choreometrics & ethnographic film

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Alan Lomax Choreometrics and Ethnographic Filmmaking 1

Filmmakers Newsletter February 1971

CHOREOMETRICS—which means the measure of dance or dance as a measure ofman—is a part of the Cantometrics Project, a study of cross-cultural expressive styleslocated at Columbia University. Supported by grants from NIMH, Ford, Wenner-Gren,and the NEH, ALAN LOMAX, with Irmgard Bartenieff and Forrestine Paulay, danceanalysts from the Center for Movement Research and Analysis in New York, devised andtested this rating system on several hundred films from all parts of the world.

* * * * * * ,~ * *

ALAN LOMAX is best known for his work in folk music. Along with his father, John A. Lomax, he is responsible for the revival and preservation of the American folk musictradition. Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters— the list is too long toname—were “discovered” by him. His writings in this field include such definitive worksas “The Folk Songs of North America” and “Folk Song Style and Culture.” He was

Assistant Director of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress; Director-Producer for CBS radio; Director-Producer for BBC (radio) in London; andcompiler of the folk-song archives for the United States, Great Britain, and Italy. Despitehis concentration in this area, he has always had an interest in film and inanthropology. He made his first film in Haiti in 1937, and has graduate degrees inanthropology from Columbia University. The summation of these three interests is hiscurrent work as Director of the Cantometrics (the study of song as a measure of society)and Choreometrics projects for Columbia University, Department of Anthropology,

Bureau of Applied So cial Research.





* A comprehensive reading list for those interested in pursuing the subject of bodymovement as discussed in the works of the above-named authors can be found in Mr,

Lomax’ book, “Folk Song Style and Culture,” which is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington,D.C. (Publication No. 88).

Readers interested in a more thorough description of the working procedures ofChoreometrics per se—what movements are considered and measured, how the relativevalue of each movement is assessed, sample factor analysis charts, etc.— should see“Sondruck aus Research Film,” Volume 6, Number 6, 1969.

The Filmmakers Newsletter would like to thank the Ford Foundation for the photographsused in the following article. The photos were taken by James Foote.

INTRODUCTION

The exact recording and storage of sound on tape and vision on film makesavailable to the scientist, the layman, and the student a vast and, to most, a ratherbewildering storehouse of information about the varied ways of mankind. The interestedperson can hear music from every part of the world and from every level of culture onlong-playing records. He can see the dances and watch the behavior of every branch ofthe human family through the visual media. Yet because there have been no systematicways of analyzing and comparing all these experiences and then relating them to their





social and historical settings, this material has little use in either science, education, or thegrowth of international understanding.

Two reasons for this anomaly may be suggested. First of all, the usual methodsfor describing and critically evaluating music and rhythmic movement were devised for

the European arts and have, therefore, proved inadequate for the analysis of the wholerange of human expressive behavior. Second, since the nature of the relationshipsbetween patterns of expressive behavior and patterns of culture and social structure wascompletely unclear, neither the layman nor the scientist could understand, even in thecrudest way, how art and society might affect one another or vary together.

Film has thus far served the anthropologist largely as a way to supplementobservations already recorded in his notebooks. The movie reminds him and informs hisstudents about what the field looked like. But Margaret Mead, Ray Birdwhistell, A.E.Scheflen, E. Hall, W. Condon,* and others have gone much further by applying structuralanalysis to evoke the communication patterns within particular cultures and situations.

CHOREOMETRICS—or the study of dance and movement style as a measure ofsociety—goes one step further by using film as data for the comparative study ofmovement style cross-culturally.

It is a commonplace to observe that stance, gesture, fashion of moving and, aboveall, dancing vary from culture to culture and have very much to say about the nature of apeople. But only recently have new techniques been developed to enable the observer tospecify exactly what these differences are and what they signify. Dance notation systems,such as Labanotation, score dances so that they can be read and reproduced from paperlike music. The more detailed techniques of kinesics enable the observer to record bodilymovement as exactly as the linguist writes speech and then to translate the content of this“body language.” Choreometrics, which combines certain features of both the earliersystems, does not describe what movements are made, but how the members of culturesmove—that is, the notable qualitative differences between the movement styles ofcultures.

PROCEDURE

Choreometrics arose out of the Cantometrics Project—or the study of song styleas a measure of society—which began in the summer of 1961. Then, in 1968, twoseminar courses with Ray Birdwhistell of the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute(now at the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania)exposed me to the dynamics of body communication. Inspired by his work, and seeingthe study of body rhythms as a logical extension of, and necessary ingredient in, mywork with song-style structure as an index of human communication, I asked IrmgardBartenieff, the leading dance analyst in the United States, and her assistant, ForrestinePaulay, to work with me. Up until then, these two had been analyzing dance movementin terms of a background in primarily Western European and American dancetraditions. When they suddenly confronted the whole panorama of human dance fromevery continent and felt for the first time how many patterns of beautiful andappropriate movement had been created, their vision of the dance was sharply altered.





In their enthusiasm, they then began to teach me, a non-dancer, their new-foundperceptions of the dance. I in turn was able to interest them in the system of structuralanalysis that I had worked out for the study of song, a system based in the theories ofConrad Arensberg and Ray Birdwhistell .

In planning this first cross-cultural study of movement, I decided on two things:First, to produce a rating system for looking at human behavior which would one day beunderstandable to anyone who wanted to use it—whether sociologist, filmmaker, orschoolboy; whether American, African, or Polynesian. The system was to rest upon themain qualitative differences in aspects of behavior which every human being has to learnfrom his parents in order to exhibit his cultural affiliation. Second, the system had to beflexible enough so that the tremendous wealth of documentary film which the greatcameramen of the past had piled up in the archives could be useful to science. In practice





we found that films were hard to use unless they contained a number of uninterruptedlong- and medium-long shots of at least 30 seconds’ duration. Swift, fancy editing toooften substituted the editor’s excitement for the continuity of human movement. We weremost comfortable, of course, when the camera simply played the part of an observer’seye, looking steadily at a scene for long periods, so that the repeated patterns of actions

and interactions shared or created by the whole group could be spotted and then checked.Footage that might bore an audience because nothing is happening is fraught withexcitement for the film analyst, for it gives him the chance to find and check patternswhich are repeated and which therefore probably represent typical behavior.We found the measures we used in the films, in the data itself, in noting how peoples ofthe varied cultures of the world employ qualities such as speed, size, and dimension. Therating scales of Choreometrics were defined by extremes we actually found in thesebehaviors in the films. Once these scales were fixed in definition, we then applied themsystematically to a sample of films from all the continents, so that all their dances cameto be rated on the same set of qualitative, world-embracing scales. Each dance profilecould then be compared with all the others in terms of qualities which all branches of the

human family share in some degree. Only those scales were kept which we found to bethe most efficient in sorting human behavior into culturally significant classes.

The first part of the rating system has been applied to a sizable sample of cultures.It deals with the way the actors in a scene handle their bodies in terms of the followingcriteria: a) body parts most frequently articulated, b) body attitude or active stance, c)shape of the movement path and of the transitions, d) patterns that link body and limb, d)dynamic qualities. The relative prominence of each characterizer is rated on a seven-pointscale. For example, a parameter concerned with forcefulness contrasts the most laxmovements we have found to the most vigorous we have seen in film and includes aswell the degrees that lie between these two extremes. The position that a particular danceoccupies on a number of such scales forms a unique profile which can be logicallycompared to any other such profile.

In every culture we found some one document of movement style. This modelseems to serve two main functions for all individuals: (1) Identification: It identifies theindividual as a member of his culture who understands and is in tune with itscommunication systems. (2) Synchrony: It forms and molds together the dynamicqualities which make it possible for the members of a culture to act together in dance,work, movement, love-making, speech—in fact, in all their interactions.

For example, the Iroquois Indian uses his body as one simultaneously organizedunit: he cuts and slogs his way straight ahead into space and employs linear back-and-forth trajectories—straightforward power coming out of a blocklike body foundation.Polynesians, on the other hand, do not so much punctuate their activity with suddenbursts of strength or speed, but rather achieve variety by gradually introducing a series ofdifferent effort qualities into the undulating and flowing line of their movement. A slowlydeveloping lightness is delicately and quickly interrupted and then blends into strengthtempered by indirectness. Such combinations of efforts lend the movement of Polynesia acomplex and fluid quality without sharp-edged focus.





Such models are relatively easy to see in the dances of a culture, for, in dance,movement pattern becomes most formalized and repetitious. Once identified, though,they may generally find within any one culture area one or two distinctive movementprofiles. And when we move across these big cultural borderlines, we find another suchset which typifies the dances of the new territories.

In a sense, we are in the first stages of the creation of an ethology of humanbehavior as we look at the different patterns of behavior which occur in the varied culturetypes of the same species. The child-rearing films we have indicate that these differencesare learned and culturally transmitted rather than biologically or genetically engendered.The contrastive patterns we are finding seem to be traces of the varying ways in whichhuman beings have organized productive and communication behavior in the world’sculture regions and transmitted them generationally. This is part of what can now bedemonstrated by ethnographic film.

Our findings do not, however, rest upon a step-by-step, phrase-by-phrase analysis sothat the dance recorded can be reproduced in its entirety from a written score. It reachesout to another level, to the level of identification, where the signals which constantly flowin the kinesic stream characterize all present in terms of age, sex, occupation, and mostespecially cultural affiliation. Birdwhistell (1957) calls this “cross-referencingidentification behavior,” showing that such behavior provides the supportive baseline for





all interaction. Choreometrics, however, does not seek to describe the particulars or thecontent of these identifying sets but to evaluate a sufficient number of their salientqualitative aspects so that the movement and interactional style of a culture may bedelineated. In simple cultures, one such description distinctively characterizes mostactivity, whether male or female, dance or everyday. Naturally there are differences

between individuals, between behaviors, between persons of different ages and sex, butthese differences are likely to grade away from a baseline movement signature whoseimprint may be recognized throughout an area. This movement style model, notable inthe stance adopted by the people of a culture and in the tempo of their activity, must belearned early in life, and is shared by everyone in simpler cultures. Any human event—scenes of work, ritual, everyday life—can be analyzed in Choreometric terms. As wescore scenes from daily life as well as dance we find that many features of song anddance vary in tight correlation with the kinds of work which are most important in aculture. In fact, dance seems to be a heightened form of the everyday movement style ofeach culture. The people of a given cultural territory carry out all their activities within asingle stylistic framework which identifies them as members of the same human

community. Thus the intentionally coarse, highly consensable descriptive methods ofChoreometrics have registered that level of the human communications system where themain communication seems to symbolize the adaptive pattern. The message here is, “Thisis who we are. This is how we do things. I belong here!”

For instance, frequency of hand and finger articulation in the filmed dances is avery accurate index of the complexity of a culture’s main productive operations. Thedegree and kind of synchrony found in a culture’s dancing mirrors the level and kind ofsynchrony necessary to complete its community subsistence tasks. As a culture works, soit sings and dances. The dance, then, seen in this light, is a reinforcement of humanadaptive patterns and can thus be used as an index of social evolution.

We are finding that a remarkably good geography of man can be produced bycareful observation of which body ~<arts are characteristically articulated, how the trunkis treated, and the effect of both in tracing a bodily geometry in space. Table 1 showshow the dimensions of this human spatial geometry are distributed globally.In broad terms, Choremoetrics affirms the existence of very few large and very old styletraditions: 1) the primitive Pacific, 2) black Africa with Melanesia and Polynesia, 3) highculture Eurasia, and 4) Europe. There also seems to be an Arctic style tradition that linksnorthern Europe across Siberia to aboriginal North America. These big style territoriesseem to shadow forth four of the stages of human economic development—man thehunter in the Pacific, man the gardner in the tropical zone, man the irrigator and empirebuilder in Eurasia, and man the agriculturist and industrialist in Europe.





These continental distributions of movement styles point to the existence ofcommunications styles which are extremely stable across time and whose life spansextend for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. Apparently every human group hasfound a pattern of rhythmic art to match its life style, carrying it everywhere andemploying it in all fresh creations. Thus, when the blacks of West Africa came to theNew World they composed their new dances of the same elements of movement that theirancestors carried to the Cape of Good Hope and Madagascar during a thousand years ofsoutheastward migration. Choreometrics discovers and illustrates such historicalcontinua—pointing, in filmed examples, to the viable similarities between the dances of,say, Harlem and Western Sudan, or to the common inheritance of style shared by theIndians of North America with the Ainu of East Asia. The extraordinary staying power of

these aesthetic systems is to be explained, as Margaret Mead, among others, has shown,by the fact that standards of spatial relations, timing, stance, and so on are learned earlyin life from parents and playmates. Looked at in this way, the vast sea of extantdocumentary films becomes the richest data for the human sciences—an unequivocalmeans for man to know himself.

So, to all people who lack written history and the sense of assurance it brings, thecontinuity of expressive style, once firmly established, might bring a sense of history,accomplishment, and self-pride. The stability and mental balance of both societies andindividuals depend in part upon such feelings, and formal education is largely concernedwith engendering them. One might assert, in fact, that a principal business of education isto reinforce culture patterns. And one would think that in a democracy, the culturalhistories of all groups must be considered. In their enthusiasm for Shakespeare,Beethoven, Michelangelo, and the so-called great tradition, American educators tended toforget this. The blacks, the Indians, the Latins, even the Scots Irish might learn toappreciate, but they could seldom identify wholeheartedly with the urban white Europeancultural tradition that educators were educated to teach. One of the great tasks of our timeis to redress this balance, to put into our information-conveying systems the patterns andcontinuities of all our citizens—black, red, brown, and even hillbilly. If they often feel

Culture Region Body Attitude1-Unit 2-Units

Part8 of the BodyMost Frequently

and Notably Articulated

Dimensionality of Movement Path

1 -Dimensional 2-Dimen8ional 3-DimensionalLinear Curved Looped

Primitive Pacific One Whole leg, whole arm Much

Polynesia Some Much Upper body, arm, legdifferentiated Much Some

Africa Some Much Head, chest-shoulders, arm,leg, differentiated

Some Much Much

Asia Some Some Head.face, chest, pelvis, leg,arm, hand-fingers,

differentiated

Some Moderate Much

Europe One Whole leg, whole arm;Moderate hand-finger,

trunk, differentiated

Much Moderate Some

Ainerindia One Whole 1eg, whole arm Much Some

Table 1: Summary of movement style factors -





lost, demoralized, and angry, this is partly because they get so little time on the air and soobscure a place in the textbooks.

What I am trying to say is that every documentary filmmaker has several potentialaudiences that he may not be aware of. I believe, myself, that all his films can be fitted

into a scheme which describes the human race and human history in terms that everyonecan understand. We have not yet seen the whole pattern, although we have studied thingsfrom most of the major areas. But when we do have a good sample, it looks as if we aregoing to be able to trace, through movement patterns, the main historical distributions ofthe human race in its wanderings around the earth and say many things that will interestarchaeologists about the meeting of cultural traditions in various parts of the world andabout the mixing of cultures. We are some way down the road from that sort of work, butwe seem to be headed there. Thus every time a documentary filmmaker opens his camerahe is, for us, adding a genuinely real increment.

Human beings are basically pattern-makers and pattern-deliverers. They are

always making their particular flower and making it again, looking at it here and againover there. Everybody in a culture speaks the basic language of the culture with his bodyand his interaction. He cannot lie about it, he cannot phony it. Which means that it ispossible for a couple of tourists who casually point their cameras as they walk past someSamoans to bring us some usable material on the Samoans.

FIELD FILMING

All filmed behavior has special value for the scientist because film splits actioninto a series of equal, small segments which can be inspected one by one and studied atleisure. Moreover, the filmed incident can be something which would be impossible inreal life. Since the invention of the camera, movies have been made everywhere in theworld, recording the activities of every branch of the human species in the samestandardized fashion. Looked at in this way, the extant corpus of newsreel, documentary,travel, amateur, and ethnographic film forms the richest body of human data available tothe social scientist. Yet all of us who study film have ideas which would make filmdocumentaries more useful to science, albeit these requirements vary somewhat with thestudy. In addition, the subject is so new that whatever one says about it is bound to bepretty naive—and I feel especially diffident because I have had so little practicalexperience in filming. Moreover, my work depends on the skill, courage, and generosityof the cameramen who shoot the footage we have to study. I hope the professionals in thefield will not then take offence as I respond to the request from the Filmmakersnewsletter for suggestions about how field filming might be improved.

The most important point concerns the value of the footage itself. The fartheraway the cameraman gets from urban centers and the mainstream, the more valuable hisfilm becomes. Non-Western cultures are being destroyed so rapidly that this film mayone day be the only witness to a way of life which has vanished; his pictures may be theonly view that future generations will have of their ancestors and how they lived. Notonly, then, should his shooting be accurate and well-conceived, but it should not degradeits subjects with poor exposures or “shooting down.” Moreover, there is always the





temptation to sensationalize, to tell the traveler’s tall tale. This can be at least temperedby taking care to show the everyday hand-skills, hard work, and constant care for otherson which all human societies depend. Margaret Mead has changed our whole system ofchild care with her films that showed Stone-Age mothers taking care of their babies.

I argue that, in a very real sense, the field trip belongs more to the people studiedor filmed than to the anthropologist or filmmaker. It is their life, their culture he isdocumenting. Without their cooperation, his efforts would come to nothing. Thus nodocumentary film expedition can be just a personal adventure—a big ego trip—because itmay also be the first and only chance for some group of human beings to be put on recordand to have their say on the big media. A window now opens on scenes which are beingbrought harshly and thoughtlessly to an end—and with no one to protest. Our aggressive,expanding, industrial culture treats less technically advanced societies as things to bechanged or gotten rid of. Little groups of people, who do not share our ambitions, occupyareas where there are stands of timber or minerals which are valuable to us. There is noone but the filmmaker who can defend these age-old rights of occupancy and the

languages, skills, and ideas of the occupants against us. The filmmaker can take anotherview; he can at least make a testament to the value of the lives of those who have helpedhim; and he can preserve all the footage which they have given him and in which theymay be remembered. Finally, as a skilled craftsman, he will strive to capture theiressential style on celluloid. Here Choreometrics has suggestions which may be of somehelp.

Although we still have much to do to confirm our findings, we know that everycultural region, every culture area, has developed a style of movement and of interactingthat shapes all its behaviors. In a very real sense this is the very base of their aesthetic. Itnot only forms their dance, it can be perceived in their speech and in their song and intheir art. These “movement styles” vary in basic ways from each other and, if they aretaken into account, will certainly result in more beautiful footage. Of course, everysensitive cameraman is, to one degree or another, aware of these differences of pattern ofposture and dynamics. What he may not realize is that he is, in a very real sense, theprisoner of his own culture’s standards and that he will, all things being equal, imposethese standards on the things he sees and the behavior that he films unless he consciouslystrives the other way.

One of our most common experiences in screening filmed footage is to seemovements cut off in mid-phrase or interactions sliced in two as they are unfolding. Thelength and, as we have noted, the spatial dimensions of movement phrases and segmentsof interaction vary profoundly among cultures. West Europeans, for example, use linear,punchy, abrupt, moderately long phrases. These factors strongly shape the way they shootand cut films of the behavior of other cultures, which often results in a series ofunresolved tag-ends of activity that produce a sort of haystack effect, visually speaking.This effect is increased when the editing process joins sequences together which have nogenuine dynamic or behavioral relationship. It is like having perceptual dust continuallythrown into one’s eyes. I believe this is the principal source of the unfortunate sleep-producing, fatiguing effect which a great deal of documentary footage produces on the





ordinary viewer. The perceptual apparatus simply cannot deal with so much broken,incomplete pattern. Fatigue sets in and the eyes droop shut. Western filmmakers can takegreat liberties with their material because, as culture members, they know the fit ofeverything in the behavior of their fellows and can work with a sure touch through achain of similar, genuinely contrastive, supplemental or dramatically connected cuts. But

lacking that intimate acquaintance when they deal with unfamiliar kinesic and socialsystems, they are likely to miscut and double the haystacking effect.

The filmmaker working in his own culture falls into its rhythms naturally. If, likeFlaherty, he can afford the time to soak himself in a foreign culture before he begins toshoot, its patterns will insensibly affect all his work. But most of us are short of time. Inthat case, preparation work may be of help. For one thing, the length of the movementphrases can be observed and timed. The spatial geometry of the subjects canThe placement of accents, whether they come at the beginning or the end of actions,whether they produce an effect of follow-through or sustained energy, gives humanbehaviors all sorts of different rhythms, and these can profitably affect the pulse of the

shooting. The most profound determinant of movement pattern is, of course, the parts ofthe body that are most actively articulated or posed in action. This body set variesprofoundly among cultures. Taking these differences into account and observing whereaction is initiated and how it moves from one part of the body to another — especiallywhich body parts will normally come into play in various kinds of actions andinteractions —will keep the cameraman in touch with the very well springs of the behaviorhe is filming. I have space to mention only one of the many films by such men asMarshall, Gardner, Asch, Bateson, Rouche, Young; Flaherty, and others where thesethings can be observed.

A film that achieved much of this was Balicki’s excellent “Fishing on the StoneWeir,” one of the great documentary series on the Netsilik Eskimo, part of which made anational hit on CBS-TV last season. The camera watched a group of Eskimos building afish dam across a swift northern river in the polar summer, then spearing and smoking awinter’s store of salmon. There are no sounds except those of nature and of the Eskimostalking. No commentary was needed because the shots were so loose and so long and thecutting rhythm was at first so slow that one had time to learn and fall into the rhythm ofthe Eskimos as they trudged across the immense tundra plain, found their camping placeby the river, and lifted boulders to make their dam. Eskimo movement is composed of astring of power-filled phrases tied together in long strings of effort. Unhurried pacing letsyou feel all that and be drawn insensibly into the action. By the time the swift fish-spearing sequences begin, one is vicariously participating in the adventure. We canenvisage films that are planned to conform to the whole envelope of carefully observedmovement style. Meanwhile, if we can find the finance, we plan to produce a set ofillustrative films which will orient filmmakers and their audiences to these things andwhich will train cameramen to grasp at once the size and shape of movement forms, themain postural habits of people, and the general shape of the dynamic pattern which runsthrough all their activities, whether dancing or talking. And once the cameraman has aconscious grasp of such elements, it will save him culture shock as well as time, energy,





and footage, since his shooting can be planned partly in terms of these factors. The designof his films may then reflect more clearly the aesthetic of the cultures he photographs.There are many other reasons why films tend to be culture-bound, and though this isappropriate for dramatic filming, it is inappropriate for documentaries of other cultures.In the first place, great emphasis has been placed upon the purely visual, as if films were

animated paintings. The rectangular framing, a main convention of Western art, brings inits train other design ideas out of the European tradition which can distort the visualpatterns of other cultures. Westerners have, moreover, ingrained preferences for swiftlypaced narratives and plots concerned with the fate of individuals, particularly youngpeople struggling to find love and marriage. These are not the central concerns of manyother cultures — indeed, the theme of romantic love seems to be a peculiarly Westernhang-up.

This romantic bent has often caused filmmakers to focus their films around thelives of some handsome young couple who are the culture’s closest equivalent to aHollywood hero-ingenue pair. While the film unwinds a remake of the familiar American

fairy tale, one sees the people who should have been stage center sitting off to the sideand regarding the proceedings with a sardonic look. Casting is a central problem andshould, if possible, focus on the people the culture seems to find important and amusingrather than those who fit Western fantasies.

Often the footage we see displays terribly low-level happenings and very littleanimation. It is clear that the filmmaker is regarded as a stranger and that he doesn’tknow where the action is. One way to overcome this difficulty is to be well-briefed, well-read, and warmly introduced by someone who knows the culture and is liked and trustedby them. There are two reasons why Mead’s and Bateson’s early films of child-rearingare still so convincing. First, they knew a great deal about the people they were filming.Second, they waited and observed what went on in the behavior that interested them, sothat when they turned their camera on the action was peaking in interest and content.Filmmakers who lack training in anthropology can make up for this by boning up on theliterature about their area or, better still, by inviting the collaboration of an ethnologist orfolklorist who knows the culture they are about to film. A week on the site with such aperson will save lots of time and endless mistakes. Anthropologists and linguists areworking in the field all over the world and would often like to join forces withcameramen interested in serious filming and willing to take suggestions.

Perhaps the main thing to think about is the number of audiences that your filmfootage can serve. First of all, we here at Choreometrics would like to look at films ofdance and accompanying kinds of highly patterned movement (such as work) from everypart of the world. We seldom get to see a complete dance filmed in all its stages ofdevelopment from the beginning to the end. Here it is not necessary to take long stretchesof repeated steps, but (1) to try to film the onset of the dance, (2) to film a minute or so ofeach section, and (3) to shoot the close of the dance. Full records of choreographies are asrare as hen’s teeth in our experience. Many cameramen when confronted with a dancewill rush toward the dancers and film bouncing heads or disembodied feet in tight andoften bewildering close-up so that one is never permitted to see: (a) the spectators and





how they are reacting; (b) the orchestra and how it relates to the dance; (c) the over-allformation and its progress; (d) a number of full-body shots of groups of dancersinteracting. Feet and head movement may be understood from medium-long shots, butthe over-all cast of the action can never be reconstructed from close-ups. This fascinationwith head-foot close-ups is typical of Europe where dances are largely made up of foot

and leg movement and the largest visible expressive surface is the face.

As the size of the Choreometric sample grows, we will be able to learn muchabout the relations of movement style and survival, choreography and socialorganization. Ours is only one of a number of new scientific methods that can turnthoughtfully and carefully shot field footage into knowledge helpful to medicine,psychology, and the history of culture.

Every documentary cameraman in the field can produce film of great use to our new

science and of incalculable value to the future by heeding some of the followingsuggestions:

1. Film one or more of the most important and representative human assemblies(meals, dances, religious rites, work, trials, quarrels, play, child care, etc.

2. Start with an overview of the whole context of the event.3. Continue medium-long shots which loosely frame the whole event and do not

change focus or angle.4. Persist in a mode of shooting which keeps the main actors in the frame throughout

long and significant stretches of action.5. Avoid close-ups of one person or of one person’s face or of isolated body parts.

These are of little use since viewers cannot judge them in isolation from theircontext. In practice we have found that when a cameraman zooms in or turns hislens away it is because the action contains behavior too painful for him tocontinue watching.

6. Notes on the what, when, and where of every scene should be made at the time. InChoreometrics we need to know, minimally, the cultural, tribal and localaffiliation of the people in the scene. Students interested in a more detailedanalysis would like to know the status and relationships of those present.

7. Sync sound is terribly important, but if not sync,8. even wild-track of the ordinary everyday sounds of conversa tion, weeping,

laughter, music, etc., can make a documentary come alive.9. Make or revise your budget so as to pay for the preservation of one complete

negative or good positive print of all your screenable footage! One of the greatestcrimes of our age is the wanton destruction of documentary footage. Millions offeet of human history are destroyed every year by the big companies who “own”it in order to save a few dollars of storage. Thousands of feet of priceless sceneshit the cutting room floor in the editing process. Here the filmmaker often kills hismost valuable sequences and sacrifices the permanent value of his priceless datain order to achieve an effect for a single theatrical product. This may accord with





his proprietary rights, but it is, I believe, fundamentally exploitative and evenunfair. The people filmed have often given endlessly of their time and talent(learning not to look at the camera, for instance) and their effort deservesconsideration, I feel. So, in the name of conscience, preserve the data you havefilmed. At the very least, label all the out-takes and let us know about them. A big

museum of ethnographic film is being planned that will one day have a place ofhonor for your footage and will keep it as a precious historical and humandocument (and Dr. Carleton Gajdusek and Dr. Richard Sorenson now maintain alimited facility for the preservation of the most valuable footage). Meantime,storage in an ordinary warehouse is very inexpensive in most cities.

Lomax, Alan Choreometrics and Ethnographic Filmmaking Filmmakers

Newsletter vol.4 #4 February 1971.Downloaded from the World Wide Web www.cda.ucla.edu/faculty/bishop

Ala n Lomax may not have known back in the early part of thi s ce ntury, that his immersion i nto other cul tures like

Africa, the Caribbea n, and Italy wa s going to lead to an ent ire new schola rly eld: ethnomusicology. A relati vely new

academic area, ethnomusicology has been around since approximately 1950 and is basically the study of other cultures

through an in-depth analysis of the music indigenous to a certain geographic area or culture.

Lomax, armed only with his tape recorder, would travel to the corners of the earth and record the sounds of the

people. This technique, which is carried out by ethnomuscologists to this day, is called "eld work." One not only

listens to the music and records it, but observes how music is incorporated into the culture, what it says about that

particular society, and, in turn, how it compares with other musical cultures of the world.

Ala n Lomax was born in 1915, in Austin, Texas, and began is career in the 1930's a ssisting his father, John Lomax, incollecting recordings for the Library of Congress. He then began making recordings on his own, capturing the sounds of

Americ a: prison songs, African-American folk songs, blues, and cowboy songs. Lomax immortalized a time period and

went on location.

By the 1950's, Lomax began travelling to other parts of the world and recorded what he found there. In the United

Kingdom he captured the traditional music of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Next, came Spain and Columbia. In the

1960's, Lomax travelled to the West Indies and did some recording over there.

In between trips outside of the country, Lomax would continue to capture American folk music, sometimes in

collaboration with the l ikes of Pete Seeger.

choreometrics & ethnographic film

Documents