American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ in sharing the work with the police themselves:

      

      I filmed events of policework for about nine months over the two-year period. On my own, I used the sequences as case studies for discussion with the cops in the loft of Station 9. A number of us would foregather with some six-packs after the four to midnight shift. . . .

      Discussion was lively. . . . Many of my sequences showed “domestics” [that is, domestic disputes between marital or live-in partners]. The cops in Station 9 had all three schools of thought: get involved and try to help the family; arrest the man, or everybody; do nothing and maybe call the welfare department. The sequences of real events and specific officers motivated and grounded the discussions. The police appreciated the reality . . . and all said they benefited from arguing their views and airing their feelings.⁵⁵

      All in all, Marshall’s personal involvement with the police he worked with to make the Pittsburgh Police Films provides an interesting contrast to another “personal” film about police work shot in Pittsburgh in 1970 and finished in 1971: Stan Brakhage’s Eyes, one of the three films that have become known as The Pittsburgh Trilogy (The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes and Deus Ex, both 1971, are the other parts of the trilogy; The Act was filmed in the Pittsburgh morgue; Deus Ex, in a Pittsburgh hospital).

      Marshall’s Pittsburgh films and Brakhage’s Eyes emblemize two radically different approaches to independent filmmaking, to documentary, and to personal filmmaking that were developing during the 1960s and early 1970s. Both projects are radically anticommercial, implicit critiques of standard Hollywood fare. In both cases, there was no scripting: Marshall and Brakhage immersed themselves in the experience of police work, then edited what they’d shot to reflect what they had come to understand so that we could experience their impressions in cinematic form and draw our own conclusions.

      Except for the fact that both filmmakers used handheld 16mm cameras, however, the films are formally quite distinct. Eyes is silent and in color, and reflects Brakhage’s fascination with the visual accoutrements of police work: the various symbols (badges, uniforms, name tags) and characteristic gestures of the police he travels with. Marshall’s fascination is with the human interactions between Pittsburgh citizens and the police, especially as these interactions are expressed vocally. While Brakhage demonstrates his feelings for the situations he witnesses (some of them quite graphic: a dead body in the street, an old man whose face has been battered) in his gestures with the camera and in his freeform editing, Marshall works at remaining invisible but within the development of events; in interior shots, his lighting makes his presence obvious, and from time to time a citizen reveals some discomfort with, or at least interest in, his presence—but in general Marshall’s films are as self-effacing as Eyes is self-expressive.

      Together, however, the two projects provide a fascinating reflection on Pittsburgh and on the ways in which independent film artists were attempting to engage the urban experience during the early 1970s. Despite the obvious formal distinctions between the work of the two filmmakers, it is clear that certain problems are endemic to Pittsburgh: in both films the police are dealing with homelessness, with young people who have nothing to do; and in both, the police are working across racial lines during an era when racial issues were especially volatile (though this remains mostly implicit in both films). In Eyes and in Marshall’s films the police are nominally, and to some extent actually, the guardians of order, but they also seem a bit at sea in dealing with the complexities of the society evolving around them.

      The early responses to the films reflect these complexities. When Marshall’s films were shown at the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence at Brandeis, the reactions to the police work depicted varied widely, as is clear in Marshall’s The 4th, 5th, & Exclusionary Rule; and Brakhage remembers that while the police “loved Eyes . . . , felt that their dignity had been restored,” and used the film “to show how kind and gentle they are,” Black Panthers in Chicago “used Eyes to show what pigs the police are.”⁵⁶ Of course, the fact that these two cinematically radical projects were shot in Pittsburgh at roughly the same time suggests something about both the openness of the city’s police department and the prestige of independent cinema in Pittsburgh at that moment.⁵⁷

      PUTTING DOWN THE CAMERA AND PICKING UP THE SHOVEL

      The journey from the subsistence to the commercial world has often been devastating, but I think few black people want to reverse the clock. Most Ju/’hoansi, at any rate, would rather go forward in the mixed economy even if it were possible to turn back.

      JOHN MARSHALL, “FILMING AND LEARNING”⁵⁸

      After his return to the Kalahari and the Ju/’hoansi, and N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman, Marshall’s documentaries of the !Kung saga take a very different form. Indeed, when I contacted Documentary Educational Resources to ask for DVD copies of Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out (1985) and To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report (1991), DER director Cynthia Close sent me the following e-mail: “I can send you N!ai [I had also requested N!ai], but John never considered those other two titles ‘films’—some of the footage from both those ‘reports’ was used throughout A KALAHARI FAMILY and the final chapter there, DEATH BY MYTH, really tells this whole aspect of the story.”⁵⁹ Whatever one calls Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out and To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report (and other related works from the 1980s that are not in distribution), they are certainly parts of Marshall’s meta-film of Kalahari life, which, as Close suggests in her e-mail, concludes with the epic, five-part series, A Kalahari Family (2001).⁶⁰ And if we can see them not only as “field reports,” but also as video works by an accomplished film artist, it becomes evident that through their form and style, as well as their apparent content, they provide a postmodern reflection on the role of filmmaking in the transformation of a way of life.

      Especially in Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out but also in To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report the video imagery is fuzzy and washed out, inferior to what one had come to expect from Marshall. But it is obvious in both videos that image quality and other “artistic” dimensions of cinema are irrelevant; composition and editing are entirely functional in these tapes. Marshall’s concern is with the developing crisis faced by the Ju/’hoansi. I’m reminded here of Joris Ivens’s The Spanish Earth (1937), where Ivens sometimes chose to sacrifice conventional concerns with film aesthetics in the hope that the film might make a positive contribution within a flow of events that constituted a political and human emergency. What is visible in Pull Ourselves Up is John Marshall himself, not as an artist documenting what is going on but as an active participant in the events. This is signaled in the titles of both field reports: “Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out” and “To Hold Our Own Ground.”⁶¹

      As is standard in Marshall’s !Kung films, we hear his voice-over, and he translates what various men and women say; here, however, he is visible physically, first, arriving in a truck, bringing cattle feed for the kral at N!am Tchoa in 1982 and, cigarette hanging from his mouth (rather like Sigourney Weaver’s character in Avatar), helping to unload the heavy bags.⁶² In the final section of the video, Marshall is visible again, this time in December 1984, at //Xaru pan, where, he explains, “We’re piling rocks around the borehole to hopefully hurt elephants’ feet and keep them off” (a magnificent elephant hovers in the distance). Marshall is then seen among a group of Ju/’hoansi who are installing a water pump. The work is interrupted by government officials who tell the group that they must have written authority to install a pump, and Marshall is heard arguing that traditional water rights in the Kalahari do not require written permission. Tsamko (the eldest son of ≠Toma) tells the officials, “This pump is our business; we just asked John to help”; and later, after an official indicates that Marshall is testing his patience, Tsamko says, “It’s us Ju/’hoansi that are doing this pump, not John Marshall” (a Ju/’hoan Bushman Development Foundation, set up by Marshall with a gift from Laurence Marshall just before his death in 1980, СКАЧАТЬ