American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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case), Marshall seems to have been ambivalent about the experience. While he says that from the beginning he and Wiseman agreed that they would be co-directors and that later he was “kicked out” of the editing room, he also admits that “it was his [Wiseman’s] movie”; “I thought of it as Fred’s movie.”48 Of course, Marshall’s contributions to Titicut Follies as cinematographer have never been in doubt, and his in-close shooting is often reminiscent of his early !Kung films.
While the working relationship between Marshall and Wiseman deteriorated once the shooting of Titicut Follies was completed, the two men seem to have worked well together during the shooting. When he was asked whether he and Wiseman developed “some kind of direction system,” Marshall responded, “We didn’t need to. We clicked. We were in tune with each other, we hit it off.”49 Their being in tune is also suggested by the fact that both were working on films about police work during the years 1968–69. Wiseman completed Law and Order, his exploration of police work in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1969 (William Brayne shot Law and Order and would shoot nine more films for Wiseman), and Marshall was shooting his Pittsburgh Police films in 1968–69: Inside/Outside Station 9 was released in 1970; Three Domestics and Vagrant Woman in 1971; Investigation of a Hit and Run and 901/904 in 1972; and the remaining fifteen titles in 1973.50 The longer films—Inside/Outside Station 9 and 901/904 include films subsequently released, often in slightly different edits, as shorts.51 The structure of the longest of the Pittsburgh Police films, Inside/Outside Station 9 (78 minutes)52 bears some relationship to the structure of Law and Order, though in general, the Wiseman film is more finished and more visceral and is shaped to appeal to a television audience, whereas Inside/Outside Station 9, and the other Marshall films, feel more raw, partly because Marshall was often shooting at night, in situations when lighting was difficult to control. Also, Wiseman seems more detached from the events, Marshall more intimate with them.
As was true of Marshall’s earlier films, the police films were made not as art films—though in many senses, of course, they are artful—but in the hope that the results would be useful in a specific practical sense, as aids in helping to improve police work and as part of courses in law schools. Indeed, although the Pittsburgh Police films were shown to the police, they were not shown to the general public for years. Investigation of a Hit and Run (1972) was followed by A Legal Discussion of a Hit and Run (1973, co-shot with Timothy Asch), in which a Harvard Law School class discusses legal aspects of what is revealed by the earlier film. The 4th & 5th & the Exclusionary Rule (1973) includes sequences from Pittsburgh Police films intercut with a panel discussion moderated by Professor James Vorenberg of Harvard Law School (filmmaker Jacqueline Shearer was a member of this panel).
The Pittsburgh films formally echo the !Kung films after The Hunters and before N!ai in that they are, in Marshall’s terminology, “sequence films”—that is, they are, or are made up of, short films documenting what John Dewey would call particular “experiences.” The differences between the Pittsburgh films and the films shot in the Kalahari are as noteworthy as the similarities, however. The police films include no voice-over or extradiagetic explanation; they were shot in black and white, probably because of the limitations of color film stocks; the result is a gritty, journalistic feel. Most important, the police films are not simply “thick” films (Marshall designates films as “thin” or “thick,” depending on how effectively they reflect the complexity of social interaction),53 they are more ambiguous than the !Kung films: while Marshall came to feel close to the police he traveled with (“Getting to know them is what the film is about. We lived with them. Some of us became very fond of each other”),54 neither they nor the citizens they come into contact with represent anything like the idealized community we see in so many of the early !Kung films. Indeed, one might conjecture that the complexity and immensity of the social issues at play in the police films helped to maintain a nostalgia in Marshall for the “small town” innocence, not so much of the Ju/’hoansi (by the early 1970s, he was well aware of what was happening to their traditional way of life), but of his own youthful experiences with them, innocence evoked in A Group of Women and A Joking Relationship and more generally expressed in the lovely color of the early films shot in the Kalahari.
As he was shooting and editing the Pittsburgh Police films, Marshall took a personal interest in sharing the work with the police themselves:
I filmed events of policework for about nine months over the two-year period. On my own, I used the sequences as case studies for discussion with the cops in the loft of Station 9. A number of us would foregather with some six-packs after the four to midnight shift. . . .
Discussion was lively. . . . Many of my sequences showed “domestics” [that is, domestic disputes between marital or live-in partners]. The cops in Station 9 had all three schools of thought: get involved and try to help the family; arrest the man, or everybody; do nothing and maybe call the welfare department. The sequences of real events and specific officers motivated and grounded the discussions. The police appreciated the reality . . . and all said they benefited from arguing their views and airing their feelings.55
All in all, Marshall’s personal involvement with the police he worked with to make the Pittsburgh Police Films provides an interesting contrast to another “personal” film about police work shot in Pittsburgh in 1970 and finished in 1971: Stan Brakhage’s Eyes, one of the three films that have become known as The Pittsburgh Trilogy (The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes and Deus Ex, both 1971, are the other parts of the trilogy; The Act was filmed in the Pittsburgh morgue; Deus Ex, in a Pittsburgh hospital).
Marshall’s Pittsburgh films and Brakhage’s Eyes emblemize two radically different approaches to independent filmmaking, to documentary, and to personal filmmaking that were developing during the 1960s and early 1970s. Both projects are radically anticommercial, implicit critiques of standard Hollywood fare. In both cases, there was no scripting: Marshall and Brakhage immersed themselves in the experience of police work, then edited what they’d shot to reflect what they had come to understand so that we could experience their impressions in cinematic form and draw our own conclusions.
Except for the fact that both filmmakers used handheld 16mm cameras, however, the films are formally quite distinct. Eyes is silent and in color, and reflects Brakhage’s fascination with the visual accoutrements of police work: the various symbols (badges, uniforms, name tags) and characteristic gestures of the police he travels with. Marshall’s fascination is with the human interactions between Pittsburgh citizens and the police, especially as these interactions are expressed vocally. While Brakhage demonstrates his feelings for the situations he witnesses (some of them quite graphic: a dead body in the street, an old man whose face has been battered) in his gestures with the camera and in his freeform editing, Marshall works at remaining invisible but within the development of events; in interior shots, his lighting makes his presence obvious, and from time to time a citizen reveals some discomfort with, or at least interest in, his presence—but in general Marshall’s films are as self-effacing as Eyes is self-expressive.
Together, however, the two projects provide a fascinating reflection on Pittsburgh and on the ways in which independent film artists were attempting to engage the urban experience during the early 1970s. Despite the obvious formal distinctions between the work of the two filmmakers, it is clear that certain problems are endemic to Pittsburgh: in both films the police are dealing with homelessness, with young people who have nothing to do; and in both, the police are working across racial lines during an era when racial issues were especially volatile (though this remains mostly implicit in both films). In Eyes and in Marshall’s films the police are nominally, and to some extent actually, the guardians of order, but they also seem a bit at sea in dealing with the complexities of the society evolving around them.
The early responses to the films reflect these complexities. When Marshall’s films were shown at the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence at Brandeis, the reactions to the police work depicted varied widely, as is clear in Marshall’s The 4th, 5th, & Exclusionary Rule; and Brakhage remembers that while the police “loved Eyes . . . , felt that their dignity had been restored,” and used the film “to show how kind and gentle they are,” Black Panthers in Chicago “used Eyes to show what pigs the police