Tim Asch's most brilliant innovations in The Ax Fight are based on a simple idea. Filmed cultural activities are difficult or impossible to understand when they are viewed once in real time, but powerful explanatory concepts can be brought forward and applied to footage that is displayed repeatedly and in slow motion. The Ax Fight makes both of these premises abundantly clear. As such, it represents the strongest argument in support of Asch's vision of short, single-concept, single-event ethnographic films, those that are viewed repeadtedly in the classroom and discussed at length (Asch Spier and Marshall; Asch). Whether footage is printed optically more than once in a single film, or is rescreened by a teacher several times for a class, the effect is the same. In both cases, the flight of the time-based medium is halted. Students are given the opportunity to reconsider and correct their first impressions, attune their eyes to details that they missed in earlier viewings but discovered in discussion, and have the leisure to experiment with radically-different scholarly hypotheses that seek to explain the same material.
The Ax Fight's innovations constituted the first serious attempt to make the apparatur of text-based scholarship available to students through ethnographic film (Biella 1993). As such, it marked a turning point in the history of anthropological education. The Ax Fight revealed not only what could and should be done, but also what was not being done by ethnographic films. As such, it altered the parameters of the discussion and sounded the intellectual death knell for naive realism, a style that has persisted without intellectual support to the present. It is a style that is parodied in The Ax Fight's so-called "final edited version." (Ruby, Asch, Marks)
Despite the powers of its argument and its broad success in terms of distribution and intellectual acclaim, The Ax Fight has spawned few imitators. Almost no ethnographic filmmakers have since used slow motion or have repeated their footage optically to facilitate analysis. To put the point more generally, ethnographic film makers have been inclined to set questions of scholarly rigor aside, and to concentrate instead on film's emotional power and evocativeness, a power made clear by the Hollywood and documentary traditions. Once may begin to explain The Ax Fight's stylistic isolation with the fact that the magic spell of cinematic realism has proved too great to be overcome by a single Guernica of protest.
The lack of imitators may also be understood as resulting from the appraisal that the film's technique, although perhaps perfectly suited to its subject, is also perhaps exclusively suited to it. Slow motion is excellent for the analysis of individual behavior in a crowd scene, particularly when the behavior is dominated by clearly-identifiable influences such as lineage affiliation. The ubiquitous ambiguity and contradictory resonances of most cultural affairs, however, would seem to defy precise visual correlates, even if the visuals are projected at the slowest speed. The ultimate problem of explanation in visual anthropology, most film makers seem to think, is not that things happen too fast to be seen in real time, but that the real things -- the categories, contradictions and resonances -- cannot be seen under any circumstances. Films for the most part have therefore turned away from the inductive, relentlessly-empirical grounding of argument that is the basis of The Ax Fight's success. They have turned instead to a more rationalist approach in which filmed behavior is passed, without substantiation, as being typical (pace, Goldschmidt 1972). In these films, the real leg-work of empirical corraboration is neither demonstrated nor advocated to students of anthropology.
Finally, The Ax Fight may have failed to attract imitators because it is ultimately unable to make its own case in the strongest imaginable way. Viewers see the protagonists -- Uuwa, Mohesiwa, Kebowa -- several times. Viewers are told of the protagonists' lineage affiliations, and are even shown a kinship diagram that depicts lines of village cleavage and alliance. Despite the optical enlargements and slow motion, however, all of this material goes by too fast to be absorbed fully. Viewers get a sense of what the argument is, and the means by which the argument is sustained empirically. Yet one also senses both that the exegesis of the argument is not precisely satisfactory, and the medium of film is not ideal to the task.
The Ax Fight, then, is a limit case. It represents the extreme in grounding cinematic argument with empirical data. Once can achieve no more with a linear and public medium, a medium designed to be viewed collectively. The Ax Fight goes as far as is possible to satisfy the level of curiosity and forbearance that may be attributed to a large and diverse audience. Any more redundancy in the film would have served the slower and more curious viewers, but it would also have alienated the vast majority. Any more detail about protagonists and lineages would have buttressed an argument required by scholars, but would also have pressed most viewers beyond their limits of tolerance.