Review: Cinematic Ethnography — Film as Research in ‘One Table Two Elephants’

Feature-length ethnographic film One Table Two Elephants by Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson of the Environmental Humanities Lab at KTH Stockholm. Screened here in Uppsala after touring around the world to various film festivals and universities. The directors show the threads of technology and culture that weave through Cape Town, ordering people’s lives.

[Also see my Uppsala University colleague, geographer Sachiko Ishihara’s post]

One Table.. follows four story threads through Cape Town’s South African urban landscape. In one story, a shaman-like character speaks of tradition and to gods we only hear the names of, at times dressing in animal horns and moving through the forest and city telling his world to us and showing it through ritual.

In another, two young street dancers learn to use the decayed landscape to, as they tell it, do something other than be gangsters. They write music and dance through the hot, still-segregated urban sprawl. (This thread is the films’ most affecting human story. In a stunning sequence two thirds of the way into the film, a static shot of the boys breakdancing though a series of rusted metal structures receding into the distance is set to classical music to mesmerizing effect. In another, a parent breaks down, sobbing at the miracle of them doing something beautiful in the poor conditions they were born into.)

In third thread, a group of workers under the command of European scientists and their iPad-assisted maps and spreadsheets, sweep the landscape, directing workers in cutting out an invasive, “alien species” of plant encroaching on the local native species. And in the fourth an activist and rapper wants to protect a part of Cape Town’s surrounding land and water. It’s an area with a myth wrapped around it; the water is said to be the tears of a young girl who was raped. The building of a shopping mall on the area would mean a second assault.

The film makers, who made the film as part of the Situated Ecologies project, say they interpret these different threads through Science and Technology Studies. The film wants to see the people, technologies and objects they filmed and followed as actors moving through the world producing knowledge. One of the central insights of Science and Technology Studies is that our methods of making knowledge, our knowledge traditions, are performative. That is, they contribute to enacting a certain type of reality, even as they help us study and understand it.

This means that, for example, when the young men learning to dance, creating new dance moves on the street and showing people around them what is possible, they are bringing into being a type of knowledge about the place they live in. What is it to be here? What is it to be human here? People would answer that differently having come into contact with them and their actions. The same goes for the scientists trying to remove alien species, their satellite-assisted knowing organizes people and plants into failures and threats, successes and investments.

Von Heland and Ernston credit the film’s many co-makers; the people in the film, the “urban knowers of Cape Town”. During the Q&A they were careful to remind us of this fact, trying to the avoid hierarchy of the film maker over those people and places filmed. (Cut that out, leave this in!) And presumably the hierarchy of the scholar / analyst over his or her subjects when returning from the field and making their analysis. (I decide what is true. The analyst always wins!)

A compelling film, especially if you take it as a piece of anthropology attempting to show how people know and make knowledge. Or even just as a film that throws you, like good cinema does, into the immediacy of the moment. On the ground there in Cape Town, with it’s hazy afternoon light, cracked concrete and the flat line of Table Top mountain hanging in clouds above.

The screening was hosted by our doctoral research group CEFO at the Center for Environment and Development Studies at the Earth Sciences Dept, and in collaboration with the Master Program in Environmental History at Uppsala University.