The Project and the Documentaries: Two Distinct and Complementary Dimensions of the "VIDEO IN THE VILLAGES" Project

Vincent Carelli*

Documenting the Project: A Question of Survival The "Video in the Villages" Project was created in the context of the activities of the Centro de Trabalho Indigenista (Center for Work with Indigenous Peoples), a nongovernmental organization which for the past twenty years has supported Brazilian indigenous communities with such initiatives as the demarcation of indigenous land, as well as economic and educational programs. The main objective of the video project has been to make video accessible to indigenous people as a tool for information, communication, and expression (1). It has given a number of villages video equipment, trained young people in how to use it, and established a network of tape distribution and exchange between villages. When I initiated the project, in addition to being a militant indigenist and a photographer, I also had a personal ambition to produce my own videos. Hence, I became both the executor of the project in the villages and an apprentice of video and documentary. I also served as producer for the project and the documentaries, assuming the responsibility of fundraising for both levels of activity. Parallel to the formation of this communications network in the villages, we produced a series of documentaries that show our methodology and the impact of the program in these communities. It was during this process that I became aware of how much making these documentaries was a matter of survival for the project itself in that it gave the project the visibility it needed to procure support and resources that were indispensable for its execution. The continuity of the work that involved indigenous people directly (which was begun on an experimental basis and developed with entirely non-professional technical resources) was guaranteed through this self-documentation, carried out with increasingly professional resources for a growing public. The first experiment conducted in late 1987 among the Nambiquara was extremely well received by the indigenous people. We brought video to the community and held daily recording/screening routines, leaving ourselves open to their response. This generated instant and growing feedback among them. The Indians soon took over the directing, and the only thing I had to do was follow them as they began to present themselves the way they wanted to see themselves, and be seen.
*

Vincent Carelli is a co-founder of the Centro de Trabalho Indigenista (Center for Work with Indigenous Peoples, est. 1979) and since 1987 coordinator of the "Video in the Villages" Project. This text was written during his residency at the Center for Media, Culture, and History at New York University while on a grant from the Environmental Program of the United Nations (UNEP/UN) during April, 1995. Translated from the Portuguese by Catherine Benamou and Kathleen Fleming.

Due to my inexperience with the camera, when we got back to Sao Paulo we had a document that certainly was not commensurate with the collective trance and delirium the experiment had generated. Even so, the material was sufficiently expressive for me to edit my first documentary, and thereby make clear the potential of work which in this case contributed to reviving a lip- and nose-piercing ceremony that had not been practised for the last twenty years. Although it was made with a conventional video language, this video proved to be much more effective in obtaining financing for the program than were the written proposals we had submitted up to that point had been. Using only text, it was difficult to convince funding agencies - especially the European foundations which had funded other CTI projects - of the consistency and efficacy of an apparently paradoxical proposal: how could a movement to reaffirm traditional cultural values in indigenous societies be strengthened using technology that was alien to them and introduced from the outside? The video The Girls Celebration (A Festa da Moa, 1987) made it clear to me that the visual documentation of our work with indigenous people, developed in a series of videos explaining the project for a non-indigenous audience, would serve as a promotional tool, and thus as the sustaining mechanism for the project itself. From that point on, producing this series became an ongoing secondary aspect of the project - an independent, yet complementary component that was vital to sustaining the video work with the Indians. For example, the short titled "Video in the Villages" (the third work in the series) was edited in haste at the end of 1989, just before my first trip to the United States in search of financial support for the project. Made with the most impressive fragments from my first two videos along with some other footage, it helped me overcome difficulty I had expressing myself in English, and in a brief interview, to synthesize our procedures and the different ways indigenous communities appropriated the medium. Once it was finished, however, it began to function beyond this immediate purpose. It became an authentic portfolio for the project, and gained enormous visibility in cultural sectors interested in alternative communications projects. From Apprentice to Mediamaker: Expanding Distribution I then decided to produce a more consistent description of the project. Taking advantage of an opportunity I had to introduce the project to a new group, the Waiapi, I shot the video screenings in the village in an attempt to record their responses. This work resulted in The Spirit of TV (O Espirito da TV , the fourth of the series, 1990), a tape that conveyed the entire range of reflections which video had catalyzed among the Waiapi (2). Edited in a more progressive style, eliminating the voiceover and letting the Indians express themselves spontaneously in their own language, The Spirit of TV shows how the screenings stimulated discussions concerning - among other themes - the redefinition of their own identity in relation to others. Of particular significance was the growth of a pan-indigenous national consciousness rooted in the similar historical processes experienced by each group since contact, and in their common problems. As well, there were the political questions they had concerning the manipulation of the image: who is going to see us? how should they see us? etc.

Breaking out of the "ghetto" of indigenous and ethnographic festivals (3) and Anthropology and Communications departments The Spirit of TV opened up broader spaces for distribution. After receiving awards at foreign festivals and at the two largest Brazilian festivals (which generally shun conventional documentaries on indigenous people), it began to be broadcast on public television stations (TV Cultura/Sao Paulo, Funtelpa/Par) and even on French and Belgian commercial television (Canal +). Distribution is a slow process, yet it grows exponentially: with each new step, you are not exhausting a possibility, but opening up new ones. After a certain point, the production begins to have a life of its own. Beyond the videomaker's intiatives, the work of five non-exclusive distributors in Canada, the United States and Europe, coupled with word-of-mouth, distribution in universities, and the multiplying effect of more traditional festivals, special screenings, and retrospectives...all of this steadily expanded the distribution possibilities of the videotapes. This work with Native people began to extend to new communities and take on new forms. Through video, each group became acquainted with other indigenous groups previously unknown to them, and with whom they felt great affinity due to their linguistic and cultural similarities. For example, upon discovering groups which still maintain more traditional ways of life, the Waiapi and the Gaviao expressed their desire to go meet them so they could strengthen relations. So we organized several inter-village encounters, and from there emerged Meeting Ancestors (A Arca dos Zo'e, 1993) and We Gather as a Family (Eu J Fui Seu Irmao, 1993), which, like The Spirit of TV, were constructed exclusively on the basis of the indigenous peoples' statements. Meeting Ancestors, about the exchange between a visiting entourage of Waiapi and members of a Zoe village, met with great success, perhaps because of its narrative structure, but primarily because it brought to the screen an insight into the relationship between indigenous peoples. This generated renewed interest in the project on the part of international festivals and public television networks which had screened the trilogy, as this group of videos came to be called. The expansion of distribution continues to replenish the credibility of the project, which, like any enterprise, cannot survive without good marketing. As difficult as it is to admit, we can knock ourselves out demonstrating how important this experiment is for indigenous people, but if we do not produce a product for non-Native viewers which can be shared on a much broader level, those who view things from the outside, it will all be considered a useless effort. I get the impression that foundations dedicate much more effort and resources to establishing connections between experiments on a global level - international meetings, distribution - than to supporting more locally focused projects. In supporting a very localized project they feel theyre throwing money into a black hole - especially when it concerns consciousness-raising processes, the results of which are intangible. In contrast, they feel theyre optimizing their investments working at the global level. The publicity around the series also took on an added dimension (which is just as important as the ones already mentioned) by spreading the example, the idea, the method to other support groups, be they indigenous groups or popular movements, generally speaking. This is not to say that "Video in the Villages" was the precursor of those efforts, since similar experiments had proliferated all over the world well before its existence; rather, the fact of making extensive documentation of a successful

experiment accessible has certainly encouraged new initiatives. To that end, we have received several requests from within Brazil and other Latin American countries, and we are therefore producing two versions of the entire series in Spanish - one subtitled for distribution by support groups and the other in voice-over for exhibition in the villages. The propaganda often makes the project appear bigger than it is in reality, creating an illusion of a big communication network, when in fact it is a small experiment. But then the illusion turns the idea itself into a reality. And it was through this propaganda that suddenly a local public TV station called us to work on an Indian Program. I then convinced them that instead of producing a program on the Indians we should work on something with the Indians. So we are about to start a third dimension of the project, opening a window for a communication between the Indian communities of Mato Grosso and the urban audience, an experiment completely new in the Brazilian mediascape. Feedback from the North American Public Two factors have prompted me to return frequently to the United States. First, it was the place where my work was always received with the most enthusiasm. The North American foundations, always attentive to the issue of giving a voice to marginalized populations and ethnic minorities, made possible the continuation of this work through donations, made either on an institutional level to the project or on an individual level in the form of artist's grants. Secondly, the United States and Canada are perhaps the countries where the distribution of independent productions via theatrical exhibition in numerous festivals and thematic screenings is best articulated, and the use of audiovisual resources in teaching the most intense, especially in universities. I have always tried to plan my agenda in this way, combining visits to foundations for the purpose of negotiating financial support with the theatrical exhibition of works which today, as incredible as it may seem, are better known in the United States than in Brazil. Upon submitting a piece for consideration by an audience I did not know when I produced the videos, it became clear how an assemblage of images contained in a documentary can stir up a range of sentiments, moral and ethical values, concepts, and ideas that work to extrapolate "objective content," the explicit message of the videos. What is the background of this audience? My apprenticeship in this field came about in response to questioning by the audience in relation to my work on one hand, and to what I could observe in the emergent production of Native North Americans on the other, which offered a panoramic view of the particular situation of Native Americans in these countries. Native North American mediamakers have produced documentaries and fiction films that critically examine how representations of indigenous peoples produced by the cultural industry have been reflected in stereotypes that permeate current interethnic relations and vice versa(4,5,6,7,8). For me, these productions acted as a barometer of existing tensions in the relations between Indians and non-Indians, and helped me understand the origin of many questions raised by the North American public in relation to my work. Of course, as a white mediamaker, I am questioned through the lens of those tensions.

Here, I will give a brief summary of the questions that most commonly recur following screenings of "Video in the Villages." Some resemble questions raised by Brazilian and European audiences, and others are very specific to the North American context. I think much of my audience is attracted by the current fascination for the "Rainforest" and the exoticism of its inhabitants. People come with curiosity - which they often no longer feel in relation to their own indigenous people; at the same time, they take the socio-political and cultural context of the Native North Americans as a frame of reference. This context includes tensions affecting interracial relations, the stereotypes associated with Indians such as alcoholism and violence, the Native movement to regain control over their own images, etc (9). I believe that in any audience there will always be someone who asks the most extravagant questions having nothing to do with the subject of the video, such as, why do Indians paint themselves red and not blue. Since indigenous ceremonies often set the stage for documentaries, there is always some anthropologist (or amateur) saying they would like to see a more thorough treatment or be given explanations about a certain ritual without realizing that the focus here is on the communication project and not the ceremonies. Setting aside the more exotic questions, let us proceed to the recurring ones: How was it possible to construct a relationship with Indians that seems so friendly and intimate? Did you just arrive there to shoot, for how long, what were the Indians' reactions? This question always comes from a student or mediamaker who has already experienced difficulty obtaining access to the "other", and who has sensed how much a camera can interfere even more within the relationship. Since the act of documenting is an intervention usually conducted from the outside in, to overcome this distance between subject and object it is necessary to invest an enormous amount of time in research, but above all in living with them so as to establish a relationship of friendship and trust with the "other." Our video project did not come out of the blue. It did not develop as an isolated relationship, a negotiated arrangement for the purpose of shooting or anything like that. Instead, it originated out of a core relationship developed over years, a living relationship, centered around cooperation between indigenous and non-indigenous people, and forged for the purpose of confronting vital problems such as demarcation and protection of reservations from intruders, finding means of subsistence and fostering integration in the national economy, and developing strategies for negotiating with the government in order to obtain access to health and education. What distinguishes my relationship to indigenous people in the field is the fact that I bring something to them. This is not just in relation to the video project; it involves years of interaction and political militancy in support of indigenous organizations. I don't go there to "expropriate" their images. On the contrary, the objective is to offer them the instruments with which they can gain access to their images, to develop and recreate their own image. The procedure whereby these images are immediately shown to them leads them to appropriate the camera. This occurs both indirectly, from the moment they begin to direct my camera, and directly, during a second phase, when the camera is handed over to them. Why is there no evidence of difficulty in relationship to the camera? Because the relationship to the camera is the point of departure for everything. The presence of

the camera is what is creating, what is instigating the recording. For this reason, not only do people feel comfortable with the camera, they interact with it and often address it explicitly and directly. The camera is not transparent; it is more than a "presence," it is one of the actors on the stage. Often, the "politically correct" patrol is lurking behind this question. Many times, the following kinds of questions are more trenchant: Did the Indians see the videos once they had been edited? Do they know you are presenting their image in this way? At the end of several presentations, we were submitted to a veritable inquisition concerning our ethical conduct. It seems to me that this excess of protectionism is the modern version of paternalism. At times, the non-Indian public, concerned with being politically correct, can be more sensitive and vigilant than the Indians themselves. In general, Native people have rarely attended my talks or classroom presentations in Canada and the US, partly because they are held in non-Native institutions, but a few have appeared on occasion. In Chicago, I had the satisfaction of meeting a Native Canadian who approached me after the screening and very warmly told me that, through the images, he had been able to sense the Indians' confidence in me. For some this is crystal clear in the videos; for others, it is not. In relation to Meeting Ancestors, there was some question like: since our intervention seems to be so important in the process, why do we hide behind the camera? In this case, the patrol is pursuing another issue - not that I am manipulating the image of indigenous people, but rather that I am misleading the audience. In trying to show the effect video has in generating social dynamics like this, I am supposedly misrepresenting these events as authentic, initiated by the Indians themselves. What do indigenous people demand in exchange? What is the deal? I think it is impossible to judge from outside what is politically correct in this kind of relationship, not to mention establish norms such as fee structures whereby from now on, you have to pay a set amount in order to shoot in an indigenous community. Yet it is also impossible to assume the posture that "I am giving these people a voice," seeing to it that the public is made aware of their problems, etc., so "therefore, I am making my contribution." Apart from the assumptions about power inherent in one party giving voice to another, this statement is tantamount to saying: "I'm great, the Indians should thank me for giving them this opportunity." But there must be a form of exchange in the relationship affective, monetary, whatever. At one of my screenings, I made a statement which became a kind of provocation for certain documentary-makers who were justifying themselves as voicegivers. Upon presenting the encounters videos (Meeting Ancestors and We Gather as a Family), I commented on the fact that the Indians opportunity to meet each other was much more important to them than the documentaries that we subsequently produced. The audience reacted by saying that I was underestimating the value of the videos to raise public consciousness, etc., etc., etc. To which I responded, causing further irritation, that public consciousness-raising is important for public opinion, and the documentaries are good for us, but in no way will they alter the lives of the indigenous people.

I have benefited greatly as a videomaker,: the satisfaction of seeing work completed, receiving awards and recognition, massages my ego. Prior to making these documentaries, I would never have had the opportunity to travel around the world. But the exchange also helps provide the Indians with access to all this information and equipment to make their own experiments and connect themselves to so many other groups. By showing the Indians in this way, aren't you afraid of reinforcing pre-existing stereotypes? While audiences seem to expect Indians to pose as victims, as a way of expressing their compassion and solidarity for them, we find on the contrary that Indians think out their strategies of representation so as to appear very strong, even aggressive toward colonizers or invaders. Most of the documentaries and TV reports produced in Brazil on indigenous people tend, on one hand, to create a mystified image of the "good savage," and on the other, to lament: they are losing their lands, their culture, their language, etc... For me, it has always been crucial to show just the opposite. First, that the Indians do not go about life crying into their soup; quite the contrary: happiness, games, and clowning around are aspects of their daily lives. This is a characteristic which has been labeled the "ingenuity, innocence of the savage" (rural Brazilians who have lived among indigenous populations always say: "the Indian is a child"). Secondly, they are not passive victims in this process of change; on the contrary, they are fully conscious of the process of change they are experiencing. There is a whole discussion and internal dynamic at work between generations, incorporating some things from outside, rejecting others, preserving the memory of certain traditions and abandoning others. In trying to explode the myth of the "good savage" and the rhetoric of the victim by showing things the way they are, you inevitably touch very sensitive issues such as alcoholism, sexuality, and violence around which the negative stereotypes of Indians have been built. Yet, in the end, if we are speaking about the "other," it is necessary to show the differences and not to mask them. The question of appearing drunk on camera is discussed, for example, by the indigenous people themselves in the video The Spirit of TV. A Canadian distributor turned down the video, saying that I had disrespected the wishes of the Indians by including that scene and that the Canadian public would condemn the video for being politically incorrect. I am in disagreement with all of this, first, because at that moment, there were divergent opinions among the Indians on this subject; and secondly, because Waiwai's own opinion changes from one moment to the next. Therefore, I did not commit any disloyal act by including the scene. Recently, in the first video produced by the Waiapi themselves to be shown to a non-Indian audience, they appear completely drunk from beginning to end. This is simply because the video is about festivities, and, as Kasiripina the author himself, explains, for the Waiapi, drunkenness at a celebration is a socially and culturally valued attitude. By showing you the Indians strategies in manipulating their own image, am I handing the goods over to the enemy? I think the enemies the Indians have in mind when they conceive these strategies of self-representation - the goldminers or the lumberers of the region - certainly do not form part of my audience. My point is

precisely to show how their evolving discussion around self-representation is a conscious one. One person was shocked by the gratuitous, "violent murder" of the goldminers acted out in a short dramatized segment by the Enauene Naue in Video Cannibalism (Antropofagia Visual). I find it funny that people who think it is perfectly natural to watch hundreds of films in which Indians are killed by the dozen can think that the massacre of two goldminers invading an indigenous reservation is shocking. The public seems not to be aware of the scale, intensity and violence of the conflicts that are occurring in the Amazon today. Sometimes shock can be a good way to confront reality; furthermore, this play-acting is nothing compared to what is really going on. Why dont the women speak in your tapes? Is there a woman shooting as part of the project? Would it have been different if the video had been presented by a woman? This question crops up in almost all the screenings Ive had, and its recurrence is inevitable in North American audiences. My response is very simple: in primitive societies more than any others, the two genders constitute very distinct universes with their own spaces and activities, which implies the existence of tensions and forms of competition between them. As I man I do not have full access to the feminine world of the Indians. But in this regard, there is an even more determining factor: everything I have said about the relationship of the village to the outside world falls into the men's domain - this is one of the main reasons why the video equipment has been restricted to the masculine sphere. This is much more their own choice than mine. Women express uneasiness approaching these strange objects. On the other hand, video is immediately seen as an instrument of power, both in terms of the content of the videos we bring them, and conversely, in the way they use video to as a vehicle for internal disputes or interethnic relations, topics that are also within the masculine sphere. By taking video to a certain village, we are furthering the political project of the leader of this community. It is thus up to him to choose who will be responsible for the equipment. The choice has always been for a son, a nephew or some other close relative to do it, so that he can retain control of the process. Even if video is presented by a woman, as has happened on occasion, it is immediately incorporated into the political sphere, which is masculine. It is clear, however, that were we to have more cameras available, this experiment could be expanded to include women, and then obviously nothing would be better than to have women carry this work forward if they so chose. Don't you think it's contradictory to introduce a new technology to help them maintain their own culture? Aren't you just precipitating changes which would lead them in the opposite direction? Aren't you creating a new category of Indians: those who retain the power because they have video and therefore produce their own version of things? I think this question arises in audiences all over the world. To a great majority of people, the Indians represent a fictive screen onto which they project ideas of

wisdom and equilibrium, harmony with nature, collectivity, etc. And these people would like this dream to remain untouched, the Indians to be preserved in a type of human zoo, or at least would like the changes in these societies to be delayed as long as possible. This ideology would be inconsequential if it remained at that, but unfortunately it permeates our entire society, and can have grave, concrete implications under various circumstances. All the official indigenous affairs policies in Brazil corroborate with this type of conception, and for this reason, the government is always trying to distinguish the "authentic," "pure" Indians from the "civilized" Indians. In addition to this distinction, it excludes the so-called "acculturated" ones from the jurisdiction of protective legislation for indigenous people, and groups them in under the common citizenship. And who are the authentic ones? The naked ones? If they have civil identity cards, are they no longer Indian? If they live in the city are they no longer Indian? This dream has nothing to do with reality. Indigenous communities are being submitted to brutal processes of change. And it's not just the pressure from the outside: with each new generation, there is an increasing desire for change coming from within the community. If they want change, who are we to impose status quo on them? I believe that the real dilemma is between change for the worse versus change for the better. Like everyone, Indians want things, they want to consume. Are they going to be eternal beggars or are they going to be economically integrated in some way? Are they going to be integrated one-by-one as the capitalist model would have it, or will they be integrated as a group, maintaining their internal organization? Are they going to exploit their natural resources according to the predatory model which surrounds them or are they going to experiment with environmentally sustainable solutions? Those are the challenges facing them, and there is no point in dreaming, because in the meantime, their world is falling apart. In the case of video, some villages had already been exposed to large television networks when the video project arrived, but most had not. Some communities then acquired satellite dishes and used the monitor I gave them to watch TV. But so what? Television will come sooner or later, there is no point in getting paralyzed by fear of change, paranoia about the responsibility for interference. So many other social categories have already been created: the indigenous bureaucrat, the indigenous truck driver, the policeman, the professor, etc., what is the problem with having the indigenous videomaker? The problem is not in incorporating new objects, new customs, but in how to assimilate them. If a new form of technology such as video can be incorporated and used to increase self-esteem, what is the problem? Videomaking makes young people proud of themselves: ("we also know how to use the whiteperson's instrument to film our things)," and reverses the process that was triggered by the invasion of mainstream television. It fights fire with fire. In these videos, what did the Indians do and what was done by you? In what way is the indigenous gaze different from our own? What do Indians prefer to document? Is there some taboo in relation to the image? The fact of the camera passing into the Indians' hands creates a great expectation on the part of the non-indigenous audience where the revelation of a new insight regarding the indigenous gaze, aesthetically, as well as in terms of content, is concerned. Viewing images of Indians shooting in my documentaries also generates

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a certain confusion where the authorship of the documentaries is concerned, even though this is unmistakably delineated in the credits. When we make it clear that the video made by the Indians is almost exclusively for internal consumption in the villages, and as such is distinct from the "Video in the Villages" series about the project, it always generates a sense of disappointment. But the Indians are taking their first steps, and their work, like any home video, cannot be judged according to aesthetic standards. It doesn't matter whether the image shakes and the takes are very long. What is important is the social and cultural dynamic associated with this image. In terms of content, people tend to expect the Indians to immediately use the camera to record problems and denounce perpetrators. But this expectation is much more a projection on our part. For them, the first and greatest interest is in documenting what they consider to be attractive, those things that make them proud-in other words, their ceremonies, their songs, their dances. And this is not just for the purpose of showing these activities to outsiders, but above all so that they can enjoy them. A non-indigenous audience certainly couldnt stand watching six hours or more of a recorded ceremony. But if they did have enough patience for that, and if they understood better the space in which the recording was made and the rituals themselves, they would be able to appreciate how precise the indigenous videomakers are in their approach. For the anthropologists who have worked on the project, it has always been a revelation to see show they conceive a ceremonial structure, and seeing the images produced by the younger cameraman, I myself discovered several shooting angles which hadn't occurred to me previously. Brazil still doesn't have an urban indigenous population involved in cultural production according to conventional standards. We have artisans in the villages, but we don't have painters or sculptors exhibiting their work in galleries, not to mention filmmakers or photographers. We are only now witnessing the first generation of urbanized Indians gaining access to the universities in states where the indigenous population is more pronounced, such as Amazonas and Mato Grosso. Even in non-Native society, cultural production such as cinema and video is still a very elite activity in Brazil, primarily because of its high cost. I myself was shocked when a distributor in Chicago recently called me saying that they were organizing an exhibition of videos on negritude and could I give them the names of black videomakers in Brazil: I was unable to remember a single name. Actually, black people constitute at least 40% of the Brazilian population (not 0.1% like the Indians). We have a huge number of black musicians, dancers and actors, but I cant think of any filmmaker or documentarist. Recently, there has been an enormous proliferation of video production within popular movements - unions, slum-dwellers, street children, etc. However, the material produced in this context, like that of the Indians, is restricted to these organizations mainly because the themes and language are designed to contribute to their internal dynamics. What is the final conclusion? Finally, what do I think after receiving so many questions and suggestions, so much criticism, advice and praise? When I made the videos, I certainly did not have a clear concept of what specific audience I would reach and what the resulting

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message would be. By getting into this type of distribution network, one ends up reaching a very diverse audience. It is impossible to please, or be understood in the same way by Greeks and Trojans. What would the understanding of other, much larger audiences from whom I have not received feedback be? What was in the minds of the Norwegians, Australians, or Chinese who saw the tapes? It is difficult to know for sure, but perhaps the answer received throughout this American marathon certainly serves as an example. Of course, we produce something so others can see it, but we don't necessarily have to submit it to audience standard in the same way as commercial television productions. Engaging in self-criticism while conceiving the tapes, I was always concerned with making something that would be attractive to the public, that is, beautiful cinematography, cuts on action, rapid editing for an audience used to consuming visual culture developed according to television standards. A bit of humor is always fundamental. But the content is really the expression of a vision, and it is delivered from a personal point of view. It is not molded in order to satisfy the expectations of any specific audience, but precisely to transmit its own ideas. The videos reached diverse audiences without being made for any audience in particular. They were shown on TV networks without having been shot in that format, and without using television language. Upon reflection, I think my editor, Tutu Nunes - my direct collaborator in the editing room - was always my immediate audience. If, for example, a video like Video Cannibalism (Antropofagia Visual) is limited to a very restricted audience because it treats sensitive themes like sexuality and violence, it doesn't matter. I do not regret it, because without such work the chronicle of the experiment would remain incomplete. Producing video is a personal compulsion, its a little like writing in a diary, to leave behind a testimonial record of how people experienced and understood the process. I always concentrated much more on the internal dynamics of the project in the villages, which is both the origin and the priority, than on the impact the documentaries might have on audiences. Sometimes, I ask myself: if I change this or that would it facilitate comprehension, would it help prevent a certain misunderstanding? The fact that the documentaries entered into distribution clearly prompts me to reflect more on this whole other dimension, namely the reception by non-indigenous people. All my apprenticeship in relation to the audience will be unconsciously incorporated into my next editorial decisions, where I will try to be more clear or more provocative with regard to certain issues. But I have always been wary of letting myself be completely absorbed by documentary concerns and classical way of seeing. There is, therefore, an ongoing tension between these two dimensions - the project and the documentaries - and hence a balance to work toward. The current development of a local public television program produced in Mato Grosso in collaboration with indigenous communities for an urban audience constitutes a new perspective for the "Video in the Villages" project. The idea for the program is to establish a dialogue between the audience and the Indians interviewing the former, then taking it to the Indians for a response - and this will encourage the Indians, as well as the crew responsible for the production, to concentrate their attention specifically on the audience issue. Just to conclude, I would like to say that although I have elaborated here on the misunderstandings, shocks and expectations of audiences with regard to my videos, nevertheless, much of the audience reacted in positive ways. Many simply did not ask

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questions because the content seemed straightforward to them, and they came forward after the discussions to thank me and to express their pleasure at the entirely new vision the videos gave them. Throughout these peregrinations I sometimes feel myself doing in the United States and Canada exactly what I do in Amazon, only I would call this "Video in the Cities." From audience to audience, from classroom to classroom, these documentaries take a trajectory similar to the videos we circulate in the villages: an electronic network channeling new information, stirring up controversies, and provoking discussions and comparisons. As for this text, perhaps it will be useful in supplying the North American audience with a little background on the Brazilian reality before screenings. And who knows? Maybe by reversing the focus of the discussions - that is, working from the Brazilian example - instead of submitting ourselves to so many interrogations, we can question the audience about the vision they have of their own minorities.

Bibliographic and Filmographic References: 1. Vincent Carelli, "Video in the Villages: Utilization of Video-Tapes as an Instrument of Ethnic Affirmation Among Brazilian Indians," in CVA (Commission on Visual Anthropology) Newsletter, pp. 10-15. 2. Dominique Gallois and Vincent Carelli, "Video nas Aldeias: a experincia dos Waiapi," in Cadernos de Campo (Universidade de Sao Paulo) 2:2 (1992), pp. 25-36; "Vido dans les Villages, l'exprience Waiapi," in Lumires/Cinma No. 32 (Qubec, 1993/1994), pp. 40-51; "Video in the Villages: The Waiapi Experience," in CVA (Commission on Visual Anthropology) Newsletter, pp. 7-11. 3. Jacqueline Urla, "Breaking All the Rules: An Interview with France Peters," in Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Fall, 1993). 4. Victor Masayesva, Jr. (Hopi), Imagining Indians (1992, 58 min.). 5. Randy Redroad (Cherokee), Haircuts Hurt (1992, 10 min.); Cow Tipping--the Militant Indian Waiter (1992, 10 min.); High Horse (1994, 40 min.). 6. Victor Masayesva, Jr., "The Indigenous Eye, An interview with Zapotec filmmaker Crisanto Manzano Avella," in Aboriginal Voices Vol. 1, No. 4 (Fall, 1994). 7. Alanis Obomsawin, Kanehsatake - 270 Years of Resistance (1993, 120 min.). Canada. 8. Sandra Osawa (Makah), Lighting the Seventh Fire (1994, 48 min.). 9. Fung, Richard, Working Through Cultural Appropriation, FUSE, Summer 1993,