American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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      FIGURE 1. Lorna Marshall with Ju/’hoansi mother and children in the 1950s. Courtesy Documentary Educational Resources.

      While The Hunters is usually considered the first important Marshall film about the !Kung and the instigation of the long series of !Kung films that followed, this is unfair to the accomplishments of First Film. While the Marshalls’ visit to Gautscha in Nyae Nyae in 1951 was only six weeks (Lorna Marshall has indicated that the 1952–53 expedition was “the most productive period of our study”),⁶ it was long enough to produce footage that not only served as warm-up and précis for the long saga of films that would follow, but was at some point edited into a film that has remained remarkably underappreciated. Shot in a very functional manner—Laurence had told John, “Don’t try to be artistic. Just film what you see people doing naturally. I want a record, not a movie”⁷—what became First Film was edited so as to provide an information-filled overview of !Kung life at Nyae Nyae.

      After a bit of indigenous music and a map locating Gautscha, a group of !Kung arrive and set up their temporary village. During the hour-long film, we see men making karosses (the cloaks made from animal skin that women wear), men and women getting and sharing water, women gathering foods (“women’s principal work”), a child dancing (the earliest imagery of N!ai, who would become a central character in John Marshall’s films about the Ju/’hoansi), boys setting snares for guinea fowl, men hunting for spring hare, the making of bows and poison arrows, men hunting gemsbok and wildebeest and the distribution of meat, eating and cooking, women making beads and a man playing music on his bow, boys playing, the group dancing and singing, a man falling into trance and coming out of it, children dancing, the group smoking, talking, and laughing; then, packing up and leaving to walk to the next temporary village. A bit of indigenous music ends the film. John Marshall’s later films would focus in on many of the particulars of Lorna Marshall’s overview, often using virtually the same language in his voice-overs as she uses in hers.

      It is the nature of Lorna Marshall’s voice-overs in First Film that makes this film distinctive and memorable—probably more distinctive and memorable than it seemed in 1951, precisely because of the way in which voice-over in documentary has been debated during the past sixty years. It is not clear precisely when this voice-over was married to the imagery (Cynthia Close, director of Documentary Educational Resources [DER], suspects that it was in the 1970s, but John Bishop, who worked with the Marshall materials at the Peabody Museum, has suggested that, whenever the soundtrack was recorded, the comments that became the voice-over had had a history in advance of their inclusion on the soundtrack of First Film: “I imagine John cut it [the first version of First Film] for her soon after their return so she could use it to illustrate a lecture, or possibly to be used for multiple performances of the lecture, a popular use of documentary footage in the 1950s.”⁸ As Bishop suggested to me, the tone of the narration “is as if she was projecting to a large audience.”

      What seems noteworthy now about Lorna Marshall’s voice-over on First Film is the degree to which she seems to have avoided many of the problems of conventional documentary voice-overs, including those in early ethnographic films. She is certainly not a “voice of god” or even a “voice of goddess.” While the imagery John Marshall recorded and put together for his mother (presumably under her direction) must have seemed exotic to the original audiences, and still may seem exotic to audiences unfamiliar with ethnographic filmmaking, the voice-over commentary in First Film reveals not merely Lorna Marshall’s familiarity with the people gathered at Gautscha, but her unpretentious empathy with them, as a parent. There are statements that seem to mean to protect the San from stereotyping by the audience—“We observed no theft nor aggression; we observed impressive honesty, cooperation, and integration among this far away and independent group”—and comments that remind us of the physical difference between the San and the viewer: as one woman cuts meat with a knife close to her face, Marshall comments, “A good way to eat if one belongs to a short-nosed race.”

      The overall tone of the voice-over is quite informal, something like the comments of a good teacher telling a class about some people she knows (Marshall, who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a B.A. degree in English, had taught English at Mt. Holyoke College before meeting Laurence Marshall). When Old Gaú is smoking, she comments, “Like every good bushman, he passes the pipe around,” and a moment later, as we see Old Gaú with his grandson, “Little ≠Gao. . . loves his grandfather and, I think, wants to be just like him. The grandfather adores this child.” As we see young N!ai dancing, Marshall notes, “She is a blithe child,” and as we see a widow, Marshall comments that she “sometimes looked lonely. Not always, but sometimes.”

      In one instance Marshall engages gender relations in a manner that suggests a kind of insight that goes beyond, or beneath, detached scholarly observation: within a composition where the “head man” is in the left foreground and his wife and several other women are sitting in a circle in the right background, Marshall indicates that the head man “rarely gives orders, but . . . ,” then says, “Watch his wife!” The wife makes a gesture СКАЧАТЬ