Fig. 1. TimAsch doing maintenance on the 16mm Arriflex Camera. Mishimishimobetene.
Yanomano Village. 1971. Photo: Craig Johnson.
INTRODUCTION
Timothy Asch's distinctive career has been synony-
mous with ethnographic filmmaking since the late 1960s.
Few anthropologists are aware, however, that Asch was
equally as interested in changing both the ways anthro-
pologists teach anthropology and the ways in which
students of anthropology see. He shifted his focus
continually between filmmaking and pedagogy
From his undergraduate years at Columbia Univer-
sity (1955-59) to his tenure as Director of the Center for
Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern
California( 1983 until his death in 1994), Asch imagined
numerous pedagogical possibilities in merging the teach-
ing of* social theory with film. He understood that
students might learn anthropology from the focused act
of attentive seeing and recogni/ed that ethnographic film
might function more effectively as a medium related to
Visual Anthropology Review Volume 17
IMAGES OF ASCH
SARAH ELDER
field observation rather than as autonomous documen-
tary or quasi illustrative lecture material. Asch en\i-
sioned a new form of creating (and learning) anthropo-
logical knowledge in v\hich image and text amplify and
inform the other each with equal \ alue. He explored
his vision in a number of interrelated ways: In his
filmmaking he chose to collaborate with anthropologists
who could pro\ ide written ethnographies- he explored
preliminary designs for film stud\ guides (Asch and
Seaman 1993); and at USC. Asch designed and taught
a prototype introductory cultural anthropolou\ course
based on ethnographic films with linked readings. He
also produced numerous short sequence films for class-
room use and collaborated on the publication of a
unique film guide monograph published w ith four \ id-
eotapes, ./era Tapakan: Balincsc healer an ethno-
graphic film monograph (Connor. Asch and Asch
19X6).
Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002 89
 When Asch first started teaching at Brandeis Uni-
versity in the early 70s and later Harvard, he discovered
that by using still and moving images he could teach
anthropology more effectively. He could teach not only
core concepts, but also teach students to see better, to
become more insightful observers of human behavior.
Before they ventured into the field Asch taught his
students the practice of observation, training them to
attend to detail, to notice, to perceive, to discern so that
they might eventually see beyond visible evidence to the
invisible patterns of culturebeyond previous cultural
analysis to their own original interpretation. Continu-
ously searching for new ways to teach and generate
anthropological knowledge, Asch persisted in his visual
experiments throughout his life. I had the good fortune
to study with Tim in his early teaching years.
Tim Asch's life work weaves together three distinct
threads: filmmaking, teaching and still photography. For
Asch these threads were inextricably bound together by
both logic and passion. Yet, he found they were often
at odds with each other and with the demands of the
profession of anthropology. I focus here on the conjunc-
tion of these paths in his early yearson the teachers
who influenced him, on Asch's early teaching, on the
profound ways I experienced Tim as my teacher, on his
relationship to still photography and briefly on his film
production from the 1950s to the 1970s.
BACKGROUND
Asch's extensive film work includes more than sixty
ethnographic films, many award winning, and always
with collaborators (including John Marshall, Patsy Asch,
Napoleon Chagnon, Linda Connor, Douglas Lewis,
James Fox, and Asen Balikci). Ironically, many anthro-
pologists know him primarily for the thirty-nine
Yanomami films he made withNapoleon Chagnon from
1968 to 1975. Asch later came to distance himself from
many of these, including The Feast (1975) and The Ax
Fight (1970), for both their methods and form as well
as their ethnographic interpretation. Still, he continued
to love what he called the "gentle" Yanomami films such
as A Man and His Wife Weave a Hammock (1975); A
Father Washes His Children (1974,); Weeding the
Garden (1975) and Tapir Distribution (1975).
Throughout his career Asch articulated and pro-
moted a distinct methodology for a formalized collabo-
ration between anthropologist and filmmaker. As Direc-
90 Volume 17 Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002
tor of the Center for Visual Anthropology in USC's
anthropology department, he developed the program's
curriculum to advance this model, requiring graduate
students to take courses in USC's film department and
encouraging them to form collaborative teams of media
maker and anthropologist.
While advancing this collaborative model, Asch also
took the lead in championing the production and class-
room use of short "discrete event" sequence films of
human activity. At Columbia, Margaret Mead with
Gregory Bateson as her photographer had experimented
with activity sequences in her still and moving images
from Bali (Moore 1995) and John Marshall further
developed this approach in the 1950s in his non-sync Ju/
'hoansi or "Bushmen" material500,000 feet of foot-
age on which Asch, as a young film editor, cut his teeth.
Asch was strongly influenced by South African anthro-
pologist Max Gluckman's "extended case-study" work
in the 1950s. Teaching at Manchester University in
England, Gluckman argued that social actions have
overarching definable structures from which normative
rules can be extrapolated by detailed observation. Asch
concluded that activity sequence films might function as
visual case studies from which original data, and even-
tual anthropological knowledge, might be derived (Marks
1995).
The case study approach complemented the
call of Margaret Mead and others in the 1960s for
collecting footage from the field. Asch, who studied with
Mead at Columbia, was excited about applying the
Carleton Gajdusek and E. Richard Sorenson research
model of shooting and storing raw footage so that it could
be utilized later for multiple modes of research not
envisioned at the time of filming (Sorenson 1967). Asch
commented in the 1990s that no one had ever success-
fully followed up on the modeleither in archiving
material or retroactively using it (1992). Nevertheless,
before his death he deposited all of his own material in
the Smithsonian Institution's Human Film Archives
Collection. It is, perhaps, far too early to speculate about
what indigenous peoples and/or anthropologists will do
in the future with the 20th-century photographic material.
There exists already a fair amount in print about Tim
Asch's work. Jay Ruby's article, "Out of Sync: The
Cinema of Tim Asch" (1995), is particularly insightful.
Ruby critically positions The Ax Fight as a naive, but
brilliant early expression of postmodern ethnographic
filmmaking. Nonetheless, a comprehensive critical text
Visual Anthropology Review
on Asch has yet to be written. Such an endeavor would valences of our values, values of which sometimes even
elucidate the origins of visual anthropology: Much of we are unconscious. In the various telling of this
Asch's visual material remains critically unframed, and childhood story, particularly in the years when he was
the pedagogical experimentations he left us deserve facing an early death from cancer, Tim laid down a
scholarly attention. Using the new capabilities of digital framework for our understanding of what was important
multimedia, his work could be examined in a layered to him. He gives us a map of where he came from and
indexical manner. As visual anthropology continues to where he might be heading, a place and space inscribed
establish its position within the profession of anthropol- by his life's process.
ogy, an examination of Asch's sixty films, film study The story text that follows is a composite taken from
drafts, unpublished curriculum, personal notes, and four sources: a taped conversation I had with Tim in
almost fifty years of still photography would contribute 1992; the videotape, Morning with Asch (1995), by
both to its history, and, perhaps more importantly, to its Jaysinhji Jhala and Lindsey Powell; the story Tim told
future practices. Asch's visual instincts, while not al- Douglas Harper, who included it in his publication, Cape
ways theoretically articulated, were exceptional in intu- Breton 1952: The Photographic Vision of Timothy
iting the profound ways in which humans make compli- Asch (1994); and, finally, my own memories of Tim
cated meaning from the visible. telling it on several occasions. I have condensed it while
As a tilmmaker, my own work has been to tell trying to retain details, and also put Tim in the third
stories, other peoples' and my own. I've written this person so that he might perform f< >r us not with voice,
article in the same vein. Because a certain amount of cadence and posturing, as he so liked to do, but as a
historical material already exists on Asch, 1 have at- protagonist of text. That is what we do when we ad:r
tempted to focus on areas with which readers may be less adopt and retell someone elses story.
familiar. I have used two interviews I recorded with Tim The story begins in New York City in 1942, when
in 1992 and 1994, and my memories of him as my Tim is ten years old. The back-story begins when Tim s
graduate school teacher, filmmaking colleague, and fatherdiedin 1935 when Tim was three. Hismotherhad
friend. What follows are bits and pieces of facts, adored her husband and fell apartthe whole family fell
fragments of stories, conversations and interpretations apart. His mother remarried to save herself. Tim's
that I have shaped to reflect less-visible parts and less- stepfather was a cold although superbly well-read man.
known aspects of Tim Asch's life workaspects which Tim began to get into trouble on the streets, in school and
I believe provide clues and insight into his visionary at home. He was kicked out of several schools; he was
influence on visual anthropology. disturbed; he wasn't learning well. In desperation, at the
suggestion of a friend who was a child psychiatrist, his
ORIGIN STORY mother decided to send him off to a school out of the city,
up north.
I will start with a story Tim told many times, and in One evening, ten-year old Tim was put on a bus and
many versions depending on his audience. It is what I call shipped out. "Nobody went with me and I was too shy
a "core story," the kind of identity story each of us tells to ask questions/ He thought he was going to some kind
about our lives. These stories are as much a part of us of prison school. He traveled all night without sleeping,
as our fingerprints. Our stories give form and meaning nervous and fearful. When dawn came, the bus began
to the inchoate details of our experiences, allowing us to driving through beautiful high peaks country. "I'd never
make sense out of life's raw footage. Core stories are seen mountains before except in comic books. There
signifiers for where we have been and where we might were mountains covered in snow and mist and clouds.
be traveling. They teach our 1 isteners the intricacies and You couldn't see the tops which made you think they
Sarah Elderisan award-winning ethnographic film director who has worked in Alaska for25 years
collaborating with Alaska Native communities and exploring a community collaborative filmmak-
ing process. Elderis currently Professor at the Department of Media Study in the University at
Buffalo, State University of New York. She co-directed the Alaska Native Heritage Film Center at
the University of Alaska from 1973 until 1997. Elder's films are distributed by Documentary
Educational Resources.

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 17 Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002 91

were all the more higher." The bus stopped and the
driver said "well here it is." There was nothing around
but six feet of snow (or eight feet or ten depending on
the telling) and a narrow farm road down which Tim
began walking. Soon ajeep jammed full of some twelve
children pulled up to a barn by the side of the road. The
driver told the kids to hurry with their chores. Tim
watched. They all raced around feeding and watering
horses, cleaning stalls and emptying a large bucket
contraption for manure. "I'd never seen horses before."
Tim figured out what to do solely by watching from a
corner; he started helping. No one knew or questioned
who he was in his Brooks Brothers jacket and camel hair
coat. The kids raced off for breakfast leaving Tim to
finish most of the chores; he worked from eight to almost
noon. "I did everything that I had to do.. .1 said to myself
'if this is prison, I want to stay here. This is fantastic.'"
So he walked the rest of the way down the country road
to the school where he found Walter Clark, the headmas-
ter, so furious with worry he had almost called the police.
No one ever noticed that Tim had completed all the barn
chores, and Tim never told. "They never asked and
nobody ever knew, and I never said anything. That was
a great school."
Tim would often follow with a story about his first
camera:
Tim: I had been at the school for about a year when
someone gave me a Brownie box camera. I had
become very good with horses, and I photographed
my horse. The photographs came back from the
drugstore and that was it. I knew I was going to be
a photographer. You know lots of people don't
know what they are going to do with their lives. I
knew somehow I would be a photographer. I loved
that horse you see, and there it was in my picture.
It was magic.
Surrounded by the high peaks ofthe wi Id Adirondack
Mountains, North Country School in Lake Placid, New
York was founded in 1938 on the principles of the
progressive education movement and inspired by Ameri-
can philosopher John Dewey who believed that a child
learns best by experience and by doing in an environment
of love. The school wanted students to learn to be useful,
productive, moral and humane. The faculty believed
that all of life's experiences both in and out of the
classroom have equal possibilities for teaching. "An
92 Volume 17 Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002
experience, a very humble experience, is capable of
generating and carrying any amount of theory (or
intellectual content), but a theory apart from experience
cannot be definitely grasped even as theory. It tends to
become a mere verbal formula, a set of catchwords used
to render thinking...obscuring perception [and] pre-
venting us from seeing..." (Dewey 1916)
Tim lived at North Country with his main teacher Ed
Bley and his wife Elsa in a farmhouse with several other
kids. When I talked with Ed about Tim's bus story, he
humorously suggested that I not "confuse Tim's stories
with actuality, but rather as inventive
autobiography... .Tim certainly knew how to find a way
to say how he was feeling" (Bley 2001). But, having
heard the story so many times, I choose not to confuse
actuality with the truth of Tim's narrative.
Ed Bley was Tim's English and social studies
teacher for all of the four years Tim was at North
Country (fifth to eighth grade). Both were particularly
fond of the other, and Bley had an enormous influence
on Tim's life. Tim's classmate Mimi Dow told me: "Ed
was the kind of teacher who changes your life forever"
(M. Dow 2001). Tim worked on the school farm and
studied in the progressive tradition. In fifth grade, Bley
taught Tim a semester's curriculum on Africa and the
experience of Blacks in American society. The kids put
on plays and covered their affluent white skins with dark
makeup. They were asked to feel what it's like to be
"others." We might shudder at this colonial race-bend-
ingit was radical for its day.
At age ten, Tim was thinking about cultural practice,
ethnocentrism and cross-cultural misunderstanding. He
began to learn in a wholly new way. A popular slogan of
progressive education was "Each one, teach one" imply-
ing not only the value of each individual child, but also
that each student must teach every other student. Tim
began teaching. The kids were immersed in fine arts and
performing arts; they each made their own pin hole
cameras, invented things, discovered ideas, made things
with their hands, and learned to think by first-hand
observationas film critics might say, without exposi-
tory narration.
Tim also had a way with a particularly wild unman-
ageable horse, "Do Tell", whom none of the other
children were permitted to go near. Only the headmaster
and young Tim could manage this horse. His equine
relationship became not only a badge of honor for Tim,
but real emotional attachment. A human bonding. A
Visual Anthropology Review
measure of great pleasure. It was "Do Tell" who opened
him to the ineffable force of photography: "I loved that
horse you see, and there he was in my picture."
Knowing the context of his earlier childhood and
later career, Tim's journey to North Country becomes
a transformation story, an origin story. A fatherless shy
boy seemingly without much talent suddenly finds his
way out of blackness into the dawn's light. Men and
women embrace him, his ingenuity, his hands-on-skills,
his love for his box camera, even his "learning prob-
lems." From a radical disjunction, he finds his place.
From his ill-fitting family home he finds family among
strangers. An unformed boy child is transformed into a
formed human being. This core story is not so much
about Tim's bus adventure, as it is about the deeper
consciousness that disjunction and eventual human
connectedness can bring. It's about the best of learning
and teaching, about original thinking and discovery, and
about being useful in the world. It is about Tim's life's
work to transform anthropology and the teaching of
anthropology so that the discipline might contribute
more effectively to making the world a more humane
place.
Sarah: Has your mission changed much over your
lifetime?
Tim: It hasn't much. Except for horses... I really did
a horse trip pretty thoroughly. And then someone
gave me a little Brownie Box camera, and I photo-
graphed my horse. I took some pictures of this
horse, and they came out! And they looked great.
It was magic. And from that moment on I was taking
pictures.. .1 was maybe 10. Then a few years later
I had my own little dark room down in the basement
of our house. I was walking the streets ofNew York,
as a 12,13,14 year old taking hundreds of pictures
everyday, all day.
By fourteen, Tim graduated from North Country
and moved on to the Putney School in Vermont, a
private secondary school famous for its progressive
education. Putney encouraged students to question
established ideas, honor the community around them,
participate in the arts, and, like North Country, do farm
work. Tim thrived developing his love for social studies
and most importantly his craft in photography. By now
he had absorbed Dewey's fundamental principles that
education must" improve the life we live in common,"
Visual Anthropology Review Volume 17
and, more significantly for Tim's later pedagogy, it
should use the "authentic experience of perception" to
avoid "the deluge of half-observations, verbal ideas, and
unassimilated knowledge which afflicts the world"
(Dewey 1916).
The entirety of Tim's early transformative learning
experiences frames Tim's later successful career. While
other filmmakers and anthropologists were pursuing
festival honors and acclaimed book publications, Tim's
early career was already dedicated to transforming the
pedagogy of cultural anthropology in the assumption
that cross-cultural knowledge might lead students not
only to do smarter anthropology, but also, as he was
taught at North Country, do some measure of social
good.
TEACHER
I first talked to Tim Asch in a phone call in 1969,
soon after I had graduated from Sarah Lawrence College
(also a progressive school). I wanted to study anthropo-
logical film. Someone (whose name I have long forgot-
ten) told me there was only one academic individual
doing such work. I nervously called Tim at Brandeis
University, and in his impassioned manner he talked to
me at length about his work with the "Yanomamo." He
encouraged me to send a portfoliophotographs from
my work on the Navajo Reservation and several stories
and poems. We seemed to have mutual ideas about the
potent role of imagestheir potential to communicate
cultural practices and their socio-political role in chang-
ing Westerners' ethnocentrism. We were also both
partial to documentary photography. We agreed almost
at that moment that I would study with him.
I enrolled at Brandeis in 1970 for my MFA in film,
and started apprenticing at the Center for Documentary
Anthropology, which Tim had founded with John
Marshall. (In 1971 they re-named it Documentary
Educational Resources, DER.) In those times DER was
a hothouse, a salon, for ethnographic filmmakers. I did
drudge work there, built mix leaders, projected rough
cuts, made coffee, and hosted visiting anthropologists
andfilmmakerssuch as Asen Balikci, Roger Sandall, and
Napoleon Chagnon. More importantly I was allowed to
sit in on brainstorming and editing sessions. Like Tim
arriving at North Country, I felt I had arrivedalmost.
The ethnographic film world was sti 11 very much a man's
world. Feminist film ideas were suspect. At DER there
was little interest in asking film subjects to speak for
Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002 93
themselves or looking at the lives of women, not to
mention giving subjects a direct role in film directing, an
approach that I began exploring in 1973 as Co-Director
of the Alaska Native Heritage Film Center (Elder
1995).
As an undergraduate in the 1960s, I had seen what
was considered the best of anthropological films. They
maddened me by their distance, lack of intimacy,
omissions and the lurking colonialism embedded in their
construction. I thought there must be a better way to
make films and told Tim my thoughts on many occa-
sions. This was a time when my country was killing
Vietnamese people, and dehumanizing and misrepre-
senting them in the media while at the same time my
cohorts and I were watching smuggled North Vietnam-
ese footage of rice farming, village life and U.S. inva-
sions. We could see the disjunction. We were watching
films from the CaliforniaNewsreel film collective which
showed raw, insider footage of American minorities
without public voice, and films such as Lucinda
Firestone's Attica (1969) about the New York State
prison uprising and massacre presenting Black prisoners
and their advocates speaking for themselves. For the
first time we were seeing films about women, by women
and for women. I was keenly aware that most filmmak-
ers were making films about people who had no power,
and that those films reflected more of the filmmakers'
point of view than those they claimed to be representing
(Elder 1995). It was the sixties; we were questioning
authority, social scientists, media makersin short
anyone who presumed to speak for or about someone
elseincluding ethnographic filmmakers.
In most anthropology classes, including mine at
Sarah Lawrence, indigenous peoples were presented as
so "special" that they had no individual voices, no
national positioning, no place in a film's authorship and
no real-life possibility of intersecting our lives. They
were "invented" as icons of human behavior. The
indigenous "they" were distant, beautiful and compli-
cated "cultures" on which we could practice our intel-
lectual careers and our visual desires. Tim had not yet
fully queried the political nature of representation or the
subjective nature of anthropology's constructed knowl-
edge, nor had I. Postmodernism was just getting a
foothold. He was interested in making films about others
in ways that might diminish Westerners' cultural myopia
and equally committed to making visual documents of
"the life ways" of swiftly changing societies, or as we
94 Volume 17 Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002
said then "disappearing cultures." From my position he
was very much an anthropologist from the explorer
tradition, with little feminist or political film theory. We
butted heads many times. And yet, Tim was always able
to listen, to give me room, to let me work independently,
to query my film and anthropology fundamentals. I
admired him for allowing me to do a feminist film
project, a subject which he said intimidated him. He
didn't hide that he was sometimes threatened by our
sixties notions; he listened carefully.
It turned out Tim had a lot to teach me. Tim
sharpened my visual perceptions; he taught me how to
see in ways that neither documentary filmmakers nor
anthropologists alone were teaching me. He instinctively
combined the two fields. As a documentarian, he looked
for Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment," and as an
anthropologist he shot for the details of cultural systems.
He understood the tension between the iconic nature of
film and the intimate particularity of an image, the
invisible culture pattern within the visible form, the
resting open energy of a wide shot and the single-minded
energy of a close up. He showed me how to look at the
visual performance of culture in ways that were absent
from linear discourse. He understood that the process of
gathering and presenting images and sound, at its worst,
can create fictive claims of truth; in its most ordinary
form the process can explicate pre-existing knowledge;
and, at its best, it can create knowledge. Instinctively,
Tim understood that the process of ethnographic filming
was a two-way process between filmer and filmed, and,
when done well, could create new anthropological
insight, new consciousness. As David MacDougall (1998)
writes, "If images lie, why are they so palpable of the life
between us? I want to look, sometime sidelong, at the
spaces between filmmaker and the subject: of imagery
and language, of memory and feeling. These are the
spaces charged with ambiguity, but are they not also the
spaces in which consciousness is created?"
Tim was enormously influenced by his work for the
Harvard educational psychologist Jerome Bruner. Bruner
was developing a visionary social science curriculum
called Man: A Course ofStudy (M ACOS) for American
elementary schools. Bruner facilitated a creative think
tank with filmmakers, novelists, designers, poets, an-
thropologists and educators. In 1965 Tim joined the
project, videotaping experimental classrooms and work-
ing on curriculum. The team's goal was to design an
elementary curriculum based around Marshall's "Bush-
Visual Anthropology Review
men" film material, Asen Balikci's Netsilik footage and
Irven DeVore's baboon footage. The course examined
what it means to be human, how we got here and how
humans could be made more human. Brunner wanted
to stir children's imagination and facilitate them gener-
ating knowledge rather than simply consuming it. Asking
questions was to be as important as finding answers. The
project was seminal ground for many of the participants'
later careers (P. Dow 1991,2001). Clearly it was for Tim
who had learned by experiential discovery and carried
forward these methods. Tim brought much of the
MACOS curriculum into our classroom including the
MACOS teacher's guide: "We get so thoroughly used to
a kind of pseudo-idea, a half perception, that we are not
aware how half-dead our mental action is, and how
much keener and more extensive our observations and
ideas would be if we formed them under conditions of
a vital experience..." (M ACO S: Seminars for Teachers
1970, fromDewey 1916)
Every class that Tim taught was an experience, a
major happening. He did anything he could to encour-
age us to think infreshways. He was experimenting with
ways to teach anthropology and, simultaneously, testing
out his own rough-cut films. Tim said of this time that
it was the best teaching he ever did.
Tim: I created an environment chamber... I had
tracing paper with rear view 35mm [slide]
projection...with audiotapes playing. Students sat
on the floor on pillows. Some of these shows were
very complicated. One of the last ones I did was the
day they [the students] took over the building at
Brandeis.
He turned off the sound on films, and made us guess
about the significance of what we were seeing. He turned
off the projection lamp and had us sit in the dark listening
to sounds. He showed raw footage of Ju/'hoansi from
Nyae Nyae ("Bushmen" or !Kung San) and Yanomami
from Venezuela, and asked us to design editing struc-
tures. He showed edited material and asked us to re-edit
it.
Woven into all of his teaching were stories. In the
middle of a lecture struggling to communicate an idea
Tim would segue into a story. Never a pause. No
linguistic cue. He would just launch in. He told field
stories, war stories, life stories. He educated us with
stories ofhis near death, his disassembling cameras in the
Visual Anthropology Review Volume 17
tropics, his conflicting fears and admiration of the
Yanomami, his cultural mistakes. He often held evening-
long classes in his home on Frost Street in Cambridge,
Mass.
Tim was drawn to Satyajit Ray's film trilogy Pather
Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), and The World of
^/?w(1959),aswellasOzo's Tokyo Story (\953). He had
us identify what qualities were ethnographic, and why
these particular narrative films worked so well to convey
complex social relationships. He had us read Marcel
Mauss' The Gift (1925/ and analyze its theoretical
implications of reciprocity and exchange in The Feast,
a film he very consciously set out to make with The Gift
in mind. As a result, I remember two years later quite
assertively directing Leonard Kamerling, my film part-
ner, to shoot the extensive distribution of bowhead
whale meat during a Siberian Yup'ik whale hunt in the
Bering Sea. I insisted on including a lengthy scene of the
whale meat give-away in our final cut of At the Time of
Whaling (1974/
Tim, as well as John Marshall, spoke about film
subjects in personal ways that I had never heard
anthropologists speak before. They used people's names
and brought the film personas of Dedeheiwa, Moawa,
=Tomo, N!ai, and /Gunda into my life in such profound
ways that these film individuals still inhabit my con-
sciousness. Tim screened The Hunters (\951) back to
back with Marshall's powerful sequence films like N/um
Tchai (1969/ allowing us to experience the profound
difference between the constructed power of narrativity
vs. real time sequences. We watched Bitter Melons
(1971) (still one of my favorite films) with and without
translation and learned the shallowness of image without
human language. We discussed the construction of
Dead Birds (1964) and what Tim considered Robert
Gardner's wasteful use of raw footage, footage which
Tim felt redundant in its coverage and shot only to
maintain a narrative line. He had us figure out how many
short sequence activity films Gardner might have made
and what they could have been about. At the same time
Tim very much admired the aesthetics in Gardner's
camera work and had us scrutinize his framing and
composition.
Tim: Bob Gardner shot 60,000 feet of film for Dead
Birds, which is only a 2000 foot film. He did a
Hollywood job. He wanted to be sure and cover
everything. I would have shot 8000 feet of film for
Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002 95
 that. People get so mesmerized by the spectacular
nature of things. But it's like fishing on the water,
where the fish are so beautiful, and you take them
out of water and they're drab. Gardner's there
absolutely enmeshed and thoroughly involved with
what was going on and all the spectacular angles he
could get, and in fact when you get the stuff home
it's pretty plain.
Sarah: Why, what happens?
Tim: Well the colors, the reality of it is so unbeliev-
able and when it gets on a two dimensional reality
it's just not the same. I had several friends; the one
major thing in their life was to finish this film they
made from Bali. And it was really spectacular
footage, but they got home to New York, and all
splendor was sort of gone. They were mesmerized
by the wrong stuff. They didn't have an idea of how
they were going to structure a film. They just said
wow look at all this beauty, and they filmed it.
Anybody can sympathize with it. It's the old prob-
lem of how you develop a story.
In order to get in-depth feedback about whatever
film he was editing, Tim invented what he called a
"sloptical" print using slides, a Bolex, a typewriter, a
duplicator and a local film lab. He would marry multiple
16mm strands of text, freeze frames or film image into
his rough assembly and test it on us. Something so easy
to do today in digital editing, this primitive editing tool
allowed him to struggle with how anthropology might be
visually taught. To my knowledge, he is the only
filmmaker who did this at the time. Without a large
budget, 16mm-film technology made it difficult to
screen a rough cut with sound, intertitles, subtitles and
freeze frames. The homemade sloptical was a cheap and
dirty method of printing all elements to get realistic
audience feedback. Tim would ask us what we thought
we saw; what we didn't understand. What cultural
generalities could we make? Who was related to whom?
Why did we think there was an ax fight? How should he
have filmed the fight? Should he leave in the filmmaker's
voice? He was adamant that a film should not be released
until it was really tested in the classroom and reworked
over and over. By 1973 when 1 was making my own
films with Leonard Kamerling at the Alaska Native
Heritage Film Project, I extended this same methodol-
ogy to a wider audience. In our test screenings we invited
Yup'ik and Inupiaq village residents, our translators,
96 Volume 17 Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002
undergrads and grad students, secretaries, janitors,
anthropologists, visitors and filmmakers. Copying Tim,
I reworked rough cuts far more than any other documen-
tary editors I knew. In hindsight I attribute much of our
films' successes to these test screenings, to Tim.
Tim brought Marshall's extraordinary Ju/'hoansi
material into the classroom. For me these were the most
powerful classes. Marshall's through-the-lens medita-
tions, his inclination to direct cinema, his attention to
detail and his clear affection for his film subjects
absolutely changed my life as a filmmaker.
Tim: In introducing the Bushmen, I had a great slide
show of what the Kalahari Desert [in Namibia] was
like in all the seasons of the year. And I had sound
effects to go with it. I had a tape recorder hooked
up to the slide projector, and there was a great film
of a storm in the middle of the Kalahari Desert during
the rainy season, I turned on a double system
Siemens projector and projected this great storm,
and then I asked the students, "well what's the
structure of this film? What's it about?" And very
few of them got the fact that it was about the
different seasons, and then I asked them to go back
and see if there were slides they wanted to re-look
at... so we went back and looked at these slides...
And then I had a slide of =Tomo in front of his
campfire... And I said "now what can you tell me
about this culture?"
So I showed them this picture of=Tomo; there were
three significant aspects of technology: the gourds,
the digging stick and the poison arrows. Often they
[students] couldn't get much. Sometimes I worked
very hard. I did this at Harvard too. I thought well
this will work for 19 minutes. I stood on the
chemistry sink with a big pointer. I'd say "I need
clues to tell what this culture is all about." And they'd
say "what's that thing hanging in a tree?" and I'd
explain that it was a skin bag, and I'd explain how
important skinning an animal and having a bag
meant. It meant that you could carry a bag back to
a base as opposed to animals that had to go from
place to place to get their food. The Bushmen could
have a permanent place and keep coming back to
it.... That was important in terms of traveling, as
were burying ostrich eggshells [for drinking water],
and the next day going out and burying more until
Visual Anthropology Review
 you could finally getto a distant location where there
were nuts.
Sarah: So what was happening to these students?
Tim: I was teaching them how to see. When they
saw a bag, then I would give them a lot of ethnog-
raphy. When they discovered a digging stick, then
I would tell them how important it was. I was giving
them a tremendous amount of ethnography; they
were finding clues. After an hour and a half at
Harvard I said, "you know we have to go; class is
over, and you haven't found the most important
piece of information in this film." There was sitting
a huge gemsbok horn that went way up, and that
would tell you that they could shoot large game....
Then I'd show my slide of New York City; it was
all concrete, and I'd ask, "what do people do here?"
We'd explore the same questions.
Then we would study a naming ritual - there was a
nice slide sequence of them [Ju/'hoansi] going
underneath this burning arch and giving a child a
name. I gave them quite a lot of literature; we
discussed it. And then I told them to go out and speak
to people about naming. And they were amazed at
how complicated naming is in our society.
So what I was doing was going over their readings,
getting them to do vicarious field work on film,
having them go out and do fieldwork themselves,
having them make conclusions about the data they
collected and then on to another subject. It was the
best teaching I ever did.
While Tim was teaching me visual anthropology, I
was also studying documentary film with Richard (Ricky)
Leacock, Ed Pincus and John Terry at MIT in Cam-
bridge. They were emphasizing very different things.
Leacock was an inspiring teacher, eloquent, vital, icono-
clastic, brilliant. Like Asch, he taught with stories. (I've
always thought that making film is just another form of
storytelling.) Leacock had been Flaherty's cameraman
on Louisiana Story (1948), and from Flaherty's tute-
lage, Ricky taught cinema as the art of revelation. He
drilled it into us to embrace the process of revealing and
discovery when shooting and to avoid preconceptions.
Did this mean no case histories? No preconceptions of
cultural patterns? No shooting agendas as Asch en-
dorsed? "When the time comes, I already know whom
I'm going to film and why I'm going to film them, so I'm
Visual Anthropology Review Volume 17
ready to do a better job than had I just walked into the
event."(Asch 1994)
Where Asch stressed social science, Leacock stressed
drama and aesthetics. He taught us how to discern
visually dramatic moments. Much like Satyajit Ray,
Leacock encouraged us to use close ups dramatically to
create visual tension. And, like Asch and Marshall,
Leacock always shot spontaneous long takes of se-
quences, but with an eye for the subsequent editing of
an organic dramatic storyline. His story emphasis was
very different from Tim's vision of distinct behavior
sequences for discreet films. Ricky was a master of
cinema verite, and showed us the filmic force of not
using narration, intertitles or other interpretive devices.
He was committed to making viewers actively work to
form their own meaning. Similar to North Country
School's progressive education principles, he believed
viewers take away far more from a film when they are
not explicitly told what to look at and what to think. But
how do you explicate an ax fight or an anthropological
concept without text? Asch taught me that film cannot
stand alone, and Leacock taught me that film must stand
alone. Of course they are both right.
Meanwhile, in the hallways and offices of MIT, Ed
Pincus was shooting his personal diary film of family life,
love affairs and friends {Diaries 1982). He encouraged
us to shoot everywhere and everything sometimes to the
point of intrusiveness. Pincus was looking for ways to
establish a new level of viewer-subject intimacy. Ricky
and Ed modeled a verite camera style more fluid than
Tim's, and one which allowed subjects to share their
own thoughts. While never abandoning his goal for an
overarching anthropological interpretation, Tim's shoot-
ing became more and more influenced by the direct
cinema ethos of the times. By the late 70s he was
stressing the dichotomy of good camera workthat it
is essential to anticipate with preconceptions and shoot
spontaneously without preconceptions.
Tim: It's very important to be able to predict the
basic course of social interaction of anyone you are
filming, so you'll have the camera there at the right
time at the right place to get the shots you want.
That's what you learn by observing early on how
[your subjects] interact with each other. Because
they do it differently than we do.
Sarah: Are you thinking while you are shooting
what can I do on film that I can't do on paper?
Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002 97
Fig. 2. John Marshall and Tim Asch in the editing room of the Center for Documentary Antrhopology which they later
renamed Documentary Educational Resources. 1971. Photo: Laurence Salzmann.

98 Volume 17 Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002 Visual Anthropology Review

F/g. 3. Timfiiming. Unknown Location. Courtesy of DER, Watertown, MA. http://
DER.org

Fig. 4. Tim Asch (Cinematography) and Craig Johnson (Audio Recording). The location is the area just
outside the Shabono in a area that was being cleared for a new garden. Filming the Weeding the Garden"
sequence. 1971 Photo: Napoleon Chagnon.

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 17 Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002 99

 Tim: No. When I film I'm not thinking about those
things at all. It's more of a humanistic relationship
between me and the people I'm filming. Like in the
Ata tana Ai film with Sina, I went into a cine trance
{Celebrations of Origins, 1992). That's when you
have this relationship when you really are moving
with them. You're not apart. You're not outside
looking in. You're inside, or on the periphery, very
much a part of things. When you really get to work
on an exciting subject it happens quite easily.
Here is one final story about Tim as teacher, to some
extent a sentimental story, but one that still touches me
and guides me in my own teaching. In 1975 Kamerling
and I won first prize at the American Film Festival in New
York City for our film At the Time of Whaling. Tim and
Napoleon Chagnon took second place for their film A
Man Called "Bee": Studying the Yanomamo. Chagnon
was at the awards banquet and was none too happy. We
received scant congratulations from him. Tim phoned
me long distance soon after and was ecstatic. He said that
if he had to place second, nothing could make him
happier than to lose to one of his own students. It was
another kind if winning. The next year we beat him again
with our film On the Spring Ice taking the blue ribbon,
and his and Chagnon's The Ax Fight taking the red
ribbon. Tim called again. Despite our many theoretical
and aesthetic disagreements over the years, to say
nothing of our mutual competitiveness, Tim celebrated
my career with me my whole life. Those of us who were
fortunate to be mentored by Tim learned from him, as
Tim had learned at North Country School, out of a place
of generosity and love.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
In the last four or five years of his life Tim told me
on several occasions that he had shifted his focus back
to still imagesthat he now got more satisfaction out of
photography than filming. I think this went far deeper
than the daunting costs and fieldwork rigors of filmmak-
ing, or the ebbing of his energy. Tim, like so many
documentary camera operators, experienced a kind of
Zen presence when he was in the act of filming. Thirty
years later, he could still recall moment-to-moment
details from early raw footage. But still photography
seemed to ground him more deeply. It gave him the
presentness of being there without the complexities of
100 Volume 17 Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002
filming. Wandering the beaches and forests with him on
our photography tramps, he seemed to photograph as an
act of meditation, a way of connecting to his source, a
way of feeling that same experience of human opening
as he found in his first pictures of "Do-Tell." Instead of
his horse, he contemplated human beings and nature.
Tim: I would want to look at the sunlight until the
last minute I guess. Everything we saw today was
so beautiful. Just walking. Just being with nature
and looking for things to photograph. Some new
beautiful thing. To be a part of that place. And it's
still therethat place as we speak. The crab shell.
The light. (Pt. Reyes beach, California, 1992)
Tim's photographic trajectory informs not only his
cinematography but also his desire to transform the
teaching of anthropology with the use of images. From
his early pictures of his horse, to Putney School where
he relentlessly polished his craft, to high school summers
when he apprenticed to Minor White and studied with
Edward Weston and Ansel Adams in California, he
considered his early still photography training vital to his
engagement with visual anthropology.
Studying under Adams, Weston and White, Tim
started out photographing nature "because that's what
they were doing, and as a young person you imitate to
learn." "But what I needed in my life was to be
photographing people... I was interested in anthropol-
ogy and people without being able to articulate it.. .but
that's how I learned" (Harper). Tim developed and
printed almost all of Minor White' s 4x5 negatives during
the summers of 1950 and 1951. He worked with little
sleep and no pay, "but I knew I was learning something."
Sarah: How did White feel about you?
Tim: He felt I was a young person who he was going
to teach. He wore himself out trying to teach me to
make something of myself.
Sarah: Did he like you?
Tim: Yes, he liked me a lot. He was a wonderful
person to be with.... That's how I got a discipline
and a commitment to something. Once you do
something like that, by rote for a while, you get
satisfaction out of it. You see these results; well it
stays with you forever.... I did a lot of printing for
Ansel Adams who was very demanding. Yuk. But
I spent a lot of time with Edward Weston that
Visual Anthropology Review
 summer too, and he was unbelievable. He was a
great, sort of down to earth, everyday-kind of plain
philosopher that said things in such a simple yet
penetrating way. Just an absolutely wonderful per-
son. We used to sit and talk and look at pictures for
hours.... If 1 weren't an anthropologist ethno-
graphic filmmaker, I'd be a still photographer.
If Minor White, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston
clinched photography for me then Morton Fried [at
Columbia University] clinched anthropology for
me. He hated pictures and film; thought they were
useless, but he was the only person at Columbia who
showed several films in the introductory course.
And I thought, my god what an interesting subject.. .if
you could teach it [anthropology] using film.. .wow!
Margaret Mead and Conrad Arensberg, they con-
vinced me that anthropology was the thing...[but] I
had a hard time at Columbia because no one
approved of me working with Margaret Mead.
Sarah: Who is no one?
Tim: Well Morton Fried and Conrad Arensberg said
"you'll never get out of here if you don't just quit
your interest in photography and stick to the books
and writing." Fried gave me a very hard time with
my thesis. It was very disappointing. And I didn't
have the respect for Margaret that I should have,
that I might have, because I was too much under the
influence of these other people that didn't have any
respect for her, these heavy males that never gave
her anything but an adjunct associate professorship.
Because of Tim's photography work, Margaret
Mead recommended Tim to Robert Gardner and John
Marshall at the Peabody Museum at Harvard in 1959.
They needed an editor for the "Bushmen" films and
wanted someone to do "dirty work, not an artist."
Tim: So I edited Bushmen films with John. Bob and
John had a big argument. It all centered around
Bob's visionof editing and John's vision.. .Basically
they [the Marshal Is] felt that Bob was an artist, really
an artist, which he is, and that they were doing more
honest scientific work. I mean times have changed
so much that when you look back on the whole thing
now it seems a bit silly, but in those days that's the
way they looked at it.
Tim got his Masters in African Studies from Boston
Visual Anthropology Review Volume 17
University and was thinking about working as a cinema-
tographer at the National Film Board of Canada when
his ex-roommate from Putney, David Sapir, convinced
him to stay and study at Harvard with Tom Beidelman.
Tim: So I met this guy [Beidelman].. .a wonderful
teacher, and it was an amazing experience because
it was as if I had never taken any anthropology
before. This man had just come from studying
British social anthropology at Oxford. I was highly
motivated because this guy was such a great teacher.
I worked so hard. He brought these dull concepts to
life. He was passionately interested in his subject,
and he was able to communicate that passion in a
very solid way. This guy was a real scholar, and his
scholarship was not something inaccessible. His
scholarship was something he could share; he could
transmit; he could communicate to students. He
really was a charismatic scholar, and people began
to flock to him. So there was a great teacher.
That's where I got anthropology and stuck with it.
And then I read a lot of Max Gluckman and the case
study method and that has been the basis for my
filming...
FILMMAKING
In 1968, Napoleon Chagnon asked Tim to be his
cinematographer and collaborator on his Yanomami
work in the Orinoco River region in southern Venezuela.
Much has been written on this pioneering collaboration
that produced thirty-nine films and several study guides
to accompany Chagnon's now very controversial mono-
graph, Yanomamo: The Fierce People (1968). Their
collaboration set an ambitious standard for the evolving
discipline of visual anthropology: "The collaboration is
one of the earliest and undoubtedly the most productive
between a U.S. anthropologist and a filmmaker. For
anyone interested in how wordsmiths and image makers
work together, it is collaboration essential to under-
stand." (Ruby 1995:24) But even during the second
location shoot both men were moving in different
directions. The overall atmosphere was one of tension.
According to Craig Johnson, the sound recordist in 1971,
Chagnon and Asch had significant conflicts in the field
about what and when to film. Chagnon had a clear script
ofactivities he wanted to gather such as the formal telling
of myths while Asch was more interested in shooting
Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002 101
 spontaneous social interactions (Johnson, personal in-
terview 2001). Some of the films that Asch continued to
likeWeeding the Garden (191 A), Children's Magical
Death (1974; and A Father Washes His Children
(1974,)were films he shot when Chagnon wasn't
around. On one occasion, Asch even refused to film, so
Johnson took over the camera. (Johnson 2001). Johnson
feels there was considerable opportunity tofilmwomen's
lives such as the wife ofthe leading shaman, Dedeheiwa,
who lived adjacent to them in the shabono; however,
neither man was particularly interested. "Exploring the
lives of women was low on Chagnon's radar, and Tim
was taking his cues from Napoleon... Tim was inter-
ested in family relationships, but not in women in
particular" (Johnson, 2002). Tim had begun to funda-
mentally disagree not only with Chagnon's field meth-
ods but also with his theoretical analysis of Yanomami
aggression, their supposed "fierceness." Ironically, the
Asch/Chagnon Yanomami films remain those with
which many anthropologists most closely associate Tim.
Sarah: When did you stop believing that there was
a way [to make ethnographic film]?
Tim: When I finished the Yanomami project it was
a considerable effort, and it all culminated around
the AAA meetings in San Francisco in 1975.1 had
a whole afternoon in which I exhibited my films and
talked about them with Judy Shapiro who was a
Yanomami specialist and was a woman. And so she
as a woman and me as a man talked about these
"fierce people," and we both sort of denigrated
Chagnon's ... idea of the fierce people, and I
showed a lot of very unfierce and interesting, you
know, general, loving, caring Yanomami films. But
it was done. I mean I had made thirty-nine films of
the Yanomami and that was it. I'd finished, and I
was going directly to Australia to start a whole new
series of films.
And then anthropology changed. People began to
doubt the certainty of truth and science, and scien-
tific fieldwork and all the rest of it. I worked hard [in
Indonesia], but 1 didn't have, there wasn't the
certainty of what I was doing. And I started making
different kinds of films. 1 started making longer
films... and discovered it paid to work with graduate
students who were wholly concerned with their
thesis work as opposed to professors who were too
busy climbing academic ladders. If you filmed the
102 Volume 17 Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002
core case study of their thesis, you could get
transcriptions, translations and analysis.
By 1972 it was more important to know what was
going on in people's heads than it was to see what
they were doing. The difference here isin the one
you objectify people; they didn't talk for them-
selves; your camera work objectified them. And in
the otheryou listen to what they are saying. And
you work the camera and move the camera around
what they are saying because there is more culture
going on in their heads than what you saw of them
doing. You ask them questions, and you get them
talking to other people.
I filmed the Yanomami in 1968 and 1971, and I did
it with sync sound, and I translated what they were
saying on film. I was one of the first people to put
subtitles onfilm.I did that with John'sfilm,A Joking
Relationship (1961J, that was such a powerful
moment.... We had subtitles in 1947, and yet here
it was in 1960 when I discovered how valuable they
would be in ethnographic films.
Sarah: How did you discover it?
Tim: I went to see Breathless (1959) one night and
came back and said: "my god why don't we have
subtitles on these films?" So that's what we did from
that moment on.... I knew how important that was
so I made a big effort to take sync sound into the field
[with Chagnon].... Jorge Preloran wouldn't have
bothered with sync sound.
But the thing was that Chagnon, as a scientist, was
more into objectifying people than interviewing
them, or finding out what they really felt about life,
what was really going on in their head. He could see
them. He could see what they were doing.... So I
wasn't collaborating with somebody who could
really do the kind of work I felt should be done. I
knew a different kind of film had to be made.
Sarah: How did you know that?
Tim: I intuited it. I didn't really know it. I just knew
that something was wrong, but I didn't know what
was wrong.
Sarah: Did you know that as you were filming or
when you got back?
Tim: I was frustrated as I was filming. In The Ax
Fight I wanted to get different points of view. 1
badgered Napoleon to do an interview with at least
Dedeheiwa who would know more than anyone else
[what was going on in the fight]. Napoleon got this
VisualAnthropology Review
 ridiculous half page interview on tape where he
learns utterly nothing beeause he's not interested in
learning anything. So we know what we know about
The Ax Fight from what we hear people saying on
the sound track. He never followed it up. And it was
at that point that 1 realized, hey, wait a minute this
is fine, but I'm working with the wrong person. 1
mean I'm going to have to make a different kind of
film.
Sarah: In hindsight what would you have asked
Dedehei wa'.' What would that ideal inten iew have
been?
Tim: 1 would have dropped everything in the next
three days, and 1 \\ ould have talked with Dedehei wa
and other people in the fight without pencil and
paper. 1 wouldn't have pushed at first, but maybe
in two or three days people would have opened up.
Sarah: 1 went to Alaska in 1972 determined to have

Fig. 5. TimAsch (Cinematography) and Craig Johnson (Audio Recording).

Background location appears to be the area in the village where the 'Ax
Fight" and "Children's Magical Death" were filmed. Mishimishimobeterie.
Yanomano Village. Photo: Napoleon Chagnon.

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 17 Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002 103

 people speak for themselves and have my film
subjects decide what would and would not be
filmed. I remember wantingto improve on whatyou
had taught. 1 thought your filming hadn't gotten
there yet.
Tim: Well, it's the younger students who are going
to know these things. I probably learned a lot from
you as you were learning something from me. Just
by discussions, or intuitively. But when I went to
Australia I knew I was going to be making a different
kind of film.. .and so the films then were cut around
what people said, and not what people did. Before
then I'd always photographed what people were
doing. And I cut for action, for beauty, how well a
cut works. Now it was words. How do we get a good
cut out of this and still keep the integrity of the
words?
I was current with things simply because I went to
the Meetings [American Anthropological Associa-
tion]. People like Jay Ruby and Alan Lomax used
to get up and scream and yell at people. Lomax
would say, "have you shown that picture back to
people?" "You mean you've made this film and
you've never shown it back to the people?" There
were all kinds of moral issues that Lomax would
bring up.
Sarah: Who else would bring this stuff up?
Tim: Jay [Ruby] was definitely a very good critic in
those days. David and Judith MacDougall left a
tremendous impression. If you went to the meet-
ings, you were au courant with what was going on,
and I absorbed all of that and used it in all of my
work.
After the surety ofhis early filmmaking efforts, Tim
spent much of his later career trying to discern an ethical
methodology with which he could feel comfortable.
During the 1960s and 1970s, ethnographic filmmakers
were working in amedium whose political ramifications
many had not foreseen. By the late seventies there was
a growing uneasiness that the practice needed to change.
Tim: I used to know how to make an ethnographic
film. I mean really know that there was only one way
to make an ethnographic film. And now of course
I know that's not true. I encourage my students to
find their own way. But it's a little discouraging; it
knocks the mission out of you when you don't have
104 Volume 17 Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002
the truth. When you don't have the way. I've made
some good films. Knowing what I know now, I can't
go to another culture and make films. It's a rip-off.
For me it's not right. I've got to make films of my
own culture. It's the only honest equitable thing to
do for me at this moment, and if my students want
to go anywhere in the world, that's great....The
Yanomami don't want us to make films of them.
They want to make their own films. We're not in any
position from another culture to do that.
Sarah: Tell me why?
Tim: I don't want to tell those stories any longer
because I don't think they are stories I should be
telling. I think members of their own culture should
be telling them. Or one of my students who can find
a way to do it in a decent way, but I can't.... Show
it back to them before the film is in its final stage so
you really do get some feedback from them, so you
haven't done some dumb stupid thing.
Sarah: Can you articulate a little more why it's
wrong for you now?
Tim: There is something exploitative about it. I'm
going to use that film. How's it going to help them?
Let's say I make a spectacular film, and get all these
prizes. I get a job out of it, and how does it help them?
John Marshall is doing a project about the way the
Bushmen were before contact, during contact and
about how they are now after contact. {Kalahari
Family, 2002) He earned the right to do all that. He
invested all his time and money to get them off their
terrible reservation and put them back on their land
in a way they can survive. And he knows so much.
He's not doing it for fame, and he's not going to
make money off of it. But he has something to say
about the history of these people, and no one else
can say it like he can say it, so to support him is a
noble thing.
I've done a credible job. I think the last film we've
done is excellentA Celebration of Origins. To
me it's done in all the right ways: feedback over
several years, they knew exactly what we were
doing, royalties go to an educational fund for their
kids....To be a really good filmmaker...and to
know how to go to a culturethat takes a lifetime.
Sarah: Tribes are now suing these days for stories
that were gathered in the past. They're saying 'it's
ours'. If someone has published a book or used the
stories in any way...
Visual Anthropology Review
Figs. 6 and 8. Tim filming Jero Tapakan
giving a massage in Bali. Fig. 7. Tim in
Balinese dress. Photos: Patsy Asch.
Courtesy of DER, Watertown, MA.
http://DER.org

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 17 Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002 105

 Tim: Thank god there was some colonialist there to
make some kind of record. What Curtis didhis
pictures, even though a third of them are all faked
up, two-thirds of them are valuable as a heritage.
Yes, they should have them, and they are lucky we
took it so that they could have them. But we should
have really good copies of everything they take. I'm
saying when the Indians come to take the material
back home with them, we should have an exact copy
so in a hundred years it will be there again. When we
took away these effervescent delicate things and
preserved them, that was very unnatural, very
unnatural, but there it is. We still have it, and they
want it. The songs on wax cylinders.. .wow. That's
great.
Sarah I agree with you. So why do you say you
would not do it anymore?
Tim: I've done this now. I've proved myself.
Everyone loves it; everyone gives me accolades for
it, and not one person follows or takes up the cudgel;
marches on. So I'm finished. Well...the one thing
I could do is get a big National Science Foundation
training grant and start hooking up some ethno-
graphic filmmakers with graduate anthropologists
... that would be the next thing for me to do.
A CLOSING
You learn everything you know about anthropology
from what you've read. Then you go out into the
field... [and] you learn what it is you're eventually
going to learn through how well you've been able to
observe .. .visually. Nonetheless, as soon as you've
done that, all of those observations go into written
notes... Why haven't we made better use of visual
media...? (Asch in conversation with Douglas
Harper, 1994:23)
The possibilities for 1 inking and co-mingling text and
image are something that Tim Asch saw before there was
a technology to get us there. He understood that process-
ing ideas with images is one ofthe fundamental ways our
brains function; it is fundamental to the way culture
produces itself and understands itself. For much of his
life Asch tried to find solutions to problems that he could
scarcely articulate. When the rest of the world was
carefully making its way on bounded paths, Asch was
bushwhacking through the brush looking for the invisible
106 Volume 17 Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002
in the visible. His colleagues, myself included, may have
taken easier paths by making films that were not
designed primarily for classrooms, or by teaching an-
thropology with more conventional methods. Anthro-
pology as a whole has stayed safe in its exploration into
the multiple elements of visuality: mediamakirig, theo-
rizing pictorial cultural expressions, visual pedagogy and
examining its own traditions of sight-centered practice
(Grimshaw 2001). In light of visual media's dominance
in today's popular culture, this is too bad; anthropology
seems ill prepared for media's brave new world.
Asch intuited profound possibilities for anthropol-
ogy which technology only now is able to support.
Today's digital imagining systems are capable of open-
ing new worlds for the profession in the same way as bio-
informatics systems are giving science and medicine
new vistas to understand the human body and the
universe. The technological and intellectual implications
for the cross-fertilization and hybridization of digital
interactivity, documentary media, ethnography and
anthropological research are compelling.
In its recent post-postmodernist reincarnation, vi-
sual anthropology has discarded most of its ancestral
positivist paradigms and fantasies of cinematic docu-
mentary truth. It has also discarded some of the empty
jargon of postmodernism while retaining the multiple
authorships, voices and authorities of "new anthropol-
ogy." Visual anthropology continues to sort itself out,
and like Asch, is still trying to get the attention of
mainstream anthropology's text-based conservatism
(Ginsburg 1998). More than thirty years since Asch
started teaching, most departments still don't teach the
practice of seeing, yet they expect students to write
dissertations based on some aspects of field observation.
Scholars still struggle to get their visual work recognized
for tenure.
As he evolved, Asch's work was a moving target.
Critics (including himself) faulted his work on various
grounds: its lack of local voices, lack of reflexivity,
didactic anthropological analysis or lack of it, its modest
production values, absence of lyricism or narrativity, its
neo-colonialism. Some of this criticism has merit. But,
given the totality of his efforts, what Tim gave to visual
anthropology was a focused formal vision against which
we could measure ourselves. His vision gave us (and
himself) something to push against, to fill in gaps, to
argue, to discard bits and pieces of, to re-invent. In this
process, however, while we know what we are discard-
Visual Anthropology Review
 Fig. 9. Tim with camera. Place, time & photographer unknown..

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 17 Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002 107

 ing, we haven't much of a clue where we are going. We
face a sea change so great in visual technology that it's
difficult to imagine its effects on anthropology. I suggest
that we look at the subtle traces in Asch's teaching, his
focus on ways of seeing, on experiential learning and
perception, on merging image and word, as a direction
to which we might move.
I believe that Tim was visionary in his understanding
of human beings' essential desire to make meaning of
our lives by seeing. Our brains make images and dream
images long before we have cameras. Images, like
stories, communicate complicated layered information.
Like the young boy in The Ax Fight who draws a line in
the dirt with a pole, Tim inscribed his markings, his
images, on the world just as he told his storiesso that
viewers and listeners might make meaning about worlds
other than their own. Before he was a filmmaker, Tim
was first and foremost a teacher. His films and stories
were what he taught. And he taught to make the world
a better place. He spent his life teaching from that same
space of pleasure and discovery as his first day at North
Country School. He looked for ways to care for our
world by teaching, by photographing, and doing the barn
chores even when the rest of the kids had gone to
breakfast. Like many great teachers and artists, he
crafted his life work from a human place of love.
Sarah: When you were ten years old and you got
your first box camera and saw your first images,
what was so exciting about an image?
Tim: I don't know. But I loved this horse. When the
pictures of the horse came back from the drugstore
I couldn'tbelieve it. It totally captivatedme, the way
it might a Yanomami or a Dodoth... It was so real.
It was so much that horse.
REFERENCES
Asch, Timothy
1992 The Ethics of Ethnographic Film-making. In Film
As Ethnography, Peter Ian Crawford and David
Turton, editors. Manchester University Press in
association with the Granada Centre for Visual
Anthropology.
1991 The Story We Now Want to Hear is Not Ours to
Tell. Visual Anthropology Review 7 (2): 102-106.
1988 Collaboration in Ethnographic Filmmaking: A
Personal View. In Anthropological Filmmaking.
108 Volume 17 Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002
Anthropological Perspectives in the Production of
Film and Video for General Public Audiences. Jack
R. Rollwagen, editor: 1-29. Harwood Academic
Publishers.
Asch, Timothy and Seaman, Gary eds.
1993 Yanomamo Film Study Guide. Los Angeles:
Ethnographies Press.
Chagnon, Napoleon A.
1968 Yanomamo: The Fierce People. New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston.
Connor, Linda, Asch, Patsy and Asch, Timothy
1986 Jero Tapakan: Balinese healer: an ethnographic
film monograph. Cambridge University Press.
Dewey, John
1916 Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan,
1944 edn.: Pp.191-192, 139-144.
Dow, Peter B.
1991 Schoolhouse Politics: Lessons from the Sputnik
Era. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Education Development Center
1970 Man: A Course of Study: Seminars for Teachers:
66. Cambridge, Mass. From Dewey 1944:139-144
Elder, Sarah
1995 Collaborative Filmmaking: An Open Space for
Making Meaning, A Moral Ground for Ethno-
graphic Film. Visual Anthropology Review 11(2):
94-102.
Ginsburg, Faye
1998 Institutionalizing the Unruly: Charting a Future for
Visual Anthropology. In Ethnos 63 (2): 173-201.
Routledge.
Grimshaw, Anna
2001 The Ethnographer's Eye: Ways of Seeing in
Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Harper, Douglas ed.
1994 Cape Breton 1952, The Photographic Vision of
Timothy Asch, Nordstrom, Alison essay. Interna-
tional Visual Sociology Association and the
Ethnographies Press.
MacDougall, David
1998 The Fate of the Cinema Subject p25. In
Transcultural Cinema. Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Marks, Dan
1995 Ethnography and Ethnographic Film: from Flaherty
to Asch and After. American Anthropologist 97(2).
Martinez, Wilton
Visual Anthropology Review
1992 Who Constructs Anthropological Knowledge?
Toward a Theory of Ethnographic Film
Spectatorship. In Film As Ethnography, Peter Ian
Crawford and David Turton, editors. Manchester
University Press in association with the Granada
Centre for Visual Anthropology.
Mauss, Marcel
1967 The Gift: Forms and functions of exchange in
archaic societies. Ian Cunnison, translator. New
York: Norton.
Moore, Alexander
1995 Understanding Event Analysis: Using the Films of
Timothy Asch. Visual Anthropology Review 11(1):
38-52.
Ruby, Jay
1995 Out of Sync: The Cinema of Tim Asch. Visual
Anthropology Review 11(1): 19-35.
Sorenson, E. Richard
1967 A Research Film Program in the Study of
Changing Man. Current Anthropology 8(5): 443-
460.
Volkman, Toby
1982 Films from DER: a guide to current ethnographic
films. Documentary Educational Resources:
Watertown, Mass.
Recorded audio interviews by Sarah Elder (unpub-
lished)
Asch, Timothy 1992 and 1994
Bley, Ed 2001 (telephone)
Bley, Elsa 2001 (telephone)
Dow, Miriam 2001
Dow, Peter 2001
Unrecorded conversations:
Johnson, Craig 2001 and 2002 (telephone)
Timothy Asch's films are available from Documentary
Educational Resources (DER),101 Morse St.,
Watertown, MA 02472-2554 http://www.der.org
FILMS CITED
Aparajito (1956) Satyajit Ray.
At The Time of Whaling (1974) Sarah Elder and
Leonard Kamerling, (DER).
Attica, Lucinda Firestone, 1969, out of distribution.
The Ax Fight (1975) Timothy Asch and Napoleon
Chagnon, DER.
Visual Anthropology Review Volume 17
A Balinese Trance Seance (1979) Linda Connor, Patsy
Asch and Tim Asch, DER.
Bitter Melons (1971) John Marshall DER.
Breathless (1959) Jean-Luc Godard.
Celebrations of Origins, (1992) E. Douglas Lewis, Tim
Asch, Patsy Asch, DER.
Children's Magical Death (1974) Timothy Asch and
Napoleon Chagnon, DER.
Dead Birds (1964) Robert Gardner, Film Study Center,
Harvard University.
Diaries (1982) (shot 1971-1976), Ed Pincus, Distribu-
tor, Ed Pincus.
A Father Washes His Children (1974) Timothy Asch
and Napoleon Chagnon, DER.
The Feast (1970) Napoleon Chagnon and Timothy
Asch, DER.
The Hunters (1958) John Marshall, DER.
Jero on Jero: A Balinese Trance Seance Observed
(1980) Connor, Asch and Asch, DER.
Jero Tapakan: Stories from the Life of a Balinese Healer
(1983) Linda Connor, Patsy Asch and Tim Asch,
DER.
A Joking Relationship (1962) John Marshall, DER.
Kalahari Family (2002) John Marshall, DER.
Louisiana Story (1948) Robert Flaherty.
A Man Called "Bee": Studying the Yanomamo (1974)
Asch and Chagnon, DER.
A Man and His Wife Weave a Hammock (1975) Tim
Asch and Napoleon Chagnon, DER.
The Medium is the Masseuse, A Balinese Massage
(1983) Connor, Asch and Asch, DER.
Morning with Asch (1995). Jaysinhji Jhala and Lindsey
Powell, DER.
N/um Tchai (1969) John Marshall, DER.
On the Spring Ice (1975) Sarah Elder and Leonard
Kamerling, DER.
Pather Panchali (1955) Satyajit Ray.
Tapir Distribution (1975) Timothy Asch and Napoleon
Chagnon, DER.
Tokyo Story (1953) Yasujiro Ozu.
Weeding the Garden (1974) Timothy Asch and Napo-
leon Chagnon, DER.
The World of Apu (1959) Satyajit Ray.
Number 2 Fall-Winter 2001-2002 109