American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ This is juxtaposed with the !Kung performing a curing ceremony (echoing N!ai’s earlier memory of /Ti!kay’s attempt to assist Sha//ge, documented in A Curing Ceremony) for this baby who, in the end, dies—in the background white tourists are enjoying the scene, taking pictures. Some soldiers arrive to trade tins of meat for !Kung artifacts and to urge !Kung men to join the South African army; this is juxtaposed with a !Kung man working on a painting.

      The most surreal aspect of this survey is Marshall’s record of Jamie Uys shooting what would become the final shot of The Gods Must Be Crazy. If I read it correctly, this sequence offers an implicit statement of Marshall’s critique of what is usually called film “art.” Marshall records a series of retakes of a moment when Xi (played by a !Kung, N!xau)⁴⁵ is supposedly returning to his home and family (N!ai plays his wife): his little son runs to him and he lifts the son up, then puts him down and greets the rest of his band. Uys wants the man to lift the boy just once, then put him down; but each time, the man lifts the boy twice before lowering him to the ground. The absurdity of Uys’s apparent preference of a single lift, juxtaposed with N!xau’s seemingly automatic double lift, subtly demonstrates the way in which this white director ignores what seems to be an automatic (and thus comparatively natural) action on the part of N!xau, in the interest of a vague aesthetic preference—an emblem presumably for the film’s failure, for all its possible good intentions, to do anything like justice to !Kung life at the time of the filming.⁴⁶

      Marshall’s record of Uys’s creating an idyllic scene for The Gods Must Be Crazy is followed by a sequence of N!ai and the other !Kung on the reservation that reveals the bitterness and conflict that has been created by N!ai’s earning money as an actress: even /Qui, who in The Hunters is described as “a simple, kindly man and an optimist, who tended to remember only the better times of his life,” bitterly complains to N!ai, demanding she buy him blankets and shoes. !Kung society seems to be falling apart.⁴⁷ One of the many ironies here is that, despite N!ai’s charisma and charm, her role in The Gods Must Be Crazy is minor; she is not credited on Uys’s film. Another is that the Coke bottle that seduces the bushmen away from their communal Eden in The Gods could be seen in retrospect to emblemize the process of filmmaking itself, both Uys’s and Marshall’s.

      N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman ends first with a visit of a white minister and his black translator to the reservation, then with a sequence of army recruits. The minister’s telling the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well comes across as vague and confusing, and N!ai sees the story as a moral offense to her !Kung ways of doing things. The officer in charge of the recruits assumes that the San believe in the whites, but it’s clear that joining the South African military to fight SWAPO (the guerrilla army fighting for the independence of what was then a South African colony) is the only way of earning a living. In the final sequence, /Qui, now a soldier, says good-bye—we can see it’s probably forever—to his friends, including ≠Toma and N!ai, and N!ai sings, “Death mocks me, Death dances with me.” The !Kung have been expelled from Marshall’s Eden into time, because over time Eden has disappeared around them.

      THE PITTSBURGH POLICE FILMS AND BRAKHAGE’S EYES

      Within the meta-narrative of John Marshall’s career, it is interesting to remember that, during the same period when he was editing the films I’ve been discussing, he was involved in the other two projects on which his reputation rests: his collaboration with Frederick Wiseman, Titicut Follies (1967), and the series of Pittsburgh Police films that were sponsored by the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence at Brandeis University. Marshall shot most of Titicut Follies (Timothy Asch also did some shooting) and was involved, early on, in the editing, though at a certain point Wiseman told Marshall he wanted to finish the film himself. While this has led to speculation that Wiseman in some sense stole the film from Marshall (early on, the credits listed Marshall as a co-director; this is no longer the case), Marshall seems to have been ambivalent about the experience. While he says that from the beginning he and Wiseman agreed that they would be co-directors and that later he was “kicked out” of the editing room, he also admits that “it was his [Wiseman’s] movie”; “I thought of it as Fred’s movie.”⁴⁸ Of course, Marshall’s contributions to Titicut Follies as cinematographer have never been in doubt, and his in-close shooting is often reminiscent of his early !Kung films.

      While the working relationship between Marshall and Wiseman deteriorated once the shooting of Titicut Follies was completed, the two men seem to have worked well together during the shooting. When he was asked whether he and Wiseman developed “some kind of direction system,” Marshall responded, “We didn’t need to. We clicked. We were in tune with each other, we hit it off.”⁴⁹ Their being in tune is also suggested by the fact that both were working on films about police work during the years 1968–69. Wiseman completed Law and Order, his exploration of police work in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1969 (William Brayne shot Law and Order and would shoot nine more films for Wiseman), and Marshall was shooting his Pittsburgh Police films in 1968–69: Inside/Outside Station 9 was released in 1970; Three Domestics and Vagrant Woman in 1971; Investigation of a Hit and Run and 901/904 in 1972; and the remaining fifteen titles in 1973.⁵⁰ The longer films—Inside/Outside Station 9 and 901/904 include films subsequently released, often in slightly different edits, as shorts.⁵¹ The structure of the longest of the Pittsburgh Police films, Inside/Outside Station 9 (78 minutes)⁵² bears some relationship to the structure of Law and Order, though in general, the Wiseman film is more finished and more visceral and is shaped to appeal to a television audience, whereas Inside/Outside Station 9, and the other Marshall films, feel more raw, partly because Marshall was often shooting at night, in situations when lighting was difficult to control. Also, Wiseman seems more detached from the events, Marshall more intimate with them.

      As was true of Marshall’s earlier films, the police films were made not as art films—though in many senses, of course, they are artful—but in the hope that the results would be useful in a specific practical sense, as aids in helping to improve police work and as part of courses in law schools. Indeed, although the Pittsburgh Police films were shown to the police, they were not shown to the general public for years. Investigation of a Hit and Run (1972) was followed by A Legal Discussion of a Hit and Run (1973, co-shot with Timothy Asch), in which a Harvard Law School class discusses legal aspects of what is revealed by the earlier film. The 4th & 5th & the Exclusionary Rule (1973) includes sequences from Pittsburgh Police films intercut with a panel discussion moderated by Professor James Vorenberg of Harvard Law School (filmmaker Jacqueline Shearer was a member of this panel).

      The Pittsburgh films formally echo the !Kung films after The Hunters and before N!ai in that they are, in Marshall’s terminology, “sequence films”—that is, they are, or are made up of, short films documenting what John Dewey would call particular “experiences.” The differences between the Pittsburgh films and the films shot in the Kalahari are as noteworthy as the similarities, however. The police films include no voice-over or extradiagetic explanation; they were shot in black and white, probably because of the limitations of color film stocks; the result is a gritty, journalistic feel. Most important, the police films are not simply “thick” films (Marshall designates films as “thin” or “thick,” depending on how effectively they reflect the complexity of social interaction),⁵³ they are more ambiguous than the !Kung films: while Marshall came to feel close to the police he traveled with (“Getting to know them is what the film is about. We lived with them. Some of us became very fond of each other”),⁵⁴ neither they nor the citizens they come into contact with represent anything like the idealized community we see in so many of the early !Kung films. Indeed, one might conjecture that the complexity and immensity of the social issues at play in the police films helped to maintain a nostalgia in Marshall for the “small town” innocence, not so much of the Ju/’hoansi (by the early 1970s, he was well aware of what was happening to their traditional way of life), but of his own youthful experiences with them, innocence evoked in A Group of Women and A Joking Relationship and more generally expressed in the lovely color of the early films shot in the Kalahari.

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