American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ up by this book, I cannot pretend to be a detached scholar. I am not, and have no desire to be, merely an observer or an analyst of what has gone on in documentary during a particular time in a specific place. Cinemagoing and the process of developing some sense of the history of the wide world of cinema have invigorated my life, providing me with experiences that have been not merely pleasurable, but formative—and as the years have gone by, re-formative—in my thinking about cinema, myself, and the world. Many of the films I discuss here have had and continue to have—to use William James’s provocative term—immense “cash value” for my work as a film history teacher. It will be obvious that my admiration of the filmmakers I discuss and of their particular films is not unalloyed; nevertheless, the writing in this volume—and this has been true of all of my writing—is essentially an ongoing act of gratitude.

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      Any long-term project in film history requires the assistance of many individuals and organizations. My designation as an Academy Scholar for 2012 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences came at a most opportune time, providing both financial and moral support for the completion of this project. But American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn required an extensive period of germination.

      In order to see the films I’ve written about, I depended on the consistent generosity of Documentary Educational Resources, and in particular of Cynthia Close, executive director at DER during most of the time when I was researching and writing. Thanks also to current Executive Director Alice Apley and Director of Design & Media Frank Aveni. A good many films by filmmakers I wanted to explore are not in distribution, and the Harvard Film Archive was very helpful in making many of these films available for study. Thanks to Haden Guest, Clayton Mattos, Mark Johnson, and Elizabeth Coffey for their assistance.

      The filmmakers themselves were remarkably generous in sharing their work with me. I am deeply grateful to Robert Gardner, Ed Pincus, Jane Pincus, Alfred Guzzetti, Miriam Weinstein, Robb Moss, Ann Schaetzel, Ross McElwee, Michel Negroponte, Steve Ascher and Jeanne Jordan, Valerie Lalonde, John Gianvito, Nina Davenport, Amie Siegel, Jeff Silva, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Ilisa Barbash, Stephanie Spray, J.P. Sniadecki, and Véréna Paravel for their kindness, generosity, and patience with me.

      During early moments in the development of this project, the LEF Foundation, that stalwart supporter of New England filmmakers and filmmaking, involved me in public events that allowed me to test the thinking that has led to The Cambridge Turn. Lyda Kuth engaged me to assist LEF with their exhibition program, Facing Realities, arranging for me to interview Robert Gardner and Jane Gillooly at a public event at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. During the summer of 2010, LEF asked me to interview Fred Wiseman after a screening of Hospital at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge. These experiences helped me to develop the confidence to pursue this study.

      My sense that the development of Pragmatism was relevant to the cinema history this volume explores was nurtured by Robert Huot, Ian MacDonald, Rutgers professor James Livingston, my Hamilton College colleague Katheryn Doran, and by the writing of Harvard professor Louis Menand.

      

      In trying to understand how ethnographic film and personal documentary developed in Cambridge, I had the assistance of several organizations. Ilisa Barbash helped me make contact with the Peabody Museum, and with the help of Reference Archivist Patricia H. Kervick, I was able to explore the origins of the Marshall project and the founding of the Film Study Center at Harvard. In July 2010, I was able to spend several days researching the Marshalls and Timothy Asch at the Human Studies Archive at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where I was assisted by Karma Foley. Robert Gardner made the resources of his Studio7Arts studio available to me several times, and Rebecca Meyers assisted my work there.

      The Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard asked me to teach the history of documentary filmmaking during the fall of 2007 and again during the winter of 2009 and fall of 2012, when I focused on Cambridge’s role in documentary history. This opportunity was very helpful, and I am grateful to David Rodowick, Dominique Bluher, J.P. Sniadecki, Stephanie Spray, Robb Moss, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Heidi Bliss, Haden Guest, Julie Knippa, Clayton Mattos, Rebecca Meyers, Jeff Silva, and Jason Steeves—and of course to the students, including Che Salazar, Lili Erlinger, Stephanie Lam, and several Nieman Fellows (Kael Alford, Thorne Anderson, Rosita Boland, Sapiyat Dakhshukaeva, Jake Hooker, Andrea Simakis, and Chris Vognar), who were part of what was a wonderful learning experience for me.

      My opportunities to teach at Hamilton College and at Colgate University during the years when this project was researched and written provided me with opportunities to test out my ideas, to travel when necessary for my research, and of course, to maintain economic stability. I am particularly grateful to my Hamilton colleagues Patricia O’Neill, Nancy Rabinowitz, Peter Rabinowitz, Marilyn Huntley, Timothy Hicks, Bret Olsen, Heather Johnsen, Deborah Pokinski, and Terri Viglietta; and to John Knecht and Lynn Schwarzer at Colgate University. Thanks too, to the Office of the Dean of the Faculty at Hamilton—and to Dean Patrick Reynolds and Associate Dean Margaret Gentry—for their willingness to support American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn with a generous subvention.

      For many years I taught at Utica College of Syracuse University (now Utica College) and had the good fortune to team-teach courses in ethnographic cinema with anthropologist John Johnsen. These were formative learning experiences for me, and I am grateful to Johnsen for his knowledge and his ongoing collegiality.

      Many other individuals, including a good many scholars and teachers, have made important contributions to my thinking, have supported my various attempts to garner financial support for this project, and have offered other forms of assistance. Thanks in particular to Jay Ruby, David James, Linda Williams, Tom Gunning, John Terry, Jane Weiner, Perle Møhl, Clayton Mattos, Fred Camper, Haden Guest, Jim Lane, Kenneth Eisenstein, and Rebecca Meyers.

      1

      Lorna and John Marshall

      At the outset, the Marshall family expeditions to the Kalahari Desert from 1950 to 1961 to find and learn something about the San peoples living there were conceived as a means to the end of a more intensive, engaged experience of family life—an upscale version of the family camping trips that would become ubiquitous across the country during the following decades. Laurence Marshall’s determination that his family’s experiences with the San be useful in producing valuable insights into an ancient way of life led (along with his willingness to finance the project) to the Peabody Museum’s sponsorship of the Marshalls’ early expeditions, which did in fact produce impressive results, including several significant contributions to the written anthropological discourse about the San and a wealth of photographic and cinematic documentation.

      John Marshall’s particular excitement about the men and women he grew to know during these expeditions had a good deal to do with his wonder at how much his new friends had come to understand about their environment through their long experience with it, but this early fascination was merely the first stage of what became a lifelong process of learning not only about the people he befriended in the Kalahari but about how much his early excitement about being with them had blinded him to the realities of their lives. Indeed, during the following years, as he came to see how quickly San life was transforming and to feel that his family’s expeditions into the Kalahari had contributed to the destruction of the way of life that had so impressed him, Marshall transformed his approach to documenting the San over and over. His hope was that each new contact he had with the “Ju/’hoansi” (Marshall came to use Ju/’hoansi to refer to the group of !Kung San he grew to know, since this is how they referred to themselves),¹ and each new film that resulted from it might bring him and his viewers toward a clearer sense of what the experience of the Ju/’hoansi actually was and what their struggles might mean for those who were coming to know something of them.

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