camera is an integral part of the folklore celebration,which does not follow the solemnity of a rigid formula.The soundtrack, an important element in the film, isdominated by a continuous noise of shacking bells andcalls that evoke the voice of the shepherd assembling hissheep. This noise is so loud and continuous that its re-verberations might even become unpleasant.

What is striking in the Fonni carnival is that themain characters are predominantly male. The genderissue is very clear from the film. This includes theambiguous, probably cross-dressed girls with colorfulribbons and the male animal-like bonding, which has alatent sexual overtone. It seems that the return to a car-nivalesque Sardinian culture permits homo-socialbonding almost completely outside a female world. Inspatial terms, the men, returning through masquerade totheir ancient form, abandon houses and roam in theoutdoor ‘‘male’’ space with women appearing in, orfrom, doorways to provide domestic cheer in the form ofwine and cakes. The men are fed outside like stray dogsand appear to have no real aim. We see women in thefilm, but they wear a normal dress that contrasts with thedarkness of the main performers.

Another important theme in Figus’s film is the con-trast between modernity and ancient customs expressedthrough images of cars, overridingly ugly buildings, andgirls in jeans. But it is also expressed by the fact thatmost of the time the men in the film are modern withordinary provincial lives in a place that could, to someextent, be anywhere in Italy. As such, Figus succeeds inportraying the exotic masks of this folkloric traditionwithout the romanticism.

The most peculiar and distinctive mask of the paradeis s’Urthu. There are at least two hypotheses about theorigins of this rough mask. The first suggests thatS’Urthu is a bear, although this animal does not live inSardinia. This suggestion draws its persuasiveness fromthe zoomorphic features of a number of characters inthe carnivals of Sardinia’s interior. The second is thats’Urthu may refer to the Latin orcus (ogre), since manySardinian prehistoric tombs are called ‘‘the house of theogre’’ or ‘‘the prison of the ogre.’’ Ultimately, the ances-tral masks of the Fonni carnival belong to the domain offolk legends and mysteries. Figus has made a commen-tary-free film. The focus on the ‘‘how’’ (the ash, thepainting of faces, the putting on of bells) over the ‘‘why,’’which is sacrificed to the commentary-less film, is espe-cially interesting. The film creates a kind of postmodernlack of closure. It does become clear to non-Sardinianviewers that the events evoke images of herders andprimitive animals. However, the question of what theevents mean and where they come from remains openand unanswered. In a sense, the film on its own is not

ideally suited for classroom use. The film’s methodolog-ical shortcoming is its lack of background information.Figus’s focus is on the raw data of a folkloric celebration.The film merely presents existential evidence of an em-pirical reality. For this reason, the film may need ananthropological critique that situates and explains thescenes, assisting the viewers in interpreting anthropo-logically a series of sketchy, vivid materials. In this way,the film would be a useful item for courses on Sardinia’sfolkloric tradition. Despite the lack of analysis, the filmcan be used as a resource for teaching. It is particularlyappropriate for visual anthropology, cultural studies/filmstudies, and documentary film. Pedagogically, a course onsensory ethnography would benefit from the inclusion ofthis film. Its phenomenological approach may serve thepurpose of introducing the students to issues of represen-tation of sensory experience involved in fieldwork. Onemay ask the students: can all knowledge be conveyedthrough words? In which sense is the knowledge producedthrough forms of writing different from the knowledgeproduced through image making? In which sense canimage making be a method of disclosure of culturalknowledge? The instructor can lead a discussion of therelation between film as a multisensory medium and tra-ditional forms of ethnographic inquiry. Useful resourcesinclude David MacDougall’s The Corporeal Image: Film,Ethnography and the Senses (Princeton University Press,2006) and Transcultural Cinema (Princeton UniversityPress, 1998), Sarah Pink’s Doing Sensory Ethnography(Sage, 2009), and The Future of Visual Anthropology: En-gaging the Senses (Routledge, 2006), as well as LauraMark’s The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema,Embodiment and the Senses (Duke University Press, 2000).Fonni: s’Urthu has an interesting educational value, for itprovides an opportunity to discuss the role of the body andthe senses in ethnographic filmmaking and that of audio-visual media in ethnographic research more in general.

Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun

Directed by Sam Pollard, 2008, 84 minutes, color. Dis-tributed by California Newsreel, PO Box 2284, SouthBurlington, VT 05407, http://www.newsreel.org

Katherine R. HenningerLouisiana State University

The overarching theme of this fine DVD introduction toZora Neale HurstonFanthropologist, folklorist, and lit-erary ‘‘genius of the South’’Fis pronounced up front:Hurston was an authentic ‘‘free spirit,’’ an ambitious,

Film Reviews 109

daring, supremely self-confident black woman wholived an improbably adventurous life of the mind andbody in a culture that would seek to censor her at everyturn. It is a theme that Hurston herself would likely ap-plaud, though with a knowing wink at the fetishizationthat hovers at the edge of such a ‘‘personality’’ focus.Eighteen years in the making, this feature-length docu-mentary produced and written by Kristy Anderson isclearly a labor of love, gathering together an impressivegroup of experts, friends, and collaborators to testify tothe power of Hurston’s presence and accomplishment.The result is a worthy overview of one of the most sig-nificant intellectual and creative forces of the 20thcentury, which, if a bit sketchy on the details of Hurs-ton’s work, provides a sufficiently nuanced view ofHurston’s milieu and her responses to it to inspire stu-dents to investigate further.

‘‘Jump at de sun’’ was Lucy Hurston’s injunction toall her children that seems to have guided her daughterZora throughout her life. Born in 1891 in Alabama,Hurston was raised in the all-black town of Eatonville,Florida, surrounded by examples of African Americanself-sufficiency and attainment, especially in the figureof her preacher father, who was elected mayor. AlthoughJohn Hurston warned that whites would not tolerate boldself-assertion from a Negro female (and was little in-clined to tolerate it himself), his daughter appears tohave internalized none of the self-doubt or fear on offerin the segregated South. Left to find her own way atage 13 after the death of her mother, Hurston beganher wanderings, ‘‘not so much in geography, but in time. . . not so much in time as in spirit’’ (Zora Neale Hurston,Dust Tracks on a Road, J. B. Lippincott, 1942: 89).Working her way North, Hurston was finally able topursue her education, entering Howard University at age28. There her literary talent was recognized by New Ne-gro author Alain Locke, who urged her to go to Harlem topursue a writing career. After winning several literarycontests, Hurston was embraced by the intellectual andcreative community, creating what would be known asthe Harlem Renaissance, and quickly proclaimed herself‘‘Queen Zora’’ in its ranks.

After entering Barnard College as its sole AfricanAmerican student in 1925, Hurston met Franz Boas,whose anthropological teachings meshed with Hurston’sacute sense of the value of African American culture.Convincing ‘‘Papa’’ Boas that black southern folklore wasin need of collection and preservation, Hurston obtainedthrough him a grant to go South. Thus began a career ofinvestigation and celebratory representation of African-descended cultures in America, the Caribbean, and Cen-tral America. Although Hurston proved perfectly capableof writing the type of ‘‘scientific’’ anthropological dis-

course standard in the 1930s, she became known formuch more intimate portrayals of her direct interactionwith her informants, with works such as Mules and Men(J. B. Lippincott, 1935) now generally recognized as pro-totypes of postmodern ethnography. First published as afiction writer, Hurston brought a keen sense of narrativestructure to her anthropology, and likewise her anthro-pological work infused her fiction writing. While on aGuggenheim-financed folklore-collecting trip to Jamaicaand Haiti in 1936 (soon published as Tell My Horse, J. B.Lippincott, 1938), Hurston also wrote her literary mas-terpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God (J. B. Lippincott,1937), a story of a woman’s search for self, inspired byher own recently ended love affair with a much youngerman. These and other works were published to greatcritical acclaim, particularly in the white press, until in1948 Hurston was charged (completely unfoundedly)with molesting two 10-year-old boys. Hurston was par-ticularly savaged for these alleged acts in the AfricanAmerican press and as a result retreated from New Yorkto Florida, where she lived out the rest of her life in anincreasingly fruitless struggle to publish her work. Shedied there in poverty (though not without community) in1960, all seven of her books out of print.

Using a full range of techniques from talking headsand archival footage to reenactments and animation,Jump at the Sun presents the facts of Hurston’s life witha satisfying combination of drama and scholarly au-thority. Many of the most important Hurston scholarscontribute their insights, including major biographersRobert Hemenway and Valerie Boyd, anthropologist LeeBaker, and historian Tiffany Patterson. Fellow writersAlice Walker, Maya Angelou, and Edwidge Danticattestify to Hurston’s ongoing influence in their ownwork. Literary scholars will be happy that major artisticcomponents are accounted for, including Hurston’simpeccable ear for African American language, theartistic-critical clash between Hurston and RichardWright, the close and ultimately shattered collaborationof Hurston and Langston Hughes, and Hurston’s ground-breaking use of free indirect discourse, clearly explicatedby critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. Hurston’s lifelong nego-tiations of the fraught world of white patronage andpublishers and deft movement between the poles of Af-rican American cultural gatekeeping are outlined withtheir nuances of color, caste, and gender. Jump at theSun treats its subject with reverence but resists hagiog-raphy: Hurston’s controversial views on segregation,World War II, and her equally magnificent capacities forlove and hate are presented forthrightly, usually usingHurston’s own vivid words.

Anthropologists will likely be less satisfied with thecoverage of Hurston’s fieldwork and publications. Although

110 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 27 Number 1 Spring 2011

the film emphasizes the political and scholarly significanceof Hurston’s respect for southern African American folklanguage and culture, it makes little mention of her ground-breaking techniques, nor their significance for the disci-pline. Her important anthropological work in Haiti andJamaica is barely noted; Tell My Horse is never mentionedby name. The spirit of Hurston’s collecting varied widelyfrom other visual anthropologists and documentarians ofthe 1930s: whether in her writing or photography, her pro-ject was to transform representations of her subjects from‘‘tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences’’ (Their EyesWere Watching God: 1) to powerfully creative, complexbeings. In the context of her contemporary culture’s racism,and of earlier disciplinary ‘‘traditions’’ (such as the in-famously racist 19th-century American School ofAnthropology), this was a radical act. Never a ‘‘neutral ob-server,’’ Hurston often put herself in the picture, blurringgeneric boundaries of ‘‘objective’’ and ‘‘subjective’’ record,and documenting her self-conscious participation andmembership in the cultures she observed. The last decadeshave seen increasing acknowledgment of Hurston’s foun-dational role in filmic anthropology and the ways herparticular techniqueFwhich ranges from static-wide shotsto handheld angles from within dance groups to mock an-thropological head shotsFanticipates postmodernistanthropological practice, visual and otherwise. As manycritics have noted, Hurston in her visual and written an-thropology searched for techniques that would embodyAfrican American expressive culture on its own terms,while also avoiding, as she told Langston Hughes, ‘‘loop-holes for the scientific crowd to rend and tear us’’ (Robert E.Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography,Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1980: 126). Hurst-on took up a camera for revisionary purposes, but verymuch with a faith in the precepts of anthropology and (atleast implicitly) in photographic anthropology. The richcontexts and implications of this work are left implicit inJump at the Sun, waiting to be teased out and exploredfurther by the curious scholar. Most helpful in this regard,Anderson and director Sam Pollard make liberal use ofHurston’s own film work (indicated by a symbol in thecorner of the screen) as well as photographs and film shecollaborated in making, which do give a glimpse into howHurston worked in the field and her then radical techniquesof observation and representation. Wonderfully, severalpeople who appeared in Hurston’s visual anthropology areinterviewed for this documentary and give firsthand ac-counts of Hurston’s approach to her subjects and crew.Educators may find in these artifacts a good opportunity tolaunch their own discussions of these topics. Undergraduatestudents wholly unfamiliar with Hurston’s career will findthe film a valuable introduction to exploring Hurston’santhropological texts. Classes engaged in more advanced

study of Hurston’s visual anthropology may find the film asinteresting for what it does not explore, as for what it does.If one wishes Edwidge Danticat’s conclusion that Hurstonhas ‘‘made us all stronger, bolder and much more willing toexperiment’’ had been as well demonstrated for her an-thropological as for her literary work, certainly Jump at theSun provides an intriguing and valuable base for furtherexploration.

Plastic Flowers Never Die

Directed by Roxanne Varzi, 2008, 34 minutes, color.Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources,101 Morse Street, Watertown, MA 02472, http://www.der.org

Maryam KashaniUniversity of Texas at Austin

Filmmaker and anthropologist Roxanne Varzi’s shortfilm Plastic Flowers Never Die works quickly and thicklyto raise questions about representation and writing forboth image and text. While historically situated, thefilm’s strength is in its poetic approach to the visualworld, martyrdom, and the state, and the reflexive posi-tion of the diasporic filmmaker and anthropologist.

‘‘How can anthropology be anything but another kindof mourning?’’ Plastic Flowers poses this question, tyingVarzi’s analysis of martyrdom and its role in the IslamicRepublic of Iran to her own practice as an anthropologist.Incorporating archival news footage, documentary films,and her own footage captured years before, Varzi alludes toan ‘‘authentic past,’’ weaving together images that coverhalf a century of IranFits streets, its trenches, and itsmartyrs. The film draws attention to the slippages that markthe construction of national histories, whether constitutedby relations between nations or by the movement of peoplebetween them. Varzi challenges her ability as an anthro-pologist to recover an authentic past and instead claims,‘‘film like history is easily reedited.’’ Paying attention to theimage (in a true anthropology of the visual), whether de-ployed as propaganda toward creating a proper Islamiccitizenry or as a medium for and site of ethnographic in-quiry, Varzi implicates her own image making and editing,situating her work within a regime of fading images in needof touching up and re-presenting. These imagesFtuckedaway in a martyrs’ museum, looming above Tehran’sstreets and highways, or overseen in cemeteries dominatedby the repetition of Khomeini’s visageFare recorded withreflections of an Iranian from the diaspora who has come towitness and mourn what she has missed.

Film Reviews 111