CHRONOMETER. Weekly Newspaper of Kavala,
Sunday 2/12/2001

“Creating Tomorrow” on ET1:
Documentary featuring the C. Nadia Seremetakis

Written by Dr Maria Papapavlou*

The dialogue among places, times and persons, whether in text or image, could also serve as the subtitle to this commentary on ET1’s tribute to the ethnologist, anthropologist and poet Nadia Seremetakis. She herself had initiated this dialogue in 1983–84 in her early article, “The Eye of the Other: Watching Death in Rural Greece,” in which she discusses the relationship of an American anthropologist and a Greek-American photographer with grieving farmers in Thessaly during funerary rituals. Her critique focuses on Tsiaras’s photographs, which reveal, among other things, his cultural and ethnographic distance from the village residents. His aesthetic priorities imposed visual angles that were unnatural and incompatible with local classifications of what was considered “important” and “beautiful.”

The visual representation of the Other is a particularly subtle yet visible indication of whether or not the researcher understands cultural difference. The conscious ethnographer’s effort to become familiar with the “local gaze,” the gaze of the Other, is evident not only in written ethnography but also in photographic and video material. This is an issue with which Seremetakis’s later work is deeply familiar.

Her ethnography, The Last Word at Europe’s Edge (Greek edition: Nea Synora–Livanis), now regarded as a foundational work in Greek anthropology, was published in 1991 by the University of Chicago Press, an academic publisher that had until then been largely inaccessible to Greek monographs, and offered a powerful response to documentary realism. The photographic material incorporated into the book speaks at least two languages: that of the photographer and that of the person photographed. In the text—both in its content and its structure—we hear two voices, the local voice and that of the researcher; we see people, places and objects engaged in an equal dialogue with one another; and we sense pluralism and polyphony, even though what we ultimately hold in our hands is only a “silent” book. Perhaps this is because the senses function as a chain and cannot be separated from one another?

Seremetakis addressed the mutual exchange and communication among the senses in her 1993 article “The Memory of the Senses,” published in the Visual Anthropology Review, introducing the subject of the senses into anthropology in an original way. She developed it further in her subsequent book The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, published in 1996 by the University of Chicago Press (Greek edition: Nea Synora–Livanis). In this book, she brought anthropology—and Greek anthropology in particular—into dialogue with philosophy, archaeology, history, the mass media and cinema.

And from text back into life. For, as she would later write in The Other City of Silence—published in English and German for the Vienna International Festival 2000—referring to the monumental public-memory event she organized in Kalamata in 1996, ten years after the devastating earthquakes: “…memory is not simply a source of ideas, but has material and sensory dimensions… Memory can be located in the emotional attachment to specific places, places that possess their own life histories and carry biographies within them. Memory can be found embodied, in miniature, in objects that trigger profound emotions and narratives. Memory is connected with sounds, smells and sights…”

And Messenia—especially Kalamata—would, through this event, see and experience for the first time the difference between culture as spectacle and viewing, the so-called cultural events, and culture as action in everyday life, as citizens entered into the process of “excavating” their own objects of memory. Image and word—lectures, photography and video—would once again come together in a harmonious and aesthetically refined dialogue.

The brief contextual reference and analysis above, concerning a multifaceted body of work and action, seeks to emphasize that the contributors** to ET1’s documentary tribute to the creator Nadia Seremetakis possessed both the knowledge and the judgement required to select the “protagonists” for an educational television documentary entitled Creating Tomorrow, as well as the necessary courage. For those of us who heard about the project, the question was whether and to what extent they would gain the “protagonist’s” trust, so that she would open up the subtext to them rather than merely grant them an interview, and whether the director, despite all the spatial, temporal, financial and other constraints imposed on such television documentaries, would be able to convey the “dialogue” between them.

If documentary realism stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from ethnographic film, this particular documentary succeeds in positioning itself somewhere between the two. From the latter, it retains the commitment to safeguarding and presenting the “local gaze”—in this case, that of the researcher who is herself being observed, both as a scholar and as a person: how she sees and experiences her own work, how she comments on it, and above all how she experiences culture and the cultural Other in her everyday life.

With a minimally intrusive camera, and without effects or supplementary lighting, the filmmaker allows his “subject” to move freely through the space—to stand up, sit down, rise again, laugh and speak naturally, without the intervention of a third party, such as an interrogative journalist. His discreet gaze succeeds in conveying a sense of immediacy to the viewer. The documentary begins with Seremetakis’s own narration, a retrospective journey into the past as she gently rocks in her armchair against the backdrop of her library, and continues by using her voice to accompany the images that follow. The camera approaches her sensitively, gradually familiarising the viewer with her as she speaks at times in a serious scholarly register and, at others, within the natural flow of interaction among people, in everyday language and with humour. It listens as she reads and analyses the poetry of others before reading her own poem on the theme of love.

The theme of love emerges aptly through the theme of death, moving beyond romantic conventions even as idyllic little harbours of Mani appear in the background. Their contrast with the harshness of the mountains and the dry, stone-built villages lends one of the subjects of her research—the death rituals of Mani—a stark austerity. An excellent choice of musical accompaniment, such as the song “Chenellas–Chenellas” performed by Nikolas Mitsovoleas, colours the images of black-clad women bent over graves, as the “eye” captures them during its continuing journey. Is it the eye of the camera, the director, or the researcher?

A sequence of black-and-white images unfolds one after another—photographs from her many years of research—allowing the viewer to witness bare moments suspended in time. In the same silent manner, her books, some of which I mentioned earlier, appear one by one. Without words, without a voice. A moment of “stillness” within the flow of everyday life, as she herself had written earlier in The Senses Still, leaving behind the sense of an encounter with another world.

The next scene, set inside her home, takes us into other worlds. We encounter her among the objects and memories that surround her, all originating from exotic places far from Greece—places of research and continual wandering. Her words alternate with a piece of African music, drawn from or inspired by her own record collection. These are indeed the moments when the dominance of speech recedes, and music and image become the means that carry the viewer into the magic of travel. A life journey across different places—geographical, scholarly and aesthetic. Poetry in motion.

And when the journey ends, you want to begin it all over again. Returning to the opening, you notice moments you had missed. In the first scene, as the titles appear, we see a series of “poses” entering into a gentle swirl, while the movements of her body and hands make her seem almost to be dancing as she approaches us. The director “reveals” a hidden dancer. I do not know whether he was aware of this aspect of her life and did it deliberately, or whether what she herself has often said simply happened in practice:
“Photography is not the act of capturing the Other. It is that moment within movement when the photographer’s gaze ‘catches’ the gaze of the other. This momentary ‘stillness’ within the flow is photography.”

The success of this thirty-minute documentary lies primarily in this dialogue—a sensitive dialogue capable of conveying far more than what is merely spoken.

* Dr Maria Papapavlou is an anthropologist and teaches in the Department of Greek Philology at Democritus University of Thrace.

** Documentary credits: Kostas Charalambous, director; Nikos Kanellos, camera; Katerina Maggana, editorial supervision; Niki-Koula Linardou, producer; music supervision: Stavros Papastavrou.