American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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and Elizabeth Coffey for their assistance.
The filmmakers themselves were remarkably generous in sharing their work with me. I am deeply grateful to Robert Gardner, Ed Pincus, Jane Pincus, Alfred Guzzetti, Miriam Weinstein, Robb Moss, Ann Schaetzel, Ross McElwee, Michel Negroponte, Steve Ascher and Jeanne Jordan, Valerie Lalonde, John Gianvito, Nina Davenport, Amie Siegel, Jeff Silva, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Ilisa Barbash, Stephanie Spray, J.P. Sniadecki, and Véréna Paravel for their kindness, generosity, and patience with me.
During early moments in the development of this project, the LEF Foundation, that stalwart supporter of New England filmmakers and filmmaking, involved me in public events that allowed me to test the thinking that has led to The Cambridge Turn. Lyda Kuth engaged me to assist LEF with their exhibition program, Facing Realities, arranging for me to interview Robert Gardner and Jane Gillooly at a public event at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. During the summer of 2010, LEF asked me to interview Fred Wiseman after a screening of Hospital at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge. These experiences helped me to develop the confidence to pursue this study.
My sense that the development of Pragmatism was relevant to the cinema history this volume explores was nurtured by Robert Huot, Ian MacDonald, Rutgers professor James Livingston, my Hamilton College colleague Katheryn Doran, and by the writing of Harvard professor Louis Menand.
In trying to understand how ethnographic film and personal documentary developed in Cambridge, I had the assistance of several organizations. Ilisa Barbash helped me make contact with the Peabody Museum, and with the help of Reference Archivist Patricia H. Kervick, I was able to explore the origins of the Marshall project and the founding of the Film Study Center at Harvard. In July 2010, I was able to spend several days researching the Marshalls and Timothy Asch at the Human Studies Archive at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where I was assisted by Karma Foley. Robert Gardner made the resources of his Studio7Arts studio available to me several times, and Rebecca Meyers assisted my work there.
The Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard asked me to teach the history of documentary filmmaking during the fall of 2007 and again during the winter of 2009 and fall of 2012, when I focused on Cambridge’s role in documentary history. This opportunity was very helpful, and I am grateful to David Rodowick, Dominique Bluher, J.P. Sniadecki, Stephanie Spray, Robb Moss, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Heidi Bliss, Haden Guest, Julie Knippa, Clayton Mattos, Rebecca Meyers, Jeff Silva, and Jason Steeves—and of course to the students, including Che Salazar, Lili Erlinger, Stephanie Lam, and several Nieman Fellows (Kael Alford, Thorne Anderson, Rosita Boland, Sapiyat Dakhshukaeva, Jake Hooker, Andrea Simakis, and Chris Vognar), who were part of what was a wonderful learning experience for me.
My opportunities to teach at Hamilton College and at Colgate University during the years when this project was researched and written provided me with opportunities to test out my ideas, to travel when necessary for my research, and of course, to maintain economic stability. I am particularly grateful to my Hamilton colleagues Patricia O’Neill, Nancy Rabinowitz, Peter Rabinowitz, Marilyn Huntley, Timothy Hicks, Bret Olsen, Heather Johnsen, Deborah Pokinski, and Terri Viglietta; and to John Knecht and Lynn Schwarzer at Colgate University. Thanks too, to the Office of the Dean of the Faculty at Hamilton—and to Dean Patrick Reynolds and Associate Dean Margaret Gentry—for their willingness to support American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn with a generous subvention.
For many years I taught at Utica College of Syracuse University (now Utica College) and had the good fortune to team-teach courses in ethnographic cinema with anthropologist John Johnsen. These were formative learning experiences for me, and I am grateful to Johnsen for his knowledge and his ongoing collegiality.
Many other individuals, including a good many scholars and teachers, have made important contributions to my thinking, have supported my various attempts to garner financial support for this project, and have offered other forms of assistance. Thanks in particular to Jay Ruby, David James, Linda Williams, Tom Gunning, John Terry, Jane Weiner, Perle Møhl, Clayton Mattos, Fred Camper, Haden Guest, Jim Lane, Kenneth Eisenstein, and Rebecca Meyers.
1
Lorna and John Marshall
At the outset, the Marshall family expeditions to the Kalahari Desert from 1950 to 1961 to find and learn something about the San peoples living there were conceived as a means to the end of a more intensive, engaged experience of family life—an upscale version of the family camping trips that would become ubiquitous across the country during the following decades. Laurence Marshall’s determination that his family’s experiences with the San be useful in producing valuable insights into an ancient way of life led (along with his willingness to finance the project) to the Peabody Museum’s sponsorship of the Marshalls’ early expeditions, which did in fact produce impressive results, including several significant contributions to the written anthropological discourse about the San and a wealth of photographic and cinematic documentation.
John Marshall’s particular excitement about the men and women he grew to know during these expeditions had a good deal to do with his wonder at how much his new friends had come to understand about their environment through their long experience with it, but this early fascination was merely the first stage of what became a lifelong process of learning not only about the people he befriended in the Kalahari but about how much his early excitement about being with them had blinded him to the realities of their lives. Indeed, during the following years, as he came to see how quickly San life was transforming and to feel that his family’s expeditions into the Kalahari had contributed to the destruction of the way of life that had so impressed him, Marshall transformed his approach to documenting the San over and over. His hope was that each new contact he had with the “Ju/’hoansi” (Marshall came to use Ju/’hoansi to refer to the group of !Kung San he grew to know, since this is how they referred to themselves),1 and each new film that resulted from it might bring him and his viewers toward a clearer sense of what the experience of the Ju/’hoansi actually was and what their struggles might mean for those who were coming to know something of them.
BEGINNINGS: LORNA MARSHALL AND FIRST FILM
When Laurence Kennedy Marshall retired from Raytheon, the electronics company he had founded in 1922, he and Lorna Marshall agreed that they needed to break away from their routines in Cambridge in order to focus on their children. Laurence and Lorna had visited South Africa in 1949, where they met Dr. E. Van Zyl, who was planning an expedition to find “The Lost City of the Kalahari.” Laurence decided to join the expedition and to take John with him. As John Marshall would explain later, “After years of war and absence from his family, Laurence wanted to take a trip to get to know his son. One of my hobbies was reading accounts of explorers like Livingstone, Stanley and Grant. I was enthralled by Jock of the Bushveld by Percy Fitzpatrick, and mesmerized by the films of Osa and Martin Johnson.”2 This first expedition, in 1950, led to a series of visits to Nyae Nyae. In 1951 Lorna Marshall and daughter Elizabeth joined Laurence and John; and the family continued to visit the region together for the next decade—a total of eight expeditions: 1950, 1951, 1952–53, 1955, 1956, 1957–58, 1959, 1961.3 And John Marshall would continue to visit Nyae Nyae into the 1980s.
The Marshalls were not tourists. From the beginning, Laurence and Lorna believed that these should be working visits, and they were immediately in touch with Lauriston Ward and J.O. Brew, anthropologists at Harvard. By the time of the 1951 expedition, the Marshalls had developed a system for serious study of what was one of the last hunter-gatherer groups in Africa:
We tried to find an ethnographer or a graduate student who wanted to go and study daily life of hunter-gatherers on the plains of Africa. We couldn’t find one. Isn’t that incredible? We went through Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, and a couple of other places that Dad called up and said, “Who wants to start this study?” Dad said he’d back them for a long time, for an in-depth, long-term study because he thought that would be unique, and nobody responded. . . . So the result was that Dad said, “Okay, Lorna, you’re going to do the ethnography; Elizabeth, you’re going to write a book; John, you’re going to do the movies.” And he handed me a camera and