The film is the text

Caninbal Tours was the best film I watched in my Visual Anthropology and in my Anthroplogy Through the Lens classes. The author Nancy Christine Lutkehaus in her article, "Excuse Me, Everything Is Not All Right": On Ethnography, Film, and Representation: An Interview with Filmmaker Dennis O'Rourke, touches upon its importance in the study of anthropological films by saying, that is a “visual exegesis of a topic rife with implications whose different levels of meaning touch on issues that are of central concern to anthropology” (Lutkehaus 1989:425). In Cannibal Tours, there is a give and take between O’Rourke and the subject of his film, be they the tourists or be they the locals. (Lutkehaus 1989:426). His form of reflexivity constantly makes the viewer “conscious of the constructed or "filmed" nature of the images and of the control the filmmaker has over this process” (Lutkehaus 1989:426). As we edit our film there has been much discussion on whether or not, how much and how often, should we leave our questions in so that the viewer is aware of US. I think on that I am being overruled.  

Mariagiulia Grassilli has a quote from the notes of the director of the film, she reviews in the essay, Anthropology and Cinema: Visual Representations of Human Rights, Displacement and Resistance in Come Back Africa, by Lionel Rogosin, where the actors become informants on the reality of the culture he is portraying in his film.  “[The actors] told me that my idea of it was much too mild and the police were much rougher” (Grassilli 2007:229). Like Flaherty he allowed the actors to be involved in their representation. I appreciated the distinction of staging being a place where “reality is captured through situations” (Grassilli 2007:230).

Grassilli, Mariagiulia (2007)'Anthropology and Cinema: Visual Representations of Human Rights, Displacement and Resistance in Come Back Africa, by Lionel Rogosin', Visual Anthropology, 20: 2, 221 — 232.

Nancy Christine Lutkehaus; Dennis O'Rourke (1989) "Excuse Me, Everything Is Not All Right": On Ethnography, Film, and Representation: An Interview with Filmmaker Dennis O'Rourke. Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 4, No. 4. (Nov.,1989),pp. 422-437.