Emily Zeamer
Paul Henley has argued that Gary Kildea’s film Celso and Cora should not have won the Royal Anthropological Institute prize in 1984, because it is not really an ethnographic film. Henley dismisses Celso and Cora as a “descriptive film” that “does not attempt to explain anything, but rather merely explores the sentiments of two particular individuals living in a given social universe.” (1984: 10) He argues that Celso and Cora fails to show anything of the sociological context of its subjects, in part because Kildea’s camera focuses too narrowly on Celso and Cora themselves. A later article about the film by the filmmakers themselves refers to a written ethnography as providing a “context” for the film. But I argue that there is a great deal of ethnographic information, including context, built into the film itself. Though the camera does not often stray from the faces of Celso and Cora, we learn a lot about the economic and social conditions they struggle under, the relationships they have with other people – all “ethnographic” information that is accessible to any alert viewer.
For example, the film focuses very richly on the complex the social and kin relationships of the young couple. From the way in which Celso and Cora first discuss how they met and their subsequent relationship, we learn by inference that it is not “proper” for unmarried people to live together. They admit that they were not immediately open about their relationship to Cora’s mother because they started living together right away. Cora’s mother does not approve of Celso, and later in the film we learn that her disapproval stems from his lack of education and resources – that Cora’s mother hoped her daughter would marry someone of a higher social class. Through this relationship, we learn about the potential economic and social power that older women have in the family, as well as the importance of social class and education. Similarly, in one scene where Celso is selling cigarettes, a man leaves him holding out his change for almost a minute, while the man fumbles with the pack and then lights a cigarette. As the seconds pass with Celso holding the money suspended in the air, ignored by the other man, we can see quite clearly how class shapes interactions between strangers. Here, a close-up shows a great deal about social context, even more poignantly because we never see the other man’s face.
Moreover, I would argue that Kildea’s tight focus on Celso and Cora themselves works to reveal the tight and constrained nature of their lives as lower-class people in Manila. After Celso has to move his cigarette stand because the hotel he used to sell in front of changed its regulations to “clean up” the street, he ends up setting up his stand in a dark corner of a market, clearly away from the street traffic. The camera lingers on Celso in this hidden space – even when Celso gestures toward the sign on the hotel, Kildea does not immediately move away from him to film anything else. From this close camera focus, we get a sense of how narrow Celso’s own zone of movement is. We can see that he is careful to stay out of the way, to keep from drawing the attention of police or others who might give him trouble. In this way, Kildea illustrates with sensitivity how claustrophobic the environment can be for the poor, in a social context where they are often actively excluded from certain spaces and interactions. Even Celso’s baby is hidden away in a box by his stand. These are people forced to live at the margins. Kildea doesn’t have to “explain” the class dynamics of this social environment for his audience to understand the importance of class in shaping every aspect of life, self-presentation, movement, and economy in this context.
Lila Abu-Lughod has argued that one reason there is little “feminist ethnography” is that individual anthropologists, especially women, strategically emulate conservative academia in order to gain recognition in the academy. She argues that the discipline has too long focused on the production of “scientific” and “objective” (and masculinist) forms of knowledge, emphasizing “sociological” details and facts, at the expense of many of the more intimate and everyday registers of social experience which are often those which characterize women’s lives. Even so-called “feminist” ethnographers have largely taken this approach, for fear of being marginalized or seeming to lack “scientific” rigor. Though he is neither a woman nor an anthropologist, Kildea effectively challenges this assumption that ethnography should be “objective” and quantitative rather than situated and qualitative, by focusing on everyday social reality and the effect of social conditions on individual experience. If he drew the criticism of some mainstream anthropologists, perhaps that just means his work indeed challenges some of the “professionalist” and “objectivist” biases of the discipline.