Me parece que esta fotografía habla mucho sobre lo que es este filme. La señora detrás de este nativo, probablemente cree que está viendo un animal salvaje. Esa es la actitud que percibo en este documental, trata sobre un grupo de turistas europeos que visitan Nueva Guinea, varios de estos turistas me parecieron pretenciosos e ignorantes, la cámara logra capturar (aunque solo es un punto de vista) el teatro que hay detrás de esta visita, por parte de los turistas y también de los nativos de Nueva Guinea. 
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ON THE MAKING OF “CANNIBAL TOURS”
by Dennis O'Rourke
To explain my film making process is a bit like a cat chasing its tail - in
any case, I confess that how I actually make my films is a complete
mystery to me. I can sit with you, looking at a film which has my name
on it and gaze in wonderment at what is transpiring on the screen; but I
certainly will not think the author is exactly the same person who is me,
watching that film.
The act of creating a documentary film is one of synthesis upon
synthesis. Every stage of the film making process - from imagining
through filming through all the stages of editing - becomes the
modifier of previous stages, in both direct and subtle ways. Also, for it to
work, the filming process must be ‘an ordeal of contact with reality.’ I
must place myself within the perceived reality of what I am attempting
to film in order to discover the authenticity of people and places, and to
fix my emotional perspective within a social and political process -
which is not academic.
I believe that documentary films should not exist outside of the reality,
which they attempt to depict. The magic of the documentary film is that
one can start to create with no idea of the direction of the narrative and
concentrate all thinking on the present moment and thing. It is
important, when you make a film, not to be rational but instead to trust
your emotions and intuition. In fact, you have to be irrational, because
when you try to be rational the true meaning and the beauty of any idea
will escape you.
I think the story is much less important than the ideas and the emotions,
which surround it. I try to give you my idea of a palpable 'truth', but
which is presented comfortably, imperceptibly, as an illusion. I try to
concentrate on the small, intimate details; using reduction and
understatement. I like to think that, in my films, nothing really
happens but it happens very quickly.
All this is made possible by those beautiful recording angels - cameras
and tape recorders - who watch and listen for me while I stumble,
trance-like, through the field of ideas. Like the ideal tourist, I travel on
a journey of discovery - on an unmarked road, to see where it leads. And
I travel not in order to return; I cannot return to the point-of-departure
because, in the meantime, I have been changed. This is why I say: “I
don't make the film, the film makes me.”
I find that most documentary films are painful to watch, because their
makers are so certain of the factual truth of their productions, and
seemingly so unaware of the time bomb which the notion of truth
contains. As well, they are often so ignorant of their real place in the
process of audiences’ readings of their work. In my film work of recent
years I have always sought to resist and repudiate the lure of that self-
gratification which comes from making the statements-to-the-
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converted, which most documentaries tend to be.
So many documentary films, despite other political and cultural
pretensions, primarily serve to make the audience feel good - feel part
of an enlightened elite - as though they have achieved some cachet or
absolution for themselves by the simple act of watching a film. And it
follows that the audience identifies with their omniscient hero, the film
maker. (I can speak with some authority about this phenomenon,
because I have noticed it in the reactions to some of my earlier films.)
The public role of the committed documentary film maker thus becomes,
essentially, one where they become the heroic protagonist of their own
films, even though these film makers are not necessarily seen or heard.
But, of course, they are the real heroic protagonists in their films. They
are alluded to by the sense of their own cleverness and goodness and
worth - alluded to by their theological position as the deliverers of the
important and politically-correct message - the ‘good news’ (or, more
likely, the ‘good’ version of the bad news).
The corollary is that, if a film maker deliberately sets out to collapse this
comfortable and secret contract between the audience and himself
(such as I did in my film THE GOOD WOMAN OF BANGKOK, which takes the
rhetorical-but-sincere position that the film maker is, in his own way,
as culpable and as implicated as the sex-tourists depicted in the film),
then, his formerly adoring audience, when forced to confront this
dilemma of identification which implicates them, will chose the easy
way out - and kill the messenger.
I am convinced that humans are not interested in reality or truth, in
themselves. What we seek is truth, which is our fantasy of it (just listen
to the discourses in "CANNIBAL TOURS”). And yet, if we really want to
understand the world in which we live, we must oppose simplicity and
slogans and seek meaning in chaos and complexity.
Unfortunately, the level of critical debate is so basic that most film
makers seem not to be conscious of what they're doing: that they are
performing the role of secular gurus to their constituencies who do not,
or cannot, differentiate between slogans and ideals. I detest the
theological pretensions of those film makers, who seem to me like Don
Quixote tilting at windmills; and I reject the whole notion of the
documentary film maker as a culture-hero. This role is ably filled by the
reporters from the current affairs shows – those men-and-women-in-
suits, with their arrogant notions of authority and their Boy Scout code
of ethics - those who provide us “official storytelling.”
Jean Baudrillard has made the point that it is precisely when they seem
the most faithful, true and accurate that images are the most diabolical.
It is when images start to contaminate reality - when they conform to
reality only to distort it, when they telescope reality, when they short-
circuit reality - that they can transmit true knowledge. But it seems to
me that the facile images and stories that now proliferate in our
cinemas and on our television screens are driving the more powerful,
true and complex ones out of circulation.
This problem of representation - how to articulate the relationship of
the author to the subject to the audience - is the fundamental challenge
which faces every storyteller. It is critical that film makers and film
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viewers be rid of the fantasy that the documentary film is a pure and
non-problematic representation of reality, and that its 'truth' can be
conveniently dispensed and received - like a pill to cure a headache.
I make documentary films (as opposed to fiction films) not because I
think they are closer to the truth, but because I am convinced that,
within a reinvented form of the non-fiction film, there is a possibility
of creating something of very great value - a kind of cinema-of-ideas,
which can affect the audience in a way that no Hollywood-style
theatrical entertainment films can. I make documentary films because I
believe in a cinema, which serves to reveal, celebrate and enlighten the
condition of the human spirit and not to trivialise or abase it. I don't do
it to provide information to people; I do it to touch people and to provoke
and astound them, and to make the truth that we already know more real
to us.
“CANNIBAL TOURS” is certainly a documentary film but it is also a
fiction because it is an artefact, that is: someone made it. The making of
art is, after all, only artifice - playing with the undifferentiated mess of
life to get a little product. But this can be both the meaning and the
subject matter. In a profound sense the viewer and the subject can be
one-and-the-same. We can be embarrassed to be inside and outside the
frame (and the process of film making), simultaneously. This
experience of self-recognition and embarrassment is the subject matter.
In “CANNIBAL TOURS” we can recognise in these Western tourists both
the hopelessness of their experience and we can recognise ourselves.
We can also recognise (at least sub-consciously) the tourists’ implicit
understanding that anyone who will see them in the film shares their
sense of hopelessness, in the face of such a futile search for utopian
meaning, which is their tourist experience.
I can only touch on some of the ideas that influenced me during the
making of the film and I will confine my remarks to tourism in
traditional societies, because this is where I have some experience.
However, I can imagine that what applies in Papua New Guinea does also
apply in many other places in the Pacific and around the world,
including even, some which are in the developed world.
It must be stated that most of the theoretical ideas only registered with
me when interested people brought them to my attention - long after
the film was completed. Firstly, I would like to quote from a review of my
film by Professor Dean MacCannel. Professor MacCannell wrote the
seminal book The Tourist, which was first published in 1976, I read it
only in 1989, when he sent me a copy after he had seen my film. I have
often speculated, “What if I had read this wonderful book before I made
“CANNIBAL TOURS” ? Would the film be better or worse? In keeping
with my philosophy of film making I am sure - perversely sure - that it
was better to read the book after the film was made.
This is part of what Professor MacCannell wrote:
“It is disheartening that any group of human beings, simply caught in
the eye of the camera, could appear to be so awkward and in such bad
faith. It is to O’Rourke’s great credit that he does not simply leave us
with these disturbing images. The film quietly provides answers to the
questions it raises, and to do this O’Rourke goes to a psychoanalytical
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level. Freud does not speak here directly, except perhaps in the final
scene where the Bette Midler-type American woman climbs in the plane
brandishing her five realistically carved dildos (“I get to ride back with
these in my lap!”). It is the camera, which throughout assumes the role
of the old paternal analyst, steady, listening, silent, pretending to be
non-judgemental...
“A lesson of the film is that the New Guineanans experience their myths
as myths, while the tourists experience their myths as symptoms and
hysteria. An old man tells the story of the New Guinean reactions to the
first ships carrying German colonialists: “Our dead ancestors have
arrived! Our dead have come back.” and he continued with a smile, “Now
when we see tourists, we say the dead have returned. That’s what we say.
We don’t seriously believe they are our dead ancestors - but we say it!”
One does not find among the tourists any similar lightness of
sensibility...
“This is what frightened me most about the film. The tourists,
throughout, seemed incapable of a conscious detachment from their
values, which was so evident a feature of the New Guinean images and
discourse. The tourists’ detachment takes the form of repression and
denial of the myth of modernity so it necessarily expresses itself always
as an out-of-control force leading to non-ritual violence. The New
Guineanans do not see this difference between themselves and the
Europeans. They rigorously maintain there is no difference with the
single exception that the Europeans have the money and they don’t.
This film is a reminder that the task of anthropology is far from done -
we have yet to explain ourselves.
There are certain statements about tourism, which I find interesting in
the context of the film. Claude Lévi-Strauss said "It is the differences
between cultures that makes their meetings fruitful. But this exchange
leads to progressive uniformity.” The second part is clear, but what does
he mean by ‘fruitful’? If he means commercially fruitful, I might
agree. As the village leader says, “They want the photographs, so they
pay” (even if what they pay is a small fraction of what they pay for one
Gin-and-Tonic on board the ship). If he means sexually, even
romantically, fruitful, then I saw some evidence of that between the
Papua New Guinean ship’s crew and some of the more adventurous
female passengers.
But I saw little fruitful interchange of any other kind, such as cultural,
educational or spiritual. As the old villager, Camillus, states in the film:
“Now we live between two worlds... All we know is that they are from
another country. We sit here confused while they take pictures of
everything.”
I suppose it’s an improvement on one hundred years ago, when the
villagers thought the Europeans were from another planet, and I can
see that the voyeuristic experience in tourism works both ways. On the
Sepik River, where tourism is a relatively new phenomenon, the natives
still do experience the thrill of looking at the tourists. It is for this that
the film begins with a self-composed epigram: "There is nothing so
strange in a strange land as the stranger who comes to visit it."
Since ours is a society - now a global society - which strains to reach
certain objectives, of which profit towers above all the others, it is
obvious that tourism as a Twentieth Century phenomenon and ‘leisure
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activity’ is strongly, intensely, utilised to this end: profit. Following the
laws of capitalism, in order to satisfy and capitalise on the demand for
leisure, this demand is itself stimulated, promoted and, at times, totally
created so that the tourist business can continue to exist. This leads to
the situation depicted in “CANNIBAL TOURS” - the commodification of
the actual act of living of a group of people. This, to my way of thinking,
has to be less than ‘fruitful’.
But this quest for profit is not only economic profit; it often is an
ideological profit. I mean the achievement of influence by one culture
(the culture of the West and all post-industrial nations) over the people
of the underdeveloped countries who are visited. As my film evidences,
modern-day tourism is, in a sense, the successor to the colonial
expeditions. It is interesting to note how tourists from countries, which
had colonies, tend to favour their former colonies as holiday
destinations.
This could be due to the fact of a shared language and some inherited
practices – like the baking of baguettes, but I feel it is more due to
nostalgia for the ‘romantic’ colonial era. There is a nostalgic wish to
revisit ‘the scene of the crime’. As the German tourist says in the film,
“I met a native man who was something like a mayor, he explained how
his village had been under the control of the Germans, and what a good
time it was!”
The raw display of economic and technological power, in the form of
television American television, for example (I cite my film YAP...HOW
DID YOU KNOW YOU’D LIKE TV?), which is transmitted by satellite to the
remotest villages of the Third World, is given flesh and concreteness
when the tourists - the living examples from the Hollywood sitcoms -
step ashore. One hundred years ago they may have been perceived as
dead ancestors but now the natives believe they are the relatives of
Arnold Schwartznegger and Sharon Stone.
The villagers know that when it comes to appreciating their culture the
average tourist cannot go much closer towards understanding it than a
certain condescending curiosity. They realise that, at best, to the
Western tourists they are merely picturesque (“... they take pictures of
everything”). Therefore, it is reasoned, to be taken seriously and on
equal terms they must cease being picturesque and replace traditional
customs, behaviour and clothing by things Western. It is a new form of
colonialism.
How can young men and women from the Sepik River villages fully
believe that their cultural way of life is satisfactory in the face of this
juggernaut? Europeans, the Japanese, Australians, Brazilians, the
Chinese – the rest of the world - cannot resist it - they watch American
TV, eat American food, play American sports, wear American clothes;
and they have allowed their antiquities and great public places and
rituals to become tourist theme parks. An American woman while
climbing Greek ruins said: “You’d think, with all these tourists around,
that they would put in an elevator here.”
The promoted idea of tourism as ‘a dialogue between cultures’ is, I
believe, a myth; because there exists such an economic and cultural
disparity between the protagonists and all human encounter is
inevitably distorted. Another obvious reason is that the actual tourist
encounters with the people who are the culture are too short - squeezed
into the three-week annual holiday and the ‘free days for shopping’
before going home.
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