BITTER HONEY comes to theaters October 2014
RL: I was doing research in the mid-90s in Indonesia, I was looking at a couple of different questions, one of which was the relationship of culture to mental illness; and specifically that recovery or outcomes for people of a severe illness is actually better in the developing world. So if you develop schizophrenia or have a psychotic illness in Nigeria or Brazil or Indonesia, you're actually going to return more quickly to your family than you would in the United States…return to work, have fewer hospitalizations...so it was a big puzzle. So I was doing kind of standard anthropological research and it was just the beginning of the kind of “digital revolution” and I had a colleague who was a filmmaker. This is in '96-'97...she came and shot some of my research and then when I came back to UCLA and started teaching, I realized the footage was really great for teaching. I mean it really brought students in and allowed them to understand some of the concepts and theories we were looking at in anthropology but in a much more direct way than you get from reading a book chapter or a journal article. So I started integrating film into my research in the early 2000's and then as the years progressed, I got more and more interested and pretty much became a filmmaker in addition to being an anthropologist. So from that point to now we've shot probably about 8,000 to 9,000 hours on a whole range of topics relative to anthropology. So we've done a dozen films on mental illness, on the sex trade, on gender based violence, etc…the latest film, Bitter Honey is on polygamy and gender based violence in Bali. So, to answer your question, I think filmmaking allows students and the general public to see and to more directly experience--more than you can get in a book or article--what the concepts are and the relevance of theory to people's lives. I've found that it's much more engaging and I mean, I write books. I'm finishing up a manuscript right now. But with my students--and I've taught thousands of students--when I put on a movie it can generate hours of discussion and it allows them to really understand the material in a different way than they would get from something written. I think that the future of anthropology and ethnography is in the integration of different forms of media.
"I think that the future of anthropology and ethnography is in the integration of different forms of media."
We're doing an e-book now--it's a study guide. We were just doing a pilot, and we're probably going to do that for all the movies...interspersed in the study guide are clips from the movies and outtakes, which is a much more immersive way to understand something than just reading.
MS: I think that that's true of academia in general, that there needs to be more integration of mediums.
RL: Particularly in the social sciences, when you're dealing with very human based issues and particularly in anthropology when you want students to understand other times and places and cultures that are really radically different from what they're used to.
MS: One thing that struck me in learning more about your documentary work...You mentioned the 8,000 hours of footage and also that you spent that you spent about 7 years in the filming of Bitter Honey...?
RL: On and off, we would go a couple times a year for two or three weeks at a shoot. So it wasn't 7 [consecutive] years but we also had very good relationships with our Indonesian collaborators. So now we have like a second generation--I have my field assistants’ and collaborators’ nephews and children and they're doing some of the work--the filming on the ground continuously over those years. I guess what I'm saying is we don't have to be on site. We would come on site for 2-3 weeks at a time but it was for years.
MS: How do you gain people’s trust, encourage them to open up to you and to keep the necessary distance when recording a documentary?
RL: I get that a lot because we've dealt with a number of very kind of difficult and sensitive subjects as I mentioned, we did the first film series in the developing world on mental illness, we did 6 portraits of different people with different forms of mental illness and we did a film on the sex trade, and also a film on the Indonesian mass killings of 1965. So it's very kind of intense material and it makes the need for behaving properly--ethnically with your subjects, your collaborators, your participants. So to answer your question, I think it comes down to some pretty basic human aspects: being truthful, being trustworthy, following through on your commitments, being understanding and compassionate and being a [part] of people's lives. For example, the subjects of our films knew that we would come back the following year or six months later, they knew that we were available and weren't just coming for a month or two months and then disappearing and they'd never see us again. Because certainly the first year we were shooting people pretty much hid everything. They made up stories about how great they're lives were. It was only after two or three years, as they saw that we came back, we showed them the footage, we showed them rough cut and assemblies of the film, they saw where we were going with it and they began to kind of really open up with their lives. And so to think the first time you do this sort of work you're going to get something approaching truth from people is a mistake. It comes down to behaving ethically. On every professional level you can. And also on a personal level. If you treat people properly, if you treat them kindly and professionally and ethically, you will generally get a good result and you don't exploit people. And there is a lot of filmmaking out there--documentary filmmaking that doesn't treat people ethically. A film, this is kind of an extreme example, I mean I don't know if you ever saw Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen)--in the beginning of Borat which is actually a very funny film, he goes to this village in Bulgaria and pays people $3 for their image and he totally lies to them. And he got sued by everyone. So there are...very unethical...
MS: I think that that's true of academia in general, that there needs to be more integration of mediums.
RL: Particularly in the social sciences, when you're dealing with very human based issues and particularly in anthropology when you want students to understand other times and places and cultures that are really radically different from what they're used to.
MS: One thing that struck me in learning more about your documentary work...You mentioned the 8,000 hours of footage and also that you spent that you spent about 7 years in the filming of Bitter Honey...?
RL: On and off, we would go a couple times a year for two or three weeks at a shoot. So it wasn't 7 [consecutive] years but we also had very good relationships with our Indonesian collaborators. So now we have like a second generation--I have my field assistants’ and collaborators’ nephews and children and they're doing some of the work--the filming on the ground continuously over those years. I guess what I'm saying is we don't have to be on site. We would come on site for 2-3 weeks at a time but it was for years.
MS: How do you gain people’s trust, encourage them to open up to you and to keep the necessary distance when recording a documentary?
RL: I get that a lot because we've dealt with a number of very kind of difficult and sensitive subjects as I mentioned, we did the first film series in the developing world on mental illness, we did 6 portraits of different people with different forms of mental illness and we did a film on the sex trade, and also a film on the Indonesian mass killings of 1965. So it's very kind of intense material and it makes the need for behaving properly--ethnically with your subjects, your collaborators, your participants. So to answer your question, I think it comes down to some pretty basic human aspects: being truthful, being trustworthy, following through on your commitments, being understanding and compassionate and being a [part] of people's lives. For example, the subjects of our films knew that we would come back the following year or six months later, they knew that we were available and weren't just coming for a month or two months and then disappearing and they'd never see us again. Because certainly the first year we were shooting people pretty much hid everything. They made up stories about how great they're lives were. It was only after two or three years, as they saw that we came back, we showed them the footage, we showed them rough cut and assemblies of the film, they saw where we were going with it and they began to kind of really open up with their lives. And so to think the first time you do this sort of work you're going to get something approaching truth from people is a mistake. It comes down to behaving ethically. On every professional level you can. And also on a personal level. If you treat people properly, if you treat them kindly and professionally and ethically, you will generally get a good result and you don't exploit people. And there is a lot of filmmaking out there--documentary filmmaking that doesn't treat people ethically. A film, this is kind of an extreme example, I mean I don't know if you ever saw Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen)--in the beginning of Borat which is actually a very funny film, he goes to this village in Bulgaria and pays people $3 for their image and he totally lies to them. And he got sued by everyone. So there are...very unethical...
It comes down to behaving ethically. On every professional level you can. And also on a personal level. If you treat people properly, if you treat them kindly and professionally and ethically, you will generally get a good result and you don't exploit people.
MS: (laughs)...
RL: (laughs) …We don't do that sort of thing, we try to treat people ethically.
MS: On your earlier note about how cultures are so radically different, there has been a lot of misrepresentation of difference in American media, domestically and abroad. So my question is, how does one identify cultural ills, such as violence against women, gender-based discrimination…how does one identify cultural ills while still holding respect for cultural values?
RL: That's a great question. I was hesitant initially to take on this one on polygamy which is viewed negatively in the West and yet, historically is probably one of the most common marital forms. If you look back historically there is this thing called the Ethnographic Atlas about 60-70 years ago that did [cultural] comparisons… Polygamy occurs historically in 75% of all societies, and it’s in the Bible... if you look throughout North and Sub-Saharan Africa, if you go to the Middle East, and parts of insular South East Asia, it's legal and it's common. It's usually not the predominant form, except in a few societies. So on the one hand, as an anthropologist, we have to approach this with a great degree of cultural relativism, but on the other hand, if you delve into people's lives like we did for an extended period, and you think things through--there a kind of process you have to go through of thinking of things as the local people understand them--that's a basic process in anthropology, and you examine the reasoning and the forms of powers, control and oppression in people's lives. I think once you've done that process, then you can start making those sort of distinctions, without engaging in forms of cultural imperialism or colonialist sort of thinking. [In the film] we show the voices and the understandings of the women themselves, you’re thinking as the locals think and understanding things as they do. And in general, at the end of the film, the women all are quite critical and skeptical of their polygamous unions. So I think that if you're not coming with a judgmental perspective and instead have a perspective of understanding, you can come up with those sort of distinctions--the distinctions that matter. In the film we made a choice to just have Balinese voices, Balinese interviewers, Balinese local experts…
MS: In the process of doing all this work, what has been the most fulfilling part of this work for you?
RL: Scholarly work is fairly isolating, if you're doing field work as a lonely anthropologist and you're writing....I mean, having done that a lot, I'm a pretty social person and I like being around people. Filmmaking allows for you to work in a team, very collaboratively, and you get to kind of have that collaborative interaction continuously...so that's one part that's really fulfilling: working with a team of local and American people. Film also allows you to engage more of your senses. We score all the pieces, so you're dealing with music, you're dealing with language, you're dealing with understanding, and intellectually that's pretty gratifying. And I would say the last thing is, one of the joys of anthropology is that you get to spend a significant amount of time in a really different place and reach out across the spaces of language and culture and history and education and be able to connect with someone whose really very, very different from yourself. I mean thinking of the Afflictions (Culture and Mental Illness in Indonesia) project, I was working with people with really severe forms of illness: Tourette's Disorder, Schizophrenia, etc...people I would never have encountered in my normal life if I wasn't doing this work, and being able to step into their world and understand their world a bit, and understand how they see it, it's very exciting stuff and it's very gratifying. And to develop long-term friendships with these people. Some of my subjects, I’ve seen every year for now, 20 years. I’ve seen them grow up in some of my films, the narrator in our film on the sex trade, is 4 in the beginning of the film and at the end she's 17… So you see people grow up and... that's a good feeling.
RL: (laughs) …We don't do that sort of thing, we try to treat people ethically.
MS: On your earlier note about how cultures are so radically different, there has been a lot of misrepresentation of difference in American media, domestically and abroad. So my question is, how does one identify cultural ills, such as violence against women, gender-based discrimination…how does one identify cultural ills while still holding respect for cultural values?
RL: That's a great question. I was hesitant initially to take on this one on polygamy which is viewed negatively in the West and yet, historically is probably one of the most common marital forms. If you look back historically there is this thing called the Ethnographic Atlas about 60-70 years ago that did [cultural] comparisons… Polygamy occurs historically in 75% of all societies, and it’s in the Bible... if you look throughout North and Sub-Saharan Africa, if you go to the Middle East, and parts of insular South East Asia, it's legal and it's common. It's usually not the predominant form, except in a few societies. So on the one hand, as an anthropologist, we have to approach this with a great degree of cultural relativism, but on the other hand, if you delve into people's lives like we did for an extended period, and you think things through--there a kind of process you have to go through of thinking of things as the local people understand them--that's a basic process in anthropology, and you examine the reasoning and the forms of powers, control and oppression in people's lives. I think once you've done that process, then you can start making those sort of distinctions, without engaging in forms of cultural imperialism or colonialist sort of thinking. [In the film] we show the voices and the understandings of the women themselves, you’re thinking as the locals think and understanding things as they do. And in general, at the end of the film, the women all are quite critical and skeptical of their polygamous unions. So I think that if you're not coming with a judgmental perspective and instead have a perspective of understanding, you can come up with those sort of distinctions--the distinctions that matter. In the film we made a choice to just have Balinese voices, Balinese interviewers, Balinese local experts…
MS: In the process of doing all this work, what has been the most fulfilling part of this work for you?
RL: Scholarly work is fairly isolating, if you're doing field work as a lonely anthropologist and you're writing....I mean, having done that a lot, I'm a pretty social person and I like being around people. Filmmaking allows for you to work in a team, very collaboratively, and you get to kind of have that collaborative interaction continuously...so that's one part that's really fulfilling: working with a team of local and American people. Film also allows you to engage more of your senses. We score all the pieces, so you're dealing with music, you're dealing with language, you're dealing with understanding, and intellectually that's pretty gratifying. And I would say the last thing is, one of the joys of anthropology is that you get to spend a significant amount of time in a really different place and reach out across the spaces of language and culture and history and education and be able to connect with someone whose really very, very different from yourself. I mean thinking of the Afflictions (Culture and Mental Illness in Indonesia) project, I was working with people with really severe forms of illness: Tourette's Disorder, Schizophrenia, etc...people I would never have encountered in my normal life if I wasn't doing this work, and being able to step into their world and understand their world a bit, and understand how they see it, it's very exciting stuff and it's very gratifying. And to develop long-term friendships with these people. Some of my subjects, I’ve seen every year for now, 20 years. I’ve seen them grow up in some of my films, the narrator in our film on the sex trade, is 4 in the beginning of the film and at the end she's 17… So you see people grow up and... that's a good feeling.
"...the joy of anthropology is that you get to spend a significant amount of time in a really different place and reach out across the spaces of language and culture and history and education and be able to connect with someone whose really very, very different from yourself."
MS: Have you seen any legislation come out of the work that you've done? Have societies undergone any legislative changes?
RL: Great questions. You know, it's interesting. I am working with two organizations called Komnas HAM (National Commission of Human Rights) and Komnas Perempuan (National Commission on the Rights of Women). And we screened and had discussions on several of my films with these groups and there was talk about bringing in portions of Bitter Honey…they talked about using the film to support legislation in the Indonesian Parliament for the rights of women…Using the film as examples of societal conditions that create oppressive circumstances for women. So there was that. I'd say in a more general sense in Indonesia proper, my films have gotten pretty wide screening. My film 40 Years of Silence which is one of the first films on the Indonesian mass killings has been screened widely, you know, it got me blacklisted for a couple years and I couldn't get a visa--
MS: I was reading about that...
RL: (laughs) ...Yeah. And that along with another film that came called The Act of Killing, last year....I would say the mass killings in Indonesia are comparable in American history to slavery, or the genocide of Native Americans in terms of the amount of people who were murdered. In the ‘65 event--a million people were killed and no one could talk about it for 40 years. So our work with some of the early films, also with a lot of Indonesian activists has brought this history to life and it’s helping to move things towards a reconciliation process, so the films actually do have that capacity [to effect change]. And also my Affliction series on mental illness...there’s an organization, the National Alliance of Mental Illness, an advocacy group for people living with mental illness in the US--there's actually a similar organization in Indonesia, and the film series has been kind of taken up by this group. And actually, the subjects in the films have gone to large scale screenings and testified about their condition. So in terms of legislature, not yet, but in terms of impact on Indonesia proper, I would say a pretty substantial amount. I would hope that the films have a positive effect in Indonesia, and I think that they have.
RL: Great questions. You know, it's interesting. I am working with two organizations called Komnas HAM (National Commission of Human Rights) and Komnas Perempuan (National Commission on the Rights of Women). And we screened and had discussions on several of my films with these groups and there was talk about bringing in portions of Bitter Honey…they talked about using the film to support legislation in the Indonesian Parliament for the rights of women…Using the film as examples of societal conditions that create oppressive circumstances for women. So there was that. I'd say in a more general sense in Indonesia proper, my films have gotten pretty wide screening. My film 40 Years of Silence which is one of the first films on the Indonesian mass killings has been screened widely, you know, it got me blacklisted for a couple years and I couldn't get a visa--
MS: I was reading about that...
RL: (laughs) ...Yeah. And that along with another film that came called The Act of Killing, last year....I would say the mass killings in Indonesia are comparable in American history to slavery, or the genocide of Native Americans in terms of the amount of people who were murdered. In the ‘65 event--a million people were killed and no one could talk about it for 40 years. So our work with some of the early films, also with a lot of Indonesian activists has brought this history to life and it’s helping to move things towards a reconciliation process, so the films actually do have that capacity [to effect change]. And also my Affliction series on mental illness...there’s an organization, the National Alliance of Mental Illness, an advocacy group for people living with mental illness in the US--there's actually a similar organization in Indonesia, and the film series has been kind of taken up by this group. And actually, the subjects in the films have gone to large scale screenings and testified about their condition. So in terms of legislature, not yet, but in terms of impact on Indonesia proper, I would say a pretty substantial amount. I would hope that the films have a positive effect in Indonesia, and I think that they have.
"In the ‘65 event--a million people were killed and no one could talk about it for 40 years. So our work with some of the early films, also with a lot of Indonesian activists has brought this history to life and it’s helping to move things towards a reconciliation process, so the films actually do have that capacity [to effect change]."
MS: What general things have you identified in the human condition that are consistent--what are the take away lessons from Bitter Honey that are true for all of us?
RL: I would say for Bitter Honey, "culture matters", and that's the basic message of anthropology. If you look at the overall message of Bitter Honey, it’s that there are rules that we all live by culturally. In Bali, one of the major structures is called Adat or (Customary Law). In many traditional societies, before colonialism, you have local village customary law regulating people's lives. In the way that the police or the court systems regulate our lives in America. And it's quite significant for women's lives in polygamous unions. For example, what the film shows is that because of patrilineality in Indonesia, when women marry, they move to a man's compound and their assets enter into his lineage, so if a woman wants to get divorced, she will lose her children, they will stay in the husband's compound, and she will lose her inheritance rights which goes from grandfather to father to son. I mean, the women maintain property and land rights through their sons, but they themselves don't own property. Perhaps most significantly, in Bali they have a belief of reincarnation of souls. For example, when I die, my soul will go into a kind of heaven place for 3 or 4 generations and then enter into the soul my great-great grandson, and similarly my soul descended from my great-great grandfather or someone of that generation. It's a kind of familial reincarnation. So what happens when they get divorced is that their souls are cut off from their husband's lineage so they actually lose their souls. Unmarried women in a village context, divorced or widowed are socially excluded on many levels. So there's also a loss of social roles, so all those things really matter when you think about someone who wants to get out an abusive marriage and how much they have to lose. So culture really matters for women's lives. And then the question is, how do you change customary law...that's complex...you know, how do you change these rules and regulations that govern people's lives? In these sort of circumstances, culture determines many, many aspects. It really matters.
MS: Why does diversity matter to you?
RL: It's interesting, I have another part of my life that I'm very involved in. My father was an inventor, and actually was involved in a lot of law cases--also very concerned about civil rights, and as an engineer and someone interested in science and engineering, he felt that the playing field in the United States, in terms of opportunity has been so entirely biased against underrepresented minorities. One of the things that I've been involved in in L.A. is called the African American Male Achievers' Network. It's one of the only science and STEM programs... basically kids go this center in Inglewood and they do science projects and inventing projects....they get hooked up with a role model who is like a big brother. For me, it's a very powerful way of kind of helping to level the playing field so that these kids can access STEM backgrounds…the kids who graduate from this AMAN program have an acceptance rate that's 5 times higher than other kids in their neighborhood. We also did a program at MIT that took very promising young minorities and gave them an intensive summer program at MIT to allow them to enter college on a somewhat more equal basis....All in an effort to support diversity. It's my belief and my Dad's belief that the playing field should be leveled. And some of the best careers for young minorities are in science and engineering.(African American Male Achievers Network) http://www.aman.org/
BITTER HONEY comes to theaters October 2014.
Learn more at http://www.bitterhoneyfilm.com/