American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary

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Scott MacDonald. American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary

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American Ethnographic Film and

Personal Documentary

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EDWIN N. WILMSEN33

I first became aware of John Marshall in 1972 at a summer film institute organized by Peter Feinstein in conjunction with what was called the University Film Study Center and presented at Hampshire College.34 Among the many opportunities available to those who enrolled in the institute was a course in ethnographic cinema taught by Marshall. My most vivid memories of this course include his beginning the week’s first screening with Peter Kubelka’s flicker film, Arnulf Rainer (1960) and his presentation of his own film, Bitter Melons (1971), which I taught regularly for a number of years. Bitter Melons, like First Film, is a general introduction to the San of the Kalahari, focusing on a band of Khwe San living at /Ei hxa o, in what is now Botswana. While Lorna Marshall organized First Film roughly in accordance with the way written anthropological studies, including her own The !Kung of Nyae Nyae, are arranged, John Marshall organized Bitter Melons around music, and in particular, around the blind musician Oukwane, whose compositions are a motif during much of the film ( Oukwane’s “Bitter Melons,” his favorite composition according to Marshall, is the source of the title).35

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