Interview of David MacDougall by Alan Macfarlane, 29th and 30th June 2007

0:05:08 Born New Hampshire, US, 1939; parents both teachers at a progressive co-educational boarding school; father, Canadian, trained as a civil engineer but both parents taught during the depression and then started the school with some other teachers; there for first five years of my life; father son of a minister, mother from up-state New York and her father was a surgeon; met on a boat going to Europe as students; married in the British Embassy in Paris; mother interested in literature and the arts; father, though a scientist, played musical instruments and as a youth carved wooden puppets; mother interested in films and I was taken often by her to the cinema; have an older brother but because of seven year's difference upbringing more like an only child; moved to New York from Vermont during the War; mother teaching at the Dalton School, Manhattan, where I went from grade 1 to 8; remember one geography teacher, John Seeger, who was a great story teller, and interesting, kind, influential teacher; first film I remember seeing at school was 'Nanook of the North'; also had a good chemistry teacher
 
9:29:14 Started taking photographs at an early age; first camera took 127 film, next camera took half-frames; later started doing street photography and got a Voigtlander camera with good lens and began to work in the dark room at Dalton School; had begun developing film at home in a dark room I had made in a closet; continued developing and printing photographs through secondary school where they also had a dark room; at thirteen went to boarding school, Putney; some resemblance to the Doon School as in all boarding schools you are away from the family and have to make a life with other people; other common things are dormitories, meals at certain times, sports, bells; enjoyed school as stimulating environment; music, writing for the school literary magazine which I eventually edited; not a keen games player but did fencing which I also did at University; myopia; good English teacher, an African-American, educated in England, had run for Governor of a State, had been a wrestler and preacher, and loved literature - Jeff Campbell; in senior year had another English teacher, a lover of Yeats' poetry

16:57:21 Didn't begin filming until University and then only in a minor way; had my great aunt's camera, an early 16mm Bell and Howell and did begin to make little films about my friends; majored in English at Harvard and did begin to take anthropology; in anthropology, Barbara Whiting was teaching; first ethnography I read was 'The Nuer'; before this, at fourteen, had been to Africa where father was working on a survey of a river system in northern Angola; allowed to take a term off from school to join parents there; very valuable experience; able to go with engineers up rivers in dugout canoes, crocodiles on the banks; got a job doing their photographic processing in their dark room in the main office in Luanda; from that time on always had an interest in Africa but more accidental that I ended up making films there as that was part of a postgraduate film making project; no particularly memorable teachers either in anthropology or English

23:17:03 At the end of four years at Harvard had decided I wanted to make films; friends and I went weekly to the Brattle Theatre and saw some extraordinary films; this was an art cinema and saw films by Antonioni, Godard, De Sica; had been taking writing courses and in final year studied with Archibald MacLeish but decided I was much more fascinated with cinema; decided to try to find a job in film making; found one in New York with a company making documentary and educational films called 'US Productions'; one of the directors, Al Butterfield, an historian (brother of Herbert), and they made both history and science films; hired as a researcher; first job was on a film about the White House which they hoped to get cooperation on from Jackie Kennedy; film never made;  did some writing as well but forbidden to touch a camera or an editing machine; secretly took a night school course at Columbia in film production where I was finally able to get my hands on a camera and to edit film; good course where the whole class collaborated on a single film, the subject of which was 'garbage'; each filmed some footage and edited jointly; I filmed mostly in Fulton Fish Market and garbage trucks; 1962 about to be drafted to Vietnam; applied to the Peace Corps to put off the draft and was sent to Africa; once out of the Peace Corps applied for an educational deferment to go to graduate school which was granted

30:42:10 Not really politicised until I went to UCLA and then began to feel the idiocy of the war; as a Peace Corps worker sent to Nyasaland which became independent Malawi while I was there; sent as a secondary school teacher in a teacher training college; very much enjoyed two years there and got another view of school life; had a camera but had little experience; filmed some of the independence celebrations and cultural performances; enjoyed roaming round villages on my own; continued to take still photographs; read a lot of books on prehistory and archaeology of Central Africa there; visited the museum in Livingstone; applied for two postgraduate programs in US, one in anthropology at Berkeley because Desmond Clark was teaching there, the other the film school at UCLA; opted for the film school

35:31:21 The Director was Colin Young, who became a major figure in my life; went there in 1965 and stayed until 1970 by which time I'd got an MFA degree in cinema and had made a number of films; there when they created one of the first programs in ethnographic film; joint program with Wally [Walter] Goldschmidt, head of anthropology, funded by the Ford Foundation, to bring together anthropology and film students; teachers led fairly ambitious projects to make films, in Ireland and Chile; I became involved in the third project in Uganda; by that time I had met Judith on the course and had asked her to shoot one of my first student films and I shot her thesis film; both went to Uganda as crew; I was asked to shoot the film; our professor, Richard Hawkins, nominally directing the film left a lot of decisions to me due to unpredictability of subject; used 16mm with sync sound; very privileged as film students to have access to the very latest equipment

40:10:15 Rationale of this ethnographic film program was to create collaborations between anthropologists and film makers, the anthropologists supplying the knowledge and concepts and the film makers supplying the film making skills; however at the back of Colin Young's mind was the anthropologist-film maker, someone who combined the two; one reason why Rouch was such an influential character; trained initially as an engineer, then as an anthropologist and wrote PhD on labour migration in West Africa; perhaps one of the few who combined anthropological and film making skills; I believe in an authored cinema, essentially made by one person rather by the industrial model with separate roles for sound engineer, camera man, director, producer, editor; the latter was the model for the 'Disappearing World' series which worked occasionally but often not well at all; always conflicting concepts of what the film should be; there were some good films such as those made by David Turton and Leslie Woodhead [among the Mursi], 'Onka's Big Moka', Hugh Brody's film on the Inuit, one on Ashanti market women, but in general there were tremendous tensions in the process; film maker is after a different kind of knowledge to the anthropologist, so an epistemological question about how you define anthropological knowledge arises; this is the problem that runs through visual anthropology; often the film maker is making just as rigorous an analysis of what's being filmed as the anthropologist but it is a different one, and this creates the problem; or the anthropologist is interested in a didactic and informational film and the film maker in an experiential approach to knowledge

47:49:24 In Uganda, Richard Hawkins teamed up with Suzette Heald who was doing research on the Gisu so we made a film about Gisu initiation; initially the film came to nothing as Richard had large teaching commitment and didn't get round to editing it, then tragically all the negative footage was lost in film laboratory and all we had was the scratched cutting print; finally finished many years later by Richard and Suzette; University let Judith and me stay on in Uganda with the film equipment to try to make a film of our own; we sold our return tickets to America and bought an old Land Rover; made a kind of connection with Makerere University in Kampala through Peter Rigby who was teaching there; they lent us a tent and camping equipment and wrote the necessary letters to give to officials when asking permission to film; went up to Karimoja District in north-eastern Uganda where there are herding people where I wanted to make a film; met some other anthropologists who gave us connections to local people; more or less worked out a film that was to be my thesis film as Judith had finished hers; had everything but film; Richard Hawkins found enough money to buy some black and white film and we had a little colour film left over from the Gisu project; made one long film 'To Live with Herds' and two short films, 'Under the Men's Tree' and 'Nawi'; these films made at a significant point in visual anthropology because of the use of subtitling; this developed as a result of being able to film with synchronized sound so that you could record conversations, then people wanted to know what subjects were saying; also, we'd grown up looking at subtitled films from Europe so seemed absolutely logical; also a rejection of the didactic style of documentary film we had grown up with where you are told what to think of the images and images are often just background to the soundtrack; led to longer takes, not running round for different angles; also attracted by the narrative possibilities of cinema; increasingly felt that films should be shot from more or less one perspective, as observers rather than directing the action
 
1:01:47:10 In the case of 'To Live with Herds' we had gone to make a visual ethnography of Jie life in past and present; found Jie under stress due to Government administration and moving into a cash economy; problems of water shortage and dependence on bore holes; whether to send children to school; realized it was more important to make a film on the contemporary situation and the Jie response to new pressures; effort by administrators to settle pastoralists and turn them into agriculturalists in places where agriculture was marginal; influential paper by Peter Rigby 'Pastoralism and Prejudice'; if there was a target audience for this film it would have been Government administrators; advocacy anthropology

1:07:05:00 Went back to film school; thesis film was 'Nawi'; both received our degrees in 1970; got a job working with James Blue who had taught for a time at UCLA, trained in the French film school IDHEC, who had made a feature film in Algeria during the war there and a number of other interesting documentaries; Rice University in Houston had created a new media centre funded by the Menil family; invited James Blue to come and I got a job with him; Colin Young also came for short periods to teach and similarly Roberto Rossellini; David Hancock, promising young film maker, also on the staff but unfortunately died young; tried to rotate the three teaching positions so that each one would have a year off to do a film project; felt that teachers of film making must be active although hard to get the University to accept; Judith and I went back to Africa for a year and a half to make the Turkana films

1:11:53:08 On the Turkana, the main film we set out to make which ended up being 'The Wedding Camels' was fairly conventional in anthropological terms; wanted to look at Turkana society through a focal event which highlit all the major preoccupations of their life - live-stock ownership, alliances between families, polygyny; wanted to follow a marriage from the discussions over bride wealth right up to the ceremonies; had to wait nine months for this to happen as nobody was marrying until the rains came; spent time trying to work out all the potential marriages that might take place, then selected one; this film worked as we intended; made two other films which were less predictable, one about the ways co-wives cooperate and their relationships with husband - 'A Wife among Wives'; third became a portrait of the patriarch of the family, Lorang - 'Lorang's Way'; essentially making three films at once; I was shooting and Judith did the sound recording; shared the decision-making entirely; Judith regrets that we didn't spend more time focussing on women's lives; she is a marvellous cinematographer and I now feel we should have done more sharing of jobs, but we did collaborate very well in the field and in the editing stage

SECOND PART

0:05:08 Turkana films took several years to edit; problems in the filming due to remoteness of the place; for any communications had to go to Eldoret or Nairobi; after exposing about 5000 feet of film, sent it to the lab and when the rushes came back found half of it was out of focus; due to an element in the lens having been put in backwards when checked by technician before we left; problems with camera motor burning out which we tried to get repaired in Nairobi; have kept a dossier of all these difficulties with letters going back and forth; Land Rover also once stolen; had originally intended to go back to Jie but in the interim Idi Amin took power in Uganda and we realized it would be difficult and dangerous; shifted the project over the border to Northern Kenya; Turkana speak essentially same language as the Jie so the closest group culturally that we could work with; in Nairobi a procedure to go through to get permission to film which involved getting a research permit from the President's office and permission from the Ministry of Information; frustrating as each wanted the other's permission first; luckily Richard Leakey stepped in as we'd made an association with the National Museums of Kenya and got the permissions for us; went up to the Turkana region and started working, language learning and meeting people; at first Lorang was the one senior person in the area who wanted nothing to do with us; told his wives to keep away from us; eventually did meet him and discovered he was extraordinarily interesting, the intellectual among his peers; had the advantage of having been away from Turkana so had a wider perspective than most men; after a short time got on well together and he enjoyed talking about the problems of change; permitted us to film in his compound; indicates that the most keen for contact are not necessarily the best to work with; after waiting for nine months, the rains came and Lorang's daughter married, and we were able to follow the bride-wealth negotiations

8:39:23 Due back to teach at Rice but the ceremony took longer than expected and James Blue very kindly stood in for me; while in Turkana we received a letter enclosing an advertisement from the Aboriginal Institute in Australia for two ethnographic film makers to re-establish a film unit at the institute; previously Roger Sandall had made films for them and they had contracted others to Curtis Levy; telegram sent inviting me to come to Australia for an interview; we were in middle of the bride-wealth negotiation, filming every day, so no possibility of leaving; camera motor burnt out at this point and sent telegram to Roger Sandall in Sydney asking him to meet and take the motor for repair while I went to Canberra for the interview; jet lagged and late for the interview; disagreed with the plans they had for the unit but was offered the job with Judith as part of the team; picked up the repaired motor and returned to continue the filming; fulfilled the rest of my commitment at Rice to teach for the rest of the year and then took up the post at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies

14:28:09 Thought we would stay in Australia for a few years but have stayed there since 1975; prior work of the Institute had been primarily salvage anthropology, trying to film ceremonies mostly in the Central Desert which were thought to be disappearing; Roger Sandall had done a long series of films with Nicolas Peterson and others, documenting these events; Curtis Levy had made film about Tiwi mortuary ceremonies and I was told by Peter Ucko on my arrival that I would be expected to film a further mortuary ceremony that was happening in a few weeks; got in touch with Maria Brandl who was  doing  anthropological work among the Tiwi on Melville Island; went there and made film guided by her; brought a Tiwi man to Canberra to help with editing and he provided a commentary on the events in the film; this was a practice we continued to use in Aboriginal communities; found it very different from filming African pastoralists where a premium is placed on being able to speak well in public which seemed totally different from the cultural style of Aboriginal people whose discourse is highly referential and symbolic; struggled with the problem and never quite solved it; then realized that times were changing and it was important for indigenous people now to make the sorts of films we had been making before; training programme for Aboriginal film makers; after about 12 years eased ourselves out and proposed that the film unit should be dissolved; began to work independently for a while on grants; Kim McKenzie had been appointed as third member of the Film Unit and he went on to make 'Waiting for Harry' and he solved the problem in a very different way

22:01:20 Peter Ucko marvellous to work with as he was loyal to staff and allowed one to work as one wished without interference; Institute very lively but gradually became more bureaucratized and lost its spark when he left; Ian Dunlop not part of this group but worked for the Australian Commonwealth Film Unit which then became Film Australia so based in Sydney; first met him in 1968 and when I came to Australia we became friends; conferred about many things such as what policy we should adopt if people wanted to use footage from our films; how to deal with distress that Aborigines might feel if films were shown of people who had died

24:55:00 From 1986 filming free lance; had a brief fellowship at Humanities Research Centre, ANU, and also did some teaching there; Ian Donaldson was the director of the HRC at the time and Anthony Forge the head of the anthropology department; Judith and I applied for a documentary film fellowship established by the Australian Film Commission in conjunction with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation; proposed making a film about still photography; theme of ten undocumented photographs and detective work on identifying them; given the fellowship but didn't make this particular film; at that point invited to an ethnographic film conference being held in India in the palace of the Maharajah of Jodhpur organised by his cousin; had never been to India before but encouraged by people at the conference to make the film in India as it had a long history of photography; interesting proposition so began to travel around; notion of finding a village with one photographer and focusing on his clientele and the events recorded; never found such a place; had been reading the novels of Narayan and his focus on small figures in Malgudi and we hoped to find a photographer like that; next step was to make contact with Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) and met Director Martand Singh who suggested we go to Mussoorie; hill station full of photographers of all sorts; resulted in the film 'Photo Wallahs'

36:12:22 Indirectly led to the film on the Doon School; next project was without Judith, made a film in Sardinia at the request of the Ethnographic Institute there on mountain shepherds - 'Tempus de Baristas' - made as co-production with the BBC, one of the few times there has been television money; commissioning editor was Andre Singer who was commissioning a series called 'Fine Cut' at that time; extra money allowed me to take more time and to hire Dai Vaughan as editor who had worked with us on 'Photo Wallahs'; probably the finest documentary editor in British television and learnt a lot from him; project finished in 1994 when film was shown; BBC version was 90 minutes though the actual film was 100 minutes; lost four sequences which I prize the most but not essential to the framework; next project was the Doon School; contacted by an Indian anthropologist Sanjay Srivastava who was completing his PhD on three schools of Northern India at Sydney University; suggested it might make a good subject for a documentary film; had thought of collaborating but he got a lectureship and went off to teach and I made the films

42:15:00 On first visit met the headmaster who was remarkably open and welcoming thinking it would give the school a different perspective on itself and be very valuable; students' education word-based and not very critical of visual images and very good for them to have a film maker around; able to do this work on a fairly small budget as could use digital video; started with a Sony model 200 which one held on the shoulder; Doon School is probably the most famous boys' boarding school in India; the use of digital video permitted me to make the films alone which seemed appropriate in the context of the school; had made a verbal agreement with ABC Television and BBC to make a film on Doon but BBC pulled out so made it on University research budget; felt free to make films as I chose; 'Doon School Chronicles' is over two hours long, divided into ten chapters, looks at the ideology of the school as well at the responses of the boys; part of the quid pro quo was that I should train some student film makers which I did with a group of about eight; they made a fortnightly film magazine which was shown to the school on film nights until they dropped the school camera in the river; used texts found in school archives and round the school which I used as epigraphs for chapters; began experimenting inserting still images; went on to make four more films which become progressively more narrowly focussed, the last on a single student

52:32:13 'Doon School Chronicles' was the product of a change in direction in my own thinking; had thought of school as a meeting place for boys with great varieties of experience - home, religion - but found school homogeneous with strong traditions and rituals; modelled on British public school to train leaders who would take over after Independence; stressed leadership, independence, self-confidence, but regimented in a way; after a few weeks felt I was in the middle of a stage play; wondered if you could look at a school as a creative work in some sense; led me to look at the social aesthetic of the school, trying to look at rituals, patterns of gesture, speech behaviour, which creates the specific cultural and physical environment; later films less explicitly about that but still in the background; over period of 3-4 years was in the school for about fourteen months, for periods of up to four months at a time; never had any problems with climate of fear surrounding filming children which effects such ventures in Britain and Australia; still do not find this anxiety in India but don't believe such films could be made in Britain and Australia; nothing really surprised me, found parallels with other schools, and my own boarding school had prepared me for much that went on; classic problems of teasing and bullying that went on under the surface; found school tried to account for every minute of the students' time and they ended up being quite stressed, especially towards the end of term; school's complex punishment system, preoccupation with clothing

1:02:22:09 After finishing the Doon project (the last film was edited 2003) I began filming at a school in South India called the Rishi Valley School, a coeducational boarding school, based on the ideas of Krishnamurti; progressive educational philosophy which is similar to the one at Putney School where I went; just substitute John Dewey for Krishnamurti; began filming and have made two long and several shorter films which are in collaboration with students; as a third project began  living and filming in a shelter for homeless children in New Delhi; comparing three institutional sites for children in India; just finishing a fairly complete edit of the third project film; to edit use Final Cut Pro on a Mac; have an editing room at the University next to my office; Judith and I have been back to Rishi Valley School as I had not been able to film the girls; during a month's stay she filmed a group of girls while I did a group of boys; that film has yet to be edited

1:06:38:23 Advice to a young anthropologist - don't be afraid about making a film if you  don't know the subject fully; camera can be a way of exploring the subject; feel that films should be part of the process of research not post facto publication of some previous research; may end up not making a film at all but the camera gives you access to situations through which you learn; I don't enjoy technology for its own sake; learn to hold the camera steady, find a frame of interest, let us look at what you find interesting

1:10:10:22 Think films can reflect complex thought but not good at making propositional statements about the world, partly due to dealing with specific cases and not having the ability to summarize many examples; films can be highly analytical in the way they explore their subject and the kinds of juxtapositions they create; words are incredibly important in film as in writing; attraction of Lorang as a Turkana intellectual; also find children have intellectual skills we tend to underestimate; words are important but don't like them to dominate films; camera can be a personal writing instrument in allowing other people to experience what you have; I move from one mode to another depending on the circumstances