American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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Rivers of Sand culminates with a major celebration among the Hamar, when young men and young women are initiated into adulthood, and when many of the elements we’ve grown familiar with during the film come together.
Jay Ruby has reviewed the controversy over Rivers of Sand within anthropological literature, reporting that the Streckers were upset with that “the artistic vision of Gardner as auteur dominated the project with little competent ethnographic assistance.”24 The assumption of the film’s critics, however, is that Rivers was meant to be a film primarily in service to the field of anthropology. While it is true that all of Gardner’s early features were originally understood under this rubric, and while Gardner often represented himself as an ethnographic filmmaker, the elements that seem to define Rivers of Sand this way—its look at the cultural practices of a group unfamiliar to most in the industrialized world, Gardner’s narrative commentary about particular elements of the culture—are simply major elements in a film that is quite different in tone and purpose, even from The Hunters or Dead Birds.
I see Rivers as an amalgam of feminism and surrealism. Gardner is less interested in providing an ethnographic analysis of Hamar culture (though it would be foolish to pretend that we don’t learn anything about the Hamar from the way they look and move, from their living spaces, and from the evidence of the cultural practices we do see) than in using what he believed he had seen in two visits to the Hamar as a way of considering, on the one hand, the nature of gender relations between men and women in most of the world, and on the other, the surreality of “normal” life, regardless of where it is lived.
The Hamar women, as portrayed in Rivers of Sand, are second-class citizens: they seem to do a majority of the work (though Gardner does seem to undervalue the labor of men, who tend the herds; we see the men at work from time to time, but there is little emphasis on whatever challenges they must face); they own nothing; they do not choose their marital partners; and they are married for life, even if their husbands die. Most obviously, the women must put up with a variety of forms of physical abuse, some of them ritualized. Gardner focuses in particular on the women’s job of grinding grain, which is both a part of everyday life and symbolic of gender relations: at the very beginning of Rivers of Sand Omali says, “A time comes when a Hamar woman leaves her father’s house to live with her husband. It’s like smoothing the grindstone with a piece of quartz. The quartz is his hand, his whip, and you are beaten and beaten.” We see and hear women at work grinding millet as a motif throughout the film, and in each instance, we are reminded of what Gardner sees as its larger implications. A second, related motif is the ritual whipping of women, which we get hints of early in Rivers and then see in some detail during the ceremonies that conclude the film. From what Gardner shows us, a woman ritually requests a man to whip her, and when she is struck, she is expected to act as if the whipping, which is powerful enough to create open wounds, has not fazed her.25 A third, related motif is the decoration of women with ankle and wrist bracelets: seen as status symbols of beauty by the Hamar, they evoke the shackles of slaves.
In many ways, the gender relations Omali describes echo those Gardner would have been familiar with from his own society, and from his own life. As he told Ilisa Barbash:
Indeed, Rivers of Sand does owe something to the climate of thought about the situation of women in the late 60s, but it also owes something to what was happening in my own life as a father and husband. Here I would like to say I think this film is not just about how women feel or behave but also about what happens to men as they make their lives with women. I made the film at a time when my own long-standing marriage was coming to an end and when there were accusations, if not good evidence, of certain kinds of abuses—I don’t mean physical abuses—I mean troubling circumstances which were distorting our life together. I would go off for a long time to make a film. For example, I left everyone at home for six or seven months when I went to do the shooting for Dead Birds. And that’s not fair. It caught up with me and it seemed quite natural and helpful to be going about the making of Rivers of Sand at that particular time.26
It seems clear that for Gardner, shooting and editing Rivers was both an experience in itself and a way of using the film production process as a way of coming to terms with the transformations occurring within his personal life. As an audience, our experience of Rivers occurs on both levels: we explore Omali’s version of her own experiences as a Hamar woman, as contextualized by Gardner; and we experience Gardner’s wrestle with the question of how fully what seem to be the gender experiences of Hamar women and men match the experiences of American women and men, including his own.
For much of Rivers of Sand Omali seems to echo the American feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s—indeed, her testimony evokes the many feminist films of the 1970s and 1980s in which women testified about their cultural oppression—but near the conclusion of the film, her narration takes what feels like a surprising turn. Omali describes to us, and speaks to Hamar girls about, the ritual of removing the two central incisors from the lower jaws of girls—theoretically to demonstrate Hamar girls’ courage and provide what the Hamar consider a beautiful look. Omali indicates that removal of the teeth is not required, but it is clearly preferred, and her comments are supportive of the ritual. Omali’s apparent approval of what seems to us still another form of oppression is confirmed at the conclusion of Rivers of Sand when she says, “Beating is our custom; we were born with it. . . . So how can it be bad?” Although on one level, this seeming acceptance of oppression as normal—something to be complained about, perhaps, but not eliminated—is reminiscent of a similar pattern of self-abnegation and acceptance of lower status that feminists have challenged in many Western countries in recent decades, it is also an instance of what Gardner sees as a larger reality, and not just for the Hamar.
All organized social life seems to involve strange combinations of logic and absurdity. This is clear in Dead Birds, where ritual war seems to have no particular function other than to provide an organizational framework for two Dani groups; it is clear in Rivers of Sand, where women seem to accept forms of oppression that seem to do little but provide a form of social continuity; and it is clear in American society, where we build ever-more-expensive new forms of weaponry to maintain peace and where each generation seems to find new ways of colonizing the body in order to create societal standards of “beauty.” In Rivers Gardner frequently shows several male elders spraying coffee with their lips, seemingly in order to maintain the spiritual health of their community. As presented in Rivers, this ritual is rather comic, though when it is juxtaposed with the continual labor of women, which it always is in the film, this all-male “spiritual” activity seems a further confirmation of the gender inequity of Hamar society. The coffee ritual is also representative of religious rituals around the world that depend on what seem (at least to nonbelievers, and perhaps even to some of those who profess their faith in these religions) to be utterly absurd activities—eating a wafer and drinking a bit of grape juice and “believing” it’s the body and blood of Jesus Christ; wearing a beard and a particular form of payot (sidelock) in order to conform to a book of the Old Testament; refusing to use electricity or automobile transportation in a culture where they are ubiquitous—as a means of maintaining a sense of community and continuity. Indeed, the more obvious the apparent absurdity of these activities, the more commitment they require, the more faith they seem to demonstrate, and the more respect they demand, both from believers and nonbelievers. This strange surreality of social life has been explored by a number of filmmakers over the decades: Buñuel, most obviously of course, but Gardner too, especially in Dead Birds, Rivers of Sand, and Deep Hearts (1981).
Like Rivers of Sand, Deep Hearts seems, at least to current audiences, focused on the issue of gender—though in a different sense. During the 1970s the feminist project of rethinking gender relations between men and women was increasingly interwoven with what we have come to understand as “Queer,” and particularly the Queer understanding of gender as a form of performance, a set of distinctions and practices not determined by sex (or not entirely by sex), but largely by cultural assumptions and societal expectations, and reflective of the complexity and contradictions of personal identity. Few scenes in any motion picture demonstrate this idea more effectively than the opening moments of Deep Hearts, when a large group of men is seen in a long line, moving sensuously in unison and chanting a dirge, outfitted in facial makeup and