American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ credits of Baobab Play indicate that Marshall produced and directed the film (it was edited by Frank Galvin, who edited many of Marshall’s films of the 1960s and 1970s; Timothy Asch was a production assistant), and it is clear throughout the film that Marshall must have directed the boys to play, presumably in their normal manner, while ignoring, insofar as possible, his presence with them under the tree and up in its branches. The film intercuts between the two “warring” groups from within each group. The cinematography and sound in Baobab Play provide an idyllic context for this depiction of childhood: the light in the tree is lovely, as is the sound of the breeze blowing through the tree, which continually transforms the lightscape of the film.

      Marshall’s meditation on male childhood in Baobab Play is deeply poignant, coming as it does near the end of the editing of the material shot during the Peabody Museum Kalahari Expeditions. By the time he edited Baobab Play, Marshall had moved through several phases of filmmaking, and his understanding of his project was radically changing. But here, for a moment, he seems to meditate not simply on the innocence of these boys, and not merely on childhood in general as represented by this group, but on what he came to think of, what perhaps he already felt were “the best years of my life, the happiest I’ve ever been, without any question”—that is, not on his own childhood, but on his filmmaking childhood, which had produced so much footage and the increasing dexterity with the camera so evident in Baobab Play. As in A Group of Women, A Joking Relationship, and in other 1960s and 1970s films, in Baobab Play Marshall is able simultaneously to record lovely moments in the lives of some Ju/’hoansi and to document his immersion within this culture and implicitly his pleasure in being accepted by these people he so admires, in being allowed to be part of their lives. In these films the baobab tree becomes a symbol of the fragile cultural Eden the Marshalls felt their expeditions had revealed to them and the Eden of John Marshall’s engagement with the !Kung as (cinematic) hunter and gatherer.²³

      Of course, it is precisely the Marshalls’ apparent assumption that what they had seen in the Kalahari was a way of life unchanged since the Pleistocene Era, a vestige of an original culture unaffected by more modern developments, within which peacefulness and cooperation were the rule—in other words, a kind of Eden—that came to be understood within the anthropological community as a fundamental problem with the films that came out of the Marshall family expeditions. The assumption that the !Kung had lived in the Kalahari, precisely the way that the Marshalls had “found” them—even the subsequent contention by both John Marshall and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas that the family’s presence had led to the problematic transformation of this ancient way of life—soon came to be seen as a naïve sense of the history of southern Africa. Subsequent research revealed that many changes had probably occurred to the San peoples as migrations of other ethnic populations into southwest Africa from other areas caused the San to move into the Kalahari. What the Marshalls “found” may have seemed Edenic to them, but it wasn’t an original Eden for the !Kung. Indeed, in their research into the 700,000 feet of footage accumulated during the years when John Marshall was filming the San, Keyan G. Tomaselli and John P. Homiak discovered that Marshall himself was well aware of a variety of inroads into San culture, but simply eliminated them from his early depictions of the particular group of !Kung he got to know.²⁴

      That during his early decades as a filmmaker, John Marshall would become attached to the idea that he had discovered an Eden, what at least for him was an Eden, is hardly surprising. It is one of the central conceits of my book, The Garden in the Machine, that within the rapidly transforming America of the late twentieth century, American cinema (filmmaking and filmgoing) became an arena not, of course, for experiencing an actual Eden, but for producing cinematic experiences that provided Edenic moments.²⁵ In a world recovering from a century of warfare, and from the psychic shock of learning the true extent of the Holocaust (an event that seemed to render all ideas of innocence in modern society absurd), any number of filmmakers came to understand that their mission was to recover some sense of innocence, some sense of the world before the Fall. Without even the idea of innocence, how could more humane societies be developed? Marshall’s idylls of the !Kung have come to seem untenable ethnographically, but they are understandable both psychologically and aesthetically—and they remain moving and in their own ways revealing.

      PEDAGOGY

      Making and poisoning arrows is an ingenious application of collected knowledge. There is nothing obvious about the use of the particular grubs in the particular way. The combination of accident and invention that produced the technique would be impossible to reconstruct. Furthermore, the ammount [sic] those people know about their world is phenomenal. They have names for almost every kind of mouse that lives in Nyae Nyae (there are a great many species). They recognize more sub-species of plants than botanists commonly do. Men’s knowledge of the behavior of animals is extraordinary; not all men, of course, but the masters of their profession are masters indeed. Somehow all this knowledge gets, or did get, passed from one generation to another. It is not, however, passed on only as an integrated body of specific knowledge wrapped up in a forgone conclusion. Each man’s experience with his profession is different and no two mixtures of poison that I ever saw had the same ingredients. Also, no two men spoor quite alike. They seem to operate on a few principles which they modify constantly.

      JOHN MARSHALL, “THE ARROW MAKERS”²⁶

      John Marshall’s filmmaking career developed in three distinct phases and reflects three different kinds of experience. During the 1950s, he learned to shoot film and found his way into !Kung practices and rituals with his camera. Beginning in 1957 with The Hunters, he began to edit the material he had collected (first with Robert Gardner at the Peabody Museum, later with Timothy Asch), fashioning individual films, and during the following seventeen years, produced sixteen short films about the Ju/’hoansi. In these short films (Marshall called them “sequence films” and the term has come to mean usually short ethnographic films about particular dimensions of a culture) we can see him trying one, then another editing strategy for presenting !Kung culture to the audience. And finally, developments within !Kung culture that had already begun during the 1950s, though they were not particularly evident to the Marshalls when they arrived in the Kalahari, accelerated during the 1960s and 1970s, forcing Marshall to reconsider his earlier work and, as a media maker, to move in new directions. N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman (1980) represented a radically different approach that Marshall continued to develop through his capstone work, A Kalahari Family (2001). The evolution of Marshall’s career also offers viewers three different kinds of experience, related to Marshall’s own development, but also distinct from it—more on this later.

      This second phase of Marshall’s career has its own contours, determined by Marshall’s quest to find what was most valuable for an audience in the footage he had shot during the 1950s. For a time, he seems to have assumed, as Flaherty apparently did, that, given the widespread stereotyping of indigenous peoples, film experiences that provided an informed but friendly window into indigenous worlds might work to confront stereotypes and to help audiences see these peoples (and themselves) more fully as part of a larger humanity. Certainly Nanook represented a radically different sense of Native Americans than most films offered during the first decades of film history; and from the beginning, the Marshalls’ films revealed the “bushmen” not simply as interesting, but exemplary. As John Marshall says in his voice-over at the beginning of Playing with Scorpions, “!Kung people by and large are not excited by the thought of dangerous encounters with each other or their environment. They do not respect the warrior or admire the struggle against nature. Such follies, they believe, are provoked by the senseless and characterize the red people (Europeans) and the animals without hooves (the Bantu).” What Marshall felt he had witnessed during the 1950s in Nyae Nyae must have seemed all the more remarkable in the late 1960s and early 1970s during the throes of the war in Vietnam. Indeed, there has been some conjecture that the Marshall family’s involvement with the !Kung was originally instigated by Laurence Marshall’s feeling of complicity with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: at Raytheon he had overseen the production of the trigger mechanism used in the original atom bombs. According to John Marshall, the elder Marshall СКАЧАТЬ