Você está na página 1de 26

Navajo Filmmakers

SOL WORTH
Annenberg School of Communications University of Pennsylvania

JOHN ADAIR
San Francisco State College
s a report of research in visual (fiim) communication investigating quesThis paper i tions in anthropology and communication. Six Navajos, aged 17-25, and one monolingual, aged 55, living on the reservation were taught only the technology of a 16mm movie camera and splicer and were asked to make films about anything you want to. We review the theoretical questions underlying the research, describe our method of teaching, and analyze the films they made and their verbalizations about them, relating their cultural, verbal grammar, and narrative style to their methods and social organization of learning filmmaking, choice of subjects and actors for their films, and their methods, both syntactic and semantic, of structuring the image events they photographed. [Navajo, Communicaiion, Language, Cognition, Visual Arts]

N THE SUMMER of 1966 we began briefly, to grasp the natives point of view, a study to determine whether it is pos- his relation to life, to realize his vision of his sible to teach people with a technically sim- world. This clearly formulated objective ple culture to make motion pictures depict- has created a methodological problem that ing their culture and themselves as they see has been partially solved by collecting life fit. We assumed that if we could teach such histories with nondirective techniques. These people to use motion pictures they would materials not only reveal things about the use it in a patterned, rather than a random dynamics of personality but also help us unfashion, and that the particular patterns derstand how the individual relates himself used would reflect their culture and their to the outer world in terms provided for by his particular language. Myths and linguistic cognition. We wish now to report on three areas of texts have likewise given us extensive verbal this research: first, to describe some of the records for analysis. Collier ( 1967), Goldschmidt and Edgerproblems underlying our work; second, to describe briefly some of the methods we ton (1961), and others (see Bouman 1954) used, both to teach the Navajo to make have done some significant work, taking films and to collect our data on the filmmak- photographs of their informants environing process; and third, to describe briefly ment and using them to elicit responses that some of the films that were made and some have produced data often missed by other of our early observations and analyses of methods. Still others have used drawings of the environment made by native artists to them. stimulate a verbal flow from informants about their environment, values, etc. But to PROBLEMS IN ANTHROPOLOGY our knowledge no one to date has overcome AND COMMUNICATION the difficulties inherent in eliciting a visual Malinowski (1922:25) wrote many years flow that can be analyzed in terms of the ago that: the final goal, of which an Eth- structure of images and the principles used nographer should never lose sight . is, in making those images. Anthropologists have, of course, used viAccepted for publication 20 May 1969. sual means of communication, but they have

. .

10

American Anthropologist

[72, 1970

not used them to determine cognitive usage in the societies under study. They have used them for illustration and visual recordkeeping in order to help their own analyses and in order to communicate things about the society. Birdwhistell ( 1952), Ekman ( 1965), Osgood ( 1966), Harrison ( 1964), Sorenson (1966), and other psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and communications researchers have also used film to study gestures, facial expressions, and the coding systems of visual modes of communication. Making such films required the cooperation of the subjects being photographed. But the subjects eye was not at the eye piece, his hand was not manipulating the lens, nor was his mind doing the editing, and seldom did he see the finished product. Anthropologists have recently considered inviting their informants to view finished films or selected film sequences made by the researcher, asking them to comment upon the rightness of the presentation or to make suggestions for the sound track. No one, so far as we know, has taught the native to use the camera and to do his own editing of the material he gathered. We reasoned that if a person who was previously the subject of such films could be trained to use the medium so that, with his hand at the lens and his eye at the camera, he chose what was of interest to him and subsequently edited the film, then we would be able to come closer to capturing his vision of his world. With this in mind, we formulated some research questions. They were global questions, but they still served to circumscribe the general area of interest that led to the work we are reporting. How do the things one makes-the paintings, the photographs, the films-work? What processes occur in human beings that allow them to communicate visually? How is it that one can look at a film and know what the maker meant? What happens to the strip of film itself? Are the structures of pictures, such as paintings or photographs, comparable to the structures of verbal events, such as words, sen-

tences, or stories? Can we learn something about how we know the world we live in by studying how we know things that others communicate to us in the visual mode? We are referring to two things. One is the way the human mind deals with images. The other is the images themselves, whose study under a variety of conditions and manipulations might help us to know how we deal with them. We are not so much concerned at this point with exploring the aesthetic or normative question of how good a film is, but, rather, with the substantive one of what does it mean and how do we know it. To find out how the process worked, Worth started teaching young people to communicate through film. He reasoned by analogy with speech that if he could observe the process of learning to use a film language--of becoming, as it were, a speaker-he might learn something about what takes place when one is being a speaker. It might be reasonable to assume for film what some researchers have assumed for verbal language: that there is for each language a specific theory, such as is represented by the rules for the use of English, and that there is also a general theory representing the rules that are basic to all verbal language. Further, Chomsky (1965: 16) and the researchers who follow his lead hypothesize that the learner of a language doesnt learn the general theory of language (deep structure) when he learns to speak English (surface structure), but that he learns to make transformations between the deep structure, which is innate, and the surface structure, which is learned. In a similar fashion, we are exploring the possibility that there is a pattern for organizing visual events and that filmmakers in different cultures learn to make transformations between these common perceptual and cognitive patterns or rules and a conventionalized set of regularities, patterns, or rules detemined by their specific cultural, social, and linguistic milieu. We saw that we had a three-part process to study (Worth 1966:327-330), covering

WORTH & ADAIR]

Navajo Filmmakers

11

first, the filmmaker; second, the film itself; and third, the viewer. Depending on the model and the discipline one prefers, these three parts can be called sender, message, and receiver; or speaker, utterance, and listener; or creator, work of art, and recreator. Research, we saw, had to be concerned with all parts of the process, and with the social, cultural, and institutional contexts surrounding them. Some parts of the process have of course been considered in the past (Worth 1968: 127-132). There is a fairly extensive literature on film and film analysis, and there has been a fairly large body of research on the effects of specific films on audiences. But there has been very little attention paid to the process of constructing (organizing, patterning, coding) visual communications. Contrary to his expectations, Worth found that all his students could make movies, that this mode of communication seemed to bypass the need for the hand-eye coordinating skills of the graphic artist and to allow ordinary people to express their feelings in visual forms. If, then, people can communicate through film-if people with varying cultures can use it widely as both makers and viewers-it becomes necessary to find, or formulate, the patterns, codes, rules, conventions, or even laws that make such communication possible. Through most of the literature on the visual arts, and particularly in film, we find one notion repeating itself in different guises. Film language . is commonly associated with my works . . . montage is a syntax for the correct construction of each particle of a film fragment said Eisenstein (1949: 108-1 11). Among other film theorists there is frequent mention of the syntax of film, the grammar of film, the structure of pictures, and the language of art. We became intrigued by the sheer multitude of allusion to language, all unsupported by reference to notions or theories of language. Although pictures and film as language had not been studied extensively or productively, verbal language and the visual arts as aspects o f culture had been. These

..

studies seemed to offer a fruitful paradigm for examining an alien culture through the films people with that culture themselves produced. Once one begins to look at a film as if it were a linguistic communication-and here we would like to emphasize the as if and not prejudge whether film is or is not really a form of language-a host of intriguing questions arise. If film is a language, are there different languages of film? Are there native speakers of film? And if so, do they correspond to those who speak the different languages of film? If languages have lexicons that order words as synonyms and order utterances as paraphrases, can w e find evidence of such units in film communication? Answers clearly depend upon research done with native speakers of different cultures. We would first need to know who spoke film, or who could speak film. It would be only after we learned who could produce film utterances that we could begin to compare them. It would be only after we had (in a film can) a variety of utterances produced under known circumstances that we could begin to deal with some of these questions. We could then analyze the corpus of utterances as a patterned output so as to abstract from it an input of rules or principles governing communicative acts within the communicative mode. These rules or principles accounting for the observed pattern would represent a part of the cognitive order within the culture under study. Such, then, were the considerations that led us to the specific research we shall now discuss. First, we proposed to determine the feasibility of teaching the use of film to people with another culture. Worth had already shown that this could be done with elevento fourteen-year-old Negro dropouts in Philadelphia and with college students in a school of communications. Since then many others have worked with a variety of cultural groups, such as Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Negroes, ranging in age down to 8

12

American Anthropologist

[72, 1970

years. Although methods and aims varied, almost everyone could be taught to use motion picture cameras, We have found that with limited instruction Navajos can be taught to conceive, photograph, and edit 16 mm silent films. Secondly, we proposed to find out if it was possible to systematize the process of teaching; to observe it with reference to the maker, the film itself, and the viewer; and to collect data about it so as to assist other ongoing research exploring the inference of meaning from film as a communicative language. Recent years have produced a small but significant body of researchers who are exploring what Sebeok has called the semiotics of film, what Worth has called Vidistics (1968:132), and who are interested in developing the rules, codes, and patterns of film communication. We wish to emphasize, then, that the purpose of our work was not only to find out about Navajos. We chose Navajos precisely because much is known about them, and we could check our inferences from their visual mode of communication with other data. A working hypothesis was that motion picture film, conceived, photographed, and sequentially arranged by a people such as the Navajo, would reveal something of their cognition and values that may be inhibited, not observable, or not analyzable when investigation is totally dependent on verbal exchange-especially when it must be donc in the language of the investigator. We were searching for pattern, code, or even rules for visual communication within a cultural CODtext. Further, we felt that our research might create new perspectives on the Whorfian hypothesis. Through cross-cultural comparative studies using film as a mode of visual communication, relationships between linguistic, cognitive, cultural, and visual phenomena might be clarified. We also reasoned that the selection of subjects, themes, and organizing methods used by the Navajo filmmakers would reveal aspects of their value orientation. O f additional interest was the innovation

process, or what happens when that process is guided by the investigators themselves. While researchers had observed and analyzed the process of technologic innovation, little was known about how a new mode of communication would be patterned by the culture to which it was introduced. We considered observation of this process to be an important aspect of the feasibility study (Adair and Worth 1967). We would also like to emphasize that one of our cardinal interests was to see what other peoples had to say about themselves through film. Our theoretical speculations may or may not be verified by further analysis, but we now have shown that this new form of expression produced by people in other cultures is possible. These films, and a description of the methods by which they were achieved, are now available for study and replication.
METHOD

In analyzing the Navajo films it would be impossible to determine what came from us, and what came from the Navajo, without knowing what we included in our instruction. There are several important methodological issues involved in the study of a corpus of expression derived from actual users. Several of our colleagues have pointed out the difficulty of deriving a unique pattern from what is essentially a learning or possibly an imitation phenomenon. In many ways this is similar to the criticisms directed at the work of the developmental linguists (Brown and Bellugi 1964; McNeill 1966) when they first began studying the development of speech in infants and children. It had been supposed that infants learned their language essentially through imitation of adult speech in a complex, operant conditioning situation, and that patterns of speech in infants, much less protogrammatical o r grammatical rules, could not be found. Such patterns as were noticed in early studies were dismissed as bad imitations or mistakes learned from

WORTH & ADAIR]

Navajo Filmmakers

13

adults. It now seems clear that when chil- community structure and organization, and dren learn a new language they follow a pat- had the added advantage of being only an tern based on some set of rules, which ac- hour by car from the Gallup airport. Aside from these factors, the matter of cording to McNeill and others seems to be an innate neurological process. rapport had to be carefully considered. We Although we are not sure that anything had only two months at our disposal. An like linguistic rules influence the production important factor in our choice of Pine of film utterances, it seems reasonable to Springs was that Adair had worked in that assume that the manipulation of image community twenty-eight years before and events necessary to the construction of a had remained in contact with his old film utterance, whether one second long or friends. Adair had also made a film there twenty minutes long, is not random. We as- previously, and we felt it might be possible sumed that something already known by the to compare his film to the films the Navajos Navajo would influence not only their se- might make. mantic and thematic choices but also the During a preliminary trip to Pine Springs way in which they structured their films. We started at an early stage in the genesis Adair introduced Worth to Sam Yazzie, of communication. Our observations and who was the oldest medicine man in the analysis were akin to studying both the pro- community and an old friend of Adair. cess of development and the structure by After Adair and Sam had caught up on which a learner goes about organizing a events that had occurred in the community since they had last seen each other, Adair communication. introduced the subject of teaching young In selecting a fieldwork area, we wanted a Navajos to make movies. Sam was very inplace that had a sense of community, that is, terested and Adair explained exactly what a set of boundaries, so that we could see if we intended to do. After some thought, Sam filmmakers would go outside their commu- turned to Worth and through the interpreter nity to make films. For example, we found asked, Will making movies do the sheep that black slum children did not like making any harm? Worth was happy to explain that as far as films on their own block. Would Navajos he knew no harm would befall the sheep if want to film in their own community? We made a brief survey of the reserva- movies were made in the community. Sam tion in March 1966 preliminary to the selec- thought for a few seconds, and looking tion of the community where we would straight at Worth asked, Will it do them work. We visited several highly acculturated any good? Worth was forced to reply that areas (Window Rock and Chinle, both ten- as far as he knew it wouldnt do the sheep ters of federal and tribal government) and any good. Sam looked at us both and said, several more traditional communities (Many Then why make movies? We realized then that in our optimism we Farms, Pinon, and Pine Springs). It was our feeling that work in the former would be had no idea whether Navajos would or difficult, because they were large and amor- could make movies. As a hedge against total phous. Although Many Farms and Pinon failure, and also because we wanted to comwere much more traditional, they presented pare how an outsider made films, we delogistic problems in transporting film in and cided to include A1 Clah, a young Navajo out of the community. It was important to artist who lived in a community about fifty hold the delay in feedback to a minimum. miles away from Pine Springs and who had Pine Springs, Arizona, was chosen.2 It attended the Institute of American Indian was much less acculturated than either Win- Art at Santa Fe, New Mexico. We felt that dow Rock or Chinle, was sufficiently small as a painter and sculptor he would be accus(around six hundred) to give us a feel for tomed to manipulating visual forms, and we

14

American Anthropologist

[72, 1970

also reasoned that there would be close rapport between him and Worth, who had himself been trained as an artist and who felt confident he could teach A1 Clah the technology of filmmaking. In the analysis section of this report we will compare the choice of subject matter, style of working, and structure of A1 Clahs film with that of the other Navajo films. A1 was both artist and outsider, and although his film is Navajo in several important respects, it is quite different from those of the others. It was decided that it would be best for the subjects to be selected by the community itself, or at least by someone within the community who was well placed in the power structure. Adair consulted an old acquaintance, Johnny Nelson, who, although under thirty and without elected position in the community, had achieved a large measure of political stature. We wanted to have at least one girl; one craftsman who would be, as it were, a step down in the artistic (in the western cultural sense) hierarchy; one person with political ambitions who might see this new way of communicating as a means to enhance his power over the community; and one who had no craft, artistic, political, or personal interest or aptitude in filmmaking. We had planned on enough cameras, editing equipment, and film for only four students. One reason for the limitation on the number of students was that we had no idea how far away from the community they would want to go for their filming, and since we wanted to observe them while filming, we were constrained by the number of observers we could use. There were only three of us. Fortunately, Johnny Nelson, whom Adair asked for help in finding students, decided that he himself would quit his job at the trading post and become a student. We now had our politician and our artist. In consultation with us Nelson then chose a young woman, Susie Bennally. She was an expert weaver and a neighbor of his, and her husband was away from the reservation in military service. He also chose a younger

man, Mike Anderson, who was home for the summer (he had worked in a potato chip factory in San Francisco) and was a member of Johnnys fathers clan. Although Worth thought the selection process was finished, he was unaware of one of the principles basic to the Navajo value system, that o f balance or equality, and it came to light when Johnny pointed out to us the advantage of having an equal number of men and women in the classroom: If I was the only man in the class, I wouldnt ever feel like speaking out. The same goes for the woman who is the only one. Thats the way it is for us Navajos. Johnny then introduced us to Mary Jane and Maxine, sisters, about 17 and 19, and daughters of the political leader of the community. This was self-selection with a vengeance: Johnny had covered himself by including the daughters of the one man with more political power than he. We then ended up with 3 men and 3 women. All spoke Navajo and English with varying degrees of fluency in both. All had seen some films before-A1 about one hundred (by his estimate), some of them documentaries, and Susie about ten (by her estimate), none of them documentaries. In the initial planning we were not certain that our subjects would have the motivation essential to learning enough about the camera and editing to give us significant results, even though we planned to pay them a modest wage. Unlike being a subject in the Rorschach, Thematic Apperception, or Draw-a-Man tests, participation in this would necessitate sustaining motivation over several months. It had been noted that polaroid photography had become attractive to the Navajo, and this suggested to us that their motivation would be strengthened by quick feedback of the footage they would shoot. We therefore arranged to have the film exposed on one day, developed, printed, and returned within the following two days. We had originally explained that Worth was a teacher of film in an Eastern university and that he wanted to teach some Navajo people to make movies. For the first

WORTH & ADAIR]

Navajo Filmmakers

15

week the students had us repeat this explanation quite often, and also asked why we wanted to do this. Worth explained that he only taught college students and wanted to learn more about how to teach all kinds of students. He said that he would teach them and ask them questions, emphasizing each time that they could make a film about anything they liked, in any way they wanted. We had previously made arrangements with the teacher in the Bureau of Indian Affairs school at Pine Springs (a boarding school for grades 1 and 2) for us to use the boys dormitory wing as classroom, editing room, and living space for our research team and for A1 Clah. This wing was roughly fifty feet long and twenty feet wide, having a four-foot aisle down the center, with four compartments on each side housing two double bunk beds in each compartment. There were eight cubbies in all. We used four compartments for sleeping, two compartments for editing, one as a classroom, one for storing equipment, and the aisle for projection. We did most of our teaching either in the dormitory or sitting just outside it under the piiion trees. We brought with us, in four portable cases easily carried by two people, all the equipment we needed: four Bell and Howell 70 DH 3-lens turret, 16 mm cameras; four Zeiss Movieskop viewers; four sets of rewinds and related equipment; and about 10,000 feet of 16 mm negative film. We also had four exposure meters and two tripods. The first day was spent moving bunk beds and improvising editing tables, giving us all a chance to get to know one another, and giving the Navajos a chance to see and to touch everything. Worth named every piece of equipment and had the students suggest places for storage. The same day, before Worth said anything about movies, we interviewed each of the six Navajo in a small office we had set up in back of the trading post. We introduced the tape recorder to them, explaining that we would operate it to begin with, but that later we would teach them to use it and they could, if they wished, work it for our

interviews or for any purpose of their choosing. There was no objection to being interviewed, both the boys and the girls watching avidly as Worth loaded tape and tested the machine. In the initial interviews (so arranged that the students could not talk with one another before Worth spoke with them) we asked each of them individually what they expected of the summers activity. We constantly used such phrases as You can make any kind of movie you want to; You can make it about anything you want; and I wont tell you what to do. We had decided that when Worth began instruction he would stick as closely as possible to the technology, trying to avoid any conceptualizing about what a film is or how one edits. On the second day he started talking to the students about making pictures, touching on the fact that peoples across time and cultures had all made pictures, and that movies were just another kind of picture. He mentioned Greeks, Egyptians, Europeans, Americans, Indian sand painting, drawing, sculpture, and weaving, generally trying to make the point that people always had special and diflerent reasons for making pictures and that the students could decide what they wanted to show in this new way. After an hour Worth asked for questions. Mike was the only one who had a question. He wanted to know if there was any people who didnt like to have their pictures taken. Neither artist nor craftsman nor politician, Mike was worried about the sanctions that might be applied against him if he took pictures of people who didnt want you to or who might not like it afterwards. Although he made a film, he was the only one who showed discomfort about the process all the way through. He was also the only one who later questioned whether we should show the finished films to the community. When Mike asked his question about people who didnt want their picture taken, Worth replied that he knew of several such cases. He told of trying to take pictures in a synagogue and having the Rabbi ask him to stop because his religion didnt allow picture tak-

16

American Anthropologist

[72, 1970

ing. Worth explained that in that situation he immediately withdrew. Adair mentioned that when we had come to Pine Springs two months before we had been invited to a Sing, and Worth, who carried a still camera hanging from a strap around his neck, had been asked not to take pictures. Mike seemed satisfied that he would not have to take pictures when people didnt want him to. Not all our students, however, felt this way. Johnny created an incident that almost caused the community to ask us to leave, by taking movies during an Enemy Way (Squaw Dance) ceremony. The ceremony didnt go well-some of the ritual behavior was not carried out correctly (the drum stick broke)-and the ceremony had to be repeated, at great cost to the community. This was a traumatic, expensive, and unhealthy situation for the community, and Johnnys movie-making was used as an excuse for things having gone badly. Eventually, a delegation arrived at the schoolhouse and asked Johnny either to give up the film footage taken during the ceremony or pay $100 and six sheep. Johnny decided to give up the footage, but this did not make him fearful about continuing; as a matter of fact, he was so enthusiastic that he subsequently made two films. At about eleven oclock of the second day, Worth began to explain the actual workings of a movie camera. He did this in much the same way that he had taught his graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania-that is, by explaining the principles of photography, touching upon how lenses worked, how silver salts on film reacted to light in much the same way that the silver which the Navajo knew and worked with tarnished when exposed to light, and how an image was fixed by hypo salts so it wouldnt continue reacting to light. Then, by using drawings and diagrams on an improvised blackboard as much as possible, he explained how a movie camera worked. He described briefly the notion that a movie was a series of still photographs made in rapid sequence and projected back

at the same rate of speed. This led to a discussion of the mechanisms by which the film was transported from one roll to another, passing bzhind the lens, stopping for the correct exposure, and then moving on so that the next still picture could be made. He pointed out the camera gate, shutter, and claw for advancing the film, and the necessity for film loops so as to allow smooth and even passage of film across the lens. He explained briefly about the ways in which exposure was controlled (F-stop and shutter) but told the students that the exposure meter would be described the next day. This preliminary talk took about an hour. We noticed then that there seemed very little tension on the part of the Navajo in this strange learning situation. They were quite relaxed, very attentive, and seemed to be absorbing all that Worth was saying, although some of the words must have been quite strange to them. Although Worth tried not to use technical or jargon words, a check of the tapes of this session showed that a great many such words (gamma, diaphragm, variable, and so on) did creep in. It became evident in later sessions that learning the use of and acquiring the ability to manipulate the materials was not dependent on knowing the names of specific parts but rather on understanding their function. It took most of the students all summer to learn the names of the parts of the cameras, projectors, and editing equipment, but they constantly referred to them by paraphrases describing their function. The diaphragm ring on a lens, for example, which set the correct exposure, was commonly called the thing you turn for exposure or, shorter, the exposure turner, much as we frequently refer to a thing as the gizmo that. . . After lunch Worth demonstrated, rather than explained, the workings of a 16 mm Bell and Howell triple-lens turret camera, pointing out how exposure settings and focus settings were made on the lens, how the viewing system worked, and how the camera was loaded. It had been his experience with graduate students that four or five

WORTH & ADAIR]

Navajo Filmmakers

17

hours of both explanation and practice were needed before the camera could be loaded and used properly. As soon as Worth finished his first loading run-through, he passed the camera around so that each of the students could examine it. He thought they would then require individual instruction before they themselves could load and be ready to use it. To his surprise, Johnny asked if he could load the camera. Worth gave him a scrap piece of film and said Sure. Johnny showed no fear of the new experience and in two tries was able to load the camera perfectly. Within the hour all students had shown they could load the camera. This requires a fair amount of finger dexterity in order to get into tiny spaces, an ability to manipulate several parts of small size in a definite sequence, and the ability to understand the notion of film loop size, claw engagement, and accurate windup procedures. Although the Navajo are known for their willingness to participate in innovative situations, we were still somewhat surprised at the rapidity and ease with which they mastered this and most other mechanical and conceptual tasks related to filmmaking. After the students had practiced loading for about half an hour we went outside, where Worth showed them how to look through the viewfinder and hold the camera. He explained that he wanted to shoot one hundred feet of film so that the roll could be sent to the laboratory for developing that day. He took about ten shots of the students standing around. He said nothing to explain what he was doing or why he was shooting with any particular lens. What they certainly observed was taking an exposure reading, winding the camera spring, focusing, and changing lenses. He then asked each student to take some pictures of anything you want. Most spent some time exploring the different images available through the various focal length viewfinders and practiced holding the camera up to their eyes. Some made shots of children in the school playground, others of

the buildings, and some chose natural objects (rocks, trees, and so on). We finished shooting at about five oclock, and Richard Chalfen (our graduate assistant) drove o f f to Gallup to put the film on the plane to the processing lab. By this, time, the second day of the project but actually the first day of instruction, we had been able to teach our students enough to load and use a motion picture camera and actually to shoot their first footage. As a guide to how and what we would teach we had begun, among ourselves, to use a speculative analogy. Suppose we could find a group of humans who were very much like us in most ways, except that they didnt have the little machine in their throats that enabled them to make the sounds that would eventually become verbal communication in the form of language. Suppose we brought them a box that could make for them all the varieties of sound that the human voice can. Suppose further that we merely taught them how the box worked and observed (1) whether they used it, (2) whether they used all the sounds, and (3) whether they organized their selected units of sound in such a way that we could observe a pattern. Our rule of thumb was to teach our Navajo students the machine (film and camera) and its mechanical works only, and to observe what set of images they produced and what system they imposed upon them, when and if they organized the images then produced. By the end of the first week, they had been taught to use the exposure meter, the camera, the viewer, rewinds, splicer, and Bell and Howell projector. It was the introduction of editing that posed the greatest problem for us. We decided that we would introduce a splicer and show them how it worked, hoping that they would discover or develop principles of film organization by themselves. Worth explained that a splicer was a machine for pasting pieces of film together. It could be used to repair film that tore or to put together lengths of film for any other purpose. We were aware that the very notion of putting lengths of film to-

18

American Anthropologist

[72, 1970

gether was a basic step in the development 134). The cademe is the unit that results from the pushing of the start button of the of any structure. The literature in developmental linguistics camera to its release, producing one continusually refers to the break between the one- uous image event. One cademe, limited only word utterance and the childs use of a by the length of film in the camera, can be a structured utterance consisting of a modi- film. This was precisely what the first fier plus noun (McNeill 1966:20). What we movies made in 1895 were. On the other were primarily interested in were the succes- hand, a film can be composed of thousands sive steps in the differentiation of units and of edemes, cademes cut up and sequenced in the development of rules for privileges of an infinite number of ways. Edemes can be occurrence, or display rules for visual com- parts of cademes, or several edemes may be municative events. We felt that giving the made from one cademe. Historically and developmentally, the prostudents the notion that pieces of film can be put together would not hinder us in our cess might be something like this. First, the attempts to determine rules of sequence or communicator has at his command one unit just as it comes out of the camera. He conrules and patterns of use. During this first week we suggested that trols the subject matter to the extent that he each student make a movie using one roll points the camera and controls the length by (100 feet) of film. We had explained that a his decision to start or stop the camera. This movie could be of any length and of any is his film. At a later stage, he realizes that he can subject. We also explained that they didnt have to use the whole roll but that they join cademes by merely pressing the button were limited to one in this first try. Our rea- and allowing the camera to start again, putson for this limitation was that we didnt ting the next set of images on the same strip want to provide the students with an experi- of film contiguously. He does this until his ence which could, too early, become a con- film runs out. He now shows the length (as straint on the final film organization that distinguished from true sequence) of several they were planning and discussing with us in cademes as it comes out of the camera, and the taped interviews. We wanted, first, to that is his film. This stage might correspond allow at least two weeks for the formation to the invention by Porter in 1893 in of ideas about the film each of them was to which he placed three cademes together to make and, second, to provide them with a show a fire truck leaving the firehouse, folquick opportunity for exploring the medium lowed by a cademe of the truck racing along and their own intuitive ways of organizing a street, followed by a cademe of the fireman putting out a fire. A further stage it. It might be of some interest at this point comes with the realization that everything to describe what Worth has termed the de- one shoots (all cademes) are not needed in velopmental structure of film organization. a film. Some may be thrown away as being This structural heuristic will help clarify not no good or not needed. Next, one would expect that the cademe only how, but how far, each filmmaker prothe gressed in the developmental process of film itself would become divisible-and communication. It will also be used as one edeme is developed. The filmmaker realizes of the basic dimensions in our analysis of that just as every cademe is not necessary, so all of each cademe is not always necesthe films. Let us first make a distinction between sary. He now makes edemes out of cademes. the shot as it comes out of the camera, He has still not learned that the original which we will call the cademe, and the shot order in which the cademe is made can be changed. as it is actually used in the utterance-the One would expect the next step to be the editing shot, or edeme (Worth 1968:133-

WORTH & ADAIR]

Navajo Filmmakers

19

development of some primitive syntactic sense. Worth does not have any evidence to show that any of the following steps must follow one another in a specific order, but the general notion of sequence contains several distinct concepts: first, that cademes themselves can be placed in sequences other than that in which they were shot; and second, that several edemes from any single cademe may be used as modifiers for other edemes. For example, a cademe of a closeup of a man walking can be cut up and made into two or more edemes. The cut-up cademe-now two edemes-of a man walking can be inserted before and after a long shot of the same man walking. We would tend to see edemes 1 and 3 (the close-up of a man walking) and edeme 2 (the long shot) as belonging to a structure signifying object and modifier. The next steps focus on the dimensions along which cademes and edemes attain meaning-their length, their time of occurrence, their spatial dimension (long shot, close-up, etc.) and their semantic content. Here too, in terms of semantic usage, there might be a developmental sequence in which one joins cademes according to some rules of occurrence, causal or associational. Analyzing precisely what rules the Navajo followed in this scheme and how far along they would go in the developmental process was the purpose for which much of our data was gathered. That is, at what point did they break cademes into edemes? What edemes served as modifiers for other edemes? What cademes were extensively used and which were discarded? How complex a structure, and how predictable a structure, did each Navajo develop individually, and what rules did all of them seem to follow? Did they correspond to our rules, or were they different? It might be useful to describe some of the first one-minute films made by the Navajo students. Mike said he wanted to make a movie of a piiion tree. He wanted to show how it grow. He set about finding a piiion seedling and making a shot of it. Then he

photographed a little taller tree, and so on, until he had photographed a series of seven cademes ending with a full-grown tree. Worth thought he was finished, but he continued with a dead piiion tree that still had some growth on it, then a tree that had fallen to the ground, then some dead branches, then a piiion nut, ending with a shot of the same piiion bush he started with. When the film was returned from the laboratory and shown to the group, we detected some puzzled looks. The film consisted of twelve cademes, as described above. Although Mike and the others couldnt then make clear the reasons for their surprise at the result of their first shooting experience, Mike later was able to articulate his difficulty. He had photographed a sequence of trees in a particular order, a cademe sequence. Its sequence and semantic content, he felt, should imply the meaning how a piiion tree grows. Instead, all the images had the same spatial relation to the size of the screen; that is, because he shot all the trees, both small and large, as close-ups (filling the full frame), he failed to communicate the process of growth which can be shown when something little becomes big. Because all the images-those that represented in reality big things and those that represented small ones-were made to appear the same size in relation to the size of the screen, their representative or iconic qualities of bigness and littleness, which were the relevant semantic dimensions of the cademes, were lost. In another case, that of Johnny, we have evidence of the independent discovery of what might be called the modifier-object relationship. Johnny said he wanted to make a movie about a horse. After getting permission from its owner to use a horse that was tethered near the trading post, Johnny started shooting. First he proceeded to examine the horse through the various focallength viewfinders on the camera. He remained in the same spatial relation to the horse but tried seeing the horse from the different distances that various focal-

20

American Anthropologist

[72, 1970

length lenses allow. He finally told Worth film that would have lots of symbols, that that he was going to make pictures of would be about the world, and that we pieces of the horse so you (meaning would understand later. Mary Jane and Worth) would get to know a Navajo horse Maxine decided that they wanted to work when you see my film. together and that they wanted to make a He shot about ten close-ups, of the head, film about the old ways, about our grandfathe eyes, the tail, the penis, the legs, and so ther, who is a very important medicine on. He took perhaps two minutes of thought man. to determine each shot. He worked quietly, By the second week, when they started asking few questions, setting exposuure and working on their real films, we stopped distance with care. After about twenty min- any formal instruction. We would answer utes he started looking at Worth frequently, questions, and we drove them to whatever not turning his head all the way, but with sites they wanted to go to for their photothat quick sideways movement of the pupil graphing. This, of course, gave us a natural characteristic of the Navajo. Then he said, excuse to hang around as observers. Our obMr. Worth, if I show pieces of this horse, servations were quite extensive and on many and then tomorrow take a picture of a com- levels. Adair obtained life histories on each plete horse at the Squaw Dance-or lots of student and his place and position in the horses, can I paste them together and will community, and on his relations with Worth people think that Im showing pieces of all and Chalfen as teachers. He kept a running the horses? record of the communitys reactions to the Worth managed to restrain himself and filmmaking project. We all kept extensive said merely, What do you think? Johnny notes and tapes of how the students conthought a bit and said, Id have to think ceived, photographed, and edited their films. about it more but I think this is so with On their conceptualizations of their films movies. Worth asked, What is so? And in progress we obtained frequent taped interJohnny replied, That when you paste pieces views, asking such questions as What do you of a horse in between pictures of a whole want to make your film about? Why? horse people will think its part of the same Who is it for? What will happen when people see it? and so on. As work continued horse. During the rest of that week the students we asked what they wanted to shoot tomorworked on their 100-foot films, and we in- row: Where d o s it fit into the film? Why do terviewed them about the real (as they you need that? How will you do it? As called them) films that they were to start the film came back from the lab we viewed the following week. All the students now it and asked our students how they liked knew very clearly just what they wanted to what they had done. As the editing prodo. This is in contrast to Worths graduate gressed we asked Why does this shot go students, who frequently are not certain of with that one? Why did you leave that their subject matter for several months and out? Whats the purpose of that? Why often for as long as six months. Susie did you splice here instead of here? When wanted to make a film about her mother the films were finished we asked each one in weaving a rug. She wanted to show how an extended interview why he had chosen hard it is, how good my mother is, and why each shot and what it meant in the film. Navajo rugs must be so expensive. Johnny These tapes are all transcribed now and are was going to make a film about a silver- part of the material we are analyzing. Other kinds of data were provided by our smith. It also should show how good Navajos are with silver, and how hard it is to observations of how the students were phomake good jewelry. Mike wanted to make tographing and editing. Our daily field notes a film about a lake, just to show all things are full of remarks such as They are doing there are there. A1 kept talking about a it all wrong, They dont start at the begin-

WORTH & ADAIR]

Navajo Filmmakers

21

ning, They have no idea of how an event is structured, and They dont know how to spot the important things. While Susie Bennally was working on her film, we observed how smoothly the filmmaking procedure became integrated into the daily life of Susie and her mother and father. People wandering by would stop and look through the viewfinder. Susies mother, Alta Kahn, was quietly curious and asked several times if she could look through the camera, which Susie let her do. The evident satisfaction that her mother showed provided us with the opportunity to see if it would be possible to pass on to a non-English speaker the same technology we had taught the bilingual. We asked Susie if she would be willing to teach her mother to make movies. AIthough Susie was extremely shy, she responded to this in a more overtly positive way than to almost anything else we had asked her to do. In agreeing to teach her mother, however, Susie laid down the rules of the game. She must be alone with her mother at first, and then Worth might observe her and record on tape what was said. (Worth was not allowed to come between mother and daughter.) Also, the mother must be able to see the film as it was returned from the laboratory, in privacy, and no other Navajo was to be around during the editing. That the mother was readily able to learn to shoot and edit is an indication of the ability of a monolingual Navajo to learn new technology quickly, but, more importantly, it is corroboration of the method of letting the participants in the transfer of the technology structure situations that are compatible with traditional role enactment. Johnny Nelson, in an interview, brought out his feeling that Worth could teach a Navajo medicine man to make film depicting ritual performances, providing he worked with an intermediary, like himself, in the role of interpreter. He was also of the opinion that the medicine men would be interested in this means of preserving ceremonies for future generations. The fieldwork was completed in two

months, during June and July of 1966. The Navajo students made seven twenty-minute films and five smaller one- and two-minute films. By July 24 all the films were finished in rough cut except the one being made by Susies mother. On the afternoon of the 2Sth, we showed the films to the community. At the suggestion of the Tsosie sisters, notices had been placed in the trading post and elsewhere with the wording World Premiere Navajo Films. Approximately 60 Navajo showed up, including children. After the showing Adair interviewed nine of the adults, five of whom were women and four men. We were especially interested in what the films said to the interviewees and how they evaluated them. Generally speaking, the films were liked because they conveyed information. Some typical responses were: Yes, that certainly teaches a lot of good things about weaving, I think they all bring out good points as far as learning is concerned, and there is a lot of teaching behind this work. The films concerned with crafts were highly valued because they were related to the economic welfare of the community. One of the respondents said she liked the films because they taught how to do these things. I think that is what the film is intended for. The same is true of the silversmithing. This should also be taught to the children. Others responded: This is the type of work that some of the people are supporting their families . . so it is good and a good thing to know.

Perhaps the Navajo rugs would bring a little more money from now o n . . . White people never give much money for anything. Maybe this is why they want to show them and how the rugs are made, It was showing how to make silver crafts which will bring more money and will be on demand. Johnnys film showing how a shallow well is made was liked because it teaches how to f i x water so you can always have clean water to use, and the Tsosie sisters The

22

American Anthropologist

[72, 1970

Spirit of the Navajo was liked because He [the medicine man] did not make any mistake. He performed the ceremony like he should. In these nine interviews we had two instances in which the Navajos made some rather interesting remarks about their reasons for not understanding certain films (Intrepid Shadows and Shallow Well). Both these films were somewhat outside the framework of Navajo cognition: Intrepid Shadows because of its complex form, and Shallow Well because of its nontraditional subject matter. When asked, Does that film tell you anything? one respondent, a woman aged 44 with one year of schooling, who stated in the same interview I never been to a movie before, replied, I cannot understand English. It was telling all about it in English which I couldnt understand.
Another response was, That picture was also being explained in English. The reason I didnt get the meaning is because I cant understand English. None of the films, of course, had any sound at all. Since these interviews were conducted in Navajo, we didnt see the translated tapes until we left the reservation, and have not been able to question our informants further along these lines. We can only speculate that when someone in a situation such as we are describing sees a film they dont understand, it seems reasonable (not only to the subject in this case but also to the Navajo interpreter) to assume it is in a language different from theirs. In this case, since we spoke English and she didnt, and she couldnt understand the film, she assumed that the film, in effect, spoke in English even though the film was silent. While these interviews were all too brief and sampled too small a group from the community, they did tend to indicate that the camera in the hands of the Navajo would in fact serve to reveal their value system, since the values of the individual filmmakers were, with the exceptions noted,

communicated to these nine viewers. Ethel Alberts statement (1956:232) about the Navajo value system-( it is) empirically based, pragmatically phrased, and geared to consequences-characterizes the films as well as the values of the viewers who judged them. Since that time we have been engaged not only in transcribing and studying the verbal material but also in devising methods for describing and organizing what might be considered the first corpus of film utterances by another culture gathered under systematic conditions. ANALYSIS We would like now to develop some of our preliminary analyses. From this point on we are reporting work in progress rather than a finished analysis of work completed. Unfortunately, we are not ready to propose a theory of codes in context that would be integral to a complete analysis of our data. The corpus of the material we have collected is too diverse, and the possible levels of analysis too heterogeneous, to allow us at this point to attempt formal theory building. However, we have had to keep some possible theoretical structure in mind, if only as an organizing principle for this preliminary analysis. We are asking the following questions: Who, in what culture, with what instructions, can produce communications, o r discourse, by the use of movies? Second, how do those who can discourse in this movie mode organize their communication? Do they code it at all, and if so, d o they code it in a manner that enables others to understand it or to infer meaning from it? Third, if humans can use this mode, and code it so that it becomes communicative, what is the relation between the code and the culture in which it is produced and understood? Although generalizations beyond the Navajo, and beyond several groups of Negro teenagers in the Philadelphia area (with whom some of Worths students have worked in the same way), can only be pure

WORTH & ADAIR]

Navajo Filmmakers

23

speculation at present, it is now possible to see whether the coding and patterning of such films follow cultural or linguistic patterns, or both. That is, will similar cultures make films similarly, and will members of these cultures understand each others movie discourse in the same way? We can report that teaching filmmaking to the Navajo, and members of other groups in our society, was easy. The Navajo seemed to know what films were-even those who said they had never seen one-and they learned to make them quickly and easily. Why should people of a culture so different from ours learn a new and seemingly complex mode of communication so quickly? The notion of a common usage of a mode of communication corresponds in some way to what might be called the universals of a language. The Navajo learned to put together discrete records of image events in a sequence that they assumed would be meaningful to someone looking at the movie that they made. It is as if in some sense they were programmed to accept the notion that visual events in sequence have meaning. The fact that the specific way in which they strung these image events together showed differences from the way we sequence events seems to us much less important than the fact that they strung them together assuming that someone else would understand. Another striking thing we observed was the fact that, although we found it comparatively easy to teach people with another culture to make a movie, this did not mean that they used it in the same way that we did, were interested in it in the same way, or would continue to use it and find a place in their culture for it. Let us now attempt to delineate some of the differences we noted. In order to do this, however, we will need to know certain elements of the context, as well as of the code, for later comparative analysis. There are basically two areas with which we will deal. The first might be said to be those dimensions that represent the cultural

context. These are (1) the learning situation, comprising the students previous level of learning, as well as what we taught them, and including the specific arrangements and methods under which they learned; (2) the choice of students, including how they were chosen (or how they chose themselves), as well as how they chose the actors for their films; (3) the choice of film subjects or themes; (4) their method of working, both technical and perceptual; and ( 5 ) the interrelation of the community and the filmmaking and teaching process, comprising a description of the social controls and freedoms available within this culture to its filmmakers. The second area of analysis might be thought to be composed of those elements which relate to the code itself, its description and, at a final stage, the rules by which a Navajo film can be generated. Here a rather difficult problem is posed: to describe adequately the parameters and units we are dealing with, on both micro and macro levels, without being able to define clearly where one ends and the other begins. Roughly the areas under consideration here will be (1) the narrative style of the films, related to mythic forms and symbols of the culture; (2) the syntactic organization and sequencing of events and units of eventing; (3) the cultural, perceptual, and cognitive taboos influencing either semantic or syntactic organization and structure; and (4) the relation between verbal language structure and visual language structure.

First let us consider that dimension of the code we are calling narrative style. One element of this might be thought of as those events in daily life important enough to show in a film about any subject. Or conversely, those events-irrespective of subject -that are always part of film utterances or discourse by the Navajo. Almost all the Navajo films portray what to us seems an inordinate amount of walking. As we observed the films being made, excessive cademes of walking seemed clearly wrong filmmaking. In Nelsons film on sil-

24

American Anthropologist

[72, 1970

versmithing, for example, most of the film is composed of edemes of the silversmith walking to get his materials. In this fifteen minute film, almost ten minutes are spent as the silversmith walks to the old mine, walks to find his silver nuggets, walks around looking, walks back to his hogan, walks again to find sandstone for the mold, walks back to the hogan again, and so on. As the Navajo were making the films and telling us about them, they repeatedly said: My mother, o r my brother, goes looking for . . ., then she goes to get . . ., then she goes . . ., then my brother goes. . . We didnt notice this repeated emphasis of the verb to go at the time of the interviews; in a sense, we screened it out, paying attention to what was important to us. It wasnt until we saw the edited film that we realized that walking was an event in and of itself, not just a way of getting somewhere. We expected the filmmakers to cut out most of the walking-but they didnt. This was the least discarded footage. In questioning them, it became clear that although they didnt verbalize it directly, walking was necessary to tell a story about something Navajo. Johnny Nelson said to us on June 13: Then the way the film is going to openits going to be John Baloo, hes going to be walking and wandering around those holes in the ground-were going to have the feeling that hes alone, and its very hard to find what hes going to find. He mentioned again in this interview that we dont see the face-well see him walking. In Susie Bennallys film about a Navajo weaver the same proportion of time is spent in walking. In a twenty-minute film, Susies mother spends fifteen minutes walking to gather vegetables for dye, walking to collect roots for soap, walking to shear the wool, and walking to and from the hogan in between all activities. Her son walks with the sheep and in one spot rides his horse away from and then to the hogan to indicate the passage of time. I n reading Navajo myths and stories we were struck by the fact that in many Navajo narratives the narrator spends much of his

time describing the walking, the landscape, and the places he passes, and dwells only briefly on what to us are the plot lines, as in The Killing of Tracking Bear (Sapir 1942:137): Then he again started o f f to the east. He went there and back in vain. There were no monsters. He also went to the south and back. There were again no monsters. He also went to the west and back. There were no monsters. He also went to the north and back. There were no monsters. He again went back to his home. Truly there were no more monsters. Now here the story stops. Now I have nothing more to tell. Or, in the Night Chant (Matthews 1910:54-55): Happily I go forth My interior feeling cold, may I walk. No longer sore, may I walk. Impervious to pain, may I walk. With lively feelings may I walk. As it used to be long ago, may I walk. Happily may I walk. Happily with abundant dark clouds, may I walk. Happily with abundant showers, may I walk. Happily with abundant plants, may I walk. Happily on a trail of pollen, may I walk. Happily may I walk. Being as it used to be long ago, may I walk. All the films but one (which we shall note later) display this unusual use of walking, not only as an intrinsic part of the eventing in the film, as can be seen in the quotes above, but as a kind of punctuation that separates activities. The mother and the silversmith, for example, are always shown walking toward or away from the hogan to indicate a structural break somewhat akin to phrase, paragraph, o r chapter structure. Compare Tracking Bear with Alta Kahn and John Baloo (in the weaving and silversmith films), who go to get roots and back again, or go to get silver and back again, or go to light the fire and back again. Throughout the films the actor goes and returns, and as in Tracking Bear, when the going stops, Now here the story stops. In Susies film of her mother, the film ends abruptly (for us) when her mother holds up the finished rug. We havent been shown

WORTH & ADAIR]

Navajo Filmmakers

25

much of her mother weaving the rug; it has been a film of coming and going. The actual weaving is only barely started. But the walking parts, of mother and family, are finished. One can almost hear Susie saying, Now that youve seen how I go and come back in making my mg, I have nothing more to tell. After the going and coming you see the rug. In the concluding words of the Night Chant, In beauty it is finished. (Matthews 1910:55). Several people who have seen these films have commented that it doesnt seem surprising to have first films composed chiefly of walking. After all, they say, what do other beginning filmmakers do? They always show people walking. Also, they argue, walking is used in such avant-garde films as those by Antonioni to show upset, lassitude, o r general qualities such as the passage of time. Several facts, however, tend to strengthen our argument that walking in Navajo films is used uniquely. First, when walking is used in our films it is hardly, if ever, seen as an event in and of itself. It is used in most cases as a bridge between activities, a structural device used to get people from one place to another, similar to the familiar shots of a railroad train speeding along the tracks, or of an airplane taking off, followed by a shot of the main character relaxing in his seat, followed by a shot of the airplane landing. When used as an event, as in an Antonioni film, it is seen as a somewhat unusual event. It is hardly the kind of thing we see in all movies, and certainly we cannot remember films in which the major action is composed of the main character merely walking. It has been suggested that the reason for so much walking is not that the Navajo were following a particular pattern derived from the structure of their narrative, but rather that they were imitating life. That is, that of Navajo, being a primitive people, walk a great deal and therefore show walking in their films in imitation of their actual daily activity. The striking observation in this regard is that the Navajo dislike walking. They will go to great lengths to ride, and will at every opportunity

use some means other than walking to get someplace. Hardly ever did we observe our filmmakers walking to where they were photographing. They always insisted on driving, and almost all the members of the Pine Springs community owned pick-up trucks and often used them for journeys as short as one hundred yards. We observed scores of instances where Navajos waited patiently for hours at the side of a road for a ride. Another striking example to support our claim for difference in the use of walking as event is our analysis of two films on Navajo life made almost twenty-five years ago by Adair on his first visit to Pine Springs. We have therefore been able to compare his films with those made by the Navajo. One is a finished film, photographed by Adair but edited by Mitchell Wilder, then at the Taylor Museum in Colorado, and the other is a film that is unedited and contains all the footage shot by Adair showing some of the daily activities surrounding weaving and silvermaking. This was Adairs first attempt at filmmaking, and although made by a young anthropologist, these films can still be said to reflect his way of structuring events, in contrast to the ways of our Navajo students. What is most notable is that Adair does two things that are different from the Navajo and are quite consistent with what we do in filmmaking today. Both his films (the cademe version and the edeme version) show almost no walking. People just are in the places they are supposed to be. Nobody searches for silver that is hard to find or walks to get roots and plants for dye. Second, his footage is full of face close-ups showing the expressions of the Navajo as they go about their activities. This leads us to another difference, that of ( 3 ) , the cultural, perceptual, and cognitive taboos influencing semantic or syntactic organization and structure of an utterance. The Navajo do not use face close-ups, except in very limited circumstances. Most shots are either cut off at the head or show the head turned away from the camera. In all the films there are no more than five face

26

American Anthropologist

[72, 1970

close-ups, and these, as far as we can determine, are in two specific situations. The first is most common, showing a full front view of the face with the eyes looking slightly upward-a sort of inward staring. When questioning the meaning of these shots, we were told by several of the students that this shows my mother (or my brother) thinking about the design. They occur in those places in the film in which the subject is about to embark on the actual work of weaving or making a piece of jewelry. The second kind of close-up is in the form of an in joke. The Navajo stares at the camera and makes a funny face. One speculation as to the reasons for this is that the Navajo generally avoid eye-to-eye contact. Staring at someone, or looking him straight in the eye, is a form of insult, unless done for clearly humorous purposes. This relates to values of privacy in Navajo culture, where close living and modesty taboos must be reconciled by some form of perceptual avoidance behavior. It seems possible to conclude that this has been carried over into film discourse. After more than a month of observations it became clear that although close-ups were used frequently, face close-ups were hardly ever taken or used. During the shooting of a sequence for the Tsosie sisters film about a medicine man, the girls were photographing their grandfather making a sandpainting. Worth was observing this sequence, and he became increasingly upset as he noted how badly the girls were photographing it. They werent showing the important parts of the action. They didnt photograph any of the preliminary steps: bringing the sand into the hogan, placing it in the right place, smoothing it with a smoothing stick, finding the center, preparing the colored sands, and so on. His restiveness and upset became apparent to the girls, who finally asked, Are we doing it right? Without thinking, Worth began suggesting that they shoot more footage of these important steps that are happening right now. Once he had intruded into their way of seeing and recording the event, Worth decided to try directing them

to make shots that they had never made by themselves. He suggested that the girls try to take some face close-ups of their grandfather. Mary Jane refused. She said she didnt know how. Maxine reluctantly took the camera from her and started looking through the viewfinder with the 3-inch (telephoto) lens. Finally she said that she couldnt see through it and handed it back to her sister. Mary Jane finally stood over her grandfather, pointed the camera at the top and back of his head and pushed the button. Worth asked her if she were getting a shot of his face, and she looked surprised and said, NO, I cant see it from here-you do it-I dont know how. The only way to get the face was to lie down on the floor shooting from low, which Worth then did and made one shot. He handed the camera back to Mary Jane and said, See, its easy; now you do it. Mary Jane said she couldnt and handed the camera (as it it were a hot potato) to her younger sister, saying, You do it. Maxine looked at Worth, lay down on a sheepskin, and put the camera to her eye. She soon looked up and said to him, I cant see. Why? Worth asked. My eyelashes get in my way, she replied. Worth acted as if this were not a good reason, and she got up and said, My hands are too weak-see, they are shaking. She held one hand before her, and Worth couldnt see a single sign of tremoi or shake. He said, I dont see you shaking. She replied, But I am, and that was the end of any attempt at face close-ups. To return to the walking. We mentioned earlier that one film did not show an inordinate amount of walking. It is an interesting deviation in support of our original observation. Johnny Nelson made two films. The first was about a silversmith, in which walking occurred a great deal. The second was about the building of a shallow well. In this film no walking occurs at all. In style it is similar to Adairs early films of Navajo activity. Our explanation for this dramatic shift in style is that in the silversmith film Johnny

WORTH Br ADAIR]

Navajo Filmmakers

27

was telling a traditional story, and therefore naturally told it in the old Navajo way. In the shallow-well film he was telling about non-Navajo ways, and in effect told it in English, not Navajo, It might be thought that a better explanation for this change in style is the fact that no walking occurred in the making of a shallow well, while walking naturally occurs in making silver jewelry. The reverse is actually the case. Adair was quite stunned when he noted that Johnny was asking his actor to go to the mine to look for silver. The fact of the matter is that silver was never mined by the Navajo. This event in the film derived from necessities imposed on the narrative style by other factors in the contextual situation. On the other hand, in the building of the well, much walking actually occurs in order to get the materials, and much coming and going of the trucks carrying the materials was observed by us. None of this motion and activity is in either the finished film or the cademe footage. What we are suggesting here is that people within the context of their culture have different codes for saying different things, that ones cognitive system might well employ a metacode or program that would relate the rules for one mode of communication to rules for the other. If one has a set of rules for talking about certain things, or telling certain stories, he might reasonably be expected to apply those rules to structuring a movie about these subjects. In the above observations we seem to have some evidence that the rules of Navajo myth and storytelhg are more relevant to how events like weaving a rug, making silver jewelry, or building a shallow well are shown than to the real events that take place when these activities are actually performed. When Adair questioned Johnny, after the films were made, about the fact that the Navajo never mined silver on the reservation, Johnny answered (without definitely denying Adairs statement) that thats the way to make a film about it. In going now to (2)-the

nization and sequencing of events and units of eventing-we shall be dealing with the way pieces or units of film were used. Here, as with verbal analysis, it is extremely difficult to separate the semantic from the syntactic, but by syntactic we shall mean those rules primarily governing the way events are structured by editing-how and at what point cademes are cut apart; what is allowed to follow what; and where the filmmaker needs something in between. In a rough way, we shall be dealing with notions similar to, but much more primitively understood than, what linguists call privileges of occurrence. On this level we found that in general the Navajo were joining elements under what seemed like quite different rules from ours. Here are two (out of many) rules for our films: Rule 1. The major purpose of editing and sequencing units is to make it appear that no join exists, so that the viewer sees one continuous piece of action. Rule 2. Things that are not joined on action and that appear suddenly on the screen (such as a glass suddenly appearing in a persons hand) are a form of magic, are funny, and are not the way things happen. It is interesting to note that the French and other avant-garde filmmakers deliberately break these rules occasionally. They use the so-called jump cut for some of the same reasons that painters began using primitive art forms; or, what is more to the point, for the same reasons that poets will say the achieve of the thing, knowing that the wrong grammar will add power to the phrase, and further, knowing that we know the rule and know that the poet knows it and is breaking it deliberately. The Negro teenagers with whom we worked followed the Hollywood-TV rule (rule l ) , They werent deliberately taught this rule but had learned it (although they couldnt verbalize it), perhaps by watching movies and television or by being members of our society and sharing with us the same culture and cognitive style. syntactic orgaThe Navajo didnt follow this rule at all.

28

American Anthropologist
I

172, 1970

FIGURE 1.

The notion of smoothness of action or nonnoticeability of a connective didnt occur to them. There are numerous examples in their films of people suddenly appearing on the screen or jumping from one place to another, or magically going from a kneeling to a walking or standing position. When we questioned them about this, we had great difficulty even getting them to see what we were asking about. Finally, after asking Isnt it strange that Sam suddenly is seen walking when he was in a kneeling position? or Isnt it strange that the boy seems as if by magic to jump across the landscape, never going behind the tree at all? we were answered, with a condescending smile, Oh, everyone knows that if hes walking he must have got up, or Why show him behind the tree-you cant see him. There is one point in Mikes finished film (Antelope Lake) where the actor is walking across a field. The scene is a long shot of a bare plain with one tree approximately in the middle of the shot. The actor is walking across the field, going from left to right. In actuality he passes for a moment behind the tree. When Mike shot this scene he did it in two cademes. The first had the actor walk into the frame, walk across the field, go behind the tree, reappear on the other side, walk a bit more-and then the camera stopped. The second cademe starts at a point before the actor goes behind the tree and continues having him walk behind the tree and continue out of the frame on the right side. Since the two cademes overlap in action, Mike had a great choice of points at f film and which he could cut both pieces o

join them to get the actor across the field. In a small study done by Worth, he asked twenty students and faculty at Penn to indicate on the diagram reproduced in Figure 1 at what point they would cut the film to achieve the effect of having the actor get from the left side of the screen to the right side. The subjects chosen were faculty members in communication, anthropology, and psychology, with varying degrees of knowledge about editing, and students at the Annenberg School. Eighteen of the twenty indicated that they would combine the film in parallel fashion; that is, no matter where they would cut the first cademe, they would match that point on the second cademe. The dotted lines on the drawing represent some of the places where they indicated they would cut. The subjects more sophisticated in film marked the cut as occurring when the actor was behind the tree. This would make the cut least noticeable. The others varied as shown. Mike, on the other hand, cut the sequence as shown by the heavy line in the diagram. He had the actor walking up to the tree and then appearing as if by magic on the other side. When asked why he did this, he said, Oh, nothing happens when hes behind the tree so I cut it out. Two of Worths students, however, marked the diagram in such a way as to achieve a jump cut, that is, so as not to achieve continuous action. But what is most striking is the fact that both (they did this at different times and had not spoken to each other) immediately looked at Worth after marking the diagram and said, with smiles

WORTH & ADAIR]

Navajo Filmmakers

29

on their faces, Fooled you, didnt I? and That screws up your experiment, doesnt it? Both students knew of our work with the Navajo and were clever enough to see the point of the study without being told. They made the necessary connections and deduced what it was that Worth was attempting to demonstrate. Apparently, they knew the rule of continuous action so well that they deliberately broke it, but couldnt resist telling Worth about it. When he pointed out that they were confirming the hypothesis that continuity of action was a rule for us, they sheepishly agreed. There are several other areas of difference that we observed, but we shall indicate them only briefly. The Navajo choice of actors for their films, and the restrictions of locale, were different from those of people living in our culture. While graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania and at schools throughout the country can make films about anybody living anywhere-even about the Navajo-the Navajo limited themselves to a choice of actors and locales that might be categorized as kin or kinsmens property. The Navajo were extremely loath to photograph nonrelatives, and always sought the closest kin as their subjects and showed the greatest ease and ability with the camera in that situation. They felt extremely uncomfortable photographing someone elses land, sheep, hogans, or horses. If the situation was such that they had no alternative that fit their plan for their film, they always asked elaborate permission or tried to borrow the person or object from someone related to them. Apparently, the use of an image was closely tied to their feelings about the use of the actual person or thing the image referred to. To illustrate this: Mike was editing his film of Antelope Lake. At one point there was a sequence in which he had juxtaposed some shots of what we took to be mud with a shot of a horse and a shot of some sheep. In interviews with Mike when his film was finished, we asked, Why does the shot of

the horse going into the lake come after the shot of the mud? and later, Why does the shot of the sheep come after this shot? He explained that the first mud shot showed horses hooves going into the water and so therefore the next shot must be of a horse. When we asked whose horse it was, he answered, I borrowed it from my brother. The next mud shot was, as he explained it, a shot of sheep going away from the lake, and so it was reasonable that it should be followed by a shot of sheep. Worth didnt ask him whose sheep they were, assuming they were his or some relatives. It was only later, during our analysis of the footage shot by all the students, that we learned that this shot had been borrowed from Susie. Neither Mike nor his family owned sheep, and rather than photograph someone elses sheep, belonging to another family, he borrowed a piece of film of a sheep sequence from Susie, who had photographed her mothers sheep. It must be pointed out that there were innumerable o p portunities for Mike to take shots of sheep. They were everywhere, grazing freely all over the landscape. He chose to borrow a shot of them from a fellow student rather than to photograph a strangers sheep himself. There was a marked difference on almost all levels of observation between Al, the artist, and the other Navajo. As A1 put it, They [the other Navajo] want to make things about outside. I want to make things about inside. His method of work, his notion of what he wanted to make a film about, and his behavior seemed much more like that of graduate students-introspective, somewhat hostile and neurotic, and slightly competitive. None of these qualities were displayed by the other Navajo. Yet Als film is also intensely Navajo, particularly in his use of motion as a form to convey meaning and in his intense feeling for, and ability to portray, the animism of his world. While all the Navajo made more use of movement than we do, his was, we think, especially complex and self-conscious. There was also a remarkable difference in

30

American Anthropologist

[72, 1970

the way all the Navajo students edited their film from the way we do. They worked faster, with such certainty that at one point Worth was convinced that they must be cutting the film at random. If not, they were able to perceive and remember individual shots and single frames of event in what to Worth was an impossible way. At one point Johnny set up two viewers on two tables, running film through both, jumping from one side of the room to the other and splicing sequences for different sections of his film at the same time. In order to determine whether they really knew the points at which they were cutting the film, Worth several times grabbed the end of a piece of film as it was cut and asked both Johnny and Susie to describe the exact point of the cut. In all cases they were able -easily-to describe the point in the image event that they were cutting. It is not that their perception of individual frames was better, but rather that their ability to perceive a single frame in a motion sequence and to remember it for both short and long periods of time was better than ours. In discussing this with Johnny Nelson, he explained that perhaps its because we always have to have the design in our heads. He told us that you have to use your knowledge and the machine is there but you have to use your head and whats up there to make a good movie. This, I think, is the same way with the weavers, that if they want to make a good rug for themselves, they have to concentrate there, very hard on what designs would impress the buyers . . . its the same way with the silversmith. We started with the notion that if the Whorfian hypothesis had any value in this study we would be able to find that the Navajo use motion in some different and significant way. By a tentative and incomplete analysis this seems to be the case. They seem to move the camera more, move it in a more controlled fashion, and move it in a circular rather than linear fashion. Years ago Margot Astrov (1950:45) pointed out:

The concept of motion in all its possible variations is the perennial current on which Navaho culture is carried along and from which it receives its unfailing stimulus. Motion pervades the Navajos universe; it permeates his mythology, his habit systems, and his language. Harry Hoijer has written (1951:115117) :
It would appear that Navaho verb categories

center very largely about the reporting of events, or better, eventings. These eventings are divided into neuters, eventings solidified, as it were, into states of being by virtue of the withdrawal of motion, and actives, eventings in motion. But this is not all. A careful analysis of the meanings of Navaho verb bases, neuter and active, reveals that eventings themselves are conceived, not abstractly for the most part, but concretely in terms o f the movements of corporeal bodies. . . . Movement itself is reported in painstaking detail, even to the extent of classifying as semantically different the movements of one, two, or several bodies, and sometimes distinguishing as well between movements of bodies differentiated by their shape and distribution in space. But this high degree of specificity in the reporting of movement is not confined in Navaho to verbs having particular reference to motion of one sort or another. On the contrary, it permeates the Navaho lexicon in the sense that many verbs, not at first sight expressive of movement, prove to be so on more detailed analysis. . . . To summarize: in three broad speech patterns, illustrated by the conjugation of active verbs, the reporting of actions and events, and the framing of substantive concepts, Navaho emphasizes movement and specifies the nature, direction, and status of such movement in considerable detail. Even the neuter category is relatable to the dominant conception of a universe in motion; for, just as someone is reported to have described architecture as frozen music, so the Navaho define position as a resultant of the withdrawal of motion. In the Navajo films, we can best understand the long sequences of walking in the context of the above. The walking provides a means of depicting eventing, (the searching for and finding of the mine, the rock for casting, the dyes for weaving, and so on).

WORTH & ADAIR]

Navajo Filmmakers

31

As an example of how one Navajo expressed the importance of motion in his scheme of things we quote Johnny Nelson, when asked to compare writing about how to make a shallow well with making a film about the same subject:
You make a movie about it and then its moving around where you actually see what is being done, how it moves. See, in a letter, you can read it over and over but you cant express exactly what, how the shallow well was, unless you want to write a whole book about it. But . . . if you write a whole book about it, then its still. You try to give it to somebody and he reads it through and he does not really get the picture in his mind. You cannot express just exactly how a shallow well was erected.

At another point Johnny said, What I really want to see is something that can move in front of my eyes, that I took myself. We have compared the films as originally shot with the films as presented by the filmmakers after considerable editing. We find that the two filmmakers whose films have been analyzed so far, Johnny Nelson and Susie Bennally, have included virtually all the scenes depicting their subjects walking but have edited out many sequences of the actual fabrication of the jewelry and the rug. We have discussed other aspects of walking earlier. Turning from linguistic form3 back to mythology, and particularly to myth style, it is to be noted that the long journey provides the central theme for many of the origin myths. Navajo myths tell of the culture hero who travels freely among the gods collecting ritual information as he goes, . . . (Spencer 1957:19). From this series of supernatural contacts his own fund of power is increased. The structure and narrative style of the silversmith film, the Antelope Lake film, Zntrepid Shadows, and the weaver film resemble the chantway myths. Johnny Nelson, for example, shows the craftsman at work, but has his craftsman set out on a journey for an ancient silver mine. The fact that silver was never mined on the reservation is inconsequential; the origin of silver

and travel to that origin, like the origin of the horse, is depicted in his film. As in the myths, power accruing from motion and especially from travel is not only a feature depicted in the film but may also explain the behavior of the filmmaker. Perhaps following his actor in his search for the mine gave him a sense of assurance in an unfamiliar situation. Certainly this is characteristic of Navajo psychology: if you are uncertain of yourself in a particular situation, dont remain still-travel. We now turn to Zntrepid shadow^.^ It will be remembered that A1 Clah, the artist, was a stranger to the community. He had no kinsman there, was never invited to any of the hogans, and stayed close to us and the other students during the whole two months. Indeed, he was not only lonely but was rejected and resented by the community of Pine Springs. I n interviews with Worth, A1 told how he wanted to make a film not about those things out there, referring to Navajo crafts, but whats in my head. Further, in talking with Worth, he said
I cant get in the film when Im taking the pictures . . this I felt was me on the inside and I have to choose someone to be in the film.

So Johnny Nelson was chosen to play the role of A1 Clah, the intruder. The shadow mentioned in the title is symbolic of one of the Navajo concepts of the soul, that which is lying in, as they say. This soul can only be killed by the sun and so we find in this film a play between man and nature and a balance between the two. At the beginning of the film the sun is strong and the shadows short and weak; and man, too, is fallible when he interferes with nature. The first dramatic act of the film occurs when the intruder happens upon a spider web, and while examining it pokes a stick into it and destroys it (taboo behavior). Poking the spider web set the stage for the start of his journey. Immediately a rolling hoop (an old tire rim) is seen moving mysteriously across the landscape. The intruder looks around but finds no explana-

32

American Anthropologist

[72, 1970

tion. Soon a Yeibechai mask appears, looking in all directions for the cause of the disturbance. The intruder has been replaced by the Yeibechai. During the course of the film the intruder gains power by contact with the Yeibechai in his wanderings. At the end of the film Al himself is intrepid, to match his shadow (which has also joined the search), and the sun is weak. We have a sense of Al with his camera merging his shadow into nature. The hoop seen intermittently rolling through the landscape may be best interpreted in the light of the following quotation (Reichard 1950:89) :

the spinning shadow shown on the screen, slowly, almost lazily making its effortless (and for most audiences, calm) circles across the earth. Then almost imperceptibly the actual wheel comes into the frame, never interfering with the shadow but gradually becoming part of the same universe. At almost the moment when an audience is able to perceive this, the film ends. The question may be asked, was Al Clah consciously using traditional Navajo symbols? Or was this symbolism and the narrative style in which it was expressed unconscious? Or is the resemblance between the abstract forms and Navajo ritual stylization fortuitous? Closed circles made of meal or pollen or It must be remembered that A1 Clah had perhaps merely described on the ground, spent seven years away from home attendhoops, and rings are frequently encountered in ritual. They represent a space so narrowed ing art school in Santa Fe, and although his down that it is under control, an area from home was nearby, he was a stranger to the which evil has been driven and within which Pine Springs community. The intruder, for power has been concentrated. the reason given earlier, is played by Johnny At the end of the film evil has been driven Nelson. However, as soon as Johnny saw the rushes of the footage Al had shot, in out, and beauty and balance restored. I n an interview with Worth, Clah ex- which Johnny was made to poke a stick into pressed (in answer to the question What do a spider web, a tension developed between you want people to feel after theyve seen them. It was not (as far as we could tell) the film?) some of these ideas in the fol- that Johnny immediately refused to act in lowing way: First I want people to feel the film, but rather that Johnny became less friendly and found that he never had the tense-then to feel, what is the word-grotesque, ugly-then at the end, they will feel time to be in subsequent shots. It was at this point that A1 started making calm. The tense section of his film, he later the Yeibechai mask out of cardboard. It was explained, occurred at the point that the in- this mask that became the symbol of the truder poked a stick into the spider web long searches. Al had originally intended to and the hoop started rolling. The gro- have the intruder (Johnny) search for the tesque section occurs during the constant thing (the rolling hoop) that started when movement of the camera as the Yeibechai is he poked into the spider web. Several brief references to standard looking for the cause of the disturbance caused by the rolling hoop set loose by the themes in Navajo mythology will give the intruders poking into the spider web. The reader an idea of the strong ties (deliberate calm comes when we see the hoop and or not) that exist between the real probits shadow merging into one entity. This lems of the filmmaker, the problems of the shot is inordinately long and well planned. It a m , and the problems of the Navajo as exis the longest shot in the film, and as Al ex- pressed in his mythology. Navajo mythology helps us understand plained before he shot it, This part will be so hard because the shadow must combine what on the surface seems to be a jumble of with the wheel and this might take a long abstract art learned in school. Katherine time to happen. The shot opens with only Spencer (1957:19), in an analysis of the

WORTH & ADAIR]

Navajo Filmmakers

33

plot construction of Navajo myths, has written: Rejection by his family or ridicule and scorn on the part of associates may set the stage for the heros reckless brhavior. Just as motion and travel and the m a n i p ulation of the environment to put people and things in motion give power, so does the manipulation of the environment in other ways-through film-give power and positive satisfaction to the Navajo. Mike and also Johnny were able to give their relatives sheep by borrowing film of sheep from Susie and inserting them in a sequence depicting their own relatives. Susie, on the other hand, could be generous by giving away film sheep and still retaining her real sheep. Susie was able to show that her mother was a superior weaver, and her mother could in return show that Susie was a superior weaver. The films thus gave the family added prestige. Mike was able to make a haunted hogan beautiful by manipulating the environment through editing to make it look as if the haunted hogan was indeed still inhabited. He showed first the outside of the hogan, which everyone knew could not be lived in, and then cut to a shot of someone elses hogan, which was clearly lived in. Johnny was able to control the making of the shallow well through film, while actually refusing the job of construction foreman. Through film he acquired the power to have his cake and eat it. Perhaps Johnny expressed it best when he said, What I really want to see is something that I can move in front of my own eyes, that I took myselfthat I made. The question of the consciousness or deliberateness with which traditional narrative forms are transferred to new modes of expression is one that estheticians, anthropologists, and art historians, among others, have asked many times. The important thing is to note that the Navajo on first using film, in an endeavor to communicate their view of their world, chose to create forms that

were fulfilling, and possibly even therapeutic, to them in traditional Navajo style. NOTES This research was supported by the Annenberg School of Communications, and by grants #lo38 and #1759 from the National Science Foundation. She1 Feldman of the Annenberg School acted as research associate during the planning period of the research, and Richard Chalfen was research assistant in the field. Robert Waterhouse and Grant McCall worked as research assistants during the period of analysis. Pine Springs is situated in the southwestern tip of Arizona about forty miles west of Gallup, New Mexico on Route 66, and fifteen miles north into the hill country of the Navajo Reservation. For a fuller analysis of this point see Worth and Adair (in press). All the films discussed here may be rented or purchased for viewing and classroom study from the Center for Mass Communication, Columbia University Press, 440 W. 110th St., New York, N.Y. 10025. REFERENCES CITED ADAIR, JOHN, and SOL WORTH 1967 The Navajo as filmmaker: a brief report of research in the cross-cultural aspects of film communication. American Anthropologist 69:76-78. ALBERT, ETHEL M. 1956 The classification of values: a method and illustration. American Anthropologist 58: 221-248. ASTROV, MARGOT 1950 The concept of motion as the psychological leitmotif of Navaho life and literature. Journal of American Folklore 63: 45-56. BIRDWHISTELL, RAY L . 1952 Introduction to kinesics. Louisville: University of Kentucky Press. BOUMAN, JANC. 1954 Bibliography on filmology as related to the social sciences. Reports and Papers on Mass Communication, No. 9. UNESCO BELLUGI BROWN, ROGER, and URSULA 1964 Three processes in the childs acquisition of syntax. Harvard Educational Review 34:133-151. CHOMSKY, NOAM 1965 Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press.

34

American Anthropologist

[72, 19701

MCNEILL,DAVID COLLIER, JOHN, JR. 1966 Developmental psycholinguistics. I n 1967 Visual anthropology: photography as The genesis of language. F. Smith and G. a research method. New York: Holt, RineA. Miller, eds. Cambridge, Mass. & Lonhart & Winston, Inc. don: The M.I.T. Press. EISENSTEIN, SERGEI CHARLES E. 1949 Film form: essays in film theory. J . OSGOOD, 1966 Dimensionality for the semantic space Leyda, ed. and trans. New York: Harfor communication via facial expressions. court, Brace & Co. Paper presented at Michigan State UniverEKMAN, PAUL sity, first of a three-part series on the 1965 Communication through nonverbal besemantics of facial expressions. havior. In Affect, cognition and personal- REICHARD, GLADYS ity. s. s. Tomkins and C. E. Izard, eds. 1950 Navaho religion: a study of symbolNew York: Springer Publishing Co. ism. Bollingen Series XVIII. New York: GOLDSCHMIDT, WALTER, AND RORERT B. EDGERPantheon Books, Inc. TON SAPIR, EDWARD 1961 A picture technique for the study of 1942 Navaho texts. (Supplementary texts values. American Anthropologist 63:26-47. by Harry Hoijer). H. Hoijer, ed. Linguistic Society of America. Iowa City: University HARRISON, RANDALL P. of Iowa Press. 1964 Pictic analysis: toward a vocabulary E. R., AND D. C. GAJDUSEK and syntax for the pictorial code; with SORENSON, research on facial communication. Unpub1966 The study of child behavior and delished Ph.D. thesis. Department of Comvelopment in primitive cultures. Pediatrics munication, Michigan State University. 37 (1, pt. 2 ) . SPENCER, KATHERINE HOIJER, HARRY 1957 Mythology and values; an analysis of 1951 Cultural implications of some Navaho Navaho chantway myths. Memoirs of the linguistic categories. Language 27: 11 1-120. American Folklore Society, 48. PhiladelMALINOWSKI, BRONISLAW phia: American Folklore Society. 1922 Argonauts of the western Pacific. Lon- WORTH, SOL don: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd.; New 1966 Film as a non-art; an approach to the York: E. P. Dutton & Co. study of film. The American Scholar 35: MATTHEWS, WASHINGTON 322-334. 1968 Cognitive aspects of sequence in visual 1910 Navaho myths, prayers, and songs; with texts and translations. P. E. Goddard, communication. AV Communication Reed. California University Publications in view 16: 121-145. American Archeology and Ethnology 5 WORTH,SOL, and JOHN ADAIR ( 2 ) , 1907-1910. F. W. Putnam and A. L. in press The Navajo make movies: the peoKroeber, eds. Berkeley: The University ple depict themselves. New York: Holt. Press. Rinehart & Winston.

Você também pode gostar