American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ see A Group of Women, A Joking Relationship, and Baobab Play as personal films, not in the sense of the “personal documentary” explored later in this volume, but in the sense that Stan Brakhage made personal films about his family and as a means of expressing his personal concerns and ecstasies. But within the canon of Marshall’s films about the Ju/’hoansi, these three films are anomalies, precisely in their refusal to be openly instructive. Laurence Marshall’s assumption that “truth could be discovered by objective means in any field” and that “most art was mushy” had a lasting impact on John, even once he had learned new ways of seeing from his friend ≠Toma and other Ju/’hoansi.²⁸ Laurence’s influence, when combined with the fact that John’s shooting had been done under the auspices of the Peabody Museum and the Smithsonian, resulted in a decision to work with the footage he had recorded so that it might be useful in academic contexts, and in the 1960s and early 1970s, this meant within the traditional conventions of documentary cinema: that is, Marshall came to feel that his sequence films needed to provide, insofar as feasible, teachable information about the !Kung and about hunter-gatherers—though the resulting films do offer moments that evoke the earlier, more personal films.

      After A Group of Women and A Joking Relationship, which forgo narration entirely, Marshall returned to voice-over, sometimes using it in a manner not very different from the pervasive commentary in The Hunters—this is the case in Bitter Melons (1971), A Rite of Passage (1972), and Debe’s Tantrum (1972)—but more often, employing a general formula that seems to have been a compromise between the desire to let his interaction with the Ju/’hoansi generate his films and the need to make the material he had collected usable within an academic context. Beginning in 1969–70 with N/um Tchai: The Ceremonial Dance of the !Kung Bushmen (1969), An Argument about a Marriage (1969) and N!owa T’ama: The Melon Tossing Game (1970), and continuing through The Wasp Nest (1972), Playing with Scorpions (1972), Men Bathing (1973), and The Meat Fight (1974), Marshall opens each film with a précis, a voice-over introduction providing information about a certain event or ritual, supplemented with still images of the people and actions Marshall describes. After this précis, the body of the film is presented without voice-over. This strategy allows Marshall to offer information about the Ju/’hoansi but also demonstrates an implicit commitment to careful looking and listening on the part of the audience. Marshall’s resistance to transforming the complex San culture into information is sometimes evident in the way he speaks of this two-part structure within the films. In N/um Tchai: The Ceremonial Dance of the !Kung Bushmen, for example, the informational précis is not preceded by a formal title, and Marshall makes clear that the longer body of the film that follows is “the film proper”; only once the précis is complete do we see the film’s formal title.²⁹

      N/um Tchai: The Ceremonial Dance of the !Kung Bushmen and N!owa T’ama: The Melon Tossing Game, as their similarly arranged titles imply, can be understood as a diptych, not only in the sense that both focus on San rituals, but because Marshall’s way of depicting these activities reveals a variety of parallels and interrelationships. Both films focus on dancing and singing, in N/um Tchai as part of a curing ceremony that includes men moving into trance (the Ju/’hoansi call it “half- death”), and in N!owa T’ama as part of symbolic game that women play, which can also cause a participant or an observer to enter trance. In both films women sing and clap, creating energy for the ceremonies. Both films provide an extended review of events that take place over a period of time, and that include some of the same characters, most notably N!ai and /Gunda, whose betrothal is a subject in N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman (and is referred to in A Joking Relationship).

      Indeed, in retrospect, we can see that the two films play out a bit of marital melodrama, though this was not clear for audiences until 1980, when N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman was finished. During the section of N/um Tchai focusing on /Gunda’s movement into trance (both in the précis and in the film proper), we see close-ups of N!ai, who seems either bored or unhappy. Since N!ai is a recognizable figure, her facial expressions seem noteworthy, if obscure in this case. In N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman we learn that N!ai was frightened of /Gunda’s going into trance (“Your face looked so crazy,” she says to /Gunda, then to Marshall, “I was so scared of this man”). Her fear comes into play during the latter part of N!owa T’ama: when an older woman is inspired to go into trance by /Gunda’s dancing, N!ai harasses the woman—as if to demonstrate her fear and resistance to trance in general and to /Gunda’s involvement in it.

      Marshall’s manner of depicting the two rituals confirms the thematic and implicitly narrative relationships between the two films, and it suggests that while he was trying to make films that would have practical pedagogical value, he had not foresworn the personal and aesthetic engagement that characterizes A Group of Women and A Joking Relationship. In both N/um Tchai and N!owa T’ama the move from précis to film proper (and this is true of other films using this two-part structure) is essentially a move from Marshall’s observing events from the outside to his cinematically joining in the rituals. In N/um Tchai the précis is presented in live action, but generally in long shot and especially at the beginning, using downward angles: that is, we see the Ju/’hoansi literally from a distance and below us. As soon as the “film proper” begins, the camera is closer and at a ground level, looking up or across at the participants. In N!owa T’ama the précis is presented differently, but to the same effect. As we hear Marshall in voice-over, explaining the melon-tossing game, we are seeing freeze frames of moments in the ritual. As David MacDougall has suggested, freezing the moving image “returns film to the status of still photography, from which cinema was born. Seized out of the flow of events, the photograph excludes us from the film and bears us away from the story. . . .”³⁰ But once the film proper begins, we are seeing live action, and we feel instantly more involved.

      In N/um Tchai Marshall’s black-and-white cinematography, especially at the beginning of the film proper, is elegant and evocative. The men dancing are seen in silhouette from a position slightly below; this evokes morning (Marshall has explained that the dancing has continued all night and into the morning) and implicitly suggests the mythic beauty of this event and its power for him. The changing chiaroscuro of the cinematography throughout the day functions as a clock. As the curing ritual becomes more involved, Marshall’s camera movement expresses the participants’ growing excitement and his own—essentially he is dancing with his camera in conjunction with the ritual; and the pace of the editing speeds up as the ritual grows more intense and slows down as the ritual concludes: a final 54-second shot concludes the film. A similar strategy is evident in N!owa T’ama, where in the film proper (here, the title comes at the very beginning, before the précis) Marshall’s color cinematography records the women throwing the melon not simply from a detached distance, but from within the dance and in a manner that expressionistically communicates the excitement of the game. In several sequences Marshall positions the camera so that when one woman throws the little melon to the next woman, the melon stays roughly in the center of the frame, while the first woman runs out of the frame, and the next runs in. The movement of women and men running and dancing quickly into and through the frame expresses the ritual as a kind of controlled wildness. When the men momentarily interrupt the ritual, Marshall interrupts his focus on the game and uses intercutting to emphasize the friendly collision of genders. Both films use sound in much the same way; the singing and clapping of the !Kung women, and in N/um Tchai, the rhythm of the men’s stamping feet, provide a continual background for the action; the singing dies out near the end of each film, signaling the conclusion of both the !Kung ritual and the cinematic ritual that allows us to engage it.

      In other films Marshall’s combination of teaching and artistic expression works in somewhat different ways. In An Argument about a Marriage, for example, the précis combines live action and freeze frame. As Marshall explains how members of a group of Ju/’hoansi who had been captured by white farmers were reunited with other members of the group (several of whom had escaped soon after capture), in part through the Marshalls’ intervention, we see a truck wending its way through the trees and the moment when the groups are reunited. Then, when he explains the complex situation that has resulted from /Qui’s having a child with Baou during captivity, we see the relevant parties in freeze frame. Then once the film proper СКАЧАТЬ