Moving Beyond Spectatorial Distance and the Objectifying Gaze:
Ecocinema’s Engaged Lens of Placefulness
Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez, Bradley University
I am interested in the filmic linguistics of placefulness. The vast majority of film
criticism has focused on the cinematography, the directing and acting, the staging, the
costuming, all the various aspects of the production and its audience reception. Because the
performative spectacle of film is so predominantly visual, the textual aspects have been
insufficiently studied, especially insofar as filmic discourse facilitates or hinders an audience’s
sense of placefulness in film. This is patently evident in the visual terms by which we reference
cinematography: we refer to viewers, not listeners; scenes, neither vignettes nor chapters; and we
primarily remember the directors and actors, not the screenwriters. But in film, the literariness of
the language can greatly facilitate audience engagement; there is an affiliative rhetoric of
connection that is textually furthered, even in many silent films through their transitional and
directive textual screens. In film, language enables deeply felt and lived connections to the depicted
places, worlds, and times. Edouard Glissant terms this a “Poetics of Relation, in which each and
every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other” (11).1 In all of the literary arts,
language is the primary vehicle for journeys into new geographies of belonging.
Defining place as “an organized world of meaning” (179), geographer Yi-Fu Tuan
explains the processes by which disconnected space becomes meaningful place: “We are in a
strange part of town: unknown space stretches ahead of us. In time we know a few landmarks
and the routes connecting them. Eventually what was strange town and unknown space becomes
familiar place. Abstract space, lacking significance other than strangeness, becomes concrete
2
place, filled with meaning” (199). Space becomes place largely through personal experience, but
such experiential familiarity with a place can be powerfully achieved without a person’s ever
being there in person. This is where ecocritical analyses of the various literary arts are crucial in
order to articulate the environmental connections made possible through language. When we
inquire what it means to be part of a place and how it is that films across time been able to
facilitate viewers’ deeply felt and negotiated connections to diverse worlds, language has played
a key role in cinema’s relational capacities.
Turning to a number of classic documentaries and films, we can see specific textual
elements that are involved in the language and grammar of connection and place. Ursula Heise
calls for “a more accurate understanding of how individuals and communities actually inhabit
particular sites at the beginning of the third millennium but also a more nuanced understanding
of how aesthetic forms . . . have shaped the environmental imagination of the global” (X). This
paper responds to her concern, demonstrating cinematic aesthetics that whose situated localism
has been the means towards a Leopoldian “land ethic” of the global. At the center of those films
that achieve such a high level of connectedness is the inclusively manifest thematic that Native
American poet Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) so succinctly describes as a focal orientation: “for
the sake of the people, for the sake of the land.” Murnau’s Sunrise of an imaginary nowhere that
is really everywhere, and his south Pacific Tabu, Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, and the Pueblo
tribes’ Surviving Columbus eloquently speak the global through their eminently accessible
specificities of storied place.
Fifty years ago, transactional theorist Louise Rosenblatt turned our attention to reading as
“a coming-together, a compenetration, of a reader and a text” with literary texts being “thought
of as an event in time” (126, 12). The various turns to reader response have generally focused on
the unidimensional impact of the text on the reader’s understanding, interpretation, and
3
identification with the literary work. Acoma Pueblo poet Simon J. Ortiz explains that the role of
the reader/listener/viewer is even far more interactive than Rosenblatt addressed. Ortiz declares
that readers and writers, viewers and directors, listeners and storytellers literally become part of
the unfolding and developing stories through their conversively relational engagements with
language and literary art: “The storyteller participates in the story with the listeners . . . The story
is not simply a narrative being told or listened to—it’s occurring; it’s happening” (64). When a
person remembers a prior lived experience, the person is said to relive the experience; in the
same way, deeply engaging literary experiences bring people into the story worlds that Leslie
Marmon Silko states are, thereby, “co-creative” such that the “storyteller pulls the story out of
the listener” (X).
This paper investigates the linguistic, grammatical, rhetorical, and poetic elements in
ecocinema that facilitate or hinder the processes of co-creative placefulness and transformational
engagement.2 For example, in four early classic films (F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise and Tabu and
Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North and Man of Aran) and four anti-/post-colonial films (Gillo
Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, the Pueblo tribes’ Surviving Columbus, Zacharius Kunuk’s
Atanarjuat, and Murnau’s Tabu), the interconnected halves of linguistic communication-language and silence--are wielded in ways that directly affect viewer-reader-listener engagement
both within the story-worlds of the films and, too, within the larger historical worlds represented
in the films. The literary processes underlying cinematic placefulness are evidenced in lexical
choice and form, syntax and prosody, rhetoric and voice, poetics and narratology (e.g., prosodic tools
such as meter and rhythm, pacing and silence, repetition, rhyme and para-rhyme, parallelism and
chiasmus), all as played out within the spatially connective realm of conversive language.3
It is the film Tabu this is the pivot around which this study circles. The film made in the
south Pacific on the island of Bora Bora in 1931 is much more akin to the recent Atanarjuat: The
4
Fast Runner (the first Indigenous feature film made entirely in the aboriginal language) than
Tabu’s contemporary Nanook of the North. Both Atanarjuat and Tabu have casts that are wholly
made up of local Indigenous performers who portray a cinematic version of a traditional tribal
story. Zacharius Kunuk’s Atanarjuat makes use of contemporary film technology to produce a
stunning film about love, jealousy, deceit, and steadfastness placed in the circumpolar Arctic
precolonial past, while Murnau’s film Tabu takes place in almost the diametrically opposite
climatic environment of Bora Bora as presented within its early twentieth century colonial
present. Although Tabu is made by a non-Indigenous director, German Murnau’s eco-systemic
holism and intersubjective relations with his cast and crew make his film co-creatively
Indigenous. This fact and its being a late silent film, the islanders are able to take significant
control over their performances as they are able to portray their characters wholly in their Native
language.4 The cast’s largely monolingual performance is visual, not linguistic, so that the film is
accessible to global viewers, language being restricted to the text on screen.
Tabu was planned as a collaborative effort by Murnau and the documentary filmmaker
Flaherty, but soon into the actual filming, the two men broke and Flaherty was forced to leave
the project. Close analysis of just the linguistic and rhetorical underpinnings of their films
demonstrates the two men’s categorically divergent approaches to film, representation, and
storytelling. Whereas Flaherty’s ethnographic othering presents diverse places through a
distancing and exoticizing Euro-American lens, in contrast, Murnau’s directing opens up actual
worlds, times, places, and people in the cinematic stories that come into view. The text of the
Murnau film provides the story line for a traditional story of love, updated into its early twentieth
century version in which the traditional forces that doom the couple are presented within the
oppressive colonial framework of a fundamentalist religiosity within the tribe, on the one hand,
and the colonial oppression of the Indigenous people by the French, on the other.5 A young
5
couple flees their island because, according to the dictum of an “old warrior,” the young woman
must be sacrificed. Trying to survive by the young man’s skill as a pearl diver, the French
colonial master impedes the couple’s escape as their inexperience with money makes them prey
to increasing indebtedness to the master. Tracked down by the tribal elder who threatens to kill
the young man, the girl accepts her sacrifice to save his life, but as she sails off with the old man,
the young man swims into the ocean after her and to his death. Renowned for their stunning
cinematography of nature and, too, of community scenes, Flaherty depicts nature as that which
“primitive” man struggles against, while Murnau presents human and natural environments as
inherently interconnected and interdependent. In Murnau’s films, when the natural world creates
struggle, more often than not, there is human culpability with concomitant implications for
nature.
For this position paper, I want to turn to textual aspects of Murnau’s Sunrise and Tabu to
delineate significant ways by which language in film facilitates viewer-reader engagement and
placefulness. In both films, the characters are unnamed--not to deny their personhood (as is the
case in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood), but rather to affirm a phenomenologically affiliative
personhood with viewers. All of the characters are delineated with a definite article (e.g., The
Man, The Woman, The Boy, The Girl, The Old Warrior, The Woman from the City) that
specifies their importance and personhood. This contrasts with Flaherty’s “a man of aran,” “his
wife,” “their child” or “Nanook” who is named but given a name that is not his own and a wife
in the documentary that is not his real wife--all minimized by the lack of capitalization, women
and children reduced to filiative dependency, and names and relationships altered or absented. In
Murnau’s case, the absence of names is connective and an affirmation of subjectivity; in
Flaherty’s, it is a reduction of personhood and intentionality.6 In The American Cinema, Andrew
Sarris contrasted the directors thus: “Where Flaherty expressed man’s adaptability to nature,
6
Murnau pondered on man’s place in the universe. Where Flaherty was concerned with the
rhythm of living, Murnau was obsessed with the meaning of life.” Placefulness is at the center of
Murnau’s work, achieving a sense of place, its lost and potential redemption.
He begins Sunrise with a textual introduction that is laid out with significant line breaks
and punctuation and with the text centered on the page with open space for reader response. In
contrast, Flaherty’s introductory prose text to Man of Aran is given in the third person objective
(“In this desperate environment the Man of Aran . . . fights for his existence bare though it may
be . . . until the end of his indomitable day or until he meets his master-- / --the sea”). In fact, the
ocean proves to be the lone subject in the film with humans mere pawns. In Murnau’s
introductory texts for Tabu and Sunrise, he speaks directly to the reader-viewer (“This song / of
the Man and his Wife / . . . / you might hear it anywhere”). In this way, the viewer of the film is
brought inclusively into the storytelling circle with a familiarization that works to bring the
world of the film into the familiar world of the viewer.7 The centered introductory text is not
technically a poem, but the linear layout with pausal breaks elicits the interactive engagement of
conversive communication, with the open-ended space at both sides of each line conveying the
interactive silence for the reader’s response. Dennis Tedlock pioneered and Leslie Silko finetuned the ways by which spacing and line breaks can open space for a more engaged listenerreader.8 Murnau explicitly references the indented text and the film as a song:
This song
of the Man and his Wife
is of no place
and every place:
you might hear it anywhere
at any time
7
or wherever the sun rises and sets
in the city’s’ turmoil
or
under the open sky on the farm
life is much the same:
sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet.
This one long and involved sentence is broken up into twelve mostly enjambed lines that convey
the connective parallelism between the cinematic story and that of the lives of the viewers. The
sentence-song includes a colon at the end of the fourth line where it divides the two independent
clauses. This and the second colon at line eleven, along with the lone “or” of line nine slow down
the reading at these points, giving added emphasis to their lines and the lines that follow them.
Repetition and the parallelism of grammar, syntax, and logic communicate the duality
and pairing of time, place, and person. The night and day are joined and divided by the sunrise.
The actions of the film and the central characters connect and contrast the country and the city.
The Wife is contrasted with “The Woman from the City” and equalized with her husband in the
subtitle of the film: “A Song of Two Humans.” Additional pairings in these few lines include:
“no place” and “every place,” “anywhere” and “any time,” “the sun rises and sets,” “city’s
turmoil” and “open sky on the farm,” “song / . . . / is” and “life is,” “sometimes bitter, sometimes
sweet,” and “in the,” “under the,” and “on the.” Meaning and emphasis are given in the repetition
of words (place, any, or, where, and sometimes), sounds in assonantal para-rhymes (time, turm-,
farm, same, some), and metrical rhythms (amphimacers in line two giving added emphasis to
Man and Wife, the trochee of “no place” and diiambus of “and every place” that de-emphasizes
the former and emphasizes the latter, the amphimacer of “anywhere” - ˘ - and the diiambus of “at
any time” ˘- ˘ - that give metrical weight and emphasis to place and time, and the de-emphasis on
8
city in the quick ditrochaeus that gives added weight to “turmoil” as well as the ending strength
in the diiambic “the open sky” and the amphimacer “on the farm” that emphasize sky and farm).
As Murnau conveys in both films, life is “much the same” in different places and cultures, and
this is why it is possible for viewers to come into relationship with diverse worlds and times.
“Sameness” does not signify a Platonic sense of essentialist identification, but rather the
similarity of notes in different octaves that are very much the same notes although they are, too,
notably different by virtue of the ebbs and flows of the cycles of time and change that are
“sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet.”
Whether it is the lack of geographic specificity in Sunrise or the very real geographic
specificity of Tabu, Murnau utilizes a strategically crafted conversive familiarization that opens
up the filmic worlds within his viewers’ respective frames of reference and interaction. Sherman
Alexie once said in an interview that “movies are the contemporary version of sitting around a
fire and telling stories” (n.p.). This is true, but it is not always true. The early work of Flaherty
and Murnau can serve as a grammatical primer, in the sense of a primary grammar text, for
lenses on the ecocritically ecocinematic language of place and connection. In the later films by
Pontecorvo (Battle of Algiers, 1966), Diane Reyna and the Pueblo tribes (Surviving Columbus,
1992), and Zacharius Kunuk (Atanarjuat, 2001), we see very much the same sorts of
linguistically connective strategies that make their films both accessible and penetrating.
Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994.
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. London: Verso, 2006.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
9
Brill de Ramírez, Susan Berry. “A Geography of Belonging: Ortiz’s Poetic, Lived, and Storied
Indigenous Ecology.” Simon J. Ortiz: A Poetic Legacy of Indigenous Continuance. Eds.
Brill de Ramírez and Evelina Zuni Lucero. Albuquerque: UNM P, 2009. 25-52.
---. Native American Life History Narratives: Colonial and Postcolonial Navajo Ethnography.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.
Cronon, William, ed. Common Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York:
W.W. Norton, 1996.
Flaherty, Robert J., dir. Man of Aran. 192X. Nanook of the North. 1922.
Glissant, Eduard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.
Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals,
Environment. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Kroskrity, Paul V. “Growing With Stories: Line, Verse, and Genre in an Arizona Tewa Text.”
Journal of Anthropological Research 41.2 (1985): 183–99.
Kunuk, Zacharius, dir. Atanarjuat : The Fast Runner. 2001.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Poetry as Experience. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Alterity and Transcendence. New York: Columbia U P, 1999.
Love, Glen A. Practical Ecocriticism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.
Murnau, F. W., dir. Sunrise : A Song of Two Humans. 1927. Tabu : A Story of the South Seas.
1931.
Naess, Arne. Life’s Philosophy: Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World. Athens: UGA P, 2002.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular-Plural. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
---. The Sense of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
10
Ortiz, Simon. “Native Heritage: A Tradition of Participation.” Whole Terrain 8 (1999/2000): 6469.
Pontecorvo, Gillo, dir. Battle of Algiers. 1966.
Reyna, Diane, dir. Surviving Columbus : The Story of the Pueblo People. 1992.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. Literature as Exploration. Fwd. Wayne Booth. New York: MLA, 1995.
Sheldrake, Philip, “Human Identity and the Particularity of Place.” Spiritus: A Journal of
Christian Spirituality 1.1 (Spring 2001): 43-64.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination.” On Nature, Landscape, and Natural History. Ed. D. Halpern. San Francisco: North Point, 1987. 83-94.
---. Storyteller. New York: Arcade, 1981.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: UMN P, 2001.
Endnotes
Glissant explicitly notes the extent to which the interplay of the oral and the written comes to bear in a “poetics of
relation.” He delineates “the main themes of such a poetics: the dialectics between the oral and the written, the
thought of multilingualism, the balance between the present moment and duration, the questioning of literary genres,
the power of the baroque, the nonprojectile imaginary construct” (35).
2
I’d like to clarify the critical precedents that coalesce in my investigations into the poetic language of the
intersubjective conversive in which subjects speak with fellow subjects in the world and thereby come into
community and place. This work builds on the post-logical-positivist language game work of Ludwig Wittgenstein;
the phenomenological work of Gaston Bachelard on spatial intimacy; the sociological work of Emile Durkheim and
Jean Baudrillard on disconnection; the presentations of co-creative and connective storytelling language from Native
American writers Leslie Marmon Silko and Simon J. Ortiz; diaspora studies scholarship (including Saidean
“worldliness,” Spivak’s subaltern subjectivity, and Bhabha’s interstitial hybridity); the power of literary connection
as diversely presented in Rosenblatt, Blanchot, and Lacoue-Labarthe; and the last decade and a half of ecocritical
work on place (e.g., Cronon, Kerridge, Evernden, Dobrin, Love, Castor, Sheldrake, Heise, and Tuan).
3
The term conversive is key in that it conveys the Leopoldian ecological sense of an inclusive and integrated biotic
community as manifested in language. Discourse (literally, to run back and forth) in Bakhtin’s dialogism points us
towards multiple voices and positions, but it is the realm of the conversive (literally, to turn with) that embodies the
intersubjective dance in which language furthers the development and sustenance of intersubjective relations among
persons (whether human, animal, plant, or mineral).
There is a grammar of connection that underlies literary conversive (conversative and transformative) writing that
brings readers into diverse storyworlds, demonstrating at the linguistic level an interdependent and empathic ethic
(Noddings and Tronto; also Leopold, Naess, Singer). For several decades, literary scholars have worked closely with
Bakhtin’s discussion of dialogism, using it to expand our understandings of the multiplicity of diverse voices within
narrative. This has provided a language and interpretive lens affirming the relative positionality of characters in
literature and their linguistic relationships, but this does not go far enough to fully articulate intersubjective
relations. The problem here is that positionality is not the same as relationality. Voices speaking across a divide are
different from the connective language of the conversive in which persons speak with each other.
4
Tabu, Battle of Algiers, Surviving Columbus, and Atanarjuat are all crucially informed by their Indigenous
communities whether in Bora Bora, Algeria, the Pueblo lands, and Nunavut. In the latter two cases, the directors are
1
11
Indigenous and from the community; in the prior cases, the European directors work integrally from within the
community. Indeed, for Battle of Algiers, the indigenous Algerian rebels approached Italian Pontecorvo to help them
make a film about their struggle.
5
Such updating has been part of oral storytelling throughout the ages as storytellers “bring the stories hither” into
the contemporary worlds of their listeners (Kroskrity X).
6
In an introduction to Nanook of the North: A story of life and love in the actual arctic (1921), Flaherty explains his
ethnographic project: “I did see that if I were to take a single character and make him typify the Eskimos as I had
known them so long and well, the results would be well worth while. . . . Poor old Nanook . . . never understood
why I should have gone to all the fuss and both of making the ‘big aggie’ of him. . . . [Many viewers] have looked
upon Nanook, the kindly, brave, simple Eskimo.” For an extensive study of the twentieth century’s colonialist
ethnography among the Diné (Navajo), see my volume Native American Life History Narratives: Colonial and
Postcolonial Navajo Ethnography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005).
7
Familiarization is the converse of Shklovsky’s Russian formalist notion of defamiliarization where the familiar is
made new, more notable, differently significant. In the process of the literary familiarization, that which is different,
foreign, alien is made familiar, close, and accessible.
8
See Silko’s collection Storyteller in which she utilizes centering, line and stanza breaks, font changes, and
indentation to help evoke voice shifts, pauses, and other aspects of oral storytelling.