American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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Both films provide an extended review of events that take place over a period of time, and that include some of the same characters, most notably N!ai and /Gunda, whose betrothal is a subject in N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman (and is referred to in A Joking Relationship).
Indeed, in retrospect, we can see that the two films play out a bit of marital melodrama, though this was not clear for audiences until 1980, when N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman was finished. During the section of N/um Tchai focusing on /Gunda’s movement into trance (both in the précis and in the film proper), we see close-ups of N!ai, who seems either bored or unhappy. Since N!ai is a recognizable figure, her facial expressions seem noteworthy, if obscure in this case. In N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman we learn that N!ai was frightened of /Gunda’s going into trance (“Your face looked so crazy,” she says to /Gunda, then to Marshall, “I was so scared of this man”). Her fear comes into play during the latter part of N!owa T’ama: when an older woman is inspired to go into trance by /Gunda’s dancing, N!ai harasses the woman—as if to demonstrate her fear and resistance to trance in general and to /Gunda’s involvement in it.
Marshall’s manner of depicting the two rituals confirms the thematic and implicitly narrative relationships between the two films, and it suggests that while he was trying to make films that would have practical pedagogical value, he had not foresworn the personal and aesthetic engagement that characterizes A Group of Women and A Joking Relationship. In both N/um Tchai and N!owa T’ama the move from précis to film proper (and this is true of other films using this two-part structure) is essentially a move from Marshall’s observing events from the outside to his cinematically joining in the rituals. In N/um Tchai the précis is presented in live action, but generally in long shot and especially at the beginning, using downward angles: that is, we see the Ju/’hoansi literally from a distance and below us. As soon as the “film proper” begins, the camera is closer and at a ground level, looking up or across at the participants. In N!owa T’ama the précis is presented differently, but to the same effect. As we hear Marshall in voice-over, explaining the melon-tossing game, we are seeing freeze frames of moments in the ritual. As David MacDougall has suggested, freezing the moving image “returns film to the status of still photography, from which cinema was born. Seized out of the flow of events, the photograph excludes us from the film and bears us away from the story. . . .”30 But once the film proper begins, we are seeing live action, and we feel instantly more involved.
In N/um Tchai Marshall’s black-and-white cinematography, especially at the beginning of the film proper, is elegant and evocative. The men dancing are seen in silhouette from a position slightly below; this evokes morning (Marshall has explained that the dancing has continued all night and into the morning) and implicitly suggests the mythic beauty of this event and its power for him. The changing chiaroscuro of the cinematography throughout the day functions as a clock. As the curing ritual becomes more involved, Marshall’s camera movement expresses the participants’ growing excitement and his own—essentially he is dancing with his camera in conjunction with the ritual; and the pace of the editing speeds up as the ritual grows more intense and slows down as the ritual concludes: a final 54-second shot concludes the film. A similar strategy is evident in N!owa T’ama, where in the film proper (here, the title comes at the very beginning, before the précis) Marshall’s color cinematography records the women throwing the melon not simply from a detached distance, but from within the dance and in a manner that expressionistically communicates the excitement of the game. In several sequences Marshall positions the camera so that when one woman throws the little melon to the next woman, the melon stays roughly in the center of the frame, while the first woman runs out of the frame, and the next runs in. The movement of women and men running and dancing quickly into and through the frame expresses the ritual as a kind of controlled wildness. When the men momentarily interrupt the ritual, Marshall interrupts his focus on the game and uses intercutting to emphasize the friendly collision of genders. Both films use sound in much the same way; the singing and clapping of the !Kung women, and in N/um Tchai, the rhythm of the men’s stamping feet, provide a continual background for the action; the singing dies out near the end of each film, signaling the conclusion of both the !Kung ritual and the cinematic ritual that allows us to engage it.
In other films Marshall’s combination of teaching and artistic expression works in somewhat different ways. In An Argument about a Marriage, for example, the précis combines live action and freeze frame. As Marshall explains how members of a group of Ju/’hoansi who had been captured by white farmers were reunited with other members of the group (several of whom had escaped soon after capture), in part through the Marshalls’ intervention, we see a truck wending its way through the trees and the moment when the groups are reunited. Then, when he explains the complex situation that has resulted from /Qui’s having a child with Baou during captivity, we see the relevant parties in freeze frame. Then once the film proper begins, we are back in live action, and as usual, inside the events: much of the ongoing action is in close-up, sometimes extreme close-up, generally filmed so that we are looking slightly up at the participants: Marshall and his filmmaking are in a submissive position with regard to the experience of the !Kung. More fully than any other of the sequence films, An Argument about a Marriage communicates the complexity, indeed the near-chaos, of this moment in the lives of the Ju/’hoansi. During the film proper, Marshall uses subtitles to translate, but often so many people are speaking at once that it is clear that we’re getting only a fraction of what is being said. The forced interplay of the !Kung and the white farmers has thrown these lives into crisis: as ≠Toma says, near the close of the film, “When we act like ourselves, these things don’t happen.” The film ends with a freeze frame on ≠Toma, who has negotiated a momentary stalemate, as Marshall explains how this volatile situation resolved itself.
Marshall’s strategy for presenting information about the !Kung allows for a wide range of moods. Men Bathing, for example, could not be more different from An Argument about a Marriage either in tone or in presentation. The précis of Men Bathing begins in live action and with John Marshall’s voice-over, as we see several men arrive at a lovely pan on a gorgeous day. Then the film shifts to freeze frame as Marshall explains who these men are and how they are related to each other. A return to live action and the increased volume of environmental sounds signal the beginning of the film proper, during which little happens: the men bathe, make jokes,31 and enjoy the moment; and Marshall’s camera meditates on this idyllic scene, on the gorgeous landscape, and on the bodies of these men. Men Bathing is the most serene of all Marshall’s films and one of the most beautiful—a final vestige, perhaps, of the filmmaker’s fast-fading innocence.
EXPULSION FROM EDEN: BITTER MELONS AND N!AI, THE STORY OF A !KUNG WOMAN
But things had changed; it came out that . . . two entire bands of Bushmen whom we had known at Gautscha, and many Bushmen from Gam, including the husband of Beautiful Ungka, had been taken away by Europeans to work on the farms. Three times European farmers had come, having followed in the tire tracks we ourselves had left behind the last time. They came all the way to Gam, where they had found the Bushmen, no longer shy of Europeans, and had “offered to take them for a ride on their trucks but had promised to bring them back.” The Bushmen had believed them, had gone for the ride, and of course were never seen again.
ELISABETH MARSHALL THOMAS, THE HARMLESS PEOPLE32
Seen as a whole, however, John’s “Bushmen” films reveal the expanding of a sensitive consciousness not only to a gestalt of life but to the complexity of filmic (re)presentation and to the limitations of audiences to comprehend what is presented. He alone of the 1950s–’60s recorders of “Bushmen” has expressed his changed views in uncompromising terms; he deserves applause for this. Collectively, his films constitute important ethnographic documents. They are not, however, dependable documents of the objectified peoples made subjects in the films, but faithful documents of the filmmaker/ethnographer situated in the discourse of a distorted modernity at the time they were made.
EDWIN N. WILMSEN33
I first became aware of John Marshall in 1972 at a summer film institute organized by Peter Feinstein in conjunction with what was called the University Film Study Center and presented at Hampshire College.34 Among the many opportunities