American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary - Scott MacDonald страница 18
Название: American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary
Автор: Scott MacDonald
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Кинематограф, театр
isbn: 9780520954939
isbn:
The very tenuous optimism of water being pumped in the final shot of the video (optimism immediately tempered by the final texts, which chart the devastating effects of reservation life on those Ju/’hoansi who have not set up their own farms and ranches) is the inverse of a subtle dimension of the review of Ju/’hoansi history that begins the video. In order to contexualize Pull Ourselves Up for those who have not followed his work, Marshall recycles a shot of a column of !Kung walking through the desert, shot in the 1950s; then, several shots from N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman of activities around the reservation offices at Tshumkwe: Jamie Uys shooting The Gods Must Be Crazy, U! going for mealy meal, /Qui marching with the soldiers and leaving. For anyone familiar with Marshall’s earlier work, this recycled imagery is at once familiar and de-familiarized by our recognition that it is faded and fuzzy—not surprisingly, since these shots are from earlier generations of film and video that have been re-recorded with video technology that substitutes convenience (and sync sound) for image quality.
In the early !Kung films, Marshall always remained outside the frame. Even though he felt personally at one with the Ju/’hoansi, and even when he was directly involved in the action (he was part of the group that shoots the giraffe in The Hunters), as a filmmaker he felt obliged to seem detached from their lives. This was, I assume, an act of respect, similar to Flaherty’s suppressing his own physical presence in Nanook of the North, as Marshall made clear even as late as the 1990s:
The problem is to let the audience meet the people in the film instead of just the filmmaker. The films that could help achieve the goal will have to try to show what people do and say, not what filmmakers feel, think and want their audience to know.
Robert Gardner, Fred Wiseman, Ricky Leacock and John Marshall are not particularly interesting. Ju/’hoansi pulling themselves up from the depths of dispossession are interesting.63
Pull Ourselves Up, however, reveals a new kind of presence that signals fundamental changes in Marshall’s thinking as media maker. Our consciousness of the (literal) decay of Marshall’s concern with aesthetic issues, at least as conventionally conceived, in both the film footage shot for N!ai and in that canonical shot of the !Kung walking into the desert (a shot that can be read as an index of Marshall’s idealistic youth), provides a historical context for Marshall’s entering the frame both in body and in voice (not simply in voice-over, but as a voice within the diegesis of the action). Here he is, for the first time in his moving image work, part of a “we”: not exactly the “we” of the Ju/’hoansi, but the “we” of a transcultural group made up of Ju/’hoansi and others working in the present for political change in the Kalahari.
The shifts in Marshall’s position with regard to filmmaking and the Ju/’hoansi continue in To Hold Our Own Ground, which takes roughly the same form as Pull Ourselves Up. Again, Marshall begins with a map and in voice-over reviews the changes in how southern African territory has come to be divided up: “The following visual report shows the Ju/wa struggle to hold on to their last fragment of land and farm for their lives.” Tsamko, who has emerged as a leader of the Ju/’hoansi (this is already evident in Pull Ourselves Up) is seen walking toward the camera, and Marshall’s revelation of Tsamko’s thoughts makes clear that he will be a focus of this video. The appearance of Tsamko leads into a review of the past, conducted both in voice-over (“I first met Tsamko in 1951”) and through recycled imagery from earlier work.
FIGURE 5. Ju/'hoansi on the move, in a Marshall photograph. Courtesy Documentary Educational Resources.
Once again, we see the canonical shot of a column of !Kung walking into the desert, here even less true to the original than the version of the shot seen in Pull Ourselves Up (fig. 5). This is followed by imagery of Tsamko learning to hunt by shooting a beetle with arrows, from The Hunters, then by imagery of the hunters shooting the giraffe and of women gathering roots (this imagery is quite faded and breaks down), and then—after a bit more information about the present political situation—imagery from N!ai (the presence of the South African soldiers at Tshumkwe) and from Pull Ourselves Up, including, in its entirety, the sequence focusing on the way in which alcohol consumption has accelerated the transformation of Ju/’hoansi life on the reservation. Here, the fight between several men and women (with /Gunda trying to calm things down) is horrific, in part because when one man is brutally knocked to the ground, he falls on a puppy whose screams of pain express what this moment means for this formerly peaceful people. Marshall’s review concludes with imagery from the attempt to keep elephants away from the waterhole and the confrontation over the installation of the water pump from Pull Ourselves Up: the recycled scenes from the earlier field report are second-generation video and the decay in quality emphasizes the “past-ness” of even these comparatively recent events.
The present in To Hold Our Own Ground was recorded in much-improved video technology that, especially in the outdoor shots revealing Tsamko’s effective leadership and the development of the Nyae Nyae Farmers Cooperative, presents these developments as a new “golden moment,” or at least as evidence of the possibility that the Ju/’hoansi, through their own efforts (and with the collaboration of others who are committed to the justice of their desire for a homeland) may overcome the many challenges still facing them. Marshall is quite clear about these challenges: among them, the myth that the Ju/’hoansi are incapable of rising above animal status; the opening of eastern Bushmanland to trophy hunting (illustrated with shots of the carcasses of dead elephants being dismembered with chainsaws); and the resistance of the neighboring Herero who spread false rumors about Tsamko’s activities and goals.
But we also see that Tsamko and the other Ju/’hoansi continue to develop their organization in ways that may be successful, and Marshall himself is again visible, not filming, but taking minutes at a meeting of the cooperative and translating for the Ju/’hoansi. The film ends with some real hope: water is flowing from a new borehole (again, evocative of The Spanish Earth, where the final scenes reveal Spanish peasants irrigating their land) and Tsamko is seen marching in support of SWAPO and an independent Namibia (there is some indication that a SWAPO victory might assist the Ju/’hoansi in their struggle). Even the video’s final credits indicate the change in Marshall’s sense of his filmmaking. Instead of the usual hierarchical designation of roles, the credits indicate that the video was “produced by DER for the Nyae Nyae Farmers Cooperative,” and that it’s “a film by Peter Baker, Cliff Bestall, John Bishop, Sue Cabezas, John Marshall, Claire Ritchie, Pitchie Rommelaere, John Terry”—that is, the cooperative nature of the Ju/’hoansi struggle is reflected in the collaborative production of the video.
THE ROAD TAKEN: A KALAHARI FAMILY
The five-part television series, A Kalahari Family, finished in 2002, is the capstone of the Marshalls’ Kalahari saga; and it moved John Marshall’s approach to filmmaking, and his understanding of his early work, into a final phase. In the opening, 90-minute episode, “A Far Country,” Marshall reviews the history of his family’s arrival in Nyae Nyae as well as the previous history of that area of southwest Africa; and, recycling footage from many of the !Kung films (in this case in gorgeous reproductions of that early footage), he recalls his experiences with the Ju/’hoansi in the 1950s, up through Laurence Marshall’s reuniting the band by interceding with the South African authorities to broker the release of those who had been working as forced labor on white farms (the resulting friction between /Ti!kay and /Qui is documented in An Argument about a Marriage).64 “A Far Country” begins in 2002, when Marshall and several Ju/’hoansi men are erecting a monument to ≠Toma, who died in 1988, under a baobab tree (the text is in Ju/’hoansi and English; the English reads “He stopped our feet/He taught us”).
“A Far County” presents two kinds of imagery from the 1950s: footage not previously released (for СКАЧАТЬ