Alan Macfarlane’s Filming Experience

As a boy I was not particularly interested in photography. I took a few photographs and I was aware that for many purposes visual images were really important but I showed no particular interest in that. Although I knew my parents had taken a little bit of cine film I was not really interested in film at all until quite late when I went to the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1968, aged 26, to start work on a PhD in anthropology.

I was appointed as my supervisor Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. He was the head of the department and a world-renowned expert on India and Nepal. I didn't know at the time but he was also a really amazing filmmaker. I've written about his importance in visual anthropology. I believe that he is probably the greatest modern ethnographer, that is collector of information about societies in various parts of the world. Part of his greatness lies in the fact that he was an excellent photographer and took many thousands of photographs in the places he worked. He was also very interested in moving film and from the time when he went to India in 1939 he always travelled with a 16mm movie camera . He became so interested that he worked with the British Broadcasting Corporation, for whom he made a number of films for television, some of them with David Attenborough.

Haimendorf filmed extensively in Nepal from 1953. So, when I went to the field, I asked whether I should take a movie camera. He advised me that a 16mm camera is too expensive and heavy and the film is, very expensive . As a PhD student probably it's not a good idea . Yet he ensured that I had a really good camera and tape recorder. But, when I was in the field, I visited Kathmandu about halfway through my fieldwork and found in a shop a new Japanese 8mm mini camera which had just begun to arrive. I bought a little moving camera.

It was very elementary. It didn't have sound, it didn't have zoom, the films only lasted for three minutes. Yet the film which I took, looking back on it, is extremely interesting. I now realize that film is like taking thousands of still photographs. Now, with modern technology, you can take out a single frame and blow it up. The quality wasn't high and there was no sound, yet as a record of a Himalayan society in 1969 it is very interesting. That set me off on one thread of my filming career which is fieldwork filming. I went back to Nepal in 1986 and did further fieldwork then and subsequently went back almost every year till about 2002 and a few times later, so I have filmed over a period of over fifty years.

Later when I went to Japan ,and particularly to China, I filmed a great deal. In China from 2002, in seventeen visits up to 2023, I filmed on our tours through many parts of China and that is a year-by-year record along with our diaries of China during its massive period of growth.

What I realised was that, while film doesn't substitute for other kinds of information collecting, there are things you can do with film which you can't possibly do with text. You can study movement and sound, capture the sense of being in another community which you can't do even with the best of writing. Furthermore, for anthropological analysis and recording, fieldwork filming is really essential. I've never understood why all field workers from the later part of the 20th century, when it became not too difficult to film, didn't take a camera. When I was teaching anthropology in Cambridge I ran classes and encouraged people to do that.

Just to return briefly to Haimendorf, when I realised he was an important filmmaker, after he'd retired I went to see him to talk about a project on his first fieldwork the Nagas. He revealed that he had a hundreds of reels of 16mm film as well as his photographs and that he didn't know what to do with these. So my wife and I brought them back to Cambridge, digitised them and put them up on the internet.

People in many of the places where he worked, in Nepal, in Hyderabad and elsewhere now find these an absolutely indispensable and unique record of worlds which have largely disappeared. So the Haimendorf archive and his experience and encouragement was enormously important.

When you do lots of fieldwork filming in different parts of the world it becomes obvious that such a technique of recording and gathering and storing information applies not merely to your contact with other peoples and other societies but your own life. So another thread in my work has been filming the history of my own family. My wife and I keep records of many different kinds – diaries, account books, letters – in an archive on which I've based the twelve volumes of my autobiography. One element of the recording of our lives is film. We managed to build up a multimedia database system so that we can put all our diaries and other material into that.

As far as I know, this an unique record of the development of a family and in particular it has one or two particular emphases. In Nepal, I had filmed a little girl growing up in the Himalayas from the early 1990s, between the age of two and twelve. When my first granddaughter was born I started filming her –an hour or two after she was born – and through to about the age of 12. I filmed over seventy hours on her life, including half a dozen interviews from the age of four. This is an unusual record of the growth of an English child, against which I can compare the growth of a little Nepalese girl. There are many films of our tours and travels in different parts of the world including Australia and India and Europe. So film as an autobiographical tool as well as a fieldwork tool is extremely important.

Another strand in my life is film as a record of, encounters with interesting individuals. In 1982, my professor, Jack Goody, decided to interview three of his senior colleagues who were famous anthropologists. At that time you had to do it in a television studio, so these were done in front of an audience. A year later Jack retired and I thought I would continue this idea of interviewing my intellectual ancestors. The first long interview was with Professor Haimendorf in my own home, because now a portable, low-band u-matic camera meant that you could film where you wanted to.

So from those beginnings, when I set up with some of my students up the Cambridge Rivers (after the famous anthropologist, W.H. Rivers) Video Project from that time I started filming interviews, anything between twenty minutes and four hours. I went through a person's life in some detail. At the beginning I was mainly concentrating on people in my own fields, in other words the social sciences, particularly anthropology and history. By the end of the twentieth century I'd done about 60 interviews, many of them important because the subjects were elderly and died. So these are records of really distinguished thinkers in history and anthropology. Up to 2000 there was nothing you could do with the films except put them in a cupboard, and occasionally show them to your students.

Then around 2002 a revolution in computing occurred; broad bandwidth on the Internet, new editing tools, mass storage devices. This meant that you could think of making an archive that would be accessible around the world. So from about that time I increased my interviews and around 2005 several distinguished scientists at my college, King's College in Cambridge, said why don't you interview scientists? So I started to do scientists and have done ten Nobel Prize laureates and numerous others of an equivalent stature. Once you do scientists then obviously you fill in everything between, so economists and philosophers and lawyers and so on.

This has been an extraordinarily interesting encounter because when you point a camera at someone and start talking about their ancestors and their parents and their early education, what made them creative, why they made some important breakthrough later in their lives, they talk in a way which would never happen in any other context. So you become really close within a very short period to someone. My technique was to let them talk in the way they wanted to, though shepherd them along in order to cover a few essential things like their hobbies and music and inspiration, their religious and philosophical beliefs and political activities perhaps. This archive now consists of over 260 interviews in many different fields. They are accessible from my website and also many of them on YouTube and the Cambridge Streaming Media Service. They're widely watched and many of the people I've interviewed over the years are now dead and their families and their students are delighted to find these interviews.

Because they are filmed they are much richer than any sound recordings. Human beings communicate as much through their faces and expressions and their body posture as they do through the actual language and watching someone talking, even the pauses and sideways look of their eyes, often indicate a great deal. So whereas there are other archives, like the British Library archive of interviews, these are, I think, less interesting and certainly less viewable than the ones I've done. Behind all of these interviews is the idea summarized by Wordsworth – ‘the child is father of the man’ – that we form much of our character in our few years. Therefore up to half of many of the interviews is devoted to the time up to the end of university. In this film about the early life, you see the character before they get covered over by an adult career which is much better known.

Film-making is a hobby for me. I've never been formally trained as a filmmaker. I've learnt the techniques on the job. I've learned a few things in this process. One of which is to ‘keep things as simple as possible’. I don't bother with lights, tripods, I don't usually bother with microphones. I just have the camera. When you're filming in the field, you should have the camera with you all the time, so keep the equipment very simple. I also keep the editing very simple. I don't re-edit, change the order of things,. Indeed I hardly edit at all now because even things which I'd assumed were a problem – when the camera goes out of focus a little or when someone walks across in front of the camera – it doesn't matter. Certainly not having a tripod doesn't matter because the slight unsteadiness of holding the camera is how we see the world. So the aim of the filming is basically fieldwork filming is to let the viewer feel that they are there and are watching this and if people wander around in front of you that's what happens and if you get off focus a bit. I've learnt all this and I've learnt that you should let the camera roll sometimes the films may need to be cut a little bit but it's better to have too much rather than too little.

Recently there have been further revolutions in the technology, which I'll end with. Recently I was given an iPhone with a wonderful lens, sound recorder and a lot of storage. This means that I no longer need to carry around a bulky camera. I have also recently found it is very easy to make a very accurate transcript of interviews, using modern AI software (I use Buzz). Finally, the development of cameras on computers, combined with Zoom and other communications technology is transforming the way I write and communicate with colleagues and friends around the world.