American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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about an important facet of Ju/’hoansi life. In the National Geographic special Bushmen of the Kalahari (1974; shot and directed by Robert M. Young), Marshall himself did say, referring to the more efficient means of hunting employed by a !Kung horseman with a rifle, depicted in that television show, “Killing so efficiently seemed to rob hunting of its symbolic quality, making it a simple act of subsistence, instead of a larger act of kinship, biding the people together.” Nevertheless, Marshall would remain embarrassed about his indulgence in art, and this embarrassment would increasingly characterize his assumptions about what he should be filming and how he should be filming it—especially once he began to realize, indeed to personally experience, what the history of the Ju/’hoansi would become during the thirty years following the first Marshall expeditions. However, while he turned increasingly away from the particularly obvious art-film dimensions of The Hunters in the following decades, he did for a moment find a way of making film art that did not seem to embarrass him, indeed that did not immediately declare itself as art at all—though the unusual artistry of some of the resulting films has become increasingly obvious and admirable as the decades have passed.
IDYLLS OF THE !KUNG
In his essay, “Filming and Learning,” Marshall offers two observations that were fundamental in his approach to filming the Ju/’hoansi. First, “What the people I am filming actually do and say is more interesting and important than what I think about them”; and second, “When I filmed people from a distance, they were easy to understand. If their actions were not obvious, I could explain what they were doing with a few words of narration. The closer I got to people with my camera, the more interesting they seemed, and the more surprised I was by what they did and said.”17 The two earliest films Marshall finished after The Hunters—A Group of Women (1961) and A Joking Relationship (1962)—represent an aesthetic breakthrough and, perhaps, to some degree a missed opportunity. These two films embody Marshall’s observations far more effectively than The Hunters.
In a sense, nothing happens in A Group of Women. It is a 5-minute montage made up of twenty-three shots focusing on several women and a baby lying together under a baobab tree (Marshall’s camera is generally so close that it is difficult to be entirely sure how many women are present, but his focus is on three). During the film, the women talk about what appears to be an imminent move for one of the women and her band to Gautscha in order to gather berries; she isn’t interested in moving, and one of the other women suggests she “just refuse it,” and later tells her, “You shouldn’t go south.” They also discuss nursing children, and the mother of the baby—she refers to her daughter in one instance as “little seed pod”—wants the child to nurse, though the child doesn’t seem interested. At one point, a woman walking by addresses the women lying under the baobab, trying to get one or all of them to go with her to get water, but they refuse, and at the end of the film they seem to have drifted off to sleep.
While there are close-ups in The Hunters, they function as close-ups normally do within a developing action-adventure narrative, but A Group of Women is almost entirely constructed of close-ups, and sometimes extreme close-ups (fig. 2). The only exceptions are the film’s first and last shots, both of them revealing the larger scene under the baobab tree, and the two medium shots of the woman who asks the friends to accompany her to the water hole (these two shots are presented from a ground-up angle, suggesting that the woman is an intruder, perhaps even a jealous intruder: she interrupts the conversation, saying, “Lazy creatures! If I lie down will you tickle me?”). At the beginning of the film, each shot moves us closer to the women, until, in the seventh shot, an extreme close-up reveals the mother’s nipple, centered in the frame. The pacing of Marshall’s editing reflects the utter tranquility of this moment among friends; the shots range from 4 seconds to 54, and are organized so as to maintain the quiet mood of this “non-action” scene: the editing builds to no climax, and in general, extended shots interrupt whatever velocity begins to develop in shorter shots.18
In A Group of Women conversation is the action. Marshall offers no voice-over explanation of what he is showing us, though he does, for the first time, provide subtitles that propose to translate what the women are saying (according to David MacDougall, this was a first, a transformative first, not only for Marshall, but for ethnographic film in general).19 As is true in the other films about the Ju/’hoansi Marshall made during the 1960s, the sound in A Group of Women is not synchronized, but, to quote the text that precedes most of these films, “was recorded at the time of filming and reconstructed during editing. Translations are from both tapes and notes.”20 Our ability to hear the voices of the women, who talk very quietly, adds an audio component to the intimacy established by the in-close cinematography, and our reading the subtitles—while it does interrupt our view on the women—engages us within this quiet moment in a way that Marshall’s voice-over in The Hunters does not.
FIGURE 2. From John Marshall's A Group of Women (1961). Courtesy Documentary Educational Resources.
Marshall’s films have nearly always been subsumed within the category of ethnographic film, the assumption being that their primary, if not only, function is to provide a useful adjunct to anthropological investigations of an indigenous group, and particularly, an indigenous group whose way of life is under threat from modernity—as represented, of course, by the camera itself. But A Group of Women only seems an ethnographic film if one thinks of it within the meta-sequence of Marshall’s Ju/’hoansi project. Understood outside of this project, the film represents, on one hand, a young man’s fascination with several young women, with their physicality, their friendship, and the realities of young motherhood. On the other hand, the film demonstrates how intimate Marshall had become with this band of Ju/’hoansi—he seems to hover quite close to the women in order to make the shots he uses (it may also be that the very difference represented by Marshall’s filming makes him, for all practical purposes, invisible to these women). A Group of Women seems to go beneath any scholarly ethnographic pretensions to a level of friendship and interchange that defies cultural distinction, even as Marshall refuses to present the women as anything but Ju/’hoansi. The differences between young women in American culture and these Ju/’hoansi women will be obvious to anyone seeing their clothing, the decorative marks on their skin, their comfort with the desert dirt and the ubiquitous flies (the first sound heard in the film is a fly buzzing). And yet, the way in which these young women relate to one another feels instantly familiar and understandable.
A useful cinematic reference here is not another ethnographic film, but Stan Brakhage’s Blood’s Tone, the second part of the trilogy 3 Films: Bluewhite, Blood’s Tone, Vein, completed in 1965. In Blood’s Tone Brakhage hovers close to his nursing child and uses his zoom lens to suggest that he is, through cinema, participating in the child’s suckling: his short zooms in and out echo the baby’s taking the nipple into her mouth and sucking on Jane Brakhage’s breast (we never see more of Jane than this breast). Blood’s Tone seems to have been filmed at night (the baby is distracted by the camera, sometimes seeming to wonder what this strange being so nearby is doing with all this light and, presumably, noise—Blood’s Tone is silent), and Brakhage’s lighting causes the little scene to be golden, an allusion not only to this golden moment of childhood and parenthood, but perhaps to the ubiquitous Renaissance and pre-Renaissance paintings of Mary and the baby Jesus that were often decorated with gold leaf.21
Like Blood’s Tone, A Group of Women takes us inside an intimate moment, a moment that for Marshall, as for Brakhage—both of them American men who grew up during an era when nudity was forbidden from the commercial cinema and when birth and nursing were kept relatively secret—must have seemed both fascinating and exciting. As in Blood’s Tone, but rather less obviously, the camera movement in A Group of Women, as well as the pacing of Marshall’s editing, is of a piece with what is filmed: as the women lie still, Marshall’s handheld shots are still; when the women reposition themselves and move the baby, Marshall’s camera makes subtle adjustments that reflect the motion of the women. Throughout the film, the serenity of the editing echoes this quiet conversation, this moment of interchange and affection before the imminent trek to Gautscha. And at the end, as the women drift off to sleep and out of