American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ The very invisibility of Marshall’s camera within the diegesis of this story is the best evidence of the fact that this is a story, and Marshall’s intercutting between hunters and giraffe (if the hunters haven’t been able to find the giraffe, how has Marshall located her!) confirms the fabrication. Of course, the unusual nature of this story and its reliance on real !Kung in a real environment, clearly killing a real giraffe, provides sufficient interest so that a consciousness of Marshall’s construction of what we see tends to disappear for most viewers, just as it does in commercial fiction films successful enough to engage viewers.

      After the giraffe has been killed, slaughtered, and “the meat spread across the werft as a ripple across water,” the group gathers to hear the story of the hunt, and Marshall provides a concluding reminder of the conflation of his storytelling with theirs: “and old men remembered, and young men listened, and so the story of the hunt was told.” These final words are closely matched to imagery of an old man sleeping and a young man listening, and at the very end, of the group getting up to go to bed and a final fade-out. The story of the hunt, told around the fire in Nyae Nyae, concludes simultaneously with the end of Marshall’s film and (one can imagine) his audience getting up to leave the theater.

      While the artistry of The Hunters is apparent in Marshall’s composition and editing and in the poetry of his narration, and is compromised only by the somewhat strident tone of his narrating voice, the film’s very artistic success quickly became a problem for Marshall himself: “Dad didn’t like . . . The Hunters. He thought it was an art film.”¹³ In subsequent years Marshall would turn away from the kinds of artistry evident in The Hunters and would account for that film as a product of youthful indulgence. While he would claim that he didn’t regret making The Hunters, he came to feel that “Laurence was right,” and that “The Hunters was a romantic film by an American kid and revealed more about me than about Ju/’hoansi.”¹⁴ Specifically, what it revealed was that “I was a kid, and I got captivated by hunting, so I went hunting. . . . I was eighteen, nineteen—the best years of my life, the happiest I’ve ever been, without any question. It was a pretty wonderful experience for a kid of that age in a place like that with people like Tshumkwe, damned decent, good-to-be-with people.”¹⁵ What it failed to reveal was the true nature of Ju/’hoansi life: The Hunters gave “the impression of people spending enormous amounts of energy and time hunting”; “And the real economy is the other way around. Not only the economy is based on gathering, but all concepts of land ownership, all the rules of land ownership, all the basis of the social organization of the people, groups, bands, all flow from gathering, and from stable, fixed, reliable sources of food and water.”¹⁶

      We might remind Marshall that obviously no single film can tell the whole story about any people or any dimension of their lives, and that The Hunters was about an important facet of Ju/’hoansi life. In the National Geographic special Bushmen of the Kalahari (1974; shot and directed by Robert M. Young), Marshall himself did say, referring to the more efficient means of hunting employed by a !Kung horseman with a rifle, depicted in that television show, “Killing so efficiently seemed to rob hunting of its symbolic quality, making it a simple act of subsistence, instead of a larger act of kinship, biding the people together.” Nevertheless, Marshall would remain embarrassed about his indulgence in art, and this embarrassment would increasingly characterize his assumptions about what he should be filming and how he should be filming it—especially once he began to realize, indeed to personally experience, what the history of the Ju/’hoansi would become during the thirty years following the first Marshall expeditions. However, while he turned increasingly away from the particularly obvious art-film dimensions of The Hunters in the following decades, he did for a moment find a way of making film art that did not seem to embarrass him, indeed that did not immediately declare itself as art at all—though the unusual artistry of some of the resulting films has become increasingly obvious and admirable as the decades have passed.

      IDYLLS OF THE !KUNG

      In his essay, “Filming and Learning,” Marshall offers two observations that were fundamental in his approach to filming the Ju/’hoansi. First, “What the people I am filming actually do and say is more interesting and important than what I think about them”; and second, “When I filmed people from a distance, they were easy to understand. If their actions were not obvious, I could explain what they were doing with a few words of narration. The closer I got to people with my camera, the more interesting they seemed, and the more surprised I was by what they did and said.”¹⁷ The two earliest films Marshall finished after The Hunters—A Group of Women (1961) and A Joking Relationship (1962)—represent an aesthetic breakthrough and, perhaps, to some degree a missed opportunity. These two films embody Marshall’s observations far more effectively than The Hunters.

      In a sense, nothing happens in A Group of Women. It is a 5-minute montage made up of twenty-three shots focusing on several women and a baby lying together under a baobab tree (Marshall’s camera is generally so close that it is difficult to be entirely sure how many women are present, but his focus is on three). During the film, the women talk about what appears to be an imminent move for one of the women and her band to Gautscha in order to gather berries; she isn’t interested in moving, and one of the other women suggests she “just refuse it,” and later tells her, “You shouldn’t go south.” They also discuss nursing children, and the mother of the baby—she refers to her daughter in one instance as “little seed pod”—wants the child to nurse, though the child doesn’t seem interested. At one point, a woman walking by addresses the women lying under the baobab, trying to get one or all of them to go with her to get water, but they refuse, and at the end of the film they seem to have drifted off to sleep.

      While there are close-ups in The Hunters, they function as close-ups normally do within a developing action-adventure narrative, but A Group of Women is almost entirely constructed of close-ups, and sometimes extreme close-ups (fig. 2). The only exceptions are the film’s first and last shots, both of them revealing the larger scene under the baobab tree, and the two medium shots of the woman who asks the friends to accompany her to the water hole (these two shots are presented from a ground-up angle, suggesting that the woman is an intruder, perhaps even a jealous intruder: she interrupts the conversation, saying, “Lazy creatures! If I lie down will you tickle me?”). At the beginning of the film, each shot moves us closer to the women, until, in the seventh shot, an extreme close-up reveals the mother’s nipple, centered in the frame. The pacing of Marshall’s editing reflects the utter tranquility of this moment among friends; the shots range from 4 seconds to 54, and are organized so as to maintain the quiet mood of this “non-action” scene: the editing builds to no climax, and in general, extended shots interrupt whatever velocity begins to develop in shorter shots.¹⁸

      In A Group of Women conversation is the action. Marshall offers no voice-over explanation of what he is showing us, though he does, for the first time, provide subtitles that propose to translate what the women are saying (according to David MacDougall, this was a first, a transformative first, not only for Marshall, but for ethnographic film in general).¹⁹ As is true in the other films about the Ju/’hoansi Marshall made during the 1960s, the sound in A Group of Women is not synchronized, but, to quote the text that precedes most of these films, “was recorded at the time of filming and reconstructed during editing. Translations are from both tapes and notes.”²⁰ Our ability to hear the voices of the women, who talk very quietly, adds an audio component to the intimacy established by the in-close cinematography, and our reading the subtitles—while it does interrupt our view on the women—engages us within this quiet moment in a way that Marshall’s voice-over in The Hunters does not.

      FIGURE 2. From John Marshall's A Group of Women (1961). Courtesy Documentary Educational Resources.

      Marshall’s films have nearly always been subsumed within the category of ethnographic film, the assumption being that their primary, if not only, function is to СКАЧАТЬ