Can the camera be viewed as an invasion into a world?

Can the camera be viewed as an invasion into a world? In the case of Jean Rouch's Les Maîtres Fous it can be. When we watched the film in class it felt as if we were looking into a secretive world that we had no place being in. In an ethnographic study I feel that one needs to be careful when you go to study a group and wish to utilize film you have to be careful with how far you go into it. Ethnographic should be observation based so that you expose as little of yourself in your research because the ethnographer can never be entirely absent from their student but they should leave as little of foot print as possible in the ethnographic study. It's akin to the butterfly effect. One little thing can affect generations for the future. When you watch Les Maîtres Fous there is a sense that the filmographer specifically chose certain images and scenes so as to not only invoke emotion in the viewer, but depict what could be considered disturbing material and make it into a fairy tale esque story, like child's play instead of the ritual the the Huaka is. Jean Rouch's comintary exhastrobates this aspect of his film where he describes what is going on to the viewer in a story teller style voice and wording. Ethnographers need to be careful when they are using spoken word to describe their studies because often times when one is writing a script it is less formal, clean and ethically proper than writing a paper or book on that same study because the amount of people who edit it before it's published is significantly smaller. Ethnographers,  and anthropologists alike should always be warily when using film to document their studies because it will always come off as a bias observation of the thing they are studying.

-Ciara Williams