FIGURE 3. N!ai in John Marshall's A Joking Relationship (1962). Courtesy Documentary Educational Resources.

      What Marshall captures in A Joking Relationship is both the open affection of an uncle and a niece, a relationship rarely accorded attention in cinema of any kind, and the underlying sexual dimension of this, and perhaps any, relationship between mature men and their young relatives. Here, this sexual pull, which seems to go both ways, is continually evident, even as the two parties are redirecting an urge that could cause them problems within the small community in which they live into good-humored banter and nonsexual (but sensual) physical interchange.²² In general, their interaction is presented in a series of pulses; N!ai and /Ti!kay wrestle around, then separate, then wrestle around some more, then separate . . . all the while bantering with each other: /Ti!kay calls N!ai a snake and an insect, tells her to “come here to be cooked and eaten!” and at one point conjoins his literal hunger and his sexual hunger: he takes out his knife, opens it, and says he’ll “nip a bud to eat”—meaning N!ai’s nipple (her breasts have just begun to show). A moment later, after his mock attack and her mock resistance, Marshall provides a close-up of /Ti!kay’s hands folding up the knife in front of his wrinkly belly—in clear contradistinction to N!ai’s young breasts. N!ai says, “Let’s stay together,” then “No, let’s stay together really,” but she soon stops playing, puts her beads back on, and despite /Ti!kay’s urging her to stay, says, “You’re a silly old man,” and walks off.

      Marshall’s composition and use of sound function as a kind of cinematic participation in this extended moment of uncle–niece interchange. When /Ti!kay and N!ai are wrestling, Marshall is in close, often focusing on a calf, a breast, an arm with bracelets, half a face; when N!ai and /Ti!kay momentarily separate, the camera moves back as well and we see N!ai and /Ti!kay in long shot and alone. Further, as the sexual tension becomes increasingly evident to the viewer (we might imagine that it was increasingly felt by young John Marshall as he was shooting), a repeated bird sound seems to speak the hidden sexual-romantic urge underlying the banter and wrestling. Whereas in A Group of Women, there are usually sounds of distant conversations in the background, A Joking Relationship seems an isolated moment, interrupted only by the presence of Marshall, which is always implicit, and for at least one moment, quite explicit. Marshall’s close-ups of N!ai’s and /Ti!kay’s faces, often seem to capture not just good-humored fun but subtle embarrassment, possibly a function of the girl’s and man’s unspoken recognition of their attraction being witnessed, and in the case of /Ti!kay, some bemusement at Marshall’s fascination with what might seem to /Ti!kay this nonevent. Near the middle of the film, /Ti!kay tells N!ai to come down from the crotch of the baobab where she is standing: “He [meaning Marshall] wants to take your picture while I tumble you.” And N!ai responds, “He wants to take me gathering in the truck.” And N!ai slides down the tree to /Ti!kay to wrestle around some more, for both the fun of it and for John Marshall and his camera.

      A different sort of idyll, though related to A Group of Women and A Joking Relationship in both form and implication, is Baobab Play (1974), finished twelve years after these films. Here again, a baobab tree is the location of the action, or really a kind of nonaction, and here too, Marshall forgoes voice-over, and even subtitles, since what is happening is quite clear without verbal intervention. All we see during the 8 minutes of Baobab Play is several boys playing around and in the baobab: the boys in the tree throw sticks, leaves, berries down at the group on the ground, and the boys on the ground respond in kind. It is the sort of good-humored “war” that seems endemic to male childhood in widely different cultures and geographies—which may have been Marshall’s fascination with this scene.

      The end credits of Baobab Play indicate that Marshall produced and directed the film (it was edited by Frank Galvin, who edited many of Marshall’s films of the 1960s and 1970s; Timothy Asch was a production assistant), and it is clear throughout the film that Marshall must have directed the boys to play, presumably in their normal manner, while ignoring, insofar as possible, his presence with them under the tree and up in its branches. The film intercuts between the two “warring” groups from within each group. The cinematography and sound in Baobab Play provide an idyllic context for this depiction of childhood: the light in the tree is lovely, as is the sound of the breeze blowing through the tree, which continually transforms the lightscape of the film.

      Marshall’s meditation on male childhood in Baobab Play is deeply poignant, coming as it does near the end of the editing of the material shot during the Peabody Museum Kalahari Expeditions. By the time he edited Baobab Play, Marshall had moved through several phases of filmmaking, and his understanding of his project was radically changing. But here, for a moment, he seems to meditate not simply on the innocence of these boys, and not merely on childhood in general as represented by this group, but on what he came to think of, what perhaps he already felt were “the best years of my life, the happiest I’ve ever been, without any question”—that is, not on his own childhood, but on his filmmaking childhood, which had produced so much footage and the increasing dexterity with the camera so evident in Baobab Play. As in A Group of Women, A Joking Relationship, and in other 1960s and 1970s films, in Baobab Play Marshall is able simultaneously to record lovely moments in the lives of some Ju/’hoansi and to document his immersion within this culture and implicitly his pleasure in being accepted by these people he so admires, in being allowed to be part of their lives. In these films the baobab tree becomes a symbol of the fragile cultural Eden the Marshalls felt their expeditions had revealed to them and the Eden of John Marshall’s engagement with the !Kung as (cinematic) hunter and gatherer.²³

      Of course, it is precisely the Marshalls’ apparent assumption that what they had seen in the Kalahari was a way of life unchanged since the Pleistocene Era, a vestige of an original culture unaffected by more modern developments, within which peacefulness and cooperation were the rule—in other words, a kind of Eden—that came to be understood within the anthropological community as a fundamental problem with the films that came out of the Marshall family expeditions. The assumption that the !Kung had lived in the Kalahari, precisely the way that the Marshalls had “found” them—even the subsequent contention by both John Marshall and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas that the family’s presence had led to the problematic transformation of this ancient way of life—soon came to be seen as a naïve sense of the history of southern Africa. Subsequent research revealed that many changes had probably occurred to the San peoples as migrations of other ethnic populations into southwest Africa from other areas caused the San to move into the Kalahari. What the Marshalls “found” may have seemed Edenic to them, but it wasn’t an original Eden for the !Kung. Indeed, in their research into the 700,000 feet of footage accumulated during the years when John Marshall was filming the San, Keyan G. Tomaselli and John P. Homiak discovered that Marshall himself was well aware