American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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A PROCESS IN TIME
According to my view, experience as a whole is a process in time, whereby innumerable particular terms lapse and are superseded by others that follow upon them by transitions which, whether disjunctive or conjunctive in content, are themselves experiences, and must in general be accounted at least as real as the terms which they relate.
WILLIAM JAMES, ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM65
To see John Marshall’s fifty-year career as a filmmaker as significant primarily because of his pioneering contribution to ethnographic cinema and his production of several canonical films—The Hunters and N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman, most obviously—is to undervalue one of the signal accomplishments of modern documentary cinema and to ghettoize an accomplished and inventive film artist. Most of those who come into contact with Marshall’s work have been anthropology students learning about indigenous, preindustrial cultures, but Marshall’s achievement as a film artist is fully evident only to those who have experienced his many films and videos about the Ju/’hoansi and have understood them as a single ever-evolving meta-work. While most film artists are satisfied with producing individual, discrete films, Marshall never seems to have thought of filmmaking this way—except perhaps momentarily at the very dawn of his career.
For Marshall, filmmaking was an ongoing, pragmatic process that went well beyond learning enough to produce films that audiences might feel they were learning from. He himself continued to engage the people he had filmed and had made films about, and as his awareness expanded, he rethought the earlier conclusions about them that were evident in those films and demonstrated this revised understanding in new work. Instead of abandoning the group of Ju/’hoansi who were recorded in his early footage and moving on to other subjects, Marshall revisited the Ju/’hoansi as often as he could (altogether Marshall made fifteen visits to Nyae Nyae), exploring their efforts to adjust to the changing world of which his presence in Nyae Nyae was a crucial part. And instead of abandoning his earlier films once he became aware of the limitations and failures of his representations of the Ju/’hoansi, he continued to revisit these films, recycling them into new works that reflected both the ongoing history of Nyae Nyae and the surrounding region, and his own expanding, continually revised awareness of this history and his attempts to honestly represent the people most affected by it.
Marshall’s !Kung films have long been understood as a record of a particular cultural group, just as the films of Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon are understood as a record of the Yanomami in southern Venezuela. Here too, however, this traditional understanding has failed to recognize the accomplishment of Marshall’s saga. The transformation we see in the Ju/’hoansi between Marshall’s early 1950s footage through his final visits to Nyae Nyae chronicled in A Kalahari Family do, of course, document the experiences of a very specific group, but, as is implicit in Marshall’s ongoing saga, these experiences are emblematic of one of the fundamental transformations that has been taking place across the globe for several centuries. If the original remoteness of the Ju/’hoansi living in the central Kalahari kept their gathering-hunting way of life more or less intact well into the twentieth century, the transformation of their lives during the past fifty years recalls the struggles of indigenous societies around the world. For an American it is difficult not to see the near-destruction of the Ju/’hoansi community through economic dependence, alcohol, and broken promises as parallel to the transformation of Native America wrought by the arrival of Europeans and the establishment of the American nation. Nyae Nyae is just one of those Other worlds that were sacrificed, that continue to be sacrificed, to make modern life seem “normal.”
In “The Regional Writer” Flannery O’Connor argues that for her to declare herself a Georgia writer is “to declare a limitation, but one which, like all limitations, is a gateway to reality. It is perhaps the greatest blessing a writer can have, to find at home what others have to go elsewhere seeking.”66 Marshall, of course, went elsewhere seeking, but he found in that elsewhere a kind of home for himself, and, over a period of half a century of visits to this new home, he transformed the limitations of his own cultural background and his own assumptions about cinema into a gateway to reality: specifically, the reality that life for “us” and for “them” (and for the relations between “us” and “them”) is always a process of personal and social transformation. And this is true if the “us” means Americans from Cambridge and “them,” the Ju/’hoansi in Nyae Nyae, and if “us” means filmmakers and “them,” their subjects, and if “us” means film audiences and “them,” filmmakers and/or their subjects.
2
Robert Gardner
While John Marshall spent much of his filmmaking life rethinking and revisiting his earlier filmmaking experiences in the Kalahari Desert, learning what he could from the ongoing transformations of San life and from what he saw as his limited understanding and his filmmaking mistakes, Robert Gardner’s career has been focused on an expansive engagement with the ways in which the human need to make life meaningful and beautiful despite the inevitability of physical death has been expressed both in far-flung cultures and by artists working in cultural environments closer to home. Gardner’s important, if controversial, contributions to ethnographic cinema have taken him to various parts of Africa (in one instance into the Kalahari with the Marshalls), to New Guinea, to the Andes, and to the Indian subcontinent. In each instance, he has thrown himself into the experience of recording what has seemed of interest to him in these cultures, not simply because the events he films are crucial within the lives of those he has documented, but also because of the relationships he sees between these events and transformations in his own culture and his own life.
Throughout his long career, Gardner has braided his fascination with exotic cultural practices that seem unusual but are sometimes surprisingly relevant to the lives of most film audiences with a fascination with artistic sensibility in general and with the particular accomplishments of writers, painters, sculptors, as well as other film artists. The result is a panorama of image making and writing within which Gardner has attempted, again and again, to confirm his commitment to the ritual of art and the art of ritual as a means of negotiating the passages of human experience.
EAST COAST/WEST COAST: EARLY EXPERIMENTS
Robert Gardner is a formative figure in the evolution of Cambridge documentary and in the emergence of Cambridge as a center of film activity. An accomplished and influential filmmaker in his own right, he was crucial in the development of the Film Study Center at Harvard, and in 1964, when the Film Study Center moved from the Peabody Museum to the new Carpenter Center, which Gardner helped to design, he managed the Film Study Center, assisting filmmakers in producing films and overseeing the programming of events at the Harvard Film Archive’s cinematheque. He was, so far as I am aware, the first to teach courses in film production and film history/theory at Harvard (in what, early on, he called the Department of Light and Communications), and over the years his teaching nurtured a number of filmmakers. Beginning in 1972 and continuing for ten years, he hosted Screening Room on channel 5 in Boston, for which he interviewed major contributors to independent filmmaking—animators, documentary filmmakers, and film artists identified with the avant-garde—and broadcast their films to the local television audience.
Gardner was director of the Carpenter Center from 1975 to 1994 and continued to teach in what had become the Visual and Environmental Studies Department until 1997, when he retired from his formal connection with the university. He has continued to contribute to film culture and the arts at Harvard, and in 2003 he established Studio7Arts, which offers monetary support and facilities to individual artists working to mine the potential of still and moving images to provide “visible evidence that testifies to our shared humanity.”1 The 2000s saw Gardner turn his attention to writing, in particular to the journals he compiled during the making of his films: The Impulse to Preserve: Reflections of a Filmmaker (New York: Other Press) appeared in 2006; Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film (Cambridge: Peabody Museum), in 2007; and Just Representations (Cambridge: Peabody Museum/Studio7Arts) in 2010.
Gardner’s diverse career has been punctuated with the production of independent documentary films, though his original interest in cinema