American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ is in close-up, sometimes extreme close-up, generally filmed so that we are looking slightly up at the participants: Marshall and his filmmaking are in a submissive position with regard to the experience of the !Kung. More fully than any other of the sequence films, An Argument about a Marriage communicates the complexity, indeed the near-chaos, of this moment in the lives of the Ju/’hoansi. During the film proper, Marshall uses subtitles to translate, but often so many people are speaking at once that it is clear that we’re getting only a fraction of what is being said. The forced interplay of the !Kung and the white farmers has thrown these lives into crisis: as ≠Toma says, near the close of the film, “When we act like ourselves, these things don’t happen.” The film ends with a freeze frame on ≠Toma, who has negotiated a momentary stalemate, as Marshall explains how this volatile situation resolved itself.

      Marshall’s strategy for presenting information about the !Kung allows for a wide range of moods. Men Bathing, for example, could not be more different from An Argument about a Marriage either in tone or in presentation. The précis of Men Bathing begins in live action and with John Marshall’s voice-over, as we see several men arrive at a lovely pan on a gorgeous day. Then the film shifts to freeze frame as Marshall explains who these men are and how they are related to each other. A return to live action and the increased volume of environmental sounds signal the beginning of the film proper, during which little happens: the men bathe, make jokes,³¹ and enjoy the moment; and Marshall’s camera meditates on this idyllic scene, on the gorgeous landscape, and on the bodies of these men. Men Bathing is the most serene of all Marshall’s films and one of the most beautiful—a final vestige, perhaps, of the filmmaker’s fast-fading innocence.

      EXPULSION FROM EDEN: BITTER MELONS AND N!AI, THE STORY OF A !KUNG WOMAN

      But things had changed; it came out that . . . two entire bands of Bushmen whom we had known at Gautscha, and many Bushmen from Gam, including the husband of Beautiful Ungka, had been taken away by Europeans to work on the farms. Three times European farmers had come, having followed in the tire tracks we ourselves had left behind the last time. They came all the way to Gam, where they had found the Bushmen, no longer shy of Europeans, and had “offered to take them for a ride on their trucks but had promised to bring them back.” The Bushmen had believed them, had gone for the ride, and of course were never seen again.

      ELISABETH MARSHALL THOMAS, THE HARMLESS PEOPLE³²

      Seen as a whole, however, John’s “Bushmen” films reveal the expanding of a sensitive consciousness not only to a gestalt of life but to the complexity of filmic (re)presentation and to the limitations of audiences to comprehend what is presented. He alone of the 1950s–’60s recorders of “Bushmen” has expressed his changed views in uncompromising terms; he deserves applause for this. Collectively, his films constitute important ethnographic documents. They are not, however, dependable documents of the objectified peoples made subjects in the films, but faithful documents of the filmmaker/ethnographer situated in the discourse of a distorted modernity at the time they were made.

      EDWIN N. WILMSEN³³

      I first became aware of John Marshall in 1972 at a summer film institute organized by Peter Feinstein in conjunction with what was called the University Film Study Center and presented at Hampshire College.³⁴ Among the many opportunities available to those who enrolled in the institute was a course in ethnographic cinema taught by Marshall. My most vivid memories of this course include his beginning the week’s first screening with Peter Kubelka’s flicker film, Arnulf Rainer (1960) and his presentation of his own film, Bitter Melons (1971), which I taught regularly for a number of years. Bitter Melons, like First Film, is a general introduction to the San of the Kalahari, focusing on a band of Khwe San living at /Ei hxa o, in what is now Botswana. While Lorna Marshall organized First Film roughly in accordance with the way written anthropological studies, including her own The !Kung of Nyae Nyae, are arranged, John Marshall organized Bitter Melons around music, and in particular, around the blind musician Oukwane, whose compositions are a motif during much of the film ( Oukwane’s “Bitter Melons,” his favorite composition according to Marshall, is the source of the title).³⁵

      During roughly the first third of the (30-minute) film, we hear a series of songs Oukwane has learned, some of them his own, others passed onto him by other musicians; Marshall provides information about the songs in voice-over. The second third of the film briefly reviews general aspects of Kalahari San life: gathering food and water, planting melons, hunting, the etiquette of sharing or not sharing various foods, the slaughtering of meat. During the final third of the film, a distant grass fire is spotted, and two men walk to the fire in the hope of meeting their relatives and bringing them back to their camp; their journey is accompanied by relevant songs played by Oukwane. After a cutaway to several boys performing traditional animal songs and playing the musical porcupine game, the two men return with the visitors and the film climaxes with men and boys dancing to various tunes. The film ends with the bands dispersing; Oukwane and his wife Kutera decide to stay where they are, being “old and finished.”

      Bitter Melons is a lovely and engaging film, in large measure because of Marshall’s obvious respect for and refusal to patronize Oukwane’s music and the traditional musics of the Khwe San: “I wanted to celebrate the wealth of music, musical traditions and games which the people supported with their marginal economy.”³⁶ Oukwane’s songs are a pleasure to hear, and the young boys’ enjoyment of their songs and games and the dancing of the men and boys near the end makes for a high-spirited experience. The landscape imagery, especially during the walk to the distant grass fire, is reminiscent of Nanook of the North; here too, we see men tiny against vast spaces, working to create a subsistence and a life against considerable odds. In general, Bitter Melons is an idyll—poignant because of Oukwane and Kutera’s decision to remain behind, alone, at the end of the film, adding a final emphasis to the challenges of the Kalahari from which all this music and enjoyable social interplay has come. Marshall’s affection and admiration for these people are evident in the general functionality of his editing and in his use of extended shots during the dancing, one of them nearly two-and-a-half-minutes long. Like Flaherty in much of Nanook, Marshall makes himself invisible as an act of respect; their art is what is interesting to Marshall, not his own.

      For anyone who has enjoyed Bitter Melons, the fact that Marshall later discredited the film might come as a surprise. But his experience in first making Bitter Melons and then coming to terms with what he saw as its failures models the central trajectory of his career from the early 1970s on. Like The Hunters, Bitter Melons is an attempt to create a general view of a people and inevitably can be faulted for leaving out as much as it includes, both in the specifics of the activities it reveals (in The Harmless People Elizabeth Marshall Thomas explains that the dance seen at the end of Bitter Melons was part of a far more complex ritual than is evident in the film),³⁷ and in a more general sense: whatever sense we have of Khwe life from the film doesn’t include the kinds of complex interaction Marshall’s Nyae Nyae films reveal.³⁸ Further, Marshall echoes Flaherty in not including those aspects of the activities we see that were affected by the filming itself: for example, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas explains, “Dances are usually held at night, but this time, out of consideration for us, they agreed to hold it [the dance we see in Bitter Melons] during the day so we could film it.”³⁹ And Marshall himself has indicated that when the visitors came to visit Oukwane, “we gave everybody water. . . . Before and after the final dance in the film everybody had a good drink. No one would, or could, have danced in the sun with only tsama melons to relieve their thirst. Everybody’s stay at /Ei hxa o was strictly limited by the water supply.”⁴⁰

      John Marshall’s discrediting of Bitter Melons, however, has less to do with these issues than with how the poignant idyll he so carefully created, and that we viewers enjoy, turned out to falsify the historical realities that occurred after the film was shot and the Marshalls had left. He has explained:

      In 1972, while working on Bushmen of the СКАЧАТЬ