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Visual Anthropology
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Scopic Regimes and the Observational Approach: Ethnographic Filmmaking in a Czech Institution Rosie Read
To cite this Article Read, Rosie(2005) 'Scopic Regimes and the Observational Approach: Ethnographic Filmmaking in a
Czech Institution', Visual Anthropology, 18: 1, 47 — 64 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/0894960590900043 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0894960590900043
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Visual Anthropology, 18: 47–64, 2005 Copyright # Taylor & Francis, Inc. ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949460590900043
Scopic Regimes and the Observational Approach: Ethnographic Filmmaking in a Czech Institution
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Rosie Read In recent years, visual anthropologists such as MacDougall [1997] and Ginsburg [1998] have identified the need to develop the connections between the study of visual cultures and practices on the one hand, and the ethnographic use of visual media on the other. This article explores one way in which this might occur through a focus on the relationships between power, routinized ways of seeing, and ethnographic documentary filmmaking. I argue that the analysis of the ways in which power relations are embedded in visual forms and practices raises questions about how these processes might be critically explored by visual means (e.g., by using film or photography). This is demonstrated through an examination of my own research in a Prague institution. In this context, routine visual practices mediated power relations and ‘‘constructed’’ people within the institution in particular ways. I consider whether the filming technique I used was adequate to the task of exploring and representing these institutional power relations, or whether it mirrored and reproduced them.
VISIBLE CULTURAL FORMS In a recent article, David MacDougall identifies two strands of enquiry within visual anthropology. On the one hand, there is the ‘‘anthropology of visible cultural forms,’’ broadly conceived as the study of visual cultures, systems, practices, representations and artifacts [1997: 283]. On the other, there is the attempt to do anthropology visually. This involves using visual media to explore social and cultural worlds, and to explore how visual representation can be constituted as a legitimate form of anthropological knowledge in its own right. MacDougall maintains that this second strand of visual anthropology poses a radical epistemological challenge to the conventionally word-bound discipline. David MacDougall is not the first to distinguish between the use and analysis of visual forms, between the production of visual ethnography on the one hand and the textual-based research of visual cultures and representations on the other ROSIE READ is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at Manchester University. Her research interests include gender, visual anthropology, and postsocialist studies. She carried out doctoral fieldwork in Prague in 1998–1999, and has made a documentary film, Domor, which was awarded the Student Prize at the 6th Go¨ttingen International Ethnographic Film Festival in 2002. E-mail: rosie_read@hotmail.com.
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[see also, for example, Worth 1981; Ruby 2000: xi]. Clearly the boundaries between these two kinds of activity are constituted institutionally as well as intellectually [see for example, Ginsburg 1998; Grimshaw 2001]. Yet, as Ginsburg suggests, there is much to be gained from forging greater connections between them [1998: 185]. One way in which this might occur is suggested by MacDougall. He argues that the ‘‘study of collective visual representations itself generates new questions about how anthropology can communicate about them’’ [1997: 286]. In other words, the analysis of visual cultures and practices can potentially shape the ways in which we use visual media to explore and represent them. In this article, I pursue MacDougall’s proposal in relation to a specific concern with power and ways of seeing. In many different social contexts, relations of power and inequality are embedded in, and mediated by, visual practices [see for instance, Berger 1972; Trinh 1991]. I argue that if we are to use visual media to explore and represent such contexts critically, an analytical understanding of the dynamics that shape visual practice and experience is crucial. The study of the relationships between vision and power can feed into and enhance the development of visual methods which investigate and represent these connections, and which do not uncritically reproduce them. I seek to demonstrate this argument in a retrospective fashion, through an exploration of my own attempt to make a documentary film within an institution in Prague which comprised of a women’s prison, a nursing home and a convent. As with many other institutions, disciplinary technologies were evident in routine visual practices, such as surveillance of prisoners’ conduct and monitoring of patients’ medical condition. I focus on how my own filming practice articulated with institutionalized ways of seeing within the nursing home and prison. I draw out how the filming technique I employed could be engaged in a critical interrogation of practices of surveillance within the nursing home, but not within the prison, where I suggest that an alternative method of filming would have generated quite different results.1
THE HISTORY OF THE INSTITUTION The Home of St. Charles Borromeo is a large, white, imposing building located in a western suburb of Prague (see Figures 1–3). It is immediately surrounded by open fields and small houses, though in the distance lies a large housing development, constructed in the socialist period, consisting of high-rise flats and a shopping precinct. The building in which the institution is housed has an interesting history. Originally constructed in 1858, it had been the property of the Borromeo order of nuns until 1950, when it was nationalized by the communist state and the nuns were forced to leave. It was only after the collapse of socialism in the mid-1990s that ownership of the property passed back to the nuns under post-1989 restitution laws. After some considerable reconstruction of the building, the nuns founded a convent, a nursing home, and — with the support of the Czech prison service — a women’s prison on the site. These are three largely independent organizations, spatially separate from each other, and each with its own management structure. The different people associated with these different
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establishments are brought together in the nursing home, where nuns and prisoners work alongside nurses to look after elderly patients. The prison is an enclosed, guarded area, run by prison service employees. It admits only women convicted of nonviolent offenses, and the vast majority of prisoners are serving sentences for theft, minor fraud, tax evasion, defaulting on loan repayments, and such like. During fieldwork, the prison housed between 35 and 40 inmates, aged anywhere between 18 and 60, from all over the Czech Republic. All inmates are employed within the institution, as cleaners, kitchen assistants, laundry workers or garden laborers, for example. It is also possible for them to undertake a three-month part-time course providing training in basic nursing skills. On the successful completion of this course, they are employed as nursing assistants (sanitarˇky) within the nursing home. The convent is also a restricted area; only nuns can enter. At the time of fieldwork about 12 nuns lived on site.2 Though a few of the resident nuns were in retirement, most of the others worked as nurses or nursing assistants in the nursing home. The nursing home provides short-term residential nursing care. It has three floors, or wards. At the time of fieldwork, it could accommodate up to one hundred patients. These were mostly elderly women from Prague who had been transferred to the nursing home for a period of convalescence and medical assessment. Their physical and mental conditions were diverse. Many had suffered heart attacks, strokes, or falls, from which they might make a full or only partial recovery. Others had dementia, Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease, though the severity of these conditions varied considerably. The nursing home also recruited nurses and nursing assistants from outside the institution.3 Thus, on the ward where I spent most of my time, the nursing staff present on a given day shift would typically include three nurses or nursing assistants from outside the institution, one nun, and two prisoners (trained as nursing assistants), collectively responsible for the care about 40 patients. In terms of their duties whilst at work, there was no formalized division of labor. Prisoners were not permitted to administer medicine, and only fully qualified nurses could give injections, but in all other circumstances everyone undertook the same tasks. For reasons of clarity, in this article the term ‘‘nurse’’ encompasses all those who cared for patients in the nursing home, be they prisoners, nuns, nurses, or nursing assistants. During the 14 months’ fieldwork that I conducted in this institution, I spent the greatest amount of time in the nursing home, where I worked voluntarily as a nursing assistant. It was only towards the end of my fieldwork that I began to use a video camera to follow the daily lives of some residents. This change in my occupation from nursing assistant to filmmaker altered my perception of the institution; I began to ‘‘see’’ differently. My concern here is to investigate how this shift took place, and what it implied for the film I would make about the institution.
SCOPIC REGIMES In the modern age, according to Foucault, the state’s preeminent concern is the maintenance and control of its citizens, who are quantified, categorized, defined, and rendered knowable as never before [1990, 1991]. This form of governance is
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facilitated by schools, hospitals, prisons, factories, and other modern institutions, all of which are characterized, for Foucault, by their reliance on disciplinary technologies. Whatever the explicit purpose of particular institutions, the people who live in them or pass through them are subject to a similar set of disciplinary procedures. These consist of routinized practices such as training exercises, drills, standardized ways of sitting, moving and talking, as well as the rationalized arrangement of subjects within space such that their conduct may be consistently supervised and surveyed. The purpose of these technologies is to create docile bodies, or bodies which ‘‘may be subjected, used, transformed and improved.’’ [Foucault 1991: 136]. In the institution analyzed here, the repeated practice of disciplinary technologies created what I call scopic regimes, by which I mean something different from surveillance per se. As Foucault argues, surveillance is one of a range of disciplinary technologies. It is a practice in which a person or a group of people watch, monitor and assess another person or group of people within a rationally organized space.4 I use the term scopic regimes to refer to a specific effect of the routinized nature of all surveillance practices, namely, their capacity to naturalize certain kinds of conduct and relationships. Within the institution, the daily repeated acts of surveillance rendered certain features of social relationships both highly visible and self-evident. As I demonstrate below, the scopic regimes in the prison and nursing home served to constitute patients and prisoners as particular types of people. PATIENTS The nursing home ward consisted of two adjacent corridors. One side of these corridors overlooked a courtyard (see Figure 4). On the other side were patients’ rooms which accommodated between one and six patients. As new patients arrived, their physical dependency was assessed. Those able to walk were placed on ‘‘B’’ corridor, while ‘‘A’’ corridor was reserved for patients who were bed bound, had difficulty walking, or were deemed to be in need of more medical supervision than usual. On ‘‘A’’ corridor, the patients could be viewed from outside their rooms through the glass panel in the door, or through the large windows to one side of the door. The more ‘‘independent’’ patients on ‘‘B’’ corridor had more privacy; their rooms could not be viewed from the outside. But in spite of this categorization by mobility, patients on both corridors led a highly static existence in the nursing home. They spent most of the day either lying in bed, or sitting on chairs next to their beds. Even for those who could walk, there were few places to walk to. There was no lounge or TV room, and no nearby shop or park. Patients were encouraged to exercise by walking up and down the corridor, but not to wander out of sight of the nurses, and certainly not to leave the building. In contrast to patients, the nurses’ presence was highly mobile. Theirs was a rationalized mobility, however. Nurses performed set tasks at particular times of day, always starting at the top of one corridor, and moving down to the bottom of the other. At 7 a.m., when the nurses’ day shift began, patients were awakened and helped on and off their commodes, at 7:30, breakfast was served and
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medication distributed, at 9:30, patients were assisted to the bathroom for their daily shower, at 11:30 they were taken to the dining room for lunch, and so forth. These tasks were repeated endlessly, and patients and nurses alike were totally familiar with them. In performing this work, the focus of nurses’ attention was always on what the patients couldn’t do, what had to be done for, or to, the patients. They worked on the assumption that patients could not feed or wash themselves. The continual enactment of the daily tasks thus foreshadowed the differences in patients’ physical capabilities.5 Instead, the routine helped generate the impression that all patients were essentially passive and docile. It helped produce and reproduce nurses’ view of patients as a series of dependent bodies in need of their assistance. The generation and circulation of medical knowledge about patients tended to echo this tendency. Nurses monitored blood pressure, weight, sleeping patterns, medication, and physical ‘‘deterioration,’’ and recorded this information in patients’ individual case files. These were consulted by the head doctor and other senior medical personnel on the weekly visita, or doctor’s rounds, during which this group toured the nursing home, moving in the same regulated pattern as the nurses, from bed to bed, room to room, one corridor to another, to assess each patient’s ‘‘progress.’’ The brief discussion between the doctor and nursing staff which took place at each patient’s bedside was rarely addressed to the patients themselves. Patients were thereby positioned as passive witnesses to authoritative medical opinion about their condition and progress.6 Moreover, the focus of their brief exchanges was always with what was ‘‘wrong’’ with the patient, what they needed in terms of diet, exercise, medicine, and treatment, and how their physical dependency was to be handled on a day-to-day basis by the nurses. The ways in which nurses and doctors moved through the space of the nursing home ensured the perpetuation of a scopic regime, in which patients’ physicality
Figure 1 The entrance to the institution.
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Figure 2
The back wing of the institution, incorporating the prison.
was constantly on display, and in which dependency and frailty appeared to be an inherent aspect of patients’ bodies, an inevitable effect of age and illness, rather than an outcome of how space and activity were organized in the nursing home. PRISONERS Prisoners were subject to an entirely different set of constraints. The official rationale for enabling these women to work as nursing assistants in the nursing
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Figure 3 The grounds of the institution.
home was that this work relieved the trauma of prison life. The prison governor stated explicitly that separation from children and other family members was difficult for all prisoners, but particularly hard for women. In her view, caring for ‘‘dependent’’ people came naturally to all women, and working as nursing assistants approximated what women prisoners would ‘‘normally’’ be doing ‘‘in the home.’’ However there was also an unofficial view, expressed by some members of prison staff, that, in having broken the law and engaged in criminal activities, women prisoners had deviated from (normalized) femininity. In this view, encouraging prisoners to work as nursing assistants was part of a drive to
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Figure 4
Christmas decoration and view of inner courtyard from nursing home corridor
inculcate and reinstate appropriate femininity within prisoners, to transform them into ‘‘good’’ women. The rhetoric about prisoner rehabilitation was therefore rather contradictory. Prisoners were both ‘‘traumatized’’ and ‘‘abnormal,’’ both ‘‘victims’’ and ‘‘deviants’’ [cf. Bosworth 1999, Naffine 1987, and Carlen 1983]. Prisoners had to juggle with this paradoxical set of assumptions about them at the level of daily practice. They were aware that definitions of moral rehabilitation were bound up with notions about appropriate forms of femininity, not least because this was unequivocally impressed upon them by prison staff. They also knew that, in order to gain early release, it was necessary for them to convince prison authorities that they regretted breaking the law and had learned their lesson. What was demanded of them was stereotypically feminine conduct, or at the very least avoidance of any behavior that suggested ‘‘transgressive’’ femininity. For instance, during ‘‘free time’’ in the evenings or on their one day off per week, all prisoners were invited to knit and sew clothes and bedding to be donated to charities. (One woman once dryly remarked to me that prison staff measured prisoners’ ‘‘rehabilitation’’ by the number of jumpers and hats they knitted.) In training as nursing assistants, they had to demonstrate consistently that they had a capacity for doing caring work, and that they could be relied upon to be deferential, hard-working and punctual. They had to be exceptionally attentive and helpful to patients, and any display of aggressive or confrontational behavior with staff, visitors, or fellow prisoners could jeopardize their job in the nursing home and even their place in the prison. Prisoners who worked as cleaners or kitchen or laundry assistants also had to be obedient, compliant, and efficient. The technologies of surveillance which enforced this conduct were multiple. Prison guards made routine surveillance tours of all parts of the institution to check up on prisoners. The head nurse on the ward and line managers in
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the kitchens and laundries made regular reports to the prison about the working attitudes of prison inmates. But more generally, complaints from any quarters about prisoners’ behavior had to be lodged directly with the prison authorities. As a result prisoners tended to manage relationships with colleagues outside the prison with particular caution. At the same time, there were routine checks and surveillance of prisoners, body searches on entering and leaving the prison compound, surveillance of their letters and parcels, searches through their belongings for drugs or mobile phones. These routines were predicated on the denial of ‘‘normal’’ rights to privacy and freedom, and were a part of the punishment. Alongside generating a tangible sense of restriction and control, they were enacted on the basic supposition that prisoners could not be trusted. In short, it was beholden on prisoners to prove that they were reformed in the face of day-to-day surveillance practices which constructed them as prone to dishonesty and covert rule-breaking. Whereas the scopic regime of the nursing home naturalized patients’ physical dependency, the scopic regime of the prison brought prisoners’ ‘‘moral characters,’’ or their ‘‘souls,’’ to use Foucault’s terminology, under the spotlight.7 It rendered prisoners’ moral conscience (closely linked to their femininity) almost inevitably problematic and dubious.
FILMING OBSERVATIONALLY The process of making a film in the institution brought my camera into a distinct engagement with each of these scopic regimes. Most of the filming took place in the nursing home, though I also filmed in the prison. I focused on two key protagonists: Mrs. Teskova´, a patient, and Dana, a prisoner.8 Both of these women were shortly to leave the institution. My aim was to follow their respective departures, and explore their attempts to rebuild their lives once outside. For the purpose of this article however, my concern is not so much with the edited film’s narrative as with the process and method of filming. I adopted an observational approach in making the film. Though interpretations of what constitutes this technique vary, at its core the observational method presupposes a relationship of respect and trust between the filmmaker and the film’s subjects [Young 1975, Grimshaw 2001: 130]. In the context of such a relationship, the filmmaker seeks to follow the protagonists in a bid to discover the social worlds they inhabit. Indeed, the method has often identified with participant-observation techniques characterizing anthropological fieldwork. Film subjects are not treated like actors, and the filmmaker assumes the role of witness to the action unfolding in front of the camera, rather than director of it. Observational film tends to be non-interventionist, the filmmaker refraining from provoking protagonists or contriving action, and seeking instead to preserve the spatiotemporal dimensions of filmed events. This is motivated not by an objectivist agenda, as has often been claimed, but by precisely that ethical stance of respect for the people being filmed, expressed through a desire to discover their worlds in the process of filming, rather than to construct a representation of them according to a preconceived idea or narrative.9
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Although a great deal more could be said about the observational approaches to filmmaking,10 my interest here is in what it meant to bring this method — with all that it implies in terms of ethics, relationships between filmmaker and subject, and so on —into a context in which ‘‘observation’’ took on a distinctly Foucauldian aspect. My filming technique articulated with the scopic regimes of prison and nursing home, and this had different implications both for my relationship with subjects, and for the possibilities for filming in a way which did not mirror the scopic regimes and the power relations which they mediated.
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FILMING PATIENTS I filmed Mrs. Teskova´ intensively over a period of about 10 days leading up to her departure from the nursing home. This was the first time I had filmed in the nursing home; for the previous nine months I had been working as a nurses’ assistant. Filming Mrs. Teskova´ therefore entailed stepping out of a role I had grown accustomed to and, consequently, led me to apprehend the nursing home in new ways. Working as a nursing assistant, I had worn the same uniform as other nursing staff and had performed the same routine tasks. I had walked up and down the corridor, giving out breakfasts and afternoon snacks, helping patients in and out of bed, on and off commodes, wheeling or walking them to or from the shower room for their daily wash. In short, I had spent much of my time relating to the patients in the same brief and functional way as the other nurses. Like them, I tended to encounter patients as physically dependent bodies in need of nursing assistance. Though I was conscious of the fact that nurses’ relationships with patients were constrained by routines of seeing, moving, and attending, I was also enacting these myself on a daily basis, and it was in and through this routine that I had formed relationships with patients. Once I began filming Mrs. Teskova´ I started to come into the nursing home wearing my own clothes. This led me to feel an immediate and powerful sense of disconnection with the other nurses in their crisp, light-colored uniforms. They commented on how different I looked in jeans and a T-shirt. Moreover, I ceased to perform the nursing routine and began moving and seeing patients in a radically different way. Adopting an observational approach entailed following Mrs. Teskova´ intensively, moving where she moved, which in practice was very little. We spent long periods of the day just sitting in her room, which she only left to go to the dining room to eat or to the shower room to be washed. As we sat, nurses breezed in and out, changing bedding and delivering or removing plates of food. Their interactions with Mrs. Teskova´ were brief and functional. Wasn’t she going to eat anymore? Had she taken her medicine? This habitual way of relating to patients; this scopic regime in which I had previously been complicit, suddenly seemed distant, disengaged, and even dehumanizing. As Moore observes, Shifts in meaning can result from a re-ordering of practical activities. If meaning is given to the organization of space through practice, it follows that small changes in procedure can provide new interpretations of spatial layouts. Such layouts provide potential
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commentaries on established ways of doing things and divisions of privilege. Shifting the grounds of meaning, reading against the grain, is often something done through practice . . . It can include using a space in a different way. [Moore 1994: 83]
Filming observationally demanded a shift in my own embodied practice, which made it overwhelmingly apparent to me that patients’ physical dependency was an effect of the nursing home’s scopic regime, rather than an inevitable aspect of old age or illness. My changed perception of the nursing home was reinforced by Mrs. Teskova´’s experience. At the time of filming, Mrs. Teskova´ was engaged in her own battle with the prevailing view of nursing home management and other nursing staff that she was now too old and infirm to live an independent life in her flat, and ought to move permanently to an old people’s home. She had been in the nursing home for a year, recovering from a stroke which had left her bedridden for several months, from which, she felt, she had made a full recovery. In her mid-eighties, a widow with no children, she had a strong desire to return to the peace and solitude of her own flat, and the community of her local Catholic church, which she had regularly attended for most of her life. She had always regarded her stay in the nursing home as a temporary arrangement. It came to her as quite a shock when she discovered that the nursing home management were strongly advocating that she accept the offer of a place in an old people’s home some 15 km outside Prague. She insisted that to move to such an institution constituted a total erasure of her personal history and her social relationships, adding that she knew nothing of the town in which this old people’s home was located; it was far away from her friends and relations, her church, her garden. However, when she voiced these objections to nurses, they replied that she was simply too dependent to live on her own. The administrator responsible for advising Mrs. Teskova´ on her accommodation options took the same view. She dismissed the idea that a home help or a visiting nurse might offer sufficient assistance to enable Mrs. Teskova´ to return to her flat, and remarked, Remember you’re not getting any younger. Things are going to get worse, rather than better. I’m very concerned about the steps. You would have to bring shopping up those steps. You’d have to bring boxes of washing powder, medicine. A home help would only rush in and out, she wouldn’t do everything. You’d have to manage the rest yourself and those steps are a real problem.
Whilst Mrs. Teskova´ understood a return to her flat in terms of her past and ongoing social relationships, the nurses and administrator evaluated its viability as a living space for a ‘‘dependent’’ old lady, and drew the conclusion that Mrs. Teskova´ simply would not be able to manage to look after herself on her own. Mrs. Teskova´’s battle to return to her flat constituted an attempt to make visible her sense of personal identity and belonging— elements of her experience which the nursing home’s scopic regime consistently rendered invisible to nursing home staff. As Mrs. Teskova´ observed to me,
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You know, it’s all impositions and orders. But these people that make all their plans and everything, they see it all set out clearly before them, but they don’t see the individual person (jednotlive´ho cˇloveˇka). They can’t understand his position. They say ‘‘Yes, you can walk, you’re healthy; no, you can’t walk, you’re not healthy,’’ but what’s inside, what I feel, they don’t understand, they don’t see it.
The administrator remained utterly convinced that Mrs. Teskova´ would truly be happier in the old people’s home. In the face of the apparently overwhelming opinion that she ‘‘couldn’t manage alone,’’ Mrs. Teskova´ eventually gave way, and moved to the old people’s home. Mrs. Teskova´’s resistance could have been filmed in many different ways, but it is my contention that my adoption of the observational technique resulted in a visual representation which interrogated the nursing home’s scopic regime. It forced me to move and see in new ways, and committed me to filming from Mrs. Teskova´’s point of view. It became evident to me how easy it would have been to film the same process from an entirely different perspective (e.g., the nurses’), one which made Mrs. Teskova´ seem hopelessly deluded and unreasonable in her desire to return to her flat. Such a representation would have constituted a reiteration of the scopic regime, rather than a critique of it.
FILMING PRISONERS As I have already shown, the scopic regime which monitored and constrained prisoners’ conduct was designed to expose potential rule-breaking, and to test consistently the extent of inmates’ moral reformation. Their position was thus quite unlike that of the patients, whose bodies were under routine observation, but who, for long stretches of the day, were left alone in their rooms. What patients thought about their treatment, the institution, or indeed anything else was not of particular significance to nurses. By contrast, prisoners’ thoughts and feelings about being in prison were a key part of what guards and the prison management were evaluating. Behavior that was resistive of the prison rules was not tolerated. It was through explicitly registering their compliance with the rules that prisoners were likely to gain early parole. It soon became apparent that filming prisoners within these circumstances was an entirely different project to that of filming patients. I began filming Dana with the best of observational intentions. I sought to follow her, and some of her friends, through their daily routine, consisting largely of a series of tightly scheduled movements between the prison compound and the nursing home. As with Mrs. Teskova´, I aimed to develop an empathetic relationship with these women, and as far as possible to film the institution as they experienced it. But I was increasingly aware that regardless of my personal intentions for the observational use of a video camera, the act of filming could not be divorced from the wider context; my filmmaking was embroiled in the practices and relationships which formed the prison’s own scopic regime. The most immediate way in which this became apparent was in the concentrated nature of filming observationally. Filming Mrs. Teskova´ intensively had
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involved moving and seeing in ways that were quite different from the conventional way in which nurses saw patients. However, following Dana and her friends intensively could not be so easily distinguished from how the prison guards and other prison staff saw prisoners. Like them, I was also engaged in the act of closely observing prisoners as a means of understanding their experience and subjectivities. My own way of observing prisoners felt uncomfortably like a duplication of the prison’s scopic regime, rather than an interrogation of it. In addition to the manner of filming, there was the issue of the footage itself. I was confident that Dana and her friends understood my filming to be part of my own independent research project, that they did not regard me as an undercover spy for the prison authorities, nor associate my motivation for observing them with that of the prison staff. However, I had also made clear to them that I would not be in a position to refuse if the prison governor asked to see the footage, this being one of the conditions for allowing me to film in the prison at all. Thus, however independent my intentions, the prisoners knew that footage I produced could be used in the service of the prison’s own technologies of surveillance. My filming generated suspicion amongst the guards. The people responsible for overseeing the prison’s scopic regime were deeply ambivalent about becoming the object of an apparently autonomous gaze, and regarded my use of a camera to film prison life as surveillance of them. Most guards refused to be filmed, which made it impossible for me to record the roll calls and body or room searches which were so much a part of daily life within the prison. At the same time the guards felt it necessary to monitor closely everything I filmed within the prison compound. They followed me as I followed the prisoners, observing the interaction from a point outside the camera’s frame. As a result, filming prisoners observationally tended to reinforce the social relationships of the prison’s scopic regime. Far from breaking with technologies of surveillance, my filming seemed to be mirroring them. This became evident from the prisoners’ response to the camera. They performed for it as they performed for the gaze of guards, the prison governor, or the head nurse. They conducted themselves like model nurses; hard-working, always ready to lend a hand to their colleagues, endlessly attentive and empathetic with patients. Dana even claimed that life in prison had been a rewarding experience. D: I’ve had time to think about my life. For the first time in my life I feel useful. R: Didn’t you feel useful before? D: In a different way . . . I’m glad I did the nursing course here. I enjoy this work. When I get out, I’d like to work in a children’s home. Or maybe a hospital.
These statements were not utterly cynical. There was much about nursing work that Dana and other prisoners found enjoyable and fulfilling. But what was emphasized for the camera was the idea that being in prison had changed her outlook on life, and provided new skills and a new moral direction. Furthermore prisoners seldom vented their frustration (with patients, or prison regulations), boredom, loneliness, or depression in front of the camera. Such feelings were commonly discussed amongst those who could be trusted (patients, nurses, etc.) but just as they were not expressed in front of guards, they were not expressed in front of my camera.
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The scopic regime of the prison effectively determined what could be seen and filmed. For the most part, prisoners presented themselves to the camera in terms which would meet with the prison authorities’ approval, editing out behavior and forms of expression which would have suggested a more mixed, contradictory impression of their prison experience. The impossibility of filming the guards and the surveillance technologies made it difficult to reveal the constraints which engendered these ‘‘performances’’ within the film itself. There were, nevertheless, occasional moments when prisoners made humorous allusions to their ways of negotiating the scopic regime of the prison. One evening I was filming Dana and her roommate in their dormitory. A guard stood in the corridor just outside the room, poking his head around the door at regular intervals. The women were in high spirits, laughing, joking, and having animated discussion about Dana’s impending departure from prison the day after next. But they were also conscious of my gaze and that of the guard. They scrutinized me as I filmed them, and kept an eye on the door to see if the guard was present. No one was in a better mood than Dana herself. She had grown increasingly bold in front of the camera as her release date drew nearer. Quite suddenly, and with heavy irony, Dana began to ‘‘admonish’’ her roommates for minor transgressions of the prison regulations. She pointed out that Janicˇka kept boxes under her bed, but knew very well that this was not permitted. Janicˇka giggled at this, whilst meeting my camera’s gaze. Dana went on to speak of ‘‘illegal eating’’ in the ‘‘bunker.’’ (This area was a lower bunk bed which could not be seen by anyone who stood in the corridor and glanced into the room through the glass panel in the door.) The others found this highly amusing, including Marusˇka, who replied by telling Dana not to reveal their secrets in front of the camera. She accused Dana of betraying her roommates. Dana replied, ‘‘I’m in prison for lying, so I’m only going to tell the truth!’’ The others found this statement utterly hilarious, and there was much laughter. With these words, Dana was drawing attention to prisoners’ negotiation of the ideas about truth and lies, honesty and dishonesty which informed rehabilitation discourse in the prison. Inmates had to persuade prison authorities that they had been transformed into honest citizens (who tell the truth) in order to gain early release. This demanded a particular presentation of self and a large amount of concealment and disguise [Goffman 1959], not least because of prisoners’ dishonesty being consistently anticipated. Dana’s words were funny because they suggested a parody, an image of the totally compliant prisoner who understands the requirement to be truthful in so literal a sense that she would take pride in revealing her own rule breaking and that of her roommates. In reality of course, surviving prison depended on a far more strategic negotiation of prison rules and discourses of rehabilitation. Insofar as the necessity of performing for power was being deliberately and explicitly alluded to, this was an unusual moment. But it also illustrates prisoners’ relationship to my camera. They were highly conscious of the need to conceal their transgressions of the rules from the camera’s gaze. Marusˇka’s accusation that Dana was betraying on her fellow roommates was humorous, but it was also a reminder of the need for caution, which expressed a degree of anxiety about what Dana might say or do in front of me. For the prisoners, my filming and the guard’s surveillance were both elements of the scopic regime.
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In effect, my footage of the prisoners failed to make the scopic regime visible. I was unable to reveal, within the film, the wider context which made the prisoners behave in the ways they did. My reliance on close, detailed observation mirrored other technologies of surveillance which were very much part of prisoners’ daily experiences, but which remained invisible within the film. Had it been possible to film the guards and practices of surveillance, I might have been able to use the observational method to explore these processes more critically. Since this was not the case however, I regard it as more fruitful, if speculative, to consider how this critical engagement could be achieved through alternative filming and=or editing methods. By what means might the gaze of the guards and the prison authorities be rendered explicit and problematic? Detailed consideration of this question is beyond the scope of this article, but I will briefly and provisionally suggest an alternative strategy manifest in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film Reassemblage. In this film, Trinh breaks with realist conventions of identification and shared time and space and uses montage techniques to make visible a patriarchal, colonialist gaze informing certain representations of African women. The application of such techniques within the prison would entail a shift of focus: the key subject would become the scopic regime itself, rather than the situated experiences of particular prisoners.
CONCLUSION I have shown how my filmmaking practice articulated with the scopic regimes of both prison and nursing home, and the prospects this articulation held for using a camera in ways which engaged critically with technologies of surveillance. In choosing to film observationally, I adopted a method which is premised on the notion of respect between filmmaker and subject. However, this approach to filmmaking produced very different results in the prison and nursing home, as it resonated in distinctive ways with the routinized, regulated ways of seeing specific to these contexts. Filming Mrs. Teskova´ observationally generated the possibility of seeing and filming in ways which diverged from the scopic regime of the nursing home, thereby opening up a space within the film for its critique. On the other hand, filming prisoners observationally seemed to mirror the processes of surveillance already in place within the prison, as if my filming had been co-opted by the prison authorities against my will. This articulation between my own filming and the visual practices of the institution demonstrates the need for a further articulation between the two strands of enquiry within visual anthropology identified by MacDougall. The critical use of visual media within anthropology relies on an informed understanding of how vision and visuality operate in the context of production. This is particularly the case in situations such as the one I have described, in which power is strongly entrenched within routine practices.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Doctoral fieldwork was carried out in this institution between December 1997 and February 1999. I wish to thank all those who participated in my research. Funding for this project was provided by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Emslie Horniman Scholarship Fund of the Royal Anthropological Institute, U.K.
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NOTES 1. In many ways, my concerns in this article are analogous to those of MacDougall in his description of his research and filmmaking in an Indian boys’ boarding school [1999]. Where MacDougall focuses on his attempt to render visually what he calls social aesthetics, or ‘‘culturally patterned sensual experience’’ amongst pupils in the school [ibid.: 5], my interests are more closely related to the possibilities of using visual media to engage critically with the relations of power embedded in daily visual practices in the institution. 2. Though small, the convent at the institution retained close ties with its larger counterpart in the center of Prague. 3. I distinguish here between nurses (zdravotni´ sestry) who were fully qualified and who had passed the high school maturita examination, and nursing assistants (osˇetrovetelky or sanitarˇky) who had not. This distinction was reflected in salaries. 4. For Foucault, disciplinary technology finds its apotheosis in Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, an architectural structure consisting of a central watchtower surrounded by eight buildings comprising many cells. Each cell has two windows, one which faces the watchtower and one on the opposite side, which allows light to enter. This ensures that the inmates of the cells are constantly visible to supervisors in the watchtower, yet they themselves can never see if they are being watched at any given moment. Given this uncertainty, inmates must conduct themselves as if surveillance of them is unremitting. In short, inmates must discipline themselves. For further discussion of Foucault’s interpretation of surveillance and the panopticon, see Crossley [1993] and Reed [1999]. 5. Hockey and James [1993] make similar points in their discussion of aging and social identity in Britain. See especially chapter 3 [pp. 73–103]. 6. This observation is comparable to Martin’s argument that medical discourse on menstruation, childbirth, and the menopause creates a separation between ‘‘self’’ and ‘‘body’’ for contemporary American women. Medical professionals present these biological processes as things that ‘‘happen to’’ women and are in that sense out of their control. 7. According to Foucault, the modern age has witnessed a shift in punitive technologies. During the classical age of the sovereign, punishment of law-breakers was characterized by highly spectacular forms of torture (e.g., hanging, mutilation); representatives of the monarch exacted a symbolic revenge on the ‘‘body of the condemned’’ [1991: 3–32]. Modern forms of punishment, by contrast, are directed towards the reform and rehabilitation of convicts’ ‘‘souls,’’ and enacted on the bodies of convicts through regimes of discipline, containment, and visibility [ibid.: 104–131]. 8. Virtually everyone in the institution addressed patients formally, as Mrs. (pani´). Co-workers of similar age addressed each other more informally, using first names. This distinction is reflected in the way I related to the two main subjects of my film during fieldwork, and in the way I refer to them in this article. 9. Over the years, there has been a great deal of debate about the extent to which observational styles of filming aspire towards objectivity and transparency. See for example Bruzzi [2000: 1–8]; Nichols [1991: 38–44]; MacDougall [1975]; Loizos [1997]; Trinh [1991: 33–37]; and Young [1975]. I concur with Grimshaw [2001: 130] and MacDougall [1998: 86] that observational cinema is in fact highly authored; its authority and communicative power is necessarily channeled through the situated presence of the filmmaker=s. As MacDougall suggests, claims of neutrality and objectivity run counter to ‘‘the prevailing spirit’’ of this method, even though this has not always been recognized by critics and audiences [1998: 137]. This claim could be read as a revision of his earlier position; see MacDougall [1975]. 10. See note 4.
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