The Serial Portrait and Coeval Time on the Cable Car Up Manakamana Mountain

Abstract

This article argues that by framing Manakamana (Spray and Velez, 2013) as a serial portrait, we illuminate the ways that the film situates its Nepalese cable car riders, its American filmmakers and its largely western spectators in an emergent and shared time, and that the sequencing of human subjects that is central to this serial portrait posits an alternative to that once ubiquitous tendency to cast non-western subjects into a time that is past. In 1983’s Time And The Other, Johannes Fabian decried the discursive and ideological effects of denying ethnographic subjects their coevalness, but in Manakamana’s formal experimentation and its strategic deployment of cinematic homologies and spiritual allegories, a reflexivity emerges to reframe the way representations of people can be organized in time.