Cineast of the human angle: with keen sensitivity to his subjects, Argentine filmmaker Jorge Preloran captures simple life stories that resonate beyond their ethnographic value.

• Author: Werner, Louis

"My movies do not use the people about whom they are made," Argentine documentary filmmaker Jorge Preloran once wrote, "but rather they are made in order to serve them." Such words are not commonly heard in today's world of sensationalist and exploitative television documentaries, but Preloran has impale a reputation among film connoisseurs worldwide as a sensitive ethnographer of Everyman.

"I am certain," Preloran says, making an inventory of his nation's livelihoods, "that if one could know a jangadero from Parana, a fisherman from Mar del Plata, a shepherd from Patagonia, a miner from Catamarca, a farmer from the altiplano, a horseman from Corrientes, plus the urban realities from the great cities and little villages, only then would we know what it meant to be an Argentine. I think a country is the sum of its inhabitants."

Until not long ago, ethnographic research was conducted as a "winner-take-all" game between unequals--the privileged, educated researcher entering uninvited into the lives of isolated, unknowing subjects, and then departing abruptly with scientific plunder--shaman's secrets, herbal cures, and the like--put into an obscure text serving the former's professional ends but written in a language the latter could not even read.

The first ethnographic filmmakers, wielding their cameras and microphones, intruded even more into others' lives but were not so different from their pen-and-paper colleagues. The one exception was that more people were likely to see films than to read dissertations. Of this larger audience, more would have a nonacademic interest in ethnography, and so would less likely possess the specialized knowledge needed to challenge what they were seeing.

Ethnographic filmmaking thus did ethnographic writing one better--it was a game of "winner-take-all" without any consequences. Think of the old newsreels about "primitive peoples," played as comedies before impatient audiences waiting for the Hollywood feature--Indians, Africans, and Asians wearing furs and skins, eating strange foods and speaking unintelligible tongues. Who was to stand up and critique what was on screen?

Robert Flaherty's 1922 film Nanook of the North, about an Inult family living on Canada's Hudson Bay, evokes condescending laughter from viewers whenever Nanook is purposely made to look childish, even though it is considered the first classic ethnographic film because of its seriousness of intent. Few know that Nanook died of starvation not long after Flaherty's "friendly" visit.

The seventy-year-old Preloran has spent his life wrestling with these ethical pitfalls in doing documentary cinema. How can a moral person, he asks, rewrite the rule book? How can the game be replayed so that it has a "win-win" outcome for both filmmaker and subject? How can the filmmaker cede power, editorial control, and artistry to the subject and still make a film that can be called the filmmakers own? How, more importantly, can the filmmaker and the subject become and remain friends?

"It is a fact that when you see films made by anthropologists," Preloran once said, "they almost always depict the rare, exotic, strange, bizarre, odd, and/or colorful activities of `primitive' people. But seldom do we have a chance of getting into their minds, to fathom deeply into their souls, to find that they are human beings, which means they have in common with us the core of all human experience."

Preloran does not call himself an ethnographer at heart. "I'm really a dramatic filmmaker able to locate the drama of real lives," he says. "I have no academic training in anthropology, and if my work is considered anthropological by some, it is simply by accident." The term he prefers for his films is "human documents."

Preloran has been making films for fifty years, and his body of work since the early 1960s has attained high stature in the ethnographic canon. Working mostly in Argentina's puna and pampas, with diversions to the Ecuadoran sierra, Venezuelan selva, and Colombian llanos, he has made some forty films that one by one answer the moral questions raised above. While little known outside a small circle of fellow filmmakers and students, Preloran's oeuvre embodies an accumulated wisdom that will long endure.

Born in 1933 in Buenos Aires to an Argentine father and Irish-American mother, Preloran was sickly and a loner as a child. He had a natural understanding for those who lead isolated lives--artists, peasants, immigrants, and the religious devout. A youthful love of movies prompted his first amateur production, Venganza (1954), a gang picture set in the barrio showing the grimy side of urban life. This led, after a brief detour studying architecture, to film school at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and a stint in the U.S...