American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ from First Film and The Hunters through Men Bathing and Baobab Play. After this historical introduction, Marshall intercuts among Lorna Marshall, ≠Toma, !U, Tsamko, N!ai,/Gunda, and Marshall himself reminiscing about their lives in the 1950s and imagery from the experiences they describe. The bulk of these reminiscences were recorded during Marshall’s return to Nyae Nyae after his twenty-year exile, as he and his friends were becoming reacquainted and remembering their previous lives together. The reminiscences also function to explain Ju/’hoansi life to those who are unfamiliar with the earlier Marshall films.

      For those who do know the earlier Marshall films, Marshall’s return to Nyae Nyae is, of course, also their return, and it is fascinating and moving to see the changes in the people remembered from those films (moving, in part, because we know their changes are reflected by our own: we’re all Rip Van Winkles, returning to a place we thought we knew). The mood of “A Far Country” is generally nostalgic, though as the episode evolves, Marshall reminds viewers that what may have seemed Edenic to him was disappearing even as it was being recorded, and in part because it was recorded: “While we were home in America, white ranchers followed our tracks into Nyae Nyae to round up the Ju/’hoansi by persuasion or force.” The later Marshall expedition, during which Laurence Marshall was able to see to the reuniting of the band, may seem to have mended this wound to the community, but, near the end of “A Far Country,” just after we see a final shot of Marshall at the ≠Toma memorial in 2002, imagery from Men Bathing is accompanied by Marshall’s voice-over: “Looking back, I’m struck by how naïve we all were about the future”; “On our last winter morning together, as we enjoyed a bath in Nama waters, we had no idea how soon or how willingly most people would give up the hunting-gathering life.” “A Far Country” concludes with the men laughing uproariously and then sleeping in the sun—a perfect metaphor for the naïveté (their own, Marshall’s, and perhaps, ours) that was part of the experience of those earlier films.

      Marshall’s recycling of the Men Bathing imagery at the conclusion of “A Far Country” also makes explicit his own presence at this event as well as his participation in the bathing (“as we enjoyed a bath in Nama waters”) and, presumably, in the joking and laughing (somewhat less in the resting, perhaps, since he is filming the men). The disappearance of the detachment of Marshall-as-filmmaker in his films, already evident in Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out and To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report, is here extended, in the sense that we are now becoming aware of the implicit fiction of Marshall’s (however well-intentioned) invisibility in his early films: Marshall is entering the frame of an earlier film, at least conceptually, in retrospect.

      As time has passed, Marshall has come to accept that he was, for a time, a member of the !Kung band—in one instance, forcibly separated from them, as they were from each other—and in a sense a part of an extended family that includes many !Kung as well as his own parents and sister. Indeed, this seems to be implied by the use of the singular in A Kalahari Family. His decision to use five Ju/’hoansi narrators (actually, we see ≠Toma, !U, Tsamko, N!ai, and /Gunda speaking and hear English translations of their memories by voice-over actors Sello Sabotsane, Lucia Mthiyane, Jerry Mofokeng, Letta Mbulu, and Michael Sishange, respectively) announces this “we” as part of the filmmaking strategy of A Kalahari Family.

      In the following three, hour-long episodes of A Kalahari Family—“End of the Road,” “Real Water,” and “Standing Tall”—Marshall returns to the period recorded in Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out and To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report, this time in more detail, both in terms of what we learn about these events and literally in how the events are seen. After a brief review of Marshall’s history in Nyae Nyae, ending with !U’s saying, “You never thought about us!”—deeply ironic for anyone aware of Marshall’s immersion in his 1950s footage from the time his visa was revoked into the 1970s—he recycles earlier imagery of Nama Pan in 1958 in order to contrast the idyllic moment there with what he found when he returned to Nyae Nyae in 1978 and what had become the ghetto of poverty at Tshumkwe, the headquarters of the Nyae Nyae reservation. Marshall’s tour of “downtown” Tshumkwe is followed by a series of recyclings of imagery from the 1950s, so that viewers can be clear about how dramatically !Kung life has changed for Tsamko, N!ai, /Gunda, G≠kao Dabe, and the others, in part because “my family’s expeditions had played a part in the South African occupation of Nyae Nyae.” As G≠kao Dabe says, “It was the roads you and your father made that brought us kadi [a cheap local corn liquor, which was doing serious damage to the !Kung community—I’m not sure about the spelling]. . . . When you and your father left, you left behind those ugly things: roads.”

      The real focus of “End of the Road,” however, is Marshall’s attempt to make amends for the damage his family’s visits helped to instigate by forming a foundation with Claire Ritchie to help the Ju/’hoansi learn a new way of life. Since gathering-hunting could no longer support the Ju/’hoansi, Marshall and Ritchie, and some of the Ju/’hoansi, too, have come to believe that the only chance for a decent life is to move away from Tshumkwe and back to Gautscha Pan and learn to garden and raise cattle. The episode ends on the morning of Christmas Eve, when Marshall, who is “pissed in more ways than one” (angry that talk of moving out of Tshumkwe has seemed to be all that was happening, and drunk), discovers that the group left Tshumkwe for Gautscha while he was sleeping. As he stands alone in Tshumkwe, looking lost and befuddled, we understand that Marshall-as-filmmaker is celebrating the initiative of the Ju/’hoansi and recognizing that it is their efforts that make change; he and his foundation can only follow them.

      “Real Water” and “Standing Tall” reveal the struggles and successes of the !Kung group at Gautscha, first to get their farms up and going and then to develop a place where the diaspora of bushmen spread across southern Africa can return to and build a new life. Tsamko and G≠kao Dabe become increasingly important figures during these episodes, when wells are drilled, farms started, and as Tsamko and his colleagues work to ensure the political viability of eastern Bushmanland by resisting first a wildlife preserve, then the luring of lions and elephants to the area for trophy hunting. At the conclusion of “Real Water,” we see the Gautscha Farmers Cooperative meeting under a tree—evoking that Edenic tree in Baobab Play and the other early films, but within a new, politically aware, progressive context.

      “Standing Tall” is a road movie, focusing on Marshall, Tsamko, G≠kao Dabe, and N!xau, the star of The Gods Must Be Crazy, venturing into Hereroland and Ghobabi in a van (Marshall drives) to locate members of !Kung families and let them know that there is now an option for them, other than the near-slavery of their lives on white farms and their destitution in Hereroland. During their travels, they meet /Ui Chapman, who seems particularly excited about the prospect of having his own place. “Standing Tall” ends with the celebration of the victory of SWAPO and Namibian independence in 1989 and with /Ui Chapman leaving a white farm and coming home to Gautscha with his family to start his own farm.

      The look, as well as the overall mood, of the middle episodes of A Kalahari Family could hardly be more different from what we see in Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out and To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report. As mentioned earlier, the fragile optimism evident in those field reports is reflected in their tenuous image quality, but by the end of the 1990s, as Marshall looked back on how events had developed, once his foundation had been established and a group of Ju/’hoansi had come to believe that gardening and ranching (combined with local gathering and hunting) could provide them with a subsistence and move them away from dependent desperation in Tshumkwe, a sense of the rightness and excitement of this moment and these developments seems to have allowed him to see that all was not lost, that the Ju/’hoansi might still recover from the unfortunate cultural transformation exacerbated by his family’s arrival in Nyae Nyae in 1951. In general, the beauty and emotional power of A Kalahari Family, at least up through “Standing Tall,” reflect this new hope and excitement.

      During “Standing Tall” we also see Marshall and his Ju/’hoansi colleagues returning to the films of the 1950s, not simply to provide a contrast between a comparatively idyllic past and a desperate present and not to reconfirm Marshall’s earlier naïveté about filmmaking. СКАЧАТЬ