the Other's eyes.55 Upon returning to Paris in 1926, he had the opportunity to learn
more directly from his secular professional counterparts in ethnology. He attended bi-
weekly lectures and debated alongside the founders of the new Institut d'Ethnologie
(founded in 1925), Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Paul Rivet, as well as Marcel Mauss. During
this trip he also came in contact with the geographer Jean Brunhes, then director of
the Archives de la Planète, a unique photo-cinematographic inventory of the world
funded by the French banker Albert Kahn between 1908 and 1931, with the intention
of promoting intercultural knowledge and cooperation in a time of increasing global
tensions. Brunhes and Kahn agreed to loan Aupiais one of their cameramen, Frédéric
Gadmer, so that the priest's textual research into African daily life could be taken to the
next level of documentation via color photography and film.
Aupiais's motivations were clearly divided: between the desire to convert and to
respect the difference of African traditional culture; between betraying secret rituals
and scientifically recording the details of cultural difference; between promoting a re-
formed humanitarian empire and critiquing the inhumanity of forced labor; between
the descriptive observational focus of ethnography and the more abstract theoreti-
cal speculations of ethnology; and ultimately, between the man of the cloth and the
man of science. Given these tensions, it is hardly surprising that his film corpus, shot
by Gadmer between December 1929 and June 1930, appears conspicuously split.
The film titled Le Dahomey chrétien (< Christian Dahomey, 1930) was shot for and owned
by the Catholic Missionary of Lyon. Heavily edited and intertitled in service to a
message supporting the church's role in the colonies, the film is unabashedly didactic
and clearly affiliated with the propaganda genre of documentary. Made with much
more freedom, Aupiais's second body of films, titled Le Dahomey religieux {Religious Da-
homey. , 1930), was shot for the Archives de la Planète and owned by Albert Kahn.
Although the latter, Kahn-owned films have been appraised as inaugurating French
ethnographic film proper (preceding Marcel Griaule's better-known Sous les masques
noirs [1938] and Au pays de Dogon [1938]), it is striking that they have so far eluded
scholarship on French colonial and documentary film.56
For the purposes of my argument, the most interesting of the formal distinctions
between the films concerns how the look at the camera functions in each. Editing,
intertitles, and framing in Christian Dahomey all signal it as belonging more to the ex-
pository model of documentary (in which shots are clearly organized, argument mo-
tivated, and evidence driven) than to predocumentary modes of early nonfiction film,
which were dominated by single-shot, "raw," slice-of-life views and a nonnarrative
emphasis on display, exhibition, and just looking. In distinct contrast to the earlier
55 On Malinowski and participant observation, see Grimshaw, The Ethnographer's Eye, 53.
56 For the claim that Aupiais's films inaugurate French ethnographic film, see Martine Balard, Dahomey 1930: Mis-
sion catholique et culte vodoun, l'oeuvre de Francis Aupiais (1877-1945), missionaire et éthnographe (Perpignan,
France: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 1998), vi, 179-182. The only analysis to date of Aupiais's films ap-
pears in Balard, Dahomey 1930, 167-207.
67
Cinema Journal 52 ! No. 3 ! Spring 201 3
model of nonfiction predocumentary films, Christian Dahomey betrays the formal and
rhetorical features of documentary proper, especially evident in how the look at the
camera is more rationalized and recuperated to the point of being self-consciously
staged as an object of commentary itself (to which I return below).
The most obvious vehicle for this recuperation is the overarching argument that
ties together Christian Dahomey's eight-part structure. The film argues that the Catholic
presence in Dahomey represents a benign force intent on bringing progress in the form
of Christianity, education, medicine, economic development, and even lighthearted
entertainment to the more simple members of France's "grande famille." As such, it
exemplifies Peter Bloom's description of colonial educational films as an auxiliary tool
within the "transformation of the colonial project from a doctrine of conquest and
commercial domination to interwar humanitarianism."57 Not surprisingly, the film di-
dactically promotes the civilizing and humanitarian effects of education and medicine
in scenes of children writing neatly in French on blackboards ("Dear Friends of the
Mission, Our Prayers Are With You All") under the watchful gaze of nuns, of mothers
being awarded prizes for displaying reformed Western family practices, and of young
boys being vaccinated by African nurses. While many of these scenes contain looks at
the camera, one sequence in particular, in which a Guignol puppet show is performed
for the missionary children, stands out for its sheer self-consciousness regarding the
camera's cross-cultural scrutiny.
In a demonstration of the entomological gaze critiqued by Sembène, the Guignol
scene stages a hyperobservational behavioral experiment that also contains a self-
referential commentary on the plurality of looks at the camera. The scene appears in the
opening sequences devoted to missionary schools, in which a sort of inventory of looks
at the camera unfolds, beginning with the more enforced respectfulness of students filing
dutifully toward the camera to the more playful mockery of individual children salut-
ing the cameraman. The laboratory-style preparation of the Guignol experiment then
ensues in the suspense-driven,
problem-solving narrative, mo-
tivated through intertitles such
as the one that poses a quasi-
scientific question - "How are
they going to 'react'?" - in
response to the cross-cultural
provocation set up by the scene
of African children watching a
French puppet play. Shot from
behind and then in front from
left and right, the audience of

young boys is studied to see how
their reactions compare to those
Figure 7. Missionary children react to the Guignol puppet show
in Christian Dahomey (Société des Missions Africaines, 1930).of Western children (Figure 7).
57 Peter B loom , French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis: Un i versity of M i n nesota
Press, 2008), 127.
68
However, far from proving racial inferiority, the children react with spontaneous joy
to the puppet show, thus providing Aupiais with evidence of cultural relativism, if not
equivalence. Although the popular racist stereotype of the out-of-control laughing black
body forms one layer of the film's implied appeal for a white audience, Aupiais's sug-
gestion in the subsequent intertitle that "the pre-rationality of Africans here meets the
irrationality of Europeans" (implied by the puppet play) also destabilizes the separation
and distance required for voyeuristic pleasure.
At this point it is worth inquiring into the nature of the puppet attraction that
keeps the children, for a good part of the scene, so distracted from looking at the
camera. What is the spectacle off-screen that leaves them as enthralled as the implied
viewers watching them on-screen? Most likely, it is a vignette typical of the populist
Guignol repertoire, characterized by antiauthoritarian, antiestablishment inversions
of the social order in which police and wives get beaten repetitively by the cudgel-
wielding representative of the Lyon silk workers, the character named Guignol. Of
particular importance is that Guignol puppets typically address the audience directly,
breaking through the fourth wall of illusionism and turning the spectators into wit-
nesses of an often ironic commentary between characters. In light of this miniature
spectacle of repetitive, violent retribution, encoded in a form that directly addresses
the children, who then (by implication) directly address the audiences watching them
being filmed, the children's glances at the camera, some of them accompanied by
the mimicry of the beating on stage, might be read to move beyond involuntary
cheekiness to a knowing rebuke of that even closer apparatus of officialdom, the co-
lonial camera. However, this reading takes us only so far, because the potential rebuke
posed by the African child's gaze toward the camera is then swiftly deflated and recu-
perated by the next intertide that announces "the happiness of being filmed!" and is
followed by the high-angle shot of the school's population congregating dutifully in a
mass salute to the camera.
In the footage of the boys being watched, or in fact studied, while they themselves
watch Guignol, the film performs an earlier version of Frantz Fanon's experience in
the cinema: "I cannot go to a film without seeing myself. I wait for me. In the interval,
just before the film starts, I wait for me. The people in the theater are watching me,
examining me, waiting for me."58 Where Fanon experiences watching, examining, and
waiting as a foundational trauma, Aupiais choreographs this interracial scenario of
looking as a spectacle whose threatening bidirectionality and doubleness is denied with
the subsequent alibi, "the happiness of being filmed!" Although Christian Dahomey is
replete with other, neater object lessons, the film's propagandist^ function goes astray
in these mise-en-abyme scenarios of returned gazes.
In contrast to Christian Dahomey , the ethnographic-based films, collectively tided
Religious Dahomey - which show fertility and funereal dances, ancestor worship, and
fetish and Vodoun rituals - are all shot with the unblinking gaze of a durational, ob-
servational style of filming in which subjects are so immersed, either as participants
or as spectators, in the matter at hand that they are less likely to look at the camera
58 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 140.
69
Cinema Journal 52 ! No. 3 I Spring 2013
(Figure 8). The relative oblivi-

ousness to the camera is even
more striking given that cer-

tain of the ethnographic
films, such as those of male
initiation ceremonies, liter-
ally constitute stolen (if not
clandestinely filmed) views
of secret ceremonies (facili-
tated in their recording by
Aupiais's African disciple and
go-between Paul Hazoumé).
Whether subjects were di-
rected not to look at the cam-
Figure 8. The observational ethnographic style is exemplified
by footage of ancestor worship from Religious Dahomey (Musée era is unclear. But at least one
Albert-Kahn, Boulogne, 1930). audience member did notice
the absence of looks at the camera. Following the first screening of Religious Dahomey
on Kahn's property on October 24, 1930, a contemporary reviewer commented in-
directly on the lack of returned gazes in the film, noting that the "authenticity" of
the footage in part derived from the fact that "the Africans ignore the fact that they
are being filmed."59 To be sure, the ethnographic footage contains fleeting glances at
the camera reflective of the acknowledged presence (whether controlling or merely
observational) of Aupiais and Gadmer (the cameraman). But these brief returned
gazes are markedly less accusatory than those in the Christian Dahomey films. And yet
it was Religious Dahomey , with its apparently less confrontational, fly-on-the-wall style
of observation, which was singled out in the decision to ban Aupiais's work from the
Colonial Exhibition.60 The ethnographic films were most likely banned because, in
addition to transgressing obvious Western taboos around fetishism, nakedness, and
violence (numerous goats are sacrificed in one film), they suggested an equivalence
between the religious dignity and profundity of Catholic and African rituals, espe-
cially when understood as extensions of Aupiais's highly scrutinized written texts and
speeches, and when viewed in a side-by-side relationship with their supplement, the
Chńsłian Dahomey films. In other words, Religious Dahomey's offense, at least for a con-
temporary French colonial eye deciding whether the films were suitable for public
screenings at the Colonial Exhibition, probably stemmed from the implications of
"authenticity" resulting from the absence of returned gazes in its footage.
It is one thing for communists, surrealists, and other members of the cultural and
political avant-garde to suggest a continuum between European and African religions,
as they did at the Counter-Colonial Exposition, which featured European fetishes
such as "kitschy plaster Jesuses and Marys" as a critical rejoinder to "the European
59 See André Charpentier, "Une manifestation d'art dahoméen," Le Matin, October 25, 1930, quoted in Baiard,
Dahomey 1930, 189-190.
60 See Baiard, Dahomey 1930, 194, 270-271.
70
Cinema Journal 52 S No. 3 ¡ Spring 2013
high culture's dismissal of African religions as magical mumbo-jumbo."61 But when a

Catholic priest was comparing animist and Vodoun rituals with those of Catholicism,
and filming them in a manner that respected their temporal and spatial integrity, and
this same priest had also put on an exhibition in France of Dahomeyan art intended to
reveal Europe and Africa's common humanity, all the while arguing in other contexts
for the priesthood to be open to indigènes , the challenge was potentially more threaten-
ing. Add to this the fact that sixty or so years later, the journal that Aupiais founded, La
Reconnaissance africaine , was considered an important progenitor for Dahomey's cultural
reawakening in the 1980s, that Leopold Senghor, the founder of the negńtude move-
ment, was inspired by Aupiais's Africanism, that the writings of Aupiais's disciple Paul
Hazoumé have recently been cited as examples of proto-nationalist sentiment, and
that an analogous comparison of African and Western rituals would result in the ban-
ning of Jean Rouch 's Les Maîtres fous (1954) in 1955, and we can clearly see why the
priest's films attracted such high-profile attention.
Moreover, displaying the problem that visual imagery has always posed for the
discipline of anthropology, Religious Dahomeýs lack of any internal explanatory struc-
ture renders its images disquietingly open ended, thus making its footage even more
reliant on Christian Dahomey for its full comparative and critical effect to come into
play. If, to invoke David McDougall's metaphor, safe visual anthropology aims to
defuse the bomblike power of the visual through contextualization (as performed by
the intertitling in Christian Dahomey ), Aupiais's Religious Dahomey , with its risk of open-
ended, wayward interpretation (because of its nonnarrativized, unsubtitled, observa-
tional and durational style), appeared to the French state to be a ticking cultural time
bomb.62 Even though Aupiais accompanied the film with a commentary, in that text
he refused to interpret the images, preferring instead to redundandy describe what
was already on the screen. Aupiais's refusal to rationalize the visual through verbal
commentary supports his larger claim that his ethnographic film was not supposed
to offer an "in-depth study" but a "perceptual study" (literally a study by the eyes,
"étude par les yeux").63 Religious Dahomey's threat, of course, resided precisely in its ex-
clusively observational nature. The film's visual autonomy was especially dangerous
given that its contextualization (in the exhibition site of the Colonial Exposition) may
have led viewers in the supplementary direction of Chńsńan Dahomey, where any posi-
tive promotion of the missionary enterprise was bound to devolve into the discordant
juxtapositions presented when Catholic and Vodoun rituals were viewed together.64 It
is not a coincidence, then, that it was Aupiais's dangerously open-ended ethnographic
films rather than his propaganda films that were banned. Speaking directly to the
threat implied by uncontextualized ethnographic images, one of Aupiais's seniors for-
mally ordered that the Religious Dahomey footage be reserved for scholars and banned
61 Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900-1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1992), 107.
62 See David MacDougall, "The Visual in Anthropology," in Rethinking Visual Anthropology, ed. Marcus Banks and
Howard Morphy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 290.
63 Aupiais, quoted in Balard, Dahomey 1930, 186.

64 For Aupiais's own claim that the two sets of films were intended to be read together, see Dahomey 1930, 67.
71
from a public audience.65 As for Aupiais's own punishment, after an attack campaign
by the Catholic Church, he was eventually forced to leave his position in Dahomey
and was exiled to a provincial post in France, where he continued to try to clear his
reputation.
For Aupiais there was no contradiction between hoping that his films would allow
traditional Dahomeyan life to be preserved "forever within eyesight" of the implied
colonial observer-protector, and making the far more radical suggestion, materialized
in his African-authored journal La Reconnaissance africaine , that "indigenous peoples
can only be studied well by the indigenous [themselves]."67 From a postcolonial per-
spective, however, the contradiction is glaring. Where the cinematic preservation of
Dahomeyan traditions merely confirms the colonial status quo, the launching of the
journal La Reconnaissance africaine prepares the postcolonial path for the sort of reverse
ethnography from which the return-of-the-gaze ethic emerges. Indeed, Paul Hazou-
mé's Le Pacte de sang ( The Blood Pact , 1937), the first auto-ethnography published by an
African, is a pioneering example of the appropriation of the gaze of the Western eth-
nographer for the purposes of African-authored histories and knowledge. If Aupiais
himself could not admit to these contradictions, they were inadvertently writ large in
the unresolvable tension between his two groups of films, especially apparent in the
films' distinct treatment of the look at the camera. In the propaganda films, variations
of the look are internally surveyed through the mise-en-scène and intertides, whereas
in the more open-ended ethnographic footage, in which returned gazes are down-
played as a sign of authentic, unstaged observation, the look was eventually externally
disciplined through the act of censorship.
What I am suggesting is that beyond the individual affront of Religious Dahomey ,
the overall offense of Aupiais's films most forcefully emerges when the two works are
placed next to each other, d'un regard Vautre (from one look to the next), in a relationship
of consanguinity, exchange, and juxtaposition. We might even say that the brief looks
at the camera in Religious Dahomey return and counter the gaze of Christian Dahomey
(much as Hazoumé's auto-ethnography reclaimed and spoke back to over a century of
French-produced studies of Dahomey). Thus, when the two otherwise polarized works
are viewed together, as they might have been at the Colonial Exposition and certainly
were for the authorities, we see how Aupiais in fact enabled, as a result of his split cor-
pus, a return-of-the-gaze effect in between the two. His own superiors seemed to sense
as much, with one of them accusing him of giving "the impression of wanting to reverse
all that we have accomplished over the past ten years [in Dahomey] ."68 It would not be
surprising if Aupiais's censored films formed part of the buildup to the infamous 1 934
65 Monsignor Chabert, quoted in Balard, Dahomey 1930, 270. Aupiais apparently ignored this order and even pro-
jected the film at a hearing in which he tried to overturn the decision made against him. See Balard, Dahomey
1930, 270, 275.
66 For the details of the attack campaign against Aupiais, see Balard, Dahomey 1930, 256-274.
67 Aupiais, quoted in Balard, Dahomey 1930, vi, 158-159.
68 Monsignor Chabert, quoted in Balard, Dahomey 1930, 266 (my emphasis).
72
Laval Decree, which stipulated that all film projects set in the French African colonies
be submitted for prior approval.69
Denied an exhibition space at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Aupiais's ethno-
graphic films were then abandoned to the "no place" of censorship, forever - well,
almost. In a variation of a trend in museum practice that has emerged in concert with
the expansion of reverse ethnography, the Albert Kahn Museum returned Aupiais's
films to Benin in 1996, where they were screened for the first time, to the descendants
of the original films' subjects. Whether we interpret the visit as a "too little, too late"
palliative intended to heal history via the suturing of a newly returned postcolonial
black gaze or, more generously, as a first step in the recovery of stolen gazes and
memories, what remains clear is that the return-of-the-gaze move bears the poten-
tial to be far more than a naively optimistic emblem of resistance. Like de Gerteau's
tactic, it recognizes that "whatever it wins, it does not keep."70 The victories of visual
riposte are always hollow. Thus, if the return of the gaze resembles an "effectively
enacted utopia" (to use Foucault's definition of heterotopia) in which cinema's objecti-
fied victims finally testify against their oppressors, the trial it stages is left adjourned.71
It is precisely this unfinished, nondeterminate questioning, rather than too easily pre-
sumed condemnation, of visual evidence, that film studies still owes to postcolonial
theory and its application for colonial history. The questioning of this prevalent (and
often problematic) trope of analysis is needed now more than ever when colonial film
archives are attracting increased attention, as in the United Kingdom's colonial film
database.72 If the tactic of visual riposte is to be more than the automatic redemption
of early cinema's sins or another opportunity to condemn vision tout court, then it
must be mobilized in a context that resists assuming, and restarts the more difficult task
of interrogating, the relation between colonial vision and power. For interpretation
to do that, we need to engage in a more self-conscious dialogue between the poles of
"remembering and improvising" when it comes to the historical record, to borrow the
terms of Ross Gibson's methodological defense of the twin practices of validating and
speculating in response to the hermeneutical challenges posed by photographs from
colonial archives.73
In this article, in addition to considering the specific cinematic codes of the re-
turned gaze, I have analyzed the recent return-of-the-gaze hermeneutic as a marker
of film studies' transformation in a postcolonial age and as an example of a structure
69 This decree, eventually deemed responsible for delaying the development of an indigenous Francophone African
cinema, allowed officials to block any project deemed critical of the colonial status quo and was infamously put to
the test in the censorship of two of the first outright French anticolonial films: René Vautier's Afrique 50 (1950)
and Chris Marker and Alain Resnais's Les Statues meurent aussi (1953). Although I have not been able to verify
his identity, footage of a priest who looks like Aupiais appears among the archival fragments used in Marker and
Resnais's film.
70 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xix.
71 Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," 24.

72 For the website related to the cataloging of British colonial film, see Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British
Empire, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/home (accessed February 13, 2013).
73 Ross Gibson, South of the West: Postcolonia I ism and the Narrative Construction of Australia (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992), 123, 125.
73
of production, distribution, and interpretation that includes academic writing, mu-

seum practice, and documentary and avant-garde film practice. Overall, I have tried
to show that the returned gaze belongs to a continuum of formal, cultural, historical,
intellectual, and political contexts that begins but does not end with specific looks at
the camera. In the case of Aupiais's footage, the trope appears in three modes: as a
formal, stylistic feature, as an interfilmic effect of the exhibition context of his films,
and as a generalized contextual horizon in which the films attracted controversy. Over-
shadowing all of these modes is its tactical, heterotopian context. Rethought in this less
formalist mode and within a strategy that heeds Foucault's critique (rather than the
more commonly assumed promotion) of ontological power, the returned gaze ought
to complicate rather than reinstate the oversimplified identification (that it would be
so easy to make with Aupiais's films) of colonial film with colonial ideology. Aupiais's
films are significant within such a rethinking of colonial film as, against all odds, they
contest rather than affirm Sembène's reproach of Africanist ethnography as a Euro-
centric, dehumanizing version of insect observation. Ultimately, as problematic as the
returned gaze interpretive move might be, potential remains in its ability to disrupt
spatiotemporal conventions by exploring cinema's censored locations, at the intersec-
tion of the memory of colonial space and the geography of postcolonial time. *
I would, like to thank Steve Choe, Kick Tablón, and the anonymous Cinema Journal readers for their helpful suggestions ,
and Steve Ungar for translation advice. This article also benefited from responses gpen to earlier versions presented at Florida
State Unwerńty (2006), the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference (2008), and the Unwerńty of
Michigan (2009).
74

Return of The Gaze AMAD

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Return of The Gaze AMAD

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Society for Cinema & Media Studies

Visual Riposte: Looking Back at the

www.cmstudies.org 52 ! No. 3 I Spring 2013 49

5 Ibid., 187, 224.

This article's reconsideration of the beginning of postcolonial studies is addition-

10 "The End of Postcolonial Theory?" PMLA (May 2007): 633-651.

Visual Riposte in Film Production, Distribution, and Museum Practice.

The Lost World of Mitchell and

(Figures 2-4). Activated by an inten-

carefree, anonymous passerby. The

returned gaze. Footage featuring Ger-

of returned gazes, culled from early

31 Vernet, "The Look at the Camera," 48.

and Ben Shahn). It is this anti-

chi's Oh! Uomo (2004), a post-

timental empathy supposedly embodied by visual exchange (Figure 6). A related, if

46 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110.

49 Vernet, "The Look at the Camera," 54.

represents a historiographical "making do" (which I would distinguish from a more

left and right, the audience of

58 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 140.

(Figure 8). The relative oblivi-

more striking given that cer-

60 See Baiard, Dahomey 1930, 194, 270-271.

high culture's dismissal of African religions as magical mumbo-jumbo."61 But when a

63 Aupiais, quoted in Balard, Dahomey 1930, 186.

68 Monsignor Chabert, quoted in Balard, Dahomey 1930, 266 (my emphasis).

70 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xix.

71 Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," 24.

of production, distribution, and interpretation that includes academic writing, mu-

Potrebbero piacerti anche