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ON THE MAKING OF “Cannibal Tours”

by Dennis O'Rourke

To explain my film making process is a bit likea cat chasing its tail; in any case, I confess thathow I actually make my films is a completemystery to me. I can sit with you, looking at afilm which has my name on it and gaze inwonderment at what is transpiring on the screen;but I certainly will not think the author isexactly the same person who is me, watchingthat film.

The act of creating a documentary film is one ofsynthesis upon synthesis. Every stage of the filmmaking process – from imagining throughfilming through all the stages of editing –becomes the modifier of previous stages, in bothdirect and subtle ways. Also, for it to work, thefilming process must be ‘an ordeal of contactwith reality.’ I must place myself within theperceived reality of what I am attempting tofilm in order to discover the authenticity ofpeople and places, and to fix my emotionalperspective within a social and political process,

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which is not academic.

I believe that documentary films should notexist outside of the reality they attempt todepict. The magic of the documentary film isthat one can start to create with no idea of thedirection of the narrative and concentrate allthinking on the present moment and thing. It isimportant, when you make a film, not to berational but instead to trust your emotions andintuition. In fact, you have to be irrational,because when you try to be rational the truemeaning and the beauty of any idea will escapeyou.

I think the story is much less important than theideas and the emotions that surround it. I try togive you my idea of a palpable 'truth', but whichis presented comfortably, imperceptibly, as anillusion. I try to concentrate on the small,intimate details; using reduction andunderstatement. I like to think that, in my films(as in Waiting for Godot), nothing reallyhappens but it happens very quickly.

All this is made possible by those beautifulrecording angels - cameras and tape recorders –who watch and listen for me while I stumble,trance-like, through the field of ideas. Like theideal tourist, I travel on a journey of discovery –on an unmarked road, to see where it leads. And

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I travel not in order to return; I cannot return tothe point-of-departure because, in the meantime,I have been changed. This is why I say: “I don'tmake the film, the film makes me.”

I find that most documentary films are painfulto watch, because their makers are so certain ofthe factual truth of their productions, andseemingly so unaware of the time bomb whichthe notion of truth contains. As well, they areoften so ignorant of their real place in theprocess of audiences’ readings of their work. Inmy film work of recent years I have alwayssought to resist and repudiate the lure of thatself-gratification which comes from making thestatements-to-the-converted, which mostdocumentaries tend to be.

So many documentary films, despite otherpolitical and cultural pretensions, primarilyserve to make the audience feel good - feel partof an enlightened elite - as though they haveachieved some cachet or absolution forthemselves by the simple act of watching a film.And it follows that the audience identifies withtheir omniscient hero, the filmmaker. (I knowabout this phenomenon, because I have noticedit in the reactions to some of my films.)

The public role of the committed documentaryfilmmakers thus becomes, essentially, one

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where they become the heroic protagonist oftheir own films, even though these filmmakersare not necessarily seen or heard. But, of course,they are the real heroic protagonists in theirfilms. They are alluded to by the sense of theirown cleverness and goodness and worth –alluded to by their theological position as thedeliverers of the important and politicallycorrect message – the ‘good news’ (or, morelikely, the sanctioned version of the bad news).

The corollary is that, if a filmmaker deliberatelysets out to collapse this comfortable and secretcontract between the audience and himself (suchas I did in my film The Good Woman ofBangkok, which takes the rhetorical-but-sincereposition that the filmmaker is, in his own way,as culpable and as implicated as the sex-touristsdepicted in the film), then, his formerly adoringaudience, when forced to confront this dilemmaof identification which implicates them, willchose the easy way out, and kill the messenger.

I am convinced that humans are not interested inreality or truth, in themselves. What we seek istruth, which is our fantasy of it (just listen to thediscourses in “Cannibal Tours”). And yet, if wereally want to understand the world in which welive, we must oppose simplicity and slogans andseek meaning in chaos and complexity.

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Unfortunately, the level of critical debate is sobasic that most filmmakers seem not to beconscious of what they're doing: that they areperforming the role of secular gurus to theirconstituencies who do not, or cannot,differentiate between slogans and ideals. I detestthe theological pretensions of those filmmakers,who seem to me like Don Quixote tilting atwindmills; and I reject the whole notion of thedocumentary filmmaker as a culture-hero. Thisrole is ably filled by the reporters from thecurrent affairs shows – those men-and-women-in-suits, with their arrogant notions of authorityand their Boy Scout code of ethics – those whogive us “official storytelling.”

Jean Baudrillard has made the point that it isprecisely when they seem the most faithful, trueand accurate that images are the most diabolical.It is when images start to contaminate reality –when they conform to reality only to distort it,when they telescope reality, when they short-circuit reality – that they can transmit trueknowledge. But it seems to me that the facileimages and stories that now proliferate in ourcinemas and on our television screens aredriving the more powerful, true and complexones out of circulation.

This problem of representation – how toarticulate the relationship of the author to the

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subject to the audience – is the fundamentalchallenge which faces every storyteller. It iscritical that filmmakers and film viewers be ridof the fantasy that the documentary film is apure and non-problematic representation ofreality, and that its 'truth' can be convenientlydispensed and received – like a pill to cure aheadache.

I make documentary films (as opposed to fictionfilms) not because I think they are closer to thetruth, but because I am convinced that, within areinvented form of the non-fiction film, there isa possibility of creating something of very greatvalue – a kind of cinema-of-ideas, which canaffect the audience in a way that no Hollywood-style theatrical entertainment films can. I makedocumentary films because I believe in acinema, which serves to reveal, celebrate andenlighten the condition of the human spirit andnot to trivialise or abase it. I don't do it toprovide information to people; I do it to touchpeople and to provoke and astound them, and tomake the truth that we already know more realto us.

“Cannibal Tours” is certainly a documentaryfilm but it is also a fiction because it is anartefact, that is: someone made it. The makingof art is, after all, only artifice – playing withthe undifferentiated mess of life to get a little

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product. But this can be both the meaning andthe subject matter. In a profound sense theviewer and the subject can be one-and-the-same.We can be embarrassed to be inside and outsidethe frame (and the process of film making),simultaneously. This experience of self-recognition and embarrassment is the subjectmatter.

In “Cannibal Tours” we can recognise in theseWestern tourists both the hopelessness of theirexperience and we can recognise ourselves. Wecan also recognise (at least sub-consciously) thetourists’ implicit understanding that anyone whowill see them in the film shares their sense ofhopelessness, in the face of such a futile searchfor utopian meaning, which is their touristicexperience.

I can only touch on some of the ideas thatinfluenced me during the making of the film andI will confine my remarks to tourism intraditional societies, because this is where Ihave some experience. However, I can imaginethat what applies in Papua New Guinea doesalso apply in many other places in the Pacificand around the world, including even, somewhich are in the developed world.

It must be stated that most of the theoreticalideas only registered with me when interested

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people brought them to my attention, long afterthe film was completed. Firstly, I would like toquote from a review of my film by ProfessorDean MacCannel. Professor MacCannell wrotethe seminal book The Tourist, which was firstpublished in 1976, I read it only in 1989, whenhe sent me a copy after he had seen my film. Ihave often speculated, “What if I had read thiswonderful book before I made “CannibalTours” ? Would the film be better or worse? Inkeeping with my philosophy of filmmaking I amsure – perversely sure – that it was better to readthe book after the film was made.

This is part of what Professor MacCannellwrote:

“It is disheartening that any group of humanbeings, simply caught in the eye of the camera,could appear to be so awkward and in such badfaith. It is to O’Rourke’s great credit that hedoes not simply leave us with these disturbingimages. The film quietly provides answers tothe questions it raises, and to do this O’Rourkegoes to a psychoanalytical level. Freud does notspeak here directly, except perhaps in the finalscene where the Bette Midler-type Americanwoman climbs in the plane brandishing her fiverealistically carved dildos (“I get to ride backwith these in my lap!”). It is the camera, whichthroughout assumes the role of the old paternal

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analyst, steady, listening, silent, pretending tobe non-judgemental...

“A lesson of the film is that the NewGuineanans experience their myths as myths,while the tourists experience their myths assymptoms and hysteria. An old man tells thestory of the New Guinean reactions to the firstships carrying German colonialists: “Our deadancestors have arrived! Our dead have comeback.” and he continued with a smile, “Nowwhen we see tourists, we say the dead havereturned. That’s what we say. We don’tseriously believe they are our dead ancestors -but we say it!” One does not find among thetourists any similar lightness of sensibility...

“This is what frightened me most about the film.The tourists, throughout, seemed incapable of aconscious detachment from their values, whichwas so evident a feature of the New Guineanimages and discourse. The tourists’ detachmenttakes the form of repression and denial of themyth of modernity so it necessarily expressesitself always as an out-of-control force leadingto non-ritual violence. The New Guineanans donot see this difference between themselves andthe Europeans. They rigorously maintain there isno difference with the single exception that theEuropeans have the money and they don’t. Thisfilm is a reminder that the task of anthropology

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is far from done - we have yet to explainourselves.

There are certain statements about tourism,which I find interesting in the context of thefilm. Claude Lévi-Strauss said "It is thedifferences between cultures that makes theirmeetings fruitful. But this exchange leads toprogressive uniformity.” The second part isclear, but what does he mean by ‘fruitful’? If hemeans commercially fruitful, I might agree. Asthe village leader says, “They want thephotographs, so they pay” (even if what they payis a small fraction of what they pay for one Gin-and-Tonic on board the ship). If he meanssexually, even romantically, fruitful, then I sawsome evidence of that between the Papua NewGuinean ship’s crew and some of the moreadventurous female passengers.

But I saw little fruitful interchange of any otherkind, such as cultural, educational or spiritual.As the old villager, Camillus, states in the film:“Now we live between two worlds... All weknow is that they are from another country. Wesit here confused while they take pictures ofeverything.”

I suppose it’s an improvement on one hundredyears ago, when the villagers thought theEuropeans were from another planet, and I can

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see that the voyeuristic experience in tourismworks both ways. On the Sepik River, wheretourism is a relatively new phenomenon, thenatives still do experience the thrill of lookingat the tourists. It is for this that the film beginswith a self-composed epigram: "There isnothing so strange in a strange land as thestranger who comes to visit it."

Since ours is a society – now a global society –which strains to reach certain objectives, ofwhich profit towers above all the others, it isobvious that tourism as a Twentieth Centuryphenomenon and ‘leisure activity’ is strongly,intensely, utilised to this end: profit. Followingthe laws of capitalism, in order to satisfy andcapitalise on the demand for leisure, thisdemand is itself stimulated, promoted and, attimes, totally created so that the tourist businesscan continue to exist. This leads to the situationdepicted in “Cannibal Tours” - thecommodification of the actual act of living of agroup of people. This, to my way of thinking,has to be less than ‘fruitful’.

But this quest for profit is not only economicprofit; it often is an ideological profit. I meanthe achievement of influence by one culture (theculture of the West and all post-industrialnations) over the people of the underdevelopedcountries who are visited. As my film suggests,

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modern-day tourism is, in a sense, the successorto the colonial expeditions. It is interesting tonote how tourists from countries, which hadcolonies, tend to favour their former colonies asholiday destinations.

This could be due to the fact of a sharedlanguage and some inherited practices (thebaking of baguettes), but I feel it is more due tonostalgia for that ‘romantic’ colonial era. Thereis a nostalgic wish to revisit ‘the scene of thecrime’. As the German tourist says in the film,“I met a native man who was something like amayor, he explained how his village had beenunder the control of the Germans, and what agood time it was!”

The raw display of economic and technologicalpower, in the form of television Americantelevision, (see my film Yap...How Did YouKnow We’d Like TV?), which is transmitted bysatellite to the remotest villages of the ThirdWorld, is given flesh and concreteness when thetourists – the living examples from theHollywood sitcoms – step ashore. One hundredyears ago they may have been perceived as deadancestors but now the natives believe they arethe relatives of Arnold Schwartznegger andSharon Stone.

The villagers know that when it comes to

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appreciating their culture the average touristcannot go much closer towards understanding itthan a certain condescending curiosity. Theyrealise that, at best, to the Western tourists theyare merely picturesque (“... they take pictures ofeverything”). Therefore, it is reasoned, to betaken seriously and on equal terms they mustcease being picturesque and replace traditionalcustoms, behaviour and clothing by thingsWestern. It is a new form of colonialism.

How can young men and women from the SepikRiver villages fully believe that their culturalway of life is satisfactory in the face of thisjuggernaut? Europeans, t he Japanese,Australians, Brazilians, the Chinese – the rest ofthe world – cannot resist it – they watchAmerican TV, eat American food, playAmerican sports, wear American clothes; andthey have allowed their antiquities and greatpublic places and rituals to become touristtheme parks. An American woman whileclimbing Greek ruins said: “You’d think, withall these tourists around, that they would put inan elevator here.”

The promoted idea of tourism as ‘a dialoguebetween cultures’ is, I believe, a myth; becausethere exists such an economic and culturaldisparity between the protagonists and allhuman encounter is inevitably distorted.

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Another obvious reason is that the actual touristencounters with the people who are the cultureare too short - squeezed into the three-weekannual holiday and the ‘free days for shopping’before going home.

The occasional word is exchanged – someonegives directions, a tip is paid – and people stareat each other, but what else? The tourists whowish to engage naturally find themselves in thecompany of the local people who are the mostconfidently acculturated – hotel staff, tourguides, trinket sellers, prostitutes – those whoare relatively well-off and who profit throughthe cultural naivety and confusion of thetourists. Meanwhile, the truly poor get verylittle. Some would claim this as ‘progress’, inthe sense of modernisation and development.However rapid social change and culturaltransformation is traumatic and it causes morehavoc and damage to the society than can beoffset by any improvement in the balance-of-trade statistics.

Mr Claude Lévi-Strauss also claimed that inorder for the Western world to continue tofunction properly it must constantly get rid ofvast quantities of waste matter, which it dumpson less fortunate peoples. He went on to say:“What travel discloses to us first of all is ourown garbage, flung in the face of humanity.”

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The following anecdote will (only obliquely, Ihope) illuminate some of what I have beensaying. When I was filming “Cannibal Tours”, Ihad to negotiate with the leaders of the variousvillages along the river and explain my film tothem at a series of community meetings. Thiswas made a little easier for me because I speakMelanesian Pidgin, and because I had a historyof involvement with the Sepik Province goingback to before Papua New Guinea achieved itsindependence. I had visited some of thevillagers with Mr Michael Somare who was thefirst and long time Prime Minister of thecountry, and who is a Sepik chief.

Agreement to film was achieved easily andamicably at all places except for one village,Tambunam. This was the place where theredoubtable American anthropologist, MargaretMead, had done a lot of her famous work. Thevillagers were angry, they told me that theyresented how she had profited from them andthat, despite promises, she had not even returnedcopies of her books. I promised, as I always do,to supply the village with copies of the finishedfilm. Some of the younger men were distrustfuland so, as a gesture of sincerity, I offered toprovide them with several copies my other filmsabout Papua New Guinea. The offer wasaccepted and I was told how useful the

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videocassettes would be for showing in thecommunity (the tourists also saw my other films– the tour operator had them on the ship andthey were watched in the evenings as part oftheir itinerary).

A few weeks later, when I returned to the villageof Tambunam with a different group of tourists,I was astounded when, as we were leaving thevillage, one of the tourists came up to me on theship, proudly holding one of thosevideocassettes, saying: “Guess what! A youngman was selling your films and I bargained himdown from fifty to twenty Kina!”

Semiotics takes as a basic premise that meaningis determined by what something is not. It isestablished differentially. Tourism is aboutactively seeking out difference. Tourismtherefore throws semiotic exchanges into sharprelief. The subjects as tourists, findingthemselves in a location where symbolic codesare not necessarily shared, are more anxious tointerpret signs and locate meaning than thesubject in their own homes. If meaning is onlypossible within shared codes, then the touristsare challenged by incomprehension. A lack ofunderstanding threatens the established unequalpower relations which characterise tourism:between the observer and the observed, thepenetrator and penetrated.

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The tourists, seeking a 'natural' and unmediatedexperience of ‘the other’, and of general orexotic difference, paradoxically also demandsomething easily readable and wellprovenanced. In these circumstances, guidancein the form of clear 'markers', or a simulatedexperience – rich in signifiers and easilyconsumable – is often preferred to the morecomplex and problematic everyday ‘real’. Thetour guide leads the hapless American matronthrough the process of bargaining, she ispropagandised to think that this is the correctway to relate, the cultural norm: “Then what doI say… ‘half price?’” The villagers wearingly gothrough this theatre-of-the-absurd, playing therole which the tour operator requests, because he(the tour operator) thinks the tourists requiretheir trip to be like something from a 1940’sHollywood jungle movie.

It is a doomed search for meaning.

In fact, our semiotic abilities as tourists areunlikely to be any greater than our semioticabilities in any other situation. Semiotic play is,however, the stuff of the tourist industry, whichcarefully nurtures and directs our conscioussemiotic inclinations, exploiting the anxietygenerated by immersion in an unfamiliar code.A key manifestation of that anxiety is this futile

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quest for 'authenticity. There is no place to go,and so we travel, you and I; and what for? Justto imagine we could go somewhere else

One condition of modernity is that nobodyknows who they are any more. “CannibalTours”, like most of my work, is situated out onwhat I call the shifting terminus of civilisation;where modern mass-culture grates and pushesagainst the original, essential aspects ofhumanity and where much of what passes for'values' and ‘good taste’ in Western culture isexposed, in stark relief, as banal and fake. Someof the actions and throwaway lines of thetourists, which seem so ridiculous in the contextof the film, would pass unnoticed if uttered athome.

People have asked about the film, "Where didyou get those amazing characters?” Theythought that they were actors. The reality seemstoo fantastic. But they weren't characters in thatsense; they were actual Western tourists - theywere, in the jargon term, ‘the real thing’. Icertainly didn't find them at the Central CastingAgency and they certainly never saw themselvesas amazing characters. Yet they reveal theignorance and insensitivity that lies under thesurface in all of us when we are tourists. Butthese are not bad people, no worse than you orme, and I am sympathetic to them all.

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I've had the opportunity to show the film tomany of those people in it and, with one or twoexceptions, they loved the film and enjoyedrecognising their own personalities. However,instructively, their reactions changed afterreading newspaper commentaries or reviews,which described them as "ugly tourists". I amsure that the journalists who wrote these articleswere wallowing in a state of cognitivedissonance (thinking to themselves: “I couldn’tpossibly behave like that!”) as they identifiedthe “ugly tourists”. To be a tourist is in part todislike tourists. Tourists can always findsomeone more ‘touristy’ than themselves tosneer at.

However, in the context of my film, all of thesereal tourists are, in part, invented characters andthey should not vilified because of what theyreveal about us. This can be understood byaccepting that all my films are not so much'documentary' but 'fiction', because they don'tpurport to be the objective truth.

In the act of first imagining a film and thenphotographing and editing it, all my subjectslose their authenticity as individuals andbecome manipulated characters in the dramathat is created. The authenticity of the film – its'truth' – is entirely subjective. There is this

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amazing and simplistic notion, almostuniversally believed, that documentary films arefound objects – a box, neatly wrapped and tiedwith a ribbon, with the ‘truth’ inside. I think itstems from the same idea I talked about earlier– that people really want their truths asfantasies.

I like to think of “Cannibal Tours” not so muchas a film about the negative effect of masstourism on fragile cultures, which should beobvious to everybody; but more as aphilosophical meditation set in the milieu of thiskind of tourism. The film is much more aboutthe whole notion of 'the primitive' and 'theother', the fascination with primitivism inWestern culture and the wrong-headed nostalgiafor the innocence of Eden.

It is this nostalgia which fuels the Noble Savagemyth. I think it stems from our quest toconceive and define that pristine state ofexistence we intuitively feel that we onceenjoyed and have now lost. I believe that thisnostalgia is inseparable from our pessimism,religious, sexual and otherwise. I believe that weall have a particular longing to be elsewhere, tobe alive in a timeless past.

And the film is about voyeurism and the act ofphotography itself. This is described in both the

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acts of the tourists a n d in my acts ofphotographing. You must see that I incorporateall kinds of self-reflexive moments, whichcreate the embarrassment of complicity which Italked about before.

My camera will shift from a point whereits/my/your gaze is privileged, ‘correct’, andsafe – where it looks at the natives beyond thetourists who are photographing them – to a newframe, where no tourist appears, and where mycamera and my act of photography replicates thetourists’ framing. Then its/my/your gaze isreciprocated by the one who is preyed upon;then we feel uncomfortable, and no longer soprivileged and correct.

For the tourists the camera is simply amediating device, carving out distance betweentourist and attraction, capturing experience to bere-lived in the safety of one's own living room.The artefacts, which are haggled for would notbe so valued on that living room wall withoutthe story of the so called ‘authentic’ transactionit took to acquire them. The only points ofintersection between tourists and villagers aretwo: the act of photography and the act ofbargaining. Is this a process, which can lead togreater understanding between cultures? Theremust be a better way.

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It could be said that I am painting a very bleakpicture of tourism as it affects traditionalsocieties. It could be said that I haveconcentrated on the negative aspects of tourism;and that I have failed to consider what positiveaspects there are, especially as they might beperceived by the host countries. However, thehistory of encounters between the West andthese societies, from colonialism to tourism, hasnot been a happy one and I strongly believe thatwe must confront this reality beforecontemplating a progressive future for tourism.It is not a solution to leave things as they standand hope that by incanting the mantra of“Economic Development” all these essentialproblems of unequal relations will evaporate.

It might be considered that this is a problemwithout solution – a problem as profound asoriginal sin. Tourism forms part of a generalframework of unequal North-South relations justas it is a manifestation of the impoverishment ofhuman relations in the post-modern, post-cultural, consumerist world. In order to changethis one element of the system one has to first,and the same time, change the whole.

To modify the relationships of tourism alsomeans to modify all attitudes towards modernlife – ours and theirs. For surely, if the touristsin my film had known what was in the minds of

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the natives before they visited them, theexperience for all parties would have been as MrClaude Lévi-Strauss suggested ‘fruitful’.

If what I have written seems to you to be toopersonal, even solipsistic, I am sorry. As Iexplained at the beginning, I can only speakabout things, which are within my own orbits ofexperience and imagination. Certainly, I do notfeel that I am insulated from the problematiccondition that I have described. Under the thrallof our separate agendas and desires, we are allimplicated in some way.

© Dennis O’Rourke 1999