American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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in common with Nanook and Moana, and over the years, it has been critiqued in much the same way. While all three films communicate a level of reality that Flaherty and Marshall understood as basic to the Inuit , the Samoans, and the Ju/’hoansi at the time when they shot these films, the Flaherty films and The Hunters are not simply candid records of events as they unfolded. As most everyone who is introduced to these films now knows, the events we see were constructed in the editing—even though the editing in all three films allows many viewers to believe they are seeing events unfold precisely as they unfolded in reality at the time of the shooting. This, it seems to me, has always said more about the hunger of film audiences to believe in the candidness of what they see than it does about any attempt on the part of the filmmakers to fool anyone; indeed, the current generation of college students seems convinced that candid recording is documentary and that any fabrication subtracts from reality—despite the obvious fact that simply turning on a camera and recording what is going on and presenting the results is revealing of almost nothing at all.
The feeling of betrayal on the part of some critics of The Hunters seems particularly naïve, since from the beginning of the film Marshall is at pains to make clear that he is not simply providing information about a far-flung cultural group but is artistically constructing a tale. Of course, in 1957, when The Hunters was completed and first shown, it was such a departure from the lecture-documentaries that had dominated nonfiction filmmaking for a quarter century that, by comparison, it must have seemed astonishingly candid.
The Hunters opens with a brief montage of nineteen shots of the Kalahari environment and its flora and fauna. The first three shots (10, 8, and 7 seconds, respectively) draw immediate attention to the filmmaker as visual artist, in that the tiny sequence is sutured together on the basis of subtle movements: in the first two shots, of a bush moving in the breeze, and in the third, by the slightly unsteady movement of the handheld camera as it records a long shot of a vulture (?) in a distant tree. After a brief shot of a lizard, at first still, then moving, we see, through some brush, a tree underneath which we gradually realize are at least two antelope. These first five shots are silent, but the longer sixth shot introduces a wide-angle shot of two men walking through a field, hunting (this image is carefully composed so that one man walks at the right edge of the frame; the other man at the left edge; the shot is accompanied by phrases of what we assume is a bit of music indigenous to this environment). Once the men are visible, our sense of the earlier shots takes on another level: we realize that our carefully noting the tiny movements in this environment has been an evocation of what these hunters must do as they search for game. This conflation of our sensitivity to Marshall’s composition and editing and the hunters’ sensitivity to their environment is maintained through the remaining thirteen shots, and concludes with a 14-second close-up of one hunter, which fades out just as the title of the film is presented.
After the title, Marshall places The Hunters within the tradition established by Nanook and Grass: a map guides us to the Nyae Nyae region of the Kalahari Desert, after which Marshall’s voice-over introduces the place and the people who live there: “The northern Kalahari is a hard, dry land. In this bitter land live a quiet people who call themselves !Kung or Ju/’hoansi.” In his introduction, and during the brief survey of !Kung life that follows, Marshall’s comments are not so different from those of the voices-of-god narrators so familiar from informational and polemical documentaries of the 1940s and early 1950s, but once he has provided some context for what will become his focus on the hunters—the distinction between women’s gathering work and men’s hunting, the process through which boys become hunters, the poison that allows the !Kung arrows to kill large animals—the nature of Marshall’s narration turns increasingly literary and evocative not merely of earlier films and Nanook but of epic literature. His introductions of the four hunters who will form the nucleus of the hunt constructed for the film are heroic in content, and poetic in diction and rhythm; for example:
≠Toma, the leader,
≠Toma, the vigorous and able,
He was a man of many words and a lively mind,
One who had traveled to the edges of his world.
and
Tao, the beautiful,
Tao was a natural hunter,
Taking great pleasure in the chase.
His arrows were keen and each point was shaped in his own fashion. . . .
On the day he consummated his marriage, Tao shot five wildebeest out of a herd of thirty and found and killed four of them and brought home the meat.
From this he got his name . . . Tao Wildebeest.
The introductions of the four hunters are followed by the hunt itself. Bill Nichols has suggested that Marshall was using San culture as a pretext for a universal story with an implicit message: “Men will venture into a dangerous world to bring back food for people who might otherwise starve. They will show us knowledge, skill patience, humor. Their success in the face of adversity commands respect; their qualities are qualities of enduring value. We must celebrate them.”12 At the time, Marshall might have said that the film was less a pretext than a demonstration of a traditional way of life, the source of myth, that he felt he had found, still alive, in the present-day real world.
Once the hunters have wounded the giraffe, Marshall constructs the adventure of tracking the animal by intercutting between the hunters following her trail and the giraffe, as she tries and increasingly fails to keep up with the other giraffes and ultimately succumbs to the hunters. The very invisibility of Marshall’s camera within the diegesis of this story is the best evidence of the fact that this is a story, and Marshall’s intercutting between hunters and giraffe (if the hunters haven’t been able to find the giraffe, how has Marshall located her!) confirms the fabrication. Of course, the unusual nature of this story and its reliance on real !Kung in a real environment, clearly killing a real giraffe, provides sufficient interest so that a consciousness of Marshall’s construction of what we see tends to disappear for most viewers, just as it does in commercial fiction films successful enough to engage viewers.
After the giraffe has been killed, slaughtered, and “the meat spread across the werft as a ripple across water,” the group gathers to hear the story of the hunt, and Marshall provides a concluding reminder of the conflation of his storytelling with theirs: “and old men remembered, and young men listened, and so the story of the hunt was told.” These final words are closely matched to imagery of an old man sleeping and a young man listening, and at the very end, of the group getting up to go to bed and a final fade-out. The story of the hunt, told around the fire in Nyae Nyae, concludes simultaneously with the end of Marshall’s film and (one can imagine) his audience getting up to leave the theater.
While the artistry of The Hunters is apparent in Marshall’s composition and editing and in the poetry of his narration, and is compromised only by the somewhat strident tone of his narrating voice, the film’s very artistic success quickly became a problem for Marshall himself: “Dad didn’t like . . . The Hunters. He thought it was an art film.”13 In subsequent years Marshall would turn away from the kinds of artistry evident in The Hunters and would account for that film as a product of youthful indulgence. While he would claim that he didn’t regret making The Hunters, he came to feel that “Laurence was right,” and that “The Hunters was a romantic film by an American kid and revealed more about me than about Ju/’hoansi.”14 Specifically, what it revealed was that “I was a kid, and I got captivated by hunting, so I went hunting. . . . I was eighteen, nineteen—the best years of my life, the happiest I’ve ever been, without any question. It was a pretty wonderful experience for a kid of that age in a place like that with people like Tshumkwe, damned decent, good-to-be-with people.”15 What it failed to reveal was the true nature of Ju/’hoansi life: The Hunters gave “the impression of people spending enormous amounts of energy and time hunting”; “And the real economy is the other way around. Not only the economy is based on gathering, but all concepts of land ownership, all the rules of land ownership, all the basis of the social organization of the people, groups, bands, all flow from gathering, and from stable, fixed, reliable sources of food and water.”16
We might remind