American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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Название: American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary

Автор: Scott MacDonald

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Кинематограф, театр

Серия:

isbn: 9780520954939

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ modernity—as represented, of course, by the camera itself. But A Group of Women only seems an ethnographic film if one thinks of it within the meta-sequence of Marshall’s Ju/’hoansi project. Understood outside of this project, the film represents, on one hand, a young man’s fascination with several young women, with their physicality, their friendship, and the realities of young motherhood. On the other hand, the film demonstrates how intimate Marshall had become with this band of Ju/’hoansi—he seems to hover quite close to the women in order to make the shots he uses (it may also be that the very difference represented by Marshall’s filming makes him, for all practical purposes, invisible to these women). A Group of Women seems to go beneath any scholarly ethnographic pretensions to a level of friendship and interchange that defies cultural distinction, even as Marshall refuses to present the women as anything but Ju/’hoansi. The differences between young women in American culture and these Ju/’hoansi women will be obvious to anyone seeing their clothing, the decorative marks on their skin, their comfort with the desert dirt and the ubiquitous flies (the first sound heard in the film is a fly buzzing). And yet, the way in which these young women relate to one another feels instantly familiar and understandable.

      A useful cinematic reference here is not another ethnographic film, but Stan Brakhage’s Blood’s Tone, the second part of the trilogy 3 Films: Bluewhite, Blood’s Tone, Vein, completed in 1965. In Blood’s Tone Brakhage hovers close to his nursing child and uses his zoom lens to suggest that he is, through cinema, participating in the child’s suckling: his short zooms in and out echo the baby’s taking the nipple into her mouth and sucking on Jane Brakhage’s breast (we never see more of Jane than this breast). Blood’s Tone seems to have been filmed at night (the baby is distracted by the camera, sometimes seeming to wonder what this strange being so nearby is doing with all this light and, presumably, noise—Blood’s Tone is silent), and Brakhage’s lighting causes the little scene to be golden, an allusion not only to this golden moment of childhood and parenthood, but perhaps to the ubiquitous Renaissance and pre-Renaissance paintings of Mary and the baby Jesus that were often decorated with gold leaf.21

      Like Blood’s Tone, A Group of Women takes us inside an intimate moment, a moment that for Marshall, as for Brakhage—both of them American men who grew up during an era when nudity was forbidden from the commercial cinema and when birth and nursing were kept relatively secret—must have seemed both fascinating and exciting. As in Blood’s Tone, but rather less obviously, the camera movement in A Group of Women, as well as the pacing of Marshall’s editing, is of a piece with what is filmed: as the women lie still, Marshall’s handheld shots are still; when the women reposition themselves and move the baby, Marshall’s camera makes subtle adjustments that reflect the motion of the women. Throughout the film, the serenity of the editing echoes this quiet conversation, this moment of interchange and affection before the imminent trek to Gautscha. And at the end, as the women drift off to sleep and out of their intimate moment, the camera moves away from the scene. The home-movie dimension of Blood’s Tone, the desire by the filmmaker father to hold on to this amazing, but inevitably fleeting moment, is similar to Marshall’s desire to record and reconstruct the loveliness of this quiet sensual moment of friendship and of the miracle of his own apparent acceptance into this space by these women.

      A similar level of intimacy, in this case between a mature man and a girl, as well as between Marshall and his subjects, is evident in A Joking Relationship, though in many ways this short film (13 minutes) is quite different in tone from A Group of Women. A Joking Relationship focuses on N!ai and her great uncle, /Ti!kay, as they banter and wrestle under a baobab tree. Again, and more obviously here, the dialogue—and this film too is largely dialogue—is not synchronized, though presumably it was recorded during the same extended moment as the imagery, and Marshall provides us with subtitled translations (fig. 3). As commentators on A Joking Relationship have often noted, what gives this film its energy is Marshall’s depiction of the complex emotions at work in the scene. N!ai is a beautiful, confident girl: when near the opening of the film /Ti!kay teases her for refusing to gather food for him, saying, “You’re a lazy wife” (N!ai had become, against her own wishes, the wife of young /Gunda), N!ai responds, “I’m not a wife and it’s too hot to gather.” Though she is betrothed to /Gunda, N!ai has refused to live with him or to consummate the marriage (N!ai’s marriage to /Gunda is a central issue in Marshall’s 1980 film, N!ai: The Story of a !Kung Woman, as is N!ai’s history of defiance of social convention).

      FIGURE 3. N!ai in John Marshall's A Joking Relationship (1962). Courtesy Documentary Educational Resources.

      What Marshall captures in A Joking Relationship is both the open affection of an uncle and a niece, a relationship rarely accorded attention in cinema of any kind, and the underlying sexual dimension of this, and perhaps any, relationship between mature men and their young relatives. Here, this sexual pull, which seems to go both ways, is continually evident, even as the two parties are redirecting an urge that could cause them problems within the small community in which they live into good-humored banter and nonsexual (but sensual) physical interchange.22 In general, their interaction is presented in a series of pulses; N!ai and /Ti!kay wrestle around, then separate, then wrestle around some more, then separate . . . all the while bantering with each other: /Ti!kay calls N!ai a snake and an insect, tells her to “come here to be cooked and eaten!” and at one point conjoins his literal hunger and his sexual hunger: he takes out his knife, opens it, and says he’ll “nip a bud to eat”—meaning N!ai’s nipple (her breasts have just begun to show). A moment later, after his mock attack and her mock resistance, Marshall provides a close-up of /Ti!kay’s hands folding up the knife in front of his wrinkly belly—in clear contradistinction to N!ai’s young breasts. N!ai says, “Let’s stay together,” then “No, let’s stay together really,” but she soon stops playing, puts her beads back on, and despite /Ti!kay’s urging her to stay, says, “You’re a silly old man,” and walks off.

      Marshall’s composition and use of sound function as a kind of cinematic participation in this extended moment of uncle–niece interchange. When /Ti!kay and N!ai are wrestling, Marshall is in close, often focusing on a calf, a breast, an arm with bracelets, half a face; when N!ai and /Ti!kay momentarily separate, the camera moves back as well and we see N!ai and /Ti!kay in long shot and alone. Further, as the sexual tension becomes increasingly evident to the viewer (we might imagine that it was increasingly felt by young John Marshall as he was shooting), a repeated bird sound seems to speak the hidden sexual-romantic urge underlying the banter and wrestling. Whereas in A Group of Women, there are usually sounds of distant conversations in the background, A Joking Relationship seems an isolated moment, interrupted only by the presence of Marshall, which is always implicit, and for at least one moment, quite explicit. Marshall’s close-ups of N!ai’s and /Ti!kay’s faces, often seem to capture not just good-humored fun but subtle embarrassment, possibly a function of the girl’s and man’s unspoken recognition of their attraction being witnessed, and in the case of /Ti!kay, some bemusement at Marshall’s fascination with what might seem to /Ti!kay this nonevent. Near the middle of the film, /Ti!kay tells N!ai to come down from the crotch of the baobab where she is standing: “He [meaning Marshall] wants to take your picture while I tumble you.” And N!ai responds, “He wants to take me gathering in the truck.” And N!ai slides down the tree to /Ti!kay to wrestle around some more, for both the fun of it and for John Marshall and his camera.

      A different sort of idyll, though related to A Group of Women and A Joking Relationship in both form and implication, is Baobab Play (1974), finished twelve years after these films. Here again, a baobab tree is the location of the action, or really a kind of nonaction, and here too, Marshall forgoes voice-over, and even subtitles, since what is happening is quite clear without verbal intervention. All we see during the 8 minutes of Baobab Play is several boys playing around and in the baobab: the boys in the tree throw sticks, leaves, berries down at the group on the ground, and the boys on the ground respond in kind. It is the sort of good-humored “war” that seems endemic to male childhood in widely different cultures and geographies—which may have been Marshall’s fascination with this СКАЧАТЬ