American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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men and women (with /Gunda trying to calm things down) is horrific, in part because when one man is brutally knocked to the ground, he falls on a puppy whose screams of pain express what this moment means for this formerly peaceful people. Marshall’s review concludes with imagery from the attempt to keep elephants away from the waterhole and the confrontation over the installation of the water pump from Pull Ourselves Up: the recycled scenes from the earlier field report are second-generation video and the decay in quality emphasizes the “past-ness” of even these comparatively recent events.
The present in To Hold Our Own Ground was recorded in much-improved video technology that, especially in the outdoor shots revealing Tsamko’s effective leadership and the development of the Nyae Nyae Farmers Cooperative, presents these developments as a new “golden moment,” or at least as evidence of the possibility that the Ju/’hoansi, through their own efforts (and with the collaboration of others who are committed to the justice of their desire for a homeland) may overcome the many challenges still facing them. Marshall is quite clear about these challenges: among them, the myth that the Ju/’hoansi are incapable of rising above animal status; the opening of eastern Bushmanland to trophy hunting (illustrated with shots of the carcasses of dead elephants being dismembered with chainsaws); and the resistance of the neighboring Herero who spread false rumors about Tsamko’s activities and goals.
But we also see that Tsamko and the other Ju/’hoansi continue to develop their organization in ways that may be successful, and Marshall himself is again visible, not filming, but taking minutes at a meeting of the cooperative and translating for the Ju/’hoansi. The film ends with some real hope: water is flowing from a new borehole (again, evocative of The Spanish Earth, where the final scenes reveal Spanish peasants irrigating their land) and Tsamko is seen marching in support of SWAPO and an independent Namibia (there is some indication that a SWAPO victory might assist the Ju/’hoansi in their struggle). Even the video’s final credits indicate the change in Marshall’s sense of his filmmaking. Instead of the usual hierarchical designation of roles, the credits indicate that the video was “produced by DER for the Nyae Nyae Farmers Cooperative,” and that it’s “a film by Peter Baker, Cliff Bestall, John Bishop, Sue Cabezas, John Marshall, Claire Ritchie, Pitchie Rommelaere, John Terry”—that is, the cooperative nature of the Ju/’hoansi struggle is reflected in the collaborative production of the video.
THE ROAD TAKEN: A KALAHARI FAMILY
The five-part television series, A Kalahari Family, finished in 2002, is the capstone of the Marshalls’ Kalahari saga; and it moved John Marshall’s approach to filmmaking, and his understanding of his early work, into a final phase. In the opening, 90-minute episode, “A Far Country,” Marshall reviews the history of his family’s arrival in Nyae Nyae as well as the previous history of that area of southwest Africa; and, recycling footage from many of the !Kung films (in this case in gorgeous reproductions of that early footage), he recalls his experiences with the Ju/’hoansi in the 1950s, up through Laurence Marshall’s reuniting the band by interceding with the South African authorities to broker the release of those who had been working as forced labor on white farms (the resulting friction between /Ti!kay and /Qui is documented in An Argument about a Marriage).64 “A Far Country” begins in 2002, when Marshall and several Ju/’hoansi men are erecting a monument to ≠Toma, who died in 1988, under a baobab tree (the text is in Ju/’hoansi and English; the English reads “He stopped our feet/He taught us”).
“A Far County” presents two kinds of imagery from the 1950s: footage not previously released (for example, Lorna Marshall’s making Polaroids of the Ju/’hoansi and her own family during the first Marshall family expedition to help explain what the family was doing in Nyae Nyae) and recycled moments from First Film and The Hunters through Men Bathing and Baobab Play. After this historical introduction, Marshall intercuts among Lorna Marshall, ≠Toma, !U, Tsamko, N!ai,/Gunda, and Marshall himself reminiscing about their lives in the 1950s and imagery from the experiences they describe. The bulk of these reminiscences were recorded during Marshall’s return to Nyae Nyae after his twenty-year exile, as he and his friends were becoming reacquainted and remembering their previous lives together. The reminiscences also function to explain Ju/’hoansi life to those who are unfamiliar with the earlier Marshall films.
For those who do know the earlier Marshall films, Marshall’s return to Nyae Nyae is, of course, also their return, and it is fascinating and moving to see the changes in the people remembered from those films (moving, in part, because we know their changes are reflected by our own: we’re all Rip Van Winkles, returning to a place we thought we knew). The mood of “A Far Country” is generally nostalgic, though as the episode evolves, Marshall reminds viewers that what may have seemed Edenic to him was disappearing even as it was being recorded, and in part because it was recorded: “While we were home in America, white ranchers followed our tracks into Nyae Nyae to round up the Ju/’hoansi by persuasion or force.” The later Marshall expedition, during which Laurence Marshall was able to see to the reuniting of the band, may seem to have mended this wound to the community, but, near the end of “A Far Country,” just after we see a final shot of Marshall at the ≠Toma memorial in 2002, imagery from Men Bathing is accompanied by Marshall’s voice-over: “Looking back, I’m struck by how naïve we all were about the future”; “On our last winter morning together, as we enjoyed a bath in Nama waters, we had no idea how soon or how willingly most people would give up the hunting-gathering life.” “A Far Country” concludes with the men laughing uproariously and then sleeping in the sun—a perfect metaphor for the naïveté (their own, Marshall’s, and perhaps, ours) that was part of the experience of those earlier films.
Marshall’s recycling of the Men Bathing imagery at the conclusion of “A Far Country” also makes explicit his own presence at this event as well as his participation in the bathing (“as we enjoyed a bath in Nama waters”) and, presumably, in the joking and laughing (somewhat less in the resting, perhaps, since he is filming the men). The disappearance of the detachment of Marshall-as-filmmaker in his films, already evident in Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out and To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report, is here extended, in the sense that we are now becoming aware of the implicit fiction of Marshall’s (however well-intentioned) invisibility in his early films: Marshall is entering the frame of an earlier film, at least conceptually, in retrospect.
As time has passed, Marshall has come to accept that he was, for a time, a member of the !Kung band—in one instance, forcibly separated from them, as they were from each other—and in a sense a part of an extended family that includes many !Kung as well as his own parents and sister. Indeed, this seems to be implied by the use of the singular in A Kalahari Family. His decision to use five Ju/’hoansi narrators (actually, we see ≠Toma, !U, Tsamko, N!ai, and /Gunda speaking and hear English translations of their memories by voice-over actors Sello Sabotsane, Lucia Mthiyane, Jerry Mofokeng, Letta Mbulu, and Michael Sishange, respectively) announces this “we” as part of the filmmaking strategy of A Kalahari Family.
In the following three, hour-long episodes of A Kalahari Family—“End of the Road,” “Real Water,” and “Standing Tall”—Marshall returns to the period recorded in Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out and To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report, this time in more detail, both in terms of what we learn about these events and literally in how the events are seen. After a brief review of Marshall’s history in Nyae Nyae, ending with !U’s saying, “You never thought about us!”—deeply ironic for anyone aware of Marshall’s immersion in his 1950s footage from the time his visa was revoked into the 1970s—he recycles earlier imagery of Nama Pan in 1958 in order to contrast the idyllic moment there with what he found when he returned to Nyae Nyae in 1978 and what had become the ghetto of poverty at Tshumkwe, the headquarters of the Nyae Nyae reservation. Marshall’s tour of “downtown” Tshumkwe is followed by a series of recyclings of imagery from the 1950s, so that viewers can be clear about how dramatically !Kung life has changed for Tsamko, N!ai, /Gunda, G≠kao Dabe, and the others, in part because “my family’s expeditions had played a part in the South African occupation of Nyae Nyae.” As G≠kao Dabe says, “It was the roads you and your father made that brought us kadi [a cheap local corn liquor, which was doing serious damage to the !Kung community—I’m not sure about the spelling]. . . . When you and your father left,