American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ the same person, though once we do, we are reminded how participation in a traditional ceremony can transform an individual. The voice-over is carefully controlled, limited to four instances when poetic lines are spoken by Selig; each of the four stanzas of the voice-over vary or build on the original phrase, “From the water: food; from the wood: a way of life,” until we hear “A way of life, a way of death, a way of dreams, and a way to remember” at the beginning of the ceremony (the cut from the man as craftsman to participant in the ceremony occurs just at the phrase “a way to remember,” foregrounding the idea of ceremony as cultural memory).⁴

      Dances of the Kwakiutl is a more straightforward document of Kwakiutl dancers performing in part for the camera, introduced with Gardner’s voice-over: “Fifty years ago, the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia held their winter ceremonial in order to bring back the youth who were staying with the supernatural protector of their society. The songs and dances which belonged to this ritual were vital to the success of the ceremony. Lately, both the intention and performance of the winter ceremonial have been substantially altered. The dances are no longer significant within the ceremonial complex and their performance depends now on an individual and spontaneous will to recreate a very old, syncopated dance form.” In the voice-over, one can sense Gardner’s disappointment with the changes he describes, but the dancing and the enthusiasm of the dancers are effectively documented.

      Mark Tobey was of special importance to Gardner in two ways. First, he did his own (color) cinematography for the first time, and this portrait of Tobey and his Seattle environment is visually impressive. Second, in Mark Tobey Gardner’s fascination with art and his own poetic urge is unbridled: while the poetic voice- over is rather overwhelming—these days it feels strident and pretentious—one can feel Gardner’s enthusiasm for his subject and his excitement that this important artist has trusted him fully enough to be an active participant in the film. If the two Kwakiutl films are early premonitions of the films that would, beginning a decade later, establish Gardner’s reputation as a pioneer in ethnographic filmmaking, Mark Tobey seems a premonition not only of Gardner’s subsequent films about artists (including a second film about Tobey), but of the focus and approach that would dominate his better-known features about the Dani, the Hamar, the Bororo (Gardner spells the name of this group “Borroro”) Fulani, and the Ika. For Gardner the making of art is a fundamental, perhaps the fundamental, function of culture; and the job of filmmaking, especially nonfiction filmmaking within our culture, is to sing the variety of art making across the globe and the ways in which particular art objects and ritual performances have functioned within particular groups as a form of cultural memory and as a spiritual basis for daily life.

      GARDNER AND THE MARSHALLS

      Between the completion of Mark Tobey and the release of Dead Birds in 1964, Gardner studied anthropology at Harvard, immersed himself in the community of poets and artists in Cambridge, and became involved with the Marshall family’s project of documenting the !Kung, assisting John Marshall with the editing of The Hunters (1957). Gardner was in touch with Laurence Marshall as early as 1953. When J.O. Brew sent the elder Marshall a copy of a seminar talk on film that Gardner had given, Marshall wrote back to Brew, expressing his appreciation of Gardner’s talk: “As to the use of film in anthropology, I still feel that it ought somehow to be essential in any study of man. . . . I think my feeling is based on some of the ideas that Bob brings out; the importance of sight in perception, the ability of film to represent the eye and to portray events in actual time so that one can perceive interaction and tempo, and not least in importance, the fact that film can be studied repeatedly and by many people.”⁵ However, Marshall remains a bit dubious about the significance of the films that have come out of the expedition and assures Brew that the costs of the film that John Marshall has been shooting would not be paid for with the money Harvard had granted the expedition, but by the Marshalls themselves.

      Brew apparently shared Laurence Marshall’s letter with Gardner, who responded, on April 16, 1953, with a seven-page letter, exploring more fully his ideas about cinema: “Through very complicated psysio-psychic processes involving principles of identification, association and learning, the net effect possible with film is to impart a credible experience to a spectator.”⁶ Defining experience as “the acquiring of knowledge by the use of one’s own perceptions of sense and judgment,” Gardner (basically paraphrasing John Dewey’s ideas about experiential learning) goes on to explore “what is meant by learning and experience”:

      In a larger sense it could also be thought to be an experiment in the use of one’s perceptions in the process of learning. In this light the old saw about experience being the best teacher gains a little luster. . . . It may already be clear that what I wish to make is a distinction between two kinds of learning, one kind which is the result of rote memorization which has a minimal participation of perceptual organs, and the other which involves multiple senses and promotes experimental participation within the learning process. Although the relative value of these two general types of learning situations depends on the individual learning and the reasons for learning at all, in a broad sense the advantages of what might be called “experience learning” have been dramatically attested in such contexts as training for war. It is now general practice, I am told, to subject trainees to maneuvers under actual fire, the supposition being that out of this experience will result a more dependable . . . soldier than the one who reads in a manual that someday he may be shot at. . . . It might seem that the point which should be brought in here as justification for the use of films in anthropology is that a film can provide a close approximation to otherwise unavailable field experiences.

      Ultimately, Gardner argues that since experiential learning requires considerable integration of information from various senses, “the film which best achieves the ‘experience’ type learning effect must be left in the hands of creative artists.”

      By 1954, when Gardner began working with John Marshall on the editing of what would become The Hunters, he had had some experience in producing, directing, and editing film; he had developed his thinking about documentary filmmaking as a creative enterprise; he had earned the confidence of the administration at the Peabody Museum; and he had been in touch with the Marshall family for more than a year. Especially given that Gardner was seven years John Marshall’s senior when they began working together (Gardner was twenty-nine; Marshall, twenty-two), it would not be surprising if Gardner had substantial input into The Hunters, though over the decades there has been some question about the nature and extent of this input (fig. 7). According to Gardner, his contribution was to collaborate with Marshall at the Peabody’s Film Study Center (the !Kung footage was the original film to be studied at the center) in expanding a 45-minute edit that Marshall had produced into the 75-minute film that was released in 1957.

      In his description of the process, however, Marshall claims that “The Hunters was edited on the third floor of our family home on Bryant Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts between 1954 and 1956,” and he would later seem to express frustration with the presumption that Gardner had had a major role in the film: when asked about his sense of the way “The Hunters was being taken up” during the years following its release, he comments, “Yes, well, we got an award. They gave Bob an award for it.”⁷ In what remains the most critical essay on Gardner’s filmmaking, Jay Ruby questions what he sees as Gardner’s tendency to take excessive credit for some of the projects he has been involved in: “John Marshall’s name does not even appear in the 1957 article Gardner wrote discussing the activities of the Film Study Center. Unless you knew otherwise, the article would lead you to believe that Robert Gardner made The Hunters by himself.”⁸ In The Impulse to Preserve (2006) Gardner claims only “a minor role [in] collaborating with John Marshall” on The Hunters; and in his introduction to Making Dead Birds (2007), Gardner calls Marshall “The Hunters’ principal and talented young author.”⁹

      FIGURE 7. John Kennedy Marshall (left foreground) and Robert Gardner during the early days СКАЧАТЬ