American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ still be alive and where they might be found. As the lives of the Ju/’hoansi are transforming, so is Marshall’s (and our) understanding of the significance of the early films. Instead of being accidental contributors to the demise of a culture, they have become an important resource for those trying to create a new, healthy Ju/’hoansi way of life on a resettled homeland. That the group is watching the films on a tiny black-and-white television is a final confirmation that while these films may be valuable as artful, often gorgeous records of a lost past—as is evident throughout A Kalahari Family—they have also become, even in their most degraded form, a potential force for positive change.

      Amid these signs of hope in “Standing Tall,” there are also what, during the final episode of A Kalahari Family, “Death by Myth,” are premonitions of problems to come. Marshall and Claire Ritchie retire as directors of the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation and are replaced by Dr. Marguerite Biesele; and when Tsamko goes to a Herero-DTA rally during the buildup to the vote on Namibian independence, we learn more of what is only hinted at during To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report. Marshall himself is attacked by a speaker at the rally: “John, what are you doing to the Ju/’hoansi? You are meddling in my people and their concerns. Does the money from John’s father help everyone? Or a chosen few, including John himself?” It is after this speech that Tsamko tries to access the microphone but is denied the opportunity to refute these charges. The sequence ends with Marshall arguing with a Herero man and asserting that Nyae Nyae is, and has always been, Ju/’hoansi territory: “I was a kid here; I saw with my own eyes!”

      Later in “Death by Myth,” Marshall returns to Nyae Nyae after a two-year absence to discover that things have not developed as he had hoped—in large measure because various constituencies in the region, white and black, have been promoting the bushman myth in order to profit from it. The myth, as Marshall explains it and as demonstrated in the film by a considerable range of men and women, is that the bushmen are “natural hunters and gatherers” who remain capable of supporting themselves if they adhere to their traditional ways, and that efforts to assist the bushmen in developing a new way to maintain themselves are misguided: as a people they are more beautiful as nature made them, in their original, primitive, hunting-gathering state. Of course, this is the myth promoted by The Gods Must Be Crazy, which has been a motif in Marshall’s !Kung saga since N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman; but in “Death by Myth” we hear the same ideas expressed by those who want to remake the region as a nature conservancy and/or to promote trophy hunting (and in the case of the Herero, to annex the land for their herds). During Marshall’s absence, assistance to farmers has ceased to be a priority for the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation, which has allocated the funds coming in from donors to building offices at a new town called Baraka, buying trucks, and hiring experts who do studies of the region and produce books about it—an echo of those earlier whites who established Tshumkwe as the political center of Bushmanland and allocated government aid primarily to facilities for the whites. All the decisions relevant to Nyae Nyae are now made in Windhoek by a German administrator and those who answer to him.

      During Marshall’s 1994 and 1995 visits, it is clear that the Ju/’hoansi struggle for their Nyae Nyae territory and a practical means of subsistence is failing. Even the baobab tree in the center of Tshumkwe has collapsed as a result of an infection. The original leaders are no longer listened to, and elephants have destroyed many farms. The German administrator is ultimately fired by the Nyae Nyae Farmers’ Coop, but Tsamko, who in earlier films was the leading proponent of the new farming communities, has been persuaded to support the Nature Conservancy, which has promised the Ju/’hoansi money from hunters and from filmmakers; in 1995 Tsamko, furious at whites who have once again taken over Nyae Nyae, refuses to be filmed by Marshall (“You make money from your film!”). Near the end of “Death by Myth,” we learn that the annual payment to each Ju/’hoansi from the conservancy is $10.50 American.

      The main body of the episode ends with tourists visiting a fake bushman village, where a group of Ju/’hoansi pretend to be living a traditional way of life. “Epilogue 2000,” which concludes A Kalahari Family, provides a tiny spark of hope: G≠kao Dabe has started farming again; Tsamko is a leader again, settling disputes between his fellow Ju/’hoansi the way his father once did; Tsamko’s sister Bao has become a health worker and the first Ju/’hoan woman to have a driver’s license; and Baraka and its fleet of vehicles has fallen apart. Still, the local road signs are hidden so as not to interfere with the tourists’ fantasies, and !U makes jewelry to sell to them. “Death by Myth,” and A Kalahari Family and the entire Marshall !Kung saga, conclude with a return to the monument to ≠Toma and with the narrator’s indication that in 2001 six members of ≠Toma’s family continue to live at Gautscha. This ambiguous ending is entirely appropriate to this remarkable project and a final demonstration of Marshall’s no longer naïve but always hopeful approach to cinema.

      A PROCESS IN TIME

      According to my view, experience as a whole is a process in time, whereby innumerable particular terms lapse and are superseded by others that follow upon them by transitions which, whether disjunctive or conjunctive in content, are themselves experiences, and must in general be accounted at least as real as the terms which they relate.

      WILLIAM JAMES, ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM⁶⁵

      To see John Marshall’s fifty-year career as a filmmaker as significant primarily because of his pioneering contribution to ethnographic cinema and his production of several canonical films—The Hunters and N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman, most obviously—is to undervalue one of the signal accomplishments of modern documentary cinema and to ghettoize an accomplished and inventive film artist. Most of those who come into contact with Marshall’s work have been anthropology students learning about indigenous, preindustrial cultures, but Marshall’s achievement as a film artist is fully evident only to those who have experienced his many films and videos about the Ju/’hoansi and have understood them as a single ever-evolving meta-work. While most film artists are satisfied with producing individual, discrete films, Marshall never seems to have thought of filmmaking this way—except perhaps momentarily at the very dawn of his career.

      For Marshall, filmmaking was an ongoing, pragmatic process that went well beyond learning enough to produce films that audiences might feel they were learning from. He himself continued to engage the people he had filmed and had made films about, and as his awareness expanded, he rethought the earlier conclusions about them that were evident in those films and demonstrated this revised understanding in new work. Instead of abandoning the group of Ju/’hoansi who were recorded in his early footage and moving on to other subjects, Marshall revisited the Ju/’hoansi as often as he could (altogether Marshall made fifteen visits to Nyae Nyae), exploring their efforts to adjust to the changing world of which his presence in Nyae Nyae was a crucial part. And instead of abandoning his earlier films once he became aware of the limitations and failures of his representations of the Ju/’hoansi, he continued to revisit these films, recycling them into new works that reflected both the ongoing history of Nyae Nyae and the surrounding region, and his own expanding, continually revised awareness of this history and his attempts to honestly represent the people most affected by it.

      Marshall’s !Kung films have long been understood as a record of a particular cultural group, just as the films of Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon are understood as a record of the Yanomami in southern Venezuela. Here too, however, this traditional understanding has failed to recognize the accomplishment of Marshall’s saga. The transformation we see in the Ju/’hoansi between Marshall’s early 1950s footage through his final visits to Nyae Nyae chronicled in A Kalahari Family do, of course, document the experiences of a very specific group, but, as is implicit in Marshall’s ongoing saga, these experiences are emblematic of one of the fundamental transformations that has been taking place across the globe for several centuries. If the original remoteness of the Ju/’hoansi living in the central Kalahari kept their gathering-hunting way of life more or less intact well into the twentieth century, the transformation of their lives during the past fifty years recalls the struggles of indigenous societies СКАЧАТЬ