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>> And so what we have are some bringer's forth, some makers, some beginners, some growers,
and the first of them is Peter Biella who is Director of the Program in Visual Anthropology
here. If you don't know about that program, it's really worth looking into because it's
terrific. He's department chair. Department of Anthropology, his PhD is in cultural anthropology
from Temple University where he also has a Master's in Culture and Communications. His
B.A. and M.A. were here at SF State in film production. His theoretical interests range
from East African Pastoralism to the anthropology of AIDS and just because everybody needs a
little take home weird fact. In 2009, he was ethnographic consultant at Pixar Studios for
the feature film John Carter of Mars. Peter, some of what you've done is in the program
and is posted on these screens. We're going to get, I think, a clip of what you did right
now. If we could have that and as soon as we are finished with our clip you can talk.
>> Sure. >> Tell us what we've seen.
^M00:01:17 [ Foreign Language Spoken ]
^M00:02:50 [ Clapping ]
^M00:02:53 So
this
is a film that you've read a little bit about in your programs. It was screened in several
places this year. Won some awards. Tell us about the project and if you have an inclination
about your own creative impulse and sense of creative engagement with what you were
doing. >> Most of the films I've been doing in Tanzania
over the last 6 years have been AIDS education from outside people. And so this was actually
a unique film that was not intentionally designed to teach anybody anything. It was just a portrait
of this man who in the clip who's the one who got the cell phone call so we didn't see
him. He's this chairman, 33 years old, a unique [inaudible] extremely effective competent
man who we admired a great deal. My colleague, Kelly Askew [phonetic], at the University
of Michigan knew him because of a grant that she had on looking at the World Bank in the
region where he works. But she found that he was so interesting that she invited me
to do this film with her. She's also got peripheral relationships with feature films but all of
us and the things that we don't talk about. Anyway, Frank was an enormously successful
guy working with huge problems. And the metaphor, the title Lions is lawyers who are corrupt,
illiteracy, land grabbing, and the AIDS epidemic. All of these things that are facing him as
a chairman, what he does about it and the reason I picked this clip is that you can
-- I mean it's only 90 seconds but the women are very reluctant to have their daughters
be educated in the community. And it seemed to me that he and his colleague did an amazing
job convincing them of the importance even to themselves that their daughters get training
can become nurses. This is a women's group who we have found in our work in AIDS education,
you know women are really the motive for us for change among Maasai. They especially with
all the problems that they've had lately of global warming and sedentarization, cattle
disease, human disease. All these problems that are really within the last 30 years for
the Maasai who previously were very independent suddenly they're beset with these problems.
And this leader is very effective at helping them overcome them.
^M00:05:27 >> One of the agenda of this program is to
alert our fellow faculty members to what creative endeavors look like in contrast, perhaps,
to the more traditional scholarly endeavors. And visual anthropology is the place where
these two things converge -- >> Yes, right.
>> I suppose. When you're making a work of anthropology like this --
>> Okay. >> Which is also a film, do you regard yourself
as an artist, as a creator or as something else?
>> Right. Right. In my other work for AIDS education, there really is a very clear scholarly
goal. We have kind of established methodology of intervention and how to do it but in a
film like this one which is more of an artistic portrait, I really didn't anticipate the more
-- this more rigidly academic agenda involved. However, I've worked with the section of Maasai
that this man is with for 30 years and I recognize the important touch points. So in that sense,
academic knowledge informed the choices that we made in filming.
>> Let me interrupt you for a second here. >> Okay, I still haven't told you about the
creative. I'll do it in just a second. >> [Multiple speakers] open this up for question.
Yeah, but I want to know this because it's really key. When can we see the whole thing
here? >> Yes. I won't say the film is locked in
the science building. I won't say that but it is. But I do have another copy. How about
-- you know I was thinking of having a screening of a number of films maybe in [inaudible]
theater, that would be nice. >> Wonderful.
>> Maybe you and I can talk. >> Now you can answer the other part of that
question. >> So one of the issues in doing this kind
of filmmaking is still called veritae [phonetic], right? But we filmed over a period of 30 days.
And we're not telling him what to do or what crises he should face. So we're there.
^M00:07:33 It's kind of catch as catch can filming. And
as a consequence of that we don't have the standard narrative arc where you have a crisis
and we work our way through it and it gets worse. And then you resolve it like a Hollywood
film so that the technique of the creative elements, let's say, is kind of a vignette
[phonetic] filming where events happened and we do our best to pursue them but the vignettes
have their own sort of arc. And then he has one crisis, women's education. And then there's
a spy in his meeting and he's being sued. And the spy is reporting to the other attorney.
That's another crisis. And so it's a different kind of narrative story line that we're working
with that I've found is good especially for if you don't have a lot of time to film. You
know I'm kind of working on this vignette model of storytelling with the through line
being the identity of the lead character but whatever crisis hits him is what hits him.
You know we don't have huge budgets and we don't have a year to spend with him which
might be ideal. >> Makes me think that your students in visual
anthropology could do a lot to help reality TV.
>> Actually it was a visual anthropologist that got the first COPS, the first cop show
was a Master's project at USC. >> Interesting. Let's open this up to questions
and comments from the colleagues who are sitting here.
>> I'm curious how you handled the language situation like do you speak [inaudible] --
>> Right. >> -- [inaudible] all that?
>> They're not speaking Swahili. They're speaking in a Maasai language called Maa but I work
closely with translators. I don't speak Maa although I've heard it's so much that I sort
of -- I know what's happening in a way. It's hard to describe but I don't usually make
mistakes based on not catching the details. >> We have time for one question or comment.
Yeah. Yes. >> How much of the labor, creative labor and
[inaudible] labor post production? >> Because of the strange vignette structure
of this one, we realized while shooting that we had to create the whole story while we
were there. And we interviewed the chairman, Frank.
>> You actually had 90 minute film. >> It's a 46. It ended up being 46 minutes.
>> And [inaudible] -- >> We shot maybe 15 hours but we had him introduce
each one of these segments sitting there, you know. So he's really the narrator of the
film but I have to say -- >> Yes.
>> -- one if [inaudible] film festival and Frank went and he got a standing ovation.
I'm so excited about that. So he really hit the jackpot.
>> Thank you so much. ^M00:10:34
[ Clapping ] ^M00:10:38
[ Silence ] ^M00:10:40