A spatula is used to apply a yellow cream to the customer's face, then a lather is worked up with a moistened shaving brush. »I learnt how to give a shave at the age of eleven,« says Felipe Lavore, who, with his brother José, runs a small barber's shop in the oldest district of Buenos Aires, San Telmo. Arnd Schneider, a filmmaker and anthropologist, devotes his attention in his documentary film »Voyage Argentina« (2002) to the nostalgia and identity of Sicilian and Greek immigrants in Argentina. In one of the first scenes of this 15-minute ethnographic film study, he delivers himself into the hands of his informants for a shave.

The sharp blade glides gently over the film director's cheeks. The razor makes an eerie noise as it cuts off the stubble. José has a song on his lips - one line of the lyrics goes, »Show your true face« - and carries out the various procedures in his friendly, talkative manner. Felipe keeps on interrupting him, and tells stories from his and his brother's childhood and youth. The two elderly, elegant-looking gentlemen are the spitting image of each other. Schneider himself barely gets a word in, prevented from opening his mouth by steaming-hot and cold towels, the hand holding the razor, lather, and aromatic lotions. After the shave, his skin has taken on a reddish hue. He screws up his face and hisses between his teeth in pain as the after-shave is put on - an obviously unpleasant experience that is conveyed directly to the audience. Is this an aspect of anthropological field research, part of the process of ethnographic filmmaking, or simply an effective trick to get the audience in?

[b]The cut as cultural technique[/b]

The first minutes of Arnd Schneider's film are a striking example of a type of experimental work in the field of visual anthropology where borders between an artistic and a scientific approach are crossed. This topic was given high priority at a three-day workshop of visual ethnographers that took place in Copenhagen in August 2002: the meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). These border-crossings contain elements of power politics that are made tangible in the shaving scene. The film director and researcher briefly puts himself at the centre of the film's action and storyline, thwarting any objectivising approaches and structures of external scrutiny. He leaves the distanced role of an observer and, through his physical presence, becomes a visible and audible part of the narrative, which, as such, can be read as a political text. The tension built up in the first short story falls off in the other two episodes, however.

The razor blade has already featured prominently in the history of film and video several times as an instrument that »inscribes« itself on the body. One example is the surrealist experimental film »An Andalusian Dog« (1928) by Luis Buñuel, in which the razor scratches an eye until fluid runs out. In the field of video art, Gina Pane was the main person to work demonstratively with self-mutilation. In her action »Psyché« (1974), she used a sharp razor to cut a curve running along her eyebrows. In »Voyage Argentina,« however, the factor of self-mutilation is not as important as the way the researcher makes this cutting instrument and its use as a cultural technique doubly visible: in the physically experiencable shave itself, and at the editing level. The cut as a socio-cultural technique operates directly on the body - that of the film director/researcher, who is given a clean shave by his informants - and on the (imagic) material of the film.

One main task of the ethnographer is unearthing the Other - mostly invisible in one's own society - and revealing what is unknown and alien. The borderline between the familiar and the Other is of necessity a very fine one, as the research material of anthropologists always reflects subjective and individual (internalised) points of view and narratives. Arnd Schneider chooses a self-reflective approach, and makes it visible, and tangible for the audience, right from the start of the film. While doing so, he employs mostly invisible cuts, and shows the interaction between himself and his informants.

[b]An imaginary montage[/b]

Special details clearly show the American Dream »made in Argentina« as it applies to immigrants from Sicily and Greece who now live in Argentina. In the barber shop of the Lavore brothers, which they have been running since the twenties, the furnishings (such as the chair) come from North America. When their parents came to their new homeland, the country was one of the richest nations in the world. »I could already dance at the age of four,« José says proudly, and points to one of the many old photos hanging in the shop, in which he can be seen with his family as a four-year-old.

The transitions from one short story to the next are sharp. From the photo of four-year-old José displayed in the barber's shop, the camera pans to a boy swinging in a playground. Stories of childhood and the nostalgic memories connected with them are given a logical continuation in the business belonging to Américo Copani, another descendant of Sicilian immigrants. Américo, whose shop is almost empty because he can't afford to buy any new merchandise, talks about his son, who has travelled to Sicily to find out his family's roots. Américo himself has never felt the urge to look into his family history in Italy or travel around the country. But he is very attached to old family heirlooms: a tin horse, which does not rock but can be made to walk - a toy his father bought his brother in the 1920s -, is one of his main keepsakes.

»I was the only Greek«: Angelika Maraïtis describes how she fled from Greece to Argentina after the Second World War as if it had all happened only a few days ago. She was on board a ship with forty Italian women. Now she runs a grocery store with a takeaway, together with her husband Nikos, who did not immigrate until several years after she did. Fifty years on, the dreams the couple once had have been overshadowed by the experience of political violence, social problems and economic instability. Nikos would like to return to Greece, but his wife thinks otherwise. He does not feel at home anywhere, he always feels like a foreigner wherever he is: »A person who leaves his native country is always nostalgic, a foreigner here and a foreigner there.«

In this film, as in ethnography, the equipment - the tools that allow the presentation of reality - usually remains in the realm of the invisible. Neither the camera nor the researcher's gaze form part of the resulting visible or readable setting. In »Voyage Argentina,« the instruments are symbolically shown in the shave given to the ethnographer. Montage as a production procedure rises tangibly to the surface with the symbolism of cutting, the »penetration« by the razor. Projections of the Other or the alien are thus exposed in the minds of the viewers as cinematically staged montages permeated by a directed gaze.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

---