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
isbn: 9780520954939
isbn:
Oukwane died of thirst somewhere between /Ei hxa o and Ghanzi. When the group reached the farms, they were driven off. /Twikwe and Da si n!a, another old woman, died of thirst along the fences. The survivors reached Ghanzi. In the town commons, the people could drink water from a municipal tap but there was nothing to eat. Kutera died of hunger. The two older boys, Wi!abe and Wi!e, disappeared. While trying to beg for corn meal, !Gai’s wife Tsetchwe was raped. She got syphilis and died. The disease had already killed their small son, N!oakwe, and riddled !Gai.
I found /Giamakwe, the other survivor, failing to get a job on another farm. I asked him if he remembered his father’s music. He said, “What music?” . . . In 1955 it did not occur to me to find out what would actually happen to the people I filmed at /Ei hxa o.42
For Marshall, whatever satisfaction the artistry of Bitter Melons (or for that matter, the artistry of Oukwane and the other musicians and dancers in the film) gave him, and whatever pleasure audiences might take from his film, were rendered pointless, once one understood the historical realities within which this film was made. And, rather than ignore those historical realities any further, Marshall committed the remainder of his filmmaking life, or at least that portion of his filmmaking life that had to do with the peoples of the Kalahari, to a direct engagement with them. The result was a series of films that not only have a very different function from the films of the 1950s through the 1970s, but that re-present material from earlier films in ways that provide this material with the context that was beyond the frame during the shooting and unacknowledged during the editing. This new context allows those of us who know Marshall’s early films to reexperience them in new ways.
N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman, at 59 minutes, was the longest film about the !Kung that Marshall had finished since The Hunters. It was made following Marshall’s long exile from Nyae Nyae; in 1958 the government of South Africa refused to renew his visa, and as a result, he was denied contact with the !Kung for twenty years, including the entire period during which he was editing the !Kung films that followed The Hunters. In retrospect, we can imagine that working with the footage that recorded what he considered the happiest experiences of his life was a way of revisiting his friends during the first years of his exile.
Like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, Marshall returned to the Kalahari in 1978, to the village of Tshumkwe on the border of Botswana and what in 1990 would become the independent nation of Namibia, now the administrative center of a reservation established in 1970 for the !Kung. Here, he discovered the dramatic changes that had occurred in his absence. He also discovered that a feature film, The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), was being shot in the area, and that N!ai, among the most frequent participants in his films, had a role in Jamie Uys’s feature. N!ai became the focus of Marshall’s shooting (fig. 4).
N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman opens with a sequence revealing the inhumane conditions on the reservation: the Ju/’hoansi can no longer gather or hunt and are sustained only by “mealy meal” (a kind of cornmeal porridge). Further, their health has deteriorated; N!ai says, “We’re all TB people [people with tuberculosis].” Marshall uses close-ups of N!ai, who is still very beautiful, speaking to the camera, as a visual motif (her comments are presented in voice-over translation by Letta Mbulu). During the first third of the film, N!ai reviews the experiences that have brought her, and her neighbors, to their current situation. N!ai’s memories are interwoven with voice-overs by Marshall, and their dual commentary is illustrated with sequences from earlier Marshall films. We see imagery of N!ai as a young girl in The Hunters and helping to gather berries in First Film; and Marshall reviews the action in The Hunters as we see moments from that film.
FIGURE 4. N!ai in John Marshall’s N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman (1980). Courtesy Documentary Educational Resources.
As N!ai’s reminiscence continues, we also learn information not in the earlier films about the marriage of N!ai and /Gunda and see footage of N!ai and /Gunda not included in earlier films: details of the marriage ritual that betrothed N!ai to /Gunda, for example. N!ai also recalls the events recorded in A Curing Ceremony (1969), where a woman gives birth to a stillborn baby; and we see a moment from A Joking Relationship when /Ti!kay chides N!ai for teasing /Gunda; and finally, moments from N/um Tchai, when /Gunda is in trance, learning to be a healer (in N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman these moments are presented in color). And N!ai and /Gunda comment on these past events themselves. N!ai talks about resisting the marriage (“I just didn’t want a husband”), and /Gunda, in good humor, remembers, “You gave me such a hard time!” Both remember how N!ai left /Gunda for other men: “My husband did not know for years. . . . I tormented him.” We find out that they did come to live as man and wife and had several children together.
Seeing imagery of N!ai and /Gunda’s past while they comment on the events from twenty-plus years later is, on one level, amusing and engaging, particularly because of their apparent good humor about their youthful struggles—indeed, the sequence of N!ai and /Gunda together is reminiscent of the couples talking about how they met and came to marry in Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally (1989)! Further, as suggested earlier, this information allows us to understand details of both N/um Tchai: The Ceremonial Dance of the !Kung Bushmen and N!owa T’ama: The Melon Tossing Game that were not yet clear in those films: the meta-narrative of Marshall’s career moves chronologically through the years and, for those familiar with the various segments of this meta-narrative, back in time: we learn what’s new, but also have an opportunity to revise our understanding of the past. Of course, the conditions at Tshumkwe in 1978 seem all the more appalling when contrasted with the imagery from the past, which is quite gorgeous. Indeed, the beauty of this footage from the 1950s and 1960s suggests a golden age, a time when, as N!ai explains, the !Kung went where they wanted to and were not poor, and when Marshall could take unabashed pleasure as a filmmaker in what he understood as an independent and beautiful way of life that, as he explains in his voice-over, had endured in the western Kalahari for twenty thousand years.43
The review of the past, conveyed by N!ai’s story, Marshall’s voice-over, and the footage from the 1950s ends with a dramatic cut from the text, “Tshum!kwi 1958,” superimposed over a shot of a giant baobab tree, to a second text, “Tshum!kwi 1978,” superimposed over a shot of a (white) man and woman, sitting in their living room.44 What follows is a more detailed investigation of the current situation at Tshumkwe. N!ai continues to address the camera, but from here on it’s mostly in song (as though the pain of the present is being redirected into art), and Marshall intervenes in voice-over from time to time to situate particular sequences. The imagery, however, is all from the present—though in several instances current activities echo images we’ve seen in the earlier part of the film. The structure of this section of the film is designed to demonstrate the ways in which the various kinds of white intervention into !Kung life are failing the !Kung.
The man and woman, presumably the administrators of the reservation, complain about how lazy the “bushmen” are, how they don’t earn the money they are given. This is juxtaposed with a !Kung servant cleaning their home. The local game warden explains government policy about hunting; his comments on the fact that the giraffe are disappearing are intercut with shots of Tsamko, ≠Toma’s son, chasing a giraffe on horseback, despite the new rules (the giraffe’s fall to the ground echoes the giraffe falling near the end of The Hunters). The game warden then reviews the South African budget for dealing with the San on the reservation (“development of human potential,” including school: 2,000 rand; social services, medical clinic: 2,500 rand; administration: 200,000 rand!), СКАЧАТЬ