American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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something about both the openness of the city’s police department and the prestige of independent cinema in Pittsburgh at that moment.57
PUTTING DOWN THE CAMERA AND PICKING UP THE SHOVEL
The journey from the subsistence to the commercial world has often been devastating, but I think few black people want to reverse the clock. Most Ju/’hoansi, at any rate, would rather go forward in the mixed economy even if it were possible to turn back.
JOHN MARSHALL, “FILMING AND LEARNING”58
After his return to the Kalahari and the Ju/’hoansi, and N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman, Marshall’s documentaries of the !Kung saga take a very different form. Indeed, when I contacted Documentary Educational Resources to ask for DVD copies of Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out (1985) and To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report (1991), DER director Cynthia Close sent me the following e-mail: “I can send you N!ai [I had also requested N!ai], but John never considered those other two titles ‘films’—some of the footage from both those ‘reports’ was used throughout A KALAHARI FAMILY and the final chapter there, DEATH BY MYTH, really tells this whole aspect of the story.”59 Whatever one calls Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out and To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report (and other related works from the 1980s that are not in distribution), they are certainly parts of Marshall’s meta-film of Kalahari life, which, as Close suggests in her e-mail, concludes with the epic, five-part series, A Kalahari Family (2001).60 And if we can see them not only as “field reports,” but also as video works by an accomplished film artist, it becomes evident that through their form and style, as well as their apparent content, they provide a postmodern reflection on the role of filmmaking in the transformation of a way of life.
Especially in Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out but also in To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report the video imagery is fuzzy and washed out, inferior to what one had come to expect from Marshall. But it is obvious in both videos that image quality and other “artistic” dimensions of cinema are irrelevant; composition and editing are entirely functional in these tapes. Marshall’s concern is with the developing crisis faced by the Ju/’hoansi. I’m reminded here of Joris Ivens’s The Spanish Earth (1937), where Ivens sometimes chose to sacrifice conventional concerns with film aesthetics in the hope that the film might make a positive contribution within a flow of events that constituted a political and human emergency. What is visible in Pull Ourselves Up is John Marshall himself, not as an artist documenting what is going on but as an active participant in the events. This is signaled in the titles of both field reports: “Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out” and “To Hold Our Own Ground.”61
As is standard in Marshall’s !Kung films, we hear his voice-over, and he translates what various men and women say; here, however, he is visible physically, first, arriving in a truck, bringing cattle feed for the kral at N!am Tchoa in 1982 and, cigarette hanging from his mouth (rather like Sigourney Weaver’s character in Avatar), helping to unload the heavy bags.62 In the final section of the video, Marshall is visible again, this time in December 1984, at //Xaru pan, where, he explains, “We’re piling rocks around the borehole to hopefully hurt elephants’ feet and keep them off” (a magnificent elephant hovers in the distance). Marshall is then seen among a group of Ju/’hoansi who are installing a water pump. The work is interrupted by government officials who tell the group that they must have written authority to install a pump, and Marshall is heard arguing that traditional water rights in the Kalahari do not require written permission. Tsamko (the eldest son of ≠Toma) tells the officials, “This pump is our business; we just asked John to help”; and later, after an official indicates that Marshall is testing his patience, Tsamko says, “It’s us Ju/’hoansi that are doing this pump, not John Marshall” (a Ju/’hoan Bushman Development Foundation, set up by Marshall with a gift from Laurence Marshall just before his death in 1980, has bought the pump and hired the contractor to install it—though this is not made clear in Pull Ourselves Up). The video ends with the officials leaving, the installation complete, and the pump working—and a final series of informational texts.
The very tenuous optimism of water being pumped in the final shot of the video (optimism immediately tempered by the final texts, which chart the devastating effects of reservation life on those Ju/’hoansi who have not set up their own farms and ranches) is the inverse of a subtle dimension of the review of Ju/’hoansi history that begins the video. In order to contexualize Pull Ourselves Up for those who have not followed his work, Marshall recycles a shot of a column of !Kung walking through the desert, shot in the 1950s; then, several shots from N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman of activities around the reservation offices at Tshumkwe: Jamie Uys shooting The Gods Must Be Crazy, U! going for mealy meal, /Qui marching with the soldiers and leaving. For anyone familiar with Marshall’s earlier work, this recycled imagery is at once familiar and de-familiarized by our recognition that it is faded and fuzzy—not surprisingly, since these shots are from earlier generations of film and video that have been re-recorded with video technology that substitutes convenience (and sync sound) for image quality.
In the early !Kung films, Marshall always remained outside the frame. Even though he felt personally at one with the Ju/’hoansi, and even when he was directly involved in the action (he was part of the group that shoots the giraffe in The Hunters), as a filmmaker he felt obliged to seem detached from their lives. This was, I assume, an act of respect, similar to Flaherty’s suppressing his own physical presence in Nanook of the North, as Marshall made clear even as late as the 1990s:
The problem is to let the audience meet the people in the film instead of just the filmmaker. The films that could help achieve the goal will have to try to show what people do and say, not what filmmakers feel, think and want their audience to know.
Robert Gardner, Fred Wiseman, Ricky Leacock and John Marshall are not particularly interesting. Ju/’hoansi pulling themselves up from the depths of dispossession are interesting.63
Pull Ourselves Up, however, reveals a new kind of presence that signals fundamental changes in Marshall’s thinking as media maker. Our consciousness of the (literal) decay of Marshall’s concern with aesthetic issues, at least as conventionally conceived, in both the film footage shot for N!ai and in that canonical shot of the !Kung walking into the desert (a shot that can be read as an index of Marshall’s idealistic youth), provides a historical context for Marshall’s entering the frame both in body and in voice (not simply in voice-over, but as a voice within the diegesis of the action). Here he is, for the first time in his moving image work, part of a “we”: not exactly the “we” of the Ju/’hoansi, but the “we” of a transcultural group made up of Ju/’hoansi and others working in the present for political change in the Kalahari.
The shifts in Marshall’s position with regard to filmmaking and the Ju/’hoansi continue in To Hold Our Own Ground, which takes roughly the same form as Pull Ourselves Up. Again, Marshall begins with a map and in voice-over reviews the changes in how southern African territory has come to be divided up: “The following visual report shows the Ju/wa struggle to hold on to their last fragment of land and farm for their lives.” Tsamko, who has emerged as a leader of the Ju/’hoansi (this is already evident in Pull Ourselves Up) is seen walking toward the camera, and Marshall’s revelation of Tsamko’s thoughts makes clear that he will be a focus of this video. The appearance of Tsamko leads into a review of the past, conducted both in voice-over (“I first met Tsamko in 1951”) and through recycled imagery from earlier work.
FIGURE 5. Ju/'hoansi on the move, in a Marshall photograph. Courtesy Documentary Educational Resources.
Once again, we see the canonical shot of a column of !Kung walking into the desert, here even less true to the original than the version of the shot seen in Pull Ourselves Up (fig. 5). This is followed by imagery of Tsamko learning to hunt by shooting a beetle with arrows, from The Hunters, then by imagery of the hunters shooting the giraffe and of women gathering roots (this imagery is quite faded and breaks down), and then—after a bit more information about the present political situation—imagery from N!ai (the presence of the South African soldiers at Tshumkwe) and from Pull Ourselves