INTRODUCTION:

ESSAYS ON STEPS FOR THE FUTURE

FAYE GINSBURG AND
BARBARA ABRASH

Production still from Night Stop, directed by Licinio Azevedo (2001), one of the award winning Steps for the
Future films. Shot in the style of a real enactment documentary, it depicts a group of sex-workers waiting for
truck drivers along Mozambiques corredor of death. (Photo courtesy Steps for the Future.)

The Steps for the Future project offers a particu-
larly exciting opportunity to revisit the perennial ques-
tion of the impact of documentary on social change.
The stakes for research on the projects effects are
high. For people who are HIV+, or living with AIDS,
or are threatened by the epidemic, the effectiveness of
prevention and education media is literally a matter of
life and death. The circumstances take our questions
and research out of the realm of the purely academic:
the results matter in immediate and personal ways, as
well as in the broader, longer-term concerns of public
health and media circulation.
In addition to the seriousness of its subject, Steps is
an especially important project because it combines
imaginative and practical ambitions: as a transnational
north to south collaboration, it represents an unusual
and productive circulation of professional expertise,
money, and visibility in very distinctive contexts, local

4 Volume 19 Numbers 1 and 2 Spring-Summer 2003 Visual Anthropology Review

ogy provides an experimental tradition that offers an
alternative framework for understanding the genealogy
of the work discussed by Susan Levine. In a number of
ways, this radical genealogy foreshadows Steps for the
Future. From the late 1950s, Jean Rouch created what
he called ethnofictions with West African friends
living in marginal situations under colonial regimes in
Abidjan and elsewhere. Inspired by Rouchs
groundbreaking Moi, un Noir, people have since used
film to improvise dramas about the dilemmas shaping
their lives, creating a narrative cinematic space for
thinking about and transforming entrenched social prob-
lems. Rouchs issues were racism and colonialism. His
ethnofictions, some have argued, helped set the stage
for African cinema, another relevant context to which
we will return later in this discussion.
(3) The ongoing use of video technologies to
enhance democratic processes among marginalized
communities. TheSteps project followed several de-
cades of video practice that sought to deliver on the
promise of social change documentary which intended
to catalyze action on the part of viewers. Challenge for
Change, the National Film Board of Canadas innova-
tive program created in the 1960s, was spurred by the
nascent revolution in small-format video which made
such media relatively cheap and easy to use. Under the
leadership of George Stoney, Challenge for Change
encouraged marginalized Canadian communities to
document, self-consciously, their local concerns and
thereby bring them to the attention of government
authorities. Since then, numerous programs have de-
veloped community-based production and outreach on
a range of issues that combine fresh cinematic strate-
gies with media advocacy.
(4) The development of formal and social innova-
tions by indigenous media practitioners. TheSteps
project bears comparison to indigenous media which
has been created in many parts of the world since the
1980s. Among the innovations it shares are pioneering,
creative, genre-bending forms of self-representation,
such as the Inuit feature film Atanarjuat: The Fast
Runner. Steps, too, breaks the silencing of traumatic
historical experiences, like documentaries on the sto-
len generations made by Aboriginal Australians; and
Steps follows others in creating community-based forms
of circulation, much like the work of the Warlpiri
Media Association coming out of Australias central
desert community of Yuendumu beginning in the 1980s.
Visual Anthropology Review Volume 19
(5) Previous work in AIDS media. Finally, the
Steps program offers a rich opportunity to put AIDS
media in historical and cross-cultural perspective. The
historical appearance of the epidemic in the U.S. coin-
cided with the video revolution. In the 1980s, inex-
pensive and widely-available media technologies were
quickly taken up by a number of movements, as activ-
ists tuned into the politics and necessity of representa-
tion, particularly on health issues. Much of the moti-
vation for their early work in the U.S. is shared with
Steps for the Future. Precursors include the camcorder,
safer-sex activism of the Gay Mens Health Crisis and
political performance activities of ACT UP. Activist
media was produced by affected communities for
themselves for education and recognition -- in order
to intervene in the silence in mass media and challenge
the social stigma attached to the infection.
Sociologically and culturally, however, there are
differences between the Steps program and HIV/AIDS
media campaigns in the U.S. The fact that so many gay
men and their supporters are involved, brought
certain kinds of resources to the American AIDS
struggle. Unlike many of the Southern AfricanSteps
filmmakers, many in the gay media-making demo-
graphic here have connections to media outlets and
arts communities, money or direct access to it, experi-
ence in activism and battles for social change, a strong
presumption of entitlement to basic health care and
social acceptance, and a heavy representation in major
urban centers that tend to be politically liberal. On the
other hand, in South Africa, activists brought an expe-
riential legacy of successful anti-apartheid activism
that undoubtedly fuels their cause.
It is not our intention to overemphasize the anti-
HIV/AIDS work of the gay community in the US to the
exclusion of other groups that more closely resemble
the activists we see in the the Steps collection: the poor,
women and children, minorities, and caretakers of
people with AIDS. Indeed, in the early 1990s, Alexandra
Juhasz, a U.S. AIDS media activist, was one of many
who developed projects training women from poor and
minority backgrounds in video production. The videos
created in her workshops circulate in housing projects,
churches, and other non-traditional venues, and pro-
vide much-needed skills and access for those who see
them. Juhaszs book, AIDS TV: Identity, Community
and Alternative Video, is a compelling document of the
time as well as an analysis of media activism as a form
Numbers 1 and 2 Spring-Summer 2003 5
of community development and self-empowerment.
Yet her book is an exception. Such efforts have been
relatively undocumented, a fact which underscores the
value of having people like Levine and Englehart track
the Steps project so carefully and in different locations.
Their close ethnographic studies show how, with whom
and in what particular cultural contexts HIV/AIDS
messages can be effective. They emphasize the need
for works to be made in local languages and idioms, in
order to break linguistic structures of silence (argued by
Levine and Stadler), and through creative strategies
that make such speech safe. As Englehart points out,
films can say what people cannot.
The need of an ongoing support system for people
who face the consequences of disclosure is made stun-
ningly clear in many of the anecdotal cases these papers
discuss. We learn, for example, of a women whose
HIV+ husband forced her to have unprotected sex and
then threw her out, homeless and with no money, when
she became pregnant. Yet what is not clear to those of
us outside the context are the resources available be-
yond the screenings and the counseling of facilitators,
and the means by which Steps engages with networks of
care. Such engagements will transform over time, and
will always be subject to historical vicissitudes such as
the announcement late in 2003 that the South African
government approved a plan to distribute free AIDS
medicine within five years to all who need it, through a
network of centers which distribute the anti-retroviral
drugs.
THE ESSAYS
We now turn briefly to address each of the papers
presented at the AAAs Steps for the Future Panel.
Simon Chislett, writing with six other members of
the Steps for the Future staff, provokes us to think about
other contexts of efficacy, locating HIV/AIDS within a
constellation of social relations. The paper also sug-
gests the importance of thinking outside the box in
impact assessment. For example, one clear conse-
quence of the Steps project is the accelerated develop-
ment (not to mention badly-needed employment) of
local talent, including filmmakers, facilitators, writers,
and others who are embedded in a web of social
services, community life, gendered activities, and pub-
lic spaces. This is an important accomplishment in and
of itself, and may have a rather rich afterlife that, we
6 Volume 19 Numbers 1 and 2 Spring-Summer 2003
suggest, will be important to track independently.
Chislett et al. also suggest that the Steps oeuvre opens
up new possibilities for African cinematic practices
we imagine both formally and in terms of infrastruc-
ture. Can work made in this health context become
part of the canon? Will it be appreciated for its local
importance, since it, unlike much African cinema (with
the exception of Nigerian /Ghanaian videos) actually
circulates in African communities?
The paper by Peter Biella, Kate Hennessy and
Peter Orth analyzes the efficacy of culturally specific
HIV/AIDS education campaigns, asks how media con-
vey messages, and how these messages are received
and acted upon. The paper examines and updates an
earlier paradigm, called the Health Belief Model, and
rightly critiques its focus on the individual. In addition,
Biella et al. stress that any health program will be
ineffective without support from the broader national
and international contexts, all of which require multiple
strategies. Thus, in the case of South Africa, theSteps
project should be placed in the context of the struggles
waged by the Treatment Action Campaign and the
ways in which media of all sorts internet, video, TV,
telephone were used to bring pressure to bear on
government policy, corporate ownership and on South
African health care policy. The cumulative impact of
these media was evident when, in September 2003, the
WTO agreed to alter its rules about drug patents to give
poor nations more access to life saving medicines.
Susan Levine assesses ethnographic observations
which she and her students made during a number of the
Steps films screenings. Her essay gives special atten-
tion to settings in Lesotho, Mozambique, and South
Africa, and to interactions between facilitators and
audiences. Levine shows how communal practices
mobilize or silence people, and highlights the workings
of linguistic strategies for expression and denial of
knowledge. Even more importantly, she offers an
exciting model for carrying out meaningful qualitative
audience research. We found particularly insightful her
discussion of the ways in which meanings are socially
negotiated not only after a screening but in what she
calls a films afterlife in discussions in communities,
among friends, and in families. We hope that further
work will describe how the research was designed and
what temporal frames will be used to measure the
afterlife, particularly in relation to design variables
described by Biella and colleagues.
Visual Anthropology Review
 Lucinda Englehart offers a close, ethnographic
observation of the screening of a Steps film, Mother to
Child, which took place in the maternity wing of a clinic
in Alexandra Township, Johannesburg. The film tells
the stories of Pinkie and Patience who discover they are
HIV+ while pregnant, and their decisions to use the
Nevirapine treatment, which greatly reduces a baby's
risk of getting the virus during birth. Pinkie and Pa-
tience were present in the clinic and facilitated the post-
screening discussion. According to the nursing sisters
there, the screenings led to a rise in the number of
women willing to be tested and use the treatment.
Nonetheless, Englehart points out in a chilling story,
that the challenges of disclosure remain. More broadly,
she raises crucial points about the nature of film audi-
ences, the solidarity that can be created by the collective
viewing experience, and the ways that meanings are
negotiated socially, particularly in discussions with a
facilitator who is skilled and open.
Jane Stadler examines the claims, implicit in many
of the Steps films, that change can be sparked by
empathetic understanding through familiar narratives,
as well as character identification with actors like
you. Given the urgency of changing peoples attitudes
and behavior, and the polysemic nature of many of the
Steps films, Stadler highlights the extreme importance
of facilitated discussion in smaller viewing contexts.
She argues, further, that on television, particularly, a
stronger framing discourse would help guide viewers
toward preferred readings. Stadler also critiques
some of the Steps decisions including the choice of
making fictional re-enactments and the fact that when
dangerous beliefs are expressed on camera in Steps
documentaries they are sometimes left uncorrected by
the filmmaker. Do such decisions, she asks, undercut
the truth claims that are key to this project? These are
essential issues and valuable follow-up research might
frame them as empirical questions. What are the cross-
cultural differences in reading different genres? How
often need the authors message be stated to have
affect? Such questions are of perennial interest in
visual anthropology.
Faye Ginsburg is the Director of the Graduate Program in Culture and Media, and the Director of the Center for
Media, Culture and History at New York University.
Barbara Abrash is Associate Director of the Center for Media, Culture and History at NYU, where she teaches in
the graduate program in Public History.
Visual Anthropology Review Volume 19
In closing, we want to pose one more question that
this project raises for us, the role played by the European
producers and audiences. TheSteps films are meant to
serve (at least) two very different groups: European
audiences that follow international and independent
film, and local African viewers whom we have just
discussed. We wish to ask whether it is important that
films be of sufficient formal interest to be invited to
prestigious western film festivals and broadcast on
European television. Has such work become the new
exotica for Europe, replacing the exhausted paradigm
of ethnographic film that can no longer titillate audi-
ences?
What is a measure of success for such films in the
European or American context? Is it recognition of the
work for its aesthetic qualities, creativity, and innova-
tive approaches? Do we expect action from Euro-
pean and American audiences and, if so, what would
that be? Do the Steps films contribute to a social
imaginary in the broadest sense? That is, do they
expand the repertoire of images that we have of African
lives and African people, allowing us to see such
subjects as agents active in handling even so severe an
issue as HIV/AIDS rather than sitting as virtual beggars
on Europes doorstep? Or, is it sufficient that gaining
audience ratings and critical success helps secure future
funding and circuits of circulation for such project? Is
this a kind of parallel to the tourist market in ethnic
handicrafts in which Third World utilitarian objects at
home are exported as saleable cultural commodities in
the First World, nonetheless bringing needed resources
and visibility back to the local producers?
What is distinctive here from colonial models of
ethnographic film, then, is that European money was
mobilized not to bring images back to Europe for its
consumption (although that did occur) but first and
foremost to serve urgent needs in Africa in multiple,
local, African settings. That urgency has clearly been a
spur to creativity in narrative form, in exhibition practice,
and in research methods that show the value that
ethnographic understandings can bring to understanding
the social practice of media.
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