American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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taught by Marshall. My most vivid memories of this course include his beginning the week’s first screening with Peter Kubelka’s flicker film, Arnulf Rainer (1960) and his presentation of his own film, Bitter Melons (1971), which I taught regularly for a number of years. Bitter Melons, like First Film, is a general introduction to the San of the Kalahari, focusing on a band of Khwe San living at /Ei hxa o, in what is now Botswana. While Lorna Marshall organized First Film roughly in accordance with the way written anthropological studies, including her own The !Kung of Nyae Nyae, are arranged, John Marshall organized Bitter Melons around music, and in particular, around the blind musician Oukwane, whose compositions are a motif during much of the film ( Oukwane’s “Bitter Melons,” his favorite composition according to Marshall, is the source of the title).35
During roughly the first third of the (30-minute) film, we hear a series of songs Oukwane has learned, some of them his own, others passed onto him by other musicians; Marshall provides information about the songs in voice-over. The second third of the film briefly reviews general aspects of Kalahari San life: gathering food and water, planting melons, hunting, the etiquette of sharing or not sharing various foods, the slaughtering of meat. During the final third of the film, a distant grass fire is spotted, and two men walk to the fire in the hope of meeting their relatives and bringing them back to their camp; their journey is accompanied by relevant songs played by Oukwane. After a cutaway to several boys performing traditional animal songs and playing the musical porcupine game, the two men return with the visitors and the film climaxes with men and boys dancing to various tunes. The film ends with the bands dispersing; Oukwane and his wife Kutera decide to stay where they are, being “old and finished.”
Bitter Melons is a lovely and engaging film, in large measure because of Marshall’s obvious respect for and refusal to patronize Oukwane’s music and the traditional musics of the Khwe San: “I wanted to celebrate the wealth of music, musical traditions and games which the people supported with their marginal economy.”36 Oukwane’s songs are a pleasure to hear, and the young boys’ enjoyment of their songs and games and the dancing of the men and boys near the end makes for a high-spirited experience. The landscape imagery, especially during the walk to the distant grass fire, is reminiscent of Nanook of the North; here too, we see men tiny against vast spaces, working to create a subsistence and a life against considerable odds. In general, Bitter Melons is an idyll—poignant because of Oukwane and Kutera’s decision to remain behind, alone, at the end of the film, adding a final emphasis to the challenges of the Kalahari from which all this music and enjoyable social interplay has come. Marshall’s affection and admiration for these people are evident in the general functionality of his editing and in his use of extended shots during the dancing, one of them nearly two-and-a-half-minutes long. Like Flaherty in much of Nanook, Marshall makes himself invisible as an act of respect; their art is what is interesting to Marshall, not his own.
For anyone who has enjoyed Bitter Melons, the fact that Marshall later discredited the film might come as a surprise. But his experience in first making Bitter Melons and then coming to terms with what he saw as its failures models the central trajectory of his career from the early 1970s on. Like The Hunters, Bitter Melons is an attempt to create a general view of a people and inevitably can be faulted for leaving out as much as it includes, both in the specifics of the activities it reveals (in The Harmless People Elizabeth Marshall Thomas explains that the dance seen at the end of Bitter Melons was part of a far more complex ritual than is evident in the film),37 and in a more general sense: whatever sense we have of Khwe life from the film doesn’t include the kinds of complex interaction Marshall’s Nyae Nyae films reveal.38 Further, Marshall echoes Flaherty in not including those aspects of the activities we see that were affected by the filming itself: for example, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas explains, “Dances are usually held at night, but this time, out of consideration for us, they agreed to hold it [the dance we see in Bitter Melons] during the day so we could film it.”39 And Marshall himself has indicated that when the visitors came to visit Oukwane, “we gave everybody water. . . . Before and after the final dance in the film everybody had a good drink. No one would, or could, have danced in the sun with only tsama melons to relieve their thirst. Everybody’s stay at /Ei hxa o was strictly limited by the water supply.”40
John Marshall’s discrediting of Bitter Melons, however, has less to do with these issues than with how the poignant idyll he so carefully created, and that we viewers enjoy, turned out to falsify the historical realities that occurred after the film was shot and the Marshalls had left. He has explained:
In 1972, while working on Bushmen of the Kalahari, I searched the Ghanzi farms for Oukwane’s people.41 I found !Gai, whom I called “the fulcrum of the little band” in Bitter Melons, and Oukwane’s youngest son, /Gaiamakwe. !Gai was staying on a farm where an exceptional white farmer allowed a few Khwe to drink water and gather bushfoods. !Gai told me what happened when our expedition pulled out of /Ei hxa o in 1955. Of course Oukwane and his wife, Kutera, did not stay at /Ei hxa o as my narration suggests. The group lived on roots and melons for as long as possible, then they tried to get back to their permanent waters at Ghanzi.
Oukwane died of thirst somewhere between /Ei hxa o and Ghanzi. When the group reached the farms, they were driven off. /Twikwe and Da si n!a, another old woman, died of thirst along the fences. The survivors reached Ghanzi. In the town commons, the people could drink water from a municipal tap but there was nothing to eat. Kutera died of hunger. The two older boys, Wi!abe and Wi!e, disappeared. While trying to beg for corn meal, !Gai’s wife Tsetchwe was raped. She got syphilis and died. The disease had already killed their small son, N!oakwe, and riddled !Gai.
I found /Giamakwe, the other survivor, failing to get a job on another farm. I asked him if he remembered his father’s music. He said, “What music?” . . . In 1955 it did not occur to me to find out what would actually happen to the people I filmed at /Ei hxa o.42
For Marshall, whatever satisfaction the artistry of Bitter Melons (or for that matter, the artistry of Oukwane and the other musicians and dancers in the film) gave him, and whatever pleasure audiences might take from his film, were rendered pointless, once one understood the historical realities within which this film was made. And, rather than ignore those historical realities any further, Marshall committed the remainder of his filmmaking life, or at least that portion of his filmmaking life that had to do with the peoples of the Kalahari, to a direct engagement with them. The result was a series of films that not only have a very different function from the films of the 1950s through the 1970s, but that re-present material from earlier films in ways that provide this material with the context that was beyond the frame during the shooting and unacknowledged during the editing. This new context allows those of us who know Marshall’s early films to reexperience them in new ways.
N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman, at 59 minutes, was the longest film about the !Kung that Marshall had finished since The Hunters. It was made following Marshall’s long exile from Nyae Nyae; in 1958 the government of South Africa refused to renew his visa, and as a result, he was denied contact with the !Kung for twenty years, including the entire period during which he was editing the !Kung films that followed The Hunters. In retrospect, we can imagine that working with the footage that recorded what he considered the happiest experiences of his life was a way of revisiting his friends during the first years of his exile.
Like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, Marshall returned to the Kalahari in 1978, to the village of Tshumkwe on the border of Botswana and what in 1990 would become the independent nation of Namibia, now the administrative center of a reservation established in 1970 for the !Kung. Here, he discovered the dramatic changes that had occurred in his absence. He also discovered that a feature film, The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), was being shot in the area, and that N!ai, among the most frequent participants in his films, had a role in Jamie Uys’s feature. N!ai became the focus of Marshall’s shooting (fig. 4).
N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman opens with a sequence revealing the inhumane conditions on the reservation: the Ju/’hoansi can no longer gather or hunt and are sustained only by “mealy meal” (a kind of cornmeal porridge). Further, their health has deteriorated; N!ai says, “We’re all TB people [people with tuberculosis].” Marshall uses close-ups of N!ai, who is still very beautiful, speaking to the camera, as a