Ethnographic, Structuralist and Real Time Filmmaking

Ethnographic, Structuralist and Real Time Filmmaking takes inspiration from Dan Graham, who described Lange’s work as being ‘between three poles of film: the anthropological, structuralist, and real-time “narrative” filmmaking’. This chapter introduces the film theory and aesthetic analysis of Lange’s real time, sparsely edited, observational style, which shared some of the structural parameters that Nöel Burch attributed to ‘primitive cinema’—a ‘purer’ cinema reduced to its basic elements and untainted by the bourgeois ideology of commercial cinema, which he termed the ‘primitive mode of representation’ (PMR). It examines what is at stake in Lange’s work, particularly his extended temporality. I argue that duration releases the workers’ singularity and subjectivity. Observation and duration, with the camera displaying a sense of solidarity, have regained significance among contemporary moving image artists exploring the subject of labour (Harun Farocki and Kevin Jerome Everson). Ethnographic film discourses serve here to examine the politics of representation and the social and political inflections embedded in Lange’s early works, such as Studies of Family Groups (1972) and throughout his Work Studies (1972–77).