An international ethnographic film seminar in the Ethnographic Exploratory at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, 26 June 2025
NAFA, together with the film project ‘Madame Lisbet’, held an ethnographic film seminar in the Ethnographic Exploratory of the University of Copenhagen. The organizers were delighted to see Holtedahl’s colleagues, former and present students of visual anthropology at University of Tromsø, and Holtedahl’s family come together. We extend a warm thank you to Barbara at University of Copenhagen for preparing the place for us.
There could hardly be a more fitting way to describe Holtedahl’s career than the seminar’s title Contrasting Worlds. For over fifty years, Holtedahl’s long-lasting engagements in northern Cameroon and in a small fishing village in Northern Norway have shaped her career as an initiator of several collaborative projects between West Africa and Northern Norway. Beyond this, Holtedahl is a visionary, artist, scholar and an ethnographic filmmaker. Holtedahl’s career as a visual anthropologist began in Maine Soroa, Niger in 1971, after accomplishing 5,700 miles together with her husband in their small Citroen 3CV from Paris to Niamey. In her book, Maine Soroa, she writes,
Our understanding of the world sprang from our safe, protected lives in Norway and Denmark. We were curious. We had a great appetite for discovering the world, but we were completely unprepared for the reality of what those notions entailed. We had no idea that we had set in motion a process of change that would transform our view of the world.
Niger – Norway
Holtedahl’s first, what could best be described as an educational, didactic, film, Niger-Norge (1975) is composed of photocollage and film clips from Tromsø and Maine Soroa. With her use of sound and photographs, she teaches us about the women’s and girls’ roles in both places.
Holtedahl takes up the notion of ethnocentrism, partly to provoke the then-contemporary discussions she was surrounded by in Northern Norway. What she considered herself as beautiful images and experiences from Maine Soroa, she hoped to convey to the audience in Tromsø. Her efforts were received with pity towards “the poor people of Africa”. Many chose to see poverty instead of beauty. Not only was her material perceived through an ethnocentric lens, but there were more challenges to come as Holtedahl continued to pursue cross-cultural communication and collaborative visual anthropology in between Europe and Africa.
At that time, the common challenge for anthropologists was to get the visual point across. Many spent their careers fighting to convey that images and film were legitimate tools for research. It was a struggle to gain recognition for the visual within a field dominated by textual anthropologists who dismissed drawings and film as legitimate anthropological methods. Moreover, it was all male, Holtedahl adds.
Holtedahl recalls her professors at University of Oslo, Axel Sommerfeldt and Fredrik Barth, as wonderful and challenging, yet very serious and intimidating to students. Moreover, neither of them used images in their publications. Hva mutter gjør er alltid viktig (1987) is a publication Holtedahl calls her most important academic contribution, but it is without pictures. Quentin Gausset asks Holtedahl, “where did the visual go?”.
It was the spirit of times.To be taken seriously one had to primarily use text. “There was a negative attitude to pictures. My professors – they were a bit arrogant when it came to continental European ethnography. Like the Germans talking about the cultural items and contamination of culture and all that.” Despite this climate, Holtedahl curated an exhibition of Dogon-masks for the Oslo Museum in 1972. “I have been so interested in seeing and I spent hours looking at masks from Africa, you see. Somehow, I was pulled by greedy eyes. I love looking at people. I take great pleasure in following gestures and expressions and reading emotions – just without any other ambitions. So, this was the milk I drank in the beginning. They were not interested in my visual interests. It was like I wasn’t ‘pure’ enough, sharp enough on the analytical enterprise.”
Le Chateau
Holtedahl’s Le Chateau (2018) was screened in full and the remaining time was spent on discussions. According to Peter Crawford, Le Chateau is a masterpiece, but it did not come easily. Roughly ten years of passive and ten years of active filmmaking.
In much of her previous work, Holtedahl has emphasised women and gender issues, but in Le Chateau, as in the preceding film about the Sultan of Adamaoua Province, The Sultan’s Burden (1993), she focuses on the elite, rich and powerful men. In Le Chateau, Holtedahl was not allowed to film Al Hajji Abbo’s four wives, excluding the scenes we see in the film.
Al Hajji Abbo was not only one of Cameroon’s most influential figures but also a towering presence in West Africa. Holtedahl recalls him representing military power, police power, political power and financial power. Despite being uneducated and starting his career as a driver, he was a self-made man who skillfully leveraged societal upheavals to advance his own interests.
For a very brief synopsis, it can be said the film follows the construction of Abbo’s palace in the outskirts of Ngaoundere during the 2000s. More broadly, it touches on issues such as power, land acquisition, relationships between the Occident and West Africa. According to Holtedahl, it shows how people get rich in Africa, what it means to stay rich, and how necessary it is for rich people to deal with the West.
Holtedahl recalls that Abbo was very difficult to work with. He was a man of ambiguity and of two personalities. One was friendly and challenging, while the other was unpredictable and nasty.
Crawford asks a rather surprising question, “Did Abbo consider you as a friend?”
“He certainly considered me as a close friend but as a female one, and his ideas about women do not correspond to the occidental, western concepts. So, when we are together alone – you see in the last scenes – the way he behaves, he confesses a lot of things about his wishes and thoughts. He asks me things about the white people. It’s very obvious that I am his friend. He’s behaving very warmly, friendly and trustworthily. I have always been able to trust that he will be there; to allow me to get into his house and participate in events but he’s really an unpleasant person, often. He has been very tough with me, in a way that has been painful. He has shouted at me to get out with the camera and after four years of filming he refused the film ever to be screened. After some years, I got accustomed little by little and just started to film again and again. Little by little, we became friends. I started to understand that he had two personalities. The other person I liked very much because he was challenging, he showed concern for me. He asked questions about my husband and my family and my health, and my problems with the university. He supported me in the crisis. Somehow, he consoled me. Like saying, this is how it is in Africa, this way of behaving.”
Crawford adds that the question about friendship is an important one. How we work with people in the film, whether it is easier to make films with people if you are friends, if you sympathize with them, one way or another. You like them for what they are doing or are. “I’m asking because there are examples in documentary and in ethnography film of filmmakers who have almost made it their hallmark to film people who they in principle hate. Like Nick Broomfield, the British documentary film maker who is trained by our mutual friend Colin Young. Several of his films are made about people he dislikes, yet he manages to portray them in a way that doesn’t show them as nasty but with respect. He made a film about (Eugène) Terre’ Blanche, who was a white supremacist in South Africa and it was amazing how he could make such a nice portrait, honest and revealing, not praising him but representing him as a human being, I suppose.”
“Is it easier to make a film with people we like or is it easier with people we dislike?”
Holtedahl and Abbo could have been described as friends. However, in the film Abbo makes it clear that friendships between an African and European are not possible due to different cultural views. That a European is interested in an African if there’s money in question. This is how Abbo interprets his relationality to his European colleagues and employees. Not through friendship, but through common financial interest. However, Abbo’s friendship and friendliness with Holtedahl didn’t match this explanation.
My wonder remains. How did Al Hajji Abbo come to place his trust in her and allow her to follow him nearly everywhere with her camera. Who gets to be welcomed into the most intimate sections of life? Who is trusted and who establishes a strong mutual liking and bond in between their protagonists? Surely not everyone. The skill of gaining access has been just one of Holtedahl’s many qualities throughout her career. She dares to touch, she dares to come close, to encourage and yet address critical questions. She has placed her life in danger several times pursuing this path. While watching Le Chateau, I couldn’t help but ask, did Abbo agree to be filmed in order to become a film star in his own film? All this despite the potential risks and consequences the exposure might bring along? He wanted the white people to learn about his richness and intelligence, but what else did we learn from Le Chateau?
According to Holtedahl, this experience taught her more than she could bear about power in Africa. “It’s been so painful and tough to fulfil the work that I wouldn’t recommend any anthropologists to take the risks”. In spite of this, she believes the film is more important than she believed, and that we don’t see descriptions of how richness develops day-to-day in Africa. “We always get the information about Africa from the Norwegian point of view. It’s linked to westerners – not from the bottom-up descriptions so to speak.”
Collaborative film-making
Holtedahl is asked whether she considers her films collaborative, but there is no simple answer to this. Holtedahl herself wouldn’t call Le Chateau collaborative, but based on a reciprocal relationship. Also, as a continuous fight. “A struggle. It was a humiliating yet gratifying process with many compromises…The collaborative elements were very violent. It was collaborative in a sense that he [Abbo] accepted me and excused himself when he went over the top. He had more power in a local setting but he felt continuously that I could potentially have more power than him. He wanted the film for his mausoleum but at the same time he also felt it was dangerous for him. It was a tough game.”
Crawford adds that in the wider context, collaborative film making has been a bit of a buzzword for twenty years and it is often regarded as a rosy red thing that we are doing because we are nice people and we want to collaborate but that it is much more complex than that. “I think a lot that’s been called collaborative is not collaborative or is so in a way that almost can be considered as neo-colonialist. On the other hand, I think observational film-making and a lot of films that you have made are definitively within the ideas of observational film making. Colin Young once said that all observational film is collaborative. Because you can’t make these kinds of films without getting into close relationships with people. Not necessarily friendships as we talked before but a close relationship.”
Continuing the discussion problematising collaboration in anthropological filmmaking, Lisbet reflects on her own intentions.
“The idealized version of my own ambitions throughout my academic career has been to problematize the practice in our Occidental world, of what they call a collaboration. I feel that everything I’ve tried to do as a politically engaged academic, is to criticise and correct and oppose colonial aspects, as I see them. What was strange and foreign to me was the academic community and how academics behaved. I observed anthropologists more eagerly than anybody else. Anthropologists use the word collaborative, but in my eyes, don’t practise reflexive analysis of their own gaze, own look upon others. I screened the film on Ersfjordbotn on television and my anthropological colleagues criticized me for having exposed the bad taste of the fishermen’s housewives. With all their China and plastic flowers. They said that it was an ethical problem and I should not have been allowed to screen it. It’s about patronizing, even though you don’t see it yourself. When you are an eager anthropologist, and start talking on behalf of others, you very quickly jump into an assumption that you can estimate what way you can take care of others. This kind of tendency is practiced all over in the development institutions. They want to take care of [the subjects] and they use the word collaborative.”
“Luckily, when this discussion arose, I received letters from these women saying it is the first documentary on women in this village. The women were very proud of it and they could feel that the film allowed them to feel stronger as actors outside the village. They could breathe.”
“For me, in my whole academic career, what has been the greatest experience of success is the happiness of the women from that village.”
At the end of the seminar, Carolina Némethy asks, “If you were to do visual anthropology today, as someone young, what would it be? What would you do differently? As technology has changed so much, the world is so different.”“I would be an activist for sensuality and erotics, and the violence of technology” are Holtedahl’s first reflections. Due to today’s technology, we can get closer. Holtedahl refers to a recent ethnographic film made by Albert Osbæck Milking (2025) about the use of technology at Danish cow farms, following lives co-produced by cows, humans, and machines. “This is in itself a field and how do we become insensitive? That’s something I would like to work on… We grew up on a farm, my father’s family. It was a tiny and very poor farm. Some eight cows and four pigs and a horse. I remembered all these fantastic things, when I saw Albert’s film. You see these beautiful animals and I have been living with cows for fifty years in Africa. In the film, these beautiful cows go into machines, the steel arms going in and out of their bodies and throwing the contents of their bodies around. It’s an incredibly visual thing. Very violent. But I think we don’t deal enough with sensuality and more intimate emotions. I can see the social organization, but we are scared of touching different aspects of lives and relationships. I would like to push it.”
References:
Holtedahl, Lisbet 2023 : Maine Soroa
Holtedahl, Lisbet 2018 : Le Chateau
Holtedahl, Lisbet 1993: Sultan’s Burden
Holtedahl, Lisbet 1987: Hva mutter gjør er alltid viktig
Holtedahl, Lisbet 1975: Niger – Norge
Osbæck Adelkilde, Albert 2025: Milking
Reference to an interview:
Manca Filak and Sarah Lunacek 2021: Q&A Lisbet Holtedahl