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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 said “Shoot the films.”⁴

The first three expeditions were sponsored by the Peabody Museum of Harvard University; the expeditions from 1955 through 1961 (the “Peabody Museum Kalahari Expeditions”) by the Peabody, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Transvaal Museum of Pretoria. These expeditions produced Lorna Marshall’s The !Kung of Nyae Nyae (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), a substantial, early ethnographic study of the San of the Kalahari; Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s The Harmless People (New York: Vintage, 1958), a beautifully written reminiscence of her and her family’s experiences with the San during the 1951, 1952–53, and 1955 expeditions; and a considerable series of films, beginning with !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari, which John Marshall says was edited by “my mother, my father, and filmmaker Jerry Ballantine”; and First Film, which Lorna edited from the same footage in 1951 (fig. 1).⁵

FIGURE 1. Lorna Marshall with Ju/’hoansi mother and children in the 1950s. Courtesy Documentary Educational Resources.

While The Hunters is usually considered the first important Marshall film about the !Kung and the instigation of the long series of !Kung films that followed, this is unfair to the accomplishments of First Film. While the Marshalls’ visit to Gautscha in Nyae Nyae in 1951 was only six weeks (Lorna Marshall has indicated that the 1952–53 expedition was “the most productive period of our study”),⁶ it was long enough to produce footage that not only served as warm-up and précis for the long saga of films that would follow, but was at some point edited into a film that has remained remarkably underappreciated. Shot in a very functional manner—Laurence had told John, “Don’t try to be artistic. Just film what you see people doing naturally. I want a record, not a movie”⁷—what became First Film was edited so as to provide an information-filled overview of !Kung life at Nyae Nyae.

After a bit of indigenous music and a map locating Gautscha, a group of !Kung arrive and set up their temporary village. During the hour-long film, we see men making karosses (the cloaks made from animal skin that women wear), men and women getting and sharing water, women gathering foods (“women’s principal work”), a child dancing (the earliest imagery of N!ai, who would become a central character in John Marshall’s films about the Ju/’hoansi), boys setting snares for guinea fowl, men hunting for spring hare, the making of bows and poison arrows, men hunting gemsbok and wildebeest and the distribution of meat, eating and cooking, women making beads and a man playing music on his bow, boys playing, the group dancing and singing, a man falling into trance and coming out of it, children dancing, the group smoking, talking, and laughing; then, packing up and leaving to walk to the next temporary village. A bit of indigenous music ends the film. John Marshall’s later films would focus in on many of the particulars of Lorna Marshall’s overview, often using virtually the same language in his voice-overs as she uses in hers.

It is the nature of Lorna Marshall’s voice-overs in First Film that makes this film distinctive and memorable—probably more distinctive and memorable than it seemed in 1951, precisely because of the way in which voice-over in documentary has been debated during the past sixty years. It is not clear precisely when this voice-over was married to the imagery (Cynthia Close, director of Documentary Educational Resources [DER], suspects that it was in the 1970s, but John Bishop, who worked with the Marshall materials at the Peabody Museum, has suggested that, whenever the soundtrack was recorded, the comments that became the voice-over had had a history in advance of their inclusion on the soundtrack of First Film: “I imagine John cut it [the first version of First Film] for her soon after their return so she could use it to illustrate a lecture, or possibly to be used for multiple performances of the lecture, a popular use of documentary footage in the 1950s.”⁸ As Bishop suggested to me, the tone of the narration “is as if she was projecting to a large audience.”

What seems noteworthy now about Lorna Marshall’s voice-over on First Film is the degree to which she seems to have avoided many of the problems of conventional documentary voice-overs, including those in early ethnographic films. She is certainly not a “voice of god” or even a “voice of goddess.” While the imagery John Marshall recorded and put together for his mother (presumably under her direction) must have seemed exotic to the original audiences, and still may seem exotic to audiences unfamiliar with ethnographic filmmaking, the voice-over commentary in First Film reveals not merely Lorna Marshall’s familiarity with the people gathered at Gautscha, but her unpretentious empathy with them, as a parent. There are statements that seem to mean to protect the San from stereotyping by the audience—“We observed no theft nor aggression; we observed impressive honesty, cooperation, and integration among this far away and independent group”—and comments that remind us of the physical difference between the San and the viewer: as one woman cuts meat with a knife close to her face, Marshall comments, “A good way to eat if one belongs to a short-nosed race.”

The overall tone of the voice-over is quite informal, something like the comments of a good teacher telling a class about some people she knows (Marshall, who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a B.A. degree in English, had taught English at Mt. Holyoke College before meeting Laurence Marshall). When Old Gaú is smoking, she comments, “Like every good bushman, he passes the pipe around,” and a moment later, as we see Old Gaú with his grandson, “Little ≠Gao. . . loves his grandfather and, I think, wants to be just like him. The grandfather adores this child.” As we see young N!ai dancing, Marshall notes, “She is a blithe child,” and as we see a widow, Marshall comments that she “sometimes looked lonely. Not always, but sometimes.”

In one instance Marshall engages gender relations in a manner that suggests a kind of insight that goes beyond, or beneath, detached scholarly observation: within a composition where the “head man” is in the left foreground and his wife and several other women are sitting in a circle in the right background, Marshall indicates that the head man “rarely gives orders, but . . . ,” then says, “Watch his wife!” The wife makes a gesture with her hand as if to say, “Leave us alone, mind your own business,” after which Marshall says, “But they do what he says.” Marshall adds that the head man “watches over his people,” and that his wife is a “lively woman”: “One felt she would not be easily imposed upon.” Throughout Lorna Marshall’s voice-over in First Film, and despite what seem to be moments of humor meant to amuse the audience, one can feel Marshall’s immense, unpatronizing respect and affection for the people she is introducing to us; these people, she suggests, are not simply types, generic representatives of a way of life, but individuals that she is coming to know and working to know better.

JOHN MARSHALL: THE HUNTERS

John has 6000 feet of film—He created a documentary—to be called The Water Hole. I yearn to see it. He will edit it. He has 2 more sequences to make. How he has opened to this and taken hold! At last his creative powers are geared to achievement. Laurence and I are deeply happy. Laurence and John are planning to order more film, so John can feel an abandon of creation, not worry about using or wasting some footage.

LORNA MARSHALL’S DIARY⁹

The filmmaker’s response is in many ways the reverse of that of other viewers. For the filmmaker, the film is an extract from all the footage shot for it, and a reminder of all the events that produced it. It reduces the experience onto a very small canvas. For the spectator, by contrast, the film is not small but large: it opens onto a wider landscape. If the images evoke for the filmmaker a world that is largely missing, in the spectator they induce endless extrapolations from what is actually seen. . . . But for the filmmaker the same images only reaffirm that the subject existed. Instead of imagining, there is remembering; instead of discovery, there is recognition; instead of curiosity, there is foreknowledge and loss.

DAVID MACDOUGALL¹⁰

The Hunters (1957), shot and edited by John Marshall (with some postproduction assistance by Robert Gardner),¹¹ remains, by far, the best-known film in the Marshall family’s saga of Ju/’hoansi life, and among the best-known of all ethnographic films. Indeed, in the United States The Hunters seems to have revived a tradition of representing far-flung cultures that was begun by Edward Curtis in In the Land of the Head-Hunters (also known as In the Land of the War Canoes) (1914) and Robert Flaherty in Nanook of the North (1921) and Moana (1926). In some senses, of course, The Hunters has much 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 Marshall that obviously no single film can tell the whole story about any people or any dimension of their lives, and that The Hunters was about an important facet of Ju/’hoansi life. In the National Geographic special Bushmen of the Kalahari (1974; shot and directed by Robert M. Young), Marshall himself did say, referring to the more efficient means of hunting employed by a !Kung horseman with a rifle, depicted in that television show, “Killing so efficiently seemed to rob hunting of its symbolic quality, making it a simple act of subsistence, instead of a larger act of kinship, biding the people together.” Nevertheless, Marshall would remain embarrassed about his indulgence in art, and this embarrassment would increasingly characterize his assumptions about what he should be filming and how he should be filming it—especially once he began to realize, indeed to personally experience, what the history of the Ju/’hoansi would become during the thirty years following the first Marshall expeditions. However, while he turned increasingly away from the particularly obvious art-film dimensions of The Hunters in the following decades, he did for a moment find a way of making film art that did not seem to embarrass him, indeed that did not immediately declare itself as art at all—though the unusual artistry of some of the resulting films has become increasingly obvious and admirable as the decades have passed.

IDYLLS OF THE !KUNG

In his essay, “Filming and Learning,” Marshall offers two observations that were fundamental in his approach to filming the Ju/’hoansi. First, “What the people I am filming actually do and say is more interesting and important than what I think about them”; and second, “When I filmed people from a distance, they were easy to understand. If their actions were not obvious, I could explain what they were doing with a few words of narration. The closer I got to people with my camera, the more interesting they seemed, and the more surprised I was by what they did and said.”¹⁷ The two earliest films Marshall finished after The Hunters—A Group of Women (1961) and A Joking Relationship (1962)—represent an aesthetic breakthrough and, perhaps, to some degree a missed opportunity. These two films embody Marshall’s observations far more effectively than The Hunters.

In a sense, nothing happens in A Group of Women. It is a 5-minute montage made up of twenty-three shots focusing on several women and a baby lying together under a baobab tree (Marshall’s camera is generally so close that it is difficult to be entirely sure how many women are present, but his focus is on three). During the film, the women talk about what appears to be an imminent move for one of the women and her band to Gautscha in order to gather berries; she isn’t interested in moving, and one of the other women suggests she “just refuse it,” and later tells her, “You shouldn’t go south.” They also discuss nursing children, and the mother of the baby—she refers to her daughter in one instance as “little seed pod”—wants the child to nurse, though the child doesn’t seem interested. At one point, a woman walking by addresses the women lying under the baobab, trying to get one or all of them to go with her to get water, but they refuse, and at the end of the film they seem to have drifted off to sleep.

While there are close-ups in The Hunters, they function as close-ups normally do within a developing action-adventure narrative, but A Group of Women is almost entirely constructed of close-ups, and sometimes extreme close-ups (fig. 2). The only exceptions are the film’s first and last shots, both of them revealing the larger scene under the baobab tree, and the two medium shots of the woman who asks the friends to accompany her to the water hole (these two shots are presented from a ground-up angle, suggesting that the woman is an intruder, perhaps even a jealous intruder: she interrupts the conversation, saying, “Lazy creatures! If I lie down will you tickle me?”). At the beginning of the film, each shot moves us closer to the women, until, in the seventh shot, an extreme close-up reveals the mother’s nipple, centered in the frame. The pacing of Marshall’s editing reflects the utter tranquility of this moment among friends; the shots range from 4 seconds to 54, and are organized so as to maintain the quiet mood of this “non-action” scene: the editing builds to no climax, and in general, extended shots interrupt whatever velocity begins to develop in shorter shots.¹⁸

In A Group of Women conversation is the action. Marshall offers no voice-over explanation of what he is showing us, though he does, for the first time, provide subtitles that propose to translate what the women are saying (according to David MacDougall, this was a first, a transformative first, not only for Marshall, but for ethnographic film in general).¹⁹ As is true in the other films about the Ju/’hoansi Marshall made during the 1960s, the sound in A Group of Women is not synchronized, but, to quote the text that precedes most of these films, “was recorded at the time of filming and reconstructed during editing. Translations are from both tapes and notes.”²⁰ Our ability to hear the voices of the women, who talk very quietly, adds an audio component to the intimacy established by the in-close cinematography, and our reading the subtitles—while it does interrupt our view on the women—engages us within this quiet moment in a way that Marshall’s voice-over in The Hunters does not.

FIGURE 2. From John Marshall's A Group of Women (1961). Courtesy Documentary Educational Resources.

Marshall’s films have nearly always been subsumed within the category of ethnographic film, the assumption being that their primary, if not only, function is to provide a useful adjunct to anthropological investigations of an indigenous group, and particularly, an indigenous group whose way of life is under threat from modernity—as represented, of course, by the camera itself. But A Group of Women only seems an ethnographic film if one thinks of it within the meta-sequence of Marshall’s Ju/’hoansi project. Understood outside of this project, the film represents, on one hand, a young man’s fascination with several young women, with their physicality, their friendship, and the realities of young motherhood. On the other hand, the film demonstrates how intimate Marshall had become with this band of Ju/’hoansi—he seems to hover quite close to the women in order to make the shots he uses (it may also be that the very difference represented by Marshall’s filming makes him, for all practical purposes, invisible to these women). A Group of Women seems to go beneath any scholarly ethnographic pretensions to a level of friendship and interchange that defies cultural distinction, even as Marshall refuses to present the women as anything but Ju/’hoansi. The differences between young women in American culture and these Ju/’hoansi women will be obvious to anyone seeing their clothing, the decorative marks on their skin, their comfort with the desert dirt and the ubiquitous flies (the first sound heard in the film is a fly buzzing). And yet, the way in which these young women relate to one another feels instantly familiar and understandable.

A useful cinematic reference here is not another ethnographic film, but Stan Brakhage’s Blood’s Tone, the second part of the trilogy 3 Films: Bluewhite, Blood’s Tone, Vein, completed in 1965. In Blood’s Tone Brakhage hovers close to his nursing child and uses his zoom lens to suggest that he is, through cinema, participating in the child’s suckling: his short zooms in and out echo the baby’s taking the nipple into her mouth and sucking on Jane Brakhage’s breast (we never see more of Jane than this breast). Blood’s Tone seems to have been filmed at night (the baby is distracted by the camera, sometimes seeming to wonder what this strange being so nearby is doing with all this light and, presumably, noise—Blood’s Tone is silent), and Brakhage’s lighting causes the little scene to be golden, an allusion not only to this golden moment of childhood and parenthood, but perhaps to the ubiquitous Renaissance and pre-Renaissance paintings of Mary and the baby Jesus that were often decorated with gold leaf.²¹

Like Blood’s Tone, A Group of Women takes us inside an intimate moment, a moment that for Marshall, as for Brakhage—both of them American men who grew up during an era when nudity was forbidden from the commercial cinema and when birth and nursing were kept relatively secret—must have seemed both fascinating and exciting. As in Blood’s Tone, but rather less obviously, the camera movement in A Group of Women, as well as the pacing of Marshall’s editing, is of a piece with what is filmed: as the women lie still, Marshall’s handheld shots are still; when the women reposition themselves and move the baby, Marshall’s camera makes subtle adjustments that reflect the motion of the women. Throughout the film, the serenity of the editing echoes this quiet conversation, this moment of interchange and affection before the imminent trek to Gautscha. And at the end, as the women drift off to sleep and out of their intimate moment, the camera moves away from the scene. The home-movie dimension of Blood’s Tone, the desire by the filmmaker father to hold on to this amazing, but inevitably fleeting moment, is similar to Marshall’s desire to record and reconstruct the loveliness of this quiet sensual moment of friendship and of the miracle of his own apparent acceptance into this space by these women.

A similar level of intimacy, in this case between a mature man and a girl, as well as between Marshall and his subjects, is evident in A Joking Relationship, though in many ways this short film (13 minutes) is quite different in tone from A Group of Women. A Joking Relationship focuses on N!ai and her great uncle, /Ti!kay, as they banter and wrestle under a baobab tree. Again, and more obviously here, the dialogue—and this film too is largely dialogue—is not synchronized, though presumably it was recorded during the same extended moment as the imagery, and Marshall provides us with subtitled translations (fig. 3). As commentators on A Joking Relationship have often noted, what gives this film its energy is Marshall’s depiction of the complex emotions at work in the scene. N!ai is a beautiful, confident girl: when near the opening of the film /Ti!kay teases her for refusing to gather food for him, saying, “You’re a lazy wife” (N!ai had become, against her own wishes, the wife of young /Gunda), N!ai responds, “I’m not a wife and it’s too hot to gather.” Though she is betrothed to /Gunda, N!ai has refused to live with him or to consummate the marriage (N!ai’s marriage to /Gunda is a central issue in Marshall’s 1980 film, N!ai: The Story of a !Kung Woman, as is N!ai’s history of defiance of social convention).

FIGURE 3. N!ai in John Marshall's A Joking Relationship (1962). Courtesy Documentary Educational Resources.

What Marshall captures in A Joking Relationship is both the open affection of an uncle and a niece, a relationship rarely accorded attention in cinema of any kind, and the underlying sexual dimension of this, and perhaps any, relationship between mature men and their young relatives. Here, this sexual pull, which seems to go both ways, is continually evident, even as the two parties are redirecting an urge that could cause them problems within the small community in which they live into good-humored banter and nonsexual (but sensual) physical interchange.²² In general, their interaction is presented in a series of pulses; N!ai and /Ti!kay wrestle around, then separate, then wrestle around some more, then separate . . . all the while bantering with each other: /Ti!kay calls N!ai a snake and an insect, tells her to “come here to be cooked and eaten!” and at one point conjoins his literal hunger and his sexual hunger: he takes out his knife, opens it, and says he’ll “nip a bud to eat”—meaning N!ai’s nipple (her breasts have just begun to show). A moment later, after his mock attack and her mock resistance, Marshall provides a close-up of /Ti!kay’s hands folding up the knife in front of his wrinkly belly—in clear contradistinction to N!ai’s young breasts. N!ai says, “Let’s stay together,” then “No, let’s stay together really,” but she soon stops playing, puts her beads back on, and despite /Ti!kay’s urging her to stay, says, “You’re a silly old man,” and walks off.

Marshall’s composition and use of sound function as a kind of cinematic participation in this extended moment of uncle–niece interchange. When /Ti!kay and N!ai are wrestling, Marshall is in close, often focusing on a calf, a breast, an arm with bracelets, half a face; when N!ai and /Ti!kay momentarily separate, the camera moves back as well and we see N!ai and /Ti!kay in long shot and alone. Further, as the sexual tension becomes increasingly evident to the viewer (we might imagine that it was increasingly felt by young John Marshall as he was shooting), a repeated bird sound seems to speak the hidden sexual-romantic urge underlying the banter and wrestling. Whereas in A Group of Women, there are usually sounds of distant conversations in the background, A Joking Relationship seems an isolated moment, interrupted only by the presence of Marshall, which is always implicit, and for at least one moment, quite explicit. Marshall’s close-ups of N!ai’s and /Ti!kay’s faces, often seem to capture not just good-humored fun but subtle embarrassment, possibly a function of the girl’s and man’s unspoken recognition of their attraction being witnessed, and in the case of /Ti!kay, some bemusement at Marshall’s fascination with what might seem to /Ti!kay this nonevent. Near the middle of the film, /Ti!kay tells N!ai to come down from the crotch of the baobab where she is standing: “He [meaning Marshall] wants to take your picture while I tumble you.” And N!ai responds, “He wants to take me gathering in the truck.” And N!ai slides down the tree to /Ti!kay to wrestle around some more, for both the fun of it and for John Marshall and his camera.

A different sort of idyll, though related to A Group of Women and A Joking Relationship in both form and implication, is Baobab Play (1974), finished twelve years after these films. Here again, a baobab tree is the location of the action, or really a kind of nonaction, and here too, Marshall forgoes voice-over, and even subtitles, since what is happening is quite clear without verbal intervention. All we see during the 8 minutes of Baobab Play is several boys playing around and in the baobab: the boys in the tree throw sticks, leaves, berries down at the group on the ground, and the boys on the ground respond in kind. It is the sort of good-humored “war” that seems endemic to male childhood in widely different cultures and geographies—which may have been Marshall’s fascination with this scene.

The end credits of Baobab Play indicate that Marshall produced and directed the film (it was edited by Frank Galvin, who edited many of Marshall’s films of the 1960s and 1970s; Timothy Asch was a production assistant), and it is clear throughout the film that Marshall must have directed the boys to play, presumably in their normal manner, while ignoring, insofar as possible, his presence with them under the tree and up in its branches. The film intercuts between the two “warring” groups from within each group. The cinematography and sound in Baobab Play provide an idyllic context for this depiction of childhood: the light in the tree is lovely, as is the sound of the breeze blowing through the tree, which continually transforms the lightscape of the film.

Marshall’s meditation on male childhood in Baobab Play is deeply poignant, coming as it does near the end of the editing of the material shot during the Peabody Museum Kalahari Expeditions. By the time he edited Baobab Play, Marshall had moved through several phases of filmmaking, and his understanding of his project was radically changing. But here, for a moment, he seems to meditate not simply on the innocence of these boys, and not merely on childhood in general as represented by this group, but on what he came to think of, what perhaps he already felt were “the best years of my life, the happiest I’ve ever been, without any question”—that is, not on his own childhood, but on his filmmaking childhood, which had produced so much footage and the increasing dexterity with the camera so evident in Baobab Play. As in A Group of Women, A Joking Relationship, and in other 1960s and 1970s films, in Baobab Play Marshall is able simultaneously to record lovely moments in the lives of some Ju/’hoansi and to document his immersion within this culture and implicitly his pleasure in being accepted by these people he so admires, in being allowed to be part of their lives. In these films the baobab tree becomes a symbol of the fragile cultural Eden the Marshalls felt their expeditions had revealed to them and the Eden of John Marshall’s engagement with the !Kung as (cinematic) hunter and gatherer.²³

Of course, it is precisely the Marshalls’ apparent assumption that what they had seen in the Kalahari was a way of life unchanged since the Pleistocene Era, a vestige of an original culture unaffected by more modern developments, within which peacefulness and cooperation were the rule—in other words, a kind of Eden—that came to be understood within the anthropological community as a fundamental problem with the films that came out of the Marshall family expeditions. The assumption that the !Kung had lived in the Kalahari, precisely the way that the Marshalls had “found” them—even the subsequent contention by both John Marshall and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas that the family’s presence had led to the problematic transformation of this ancient way of life—soon came to be seen as a naïve sense of the history of southern Africa. Subsequent research revealed that many changes had probably occurred to the San peoples as migrations of other ethnic populations into southwest Africa from other areas caused the San to move into the Kalahari. What the Marshalls “found” may have seemed Edenic to them, but it wasn’t an original Eden for the !Kung. Indeed, in their research into the 700,000 feet of footage accumulated during the years when John Marshall was filming the San, Keyan G. Tomaselli and John P. Homiak discovered that Marshall himself was well aware of a variety of inroads into San culture, but simply eliminated them from his early depictions of the particular group of !Kung he got to know.²⁴

That during his early decades as a filmmaker, John Marshall would become attached to the idea that he had discovered an Eden, what at least for him was an Eden, is hardly surprising. It is one of the central conceits of my book, The Garden in the Machine, that within the rapidly transforming America of the late twentieth century, American cinema (filmmaking and filmgoing) became an arena not, of course, for experiencing an actual Eden, but for producing cinematic experiences that provided Edenic moments.²⁵ In a world recovering from a century of warfare, and from the psychic shock of learning the true extent of the Holocaust (an event that seemed to render all ideas of innocence in modern society absurd), any number of filmmakers came to understand that their mission was to recover some sense of innocence, some sense of the world before the Fall. Without even the idea of innocence, how could more humane societies be developed? Marshall’s idylls of the !Kung have come to seem untenable ethnographically, but they are understandable both psychologically and aesthetically—and they remain moving and in their own ways revealing.

PEDAGOGY

Making and poisoning arrows is an ingenious application of collected knowledge. There is nothing obvious about the use of the particular grubs in the particular way. The combination of accident and invention that produced the technique would be impossible to reconstruct. Furthermore, the ammount [sic] those people know about their world is phenomenal. They have names for almost every kind of mouse that lives in Nyae Nyae (there are a great many species). They recognize more sub-species of plants than botanists commonly do. Men’s knowledge of the behavior of animals is extraordinary; not all men, of course, but the masters of their profession are masters indeed. Somehow all this knowledge gets, or did get, passed from one generation to another. It is not, however, passed on only as an integrated body of specific knowledge wrapped up in a forgone conclusion. Each man’s experience with his profession is different and no two mixtures of poison that I ever saw had the same ingredients. Also, no two men spoor quite alike. They seem to operate on a few principles which they modify constantly.

JOHN MARSHALL, “THE ARROW MAKERS”²⁶

John Marshall’s filmmaking career developed in three distinct phases and reflects three different kinds of experience. During the 1950s, he learned to shoot film and found his way into !Kung practices and rituals with his camera. Beginning in 1957 with The Hunters, he began to edit the material he had collected (first with Robert Gardner at the Peabody Museum, later with Timothy Asch), fashioning individual films, and during the following seventeen years, produced sixteen short films about the Ju/’hoansi. In these short films (Marshall called them “sequence films” and the term has come to mean usually short ethnographic films about particular dimensions of a culture) we can see him trying one, then another editing strategy for presenting !Kung culture to the audience. And finally, developments within !Kung culture that had already begun during the 1950s, though they were not particularly evident to the Marshalls when they arrived in the Kalahari, accelerated during the 1960s and 1970s, forcing Marshall to reconsider his earlier work and, as a media maker, to move in new directions. N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman (1980) represented a radically different approach that Marshall continued to develop through his capstone work, A Kalahari Family (2001). The evolution of Marshall’s career also offers viewers three different kinds of experience, related to Marshall’s own development, but also distinct from it—more on this later.

This second phase of Marshall’s career has its own contours, determined by Marshall’s quest to find what was most valuable for an audience in the footage he had shot during the 1950s. For a time, he seems to have assumed, as Flaherty apparently did, that, given the widespread stereotyping of indigenous peoples, film experiences that provided an informed but friendly window into indigenous worlds might work to confront stereotypes and to help audiences see these peoples (and themselves) more fully as part of a larger humanity. Certainly Nanook represented a radically different sense of Native Americans than most films offered during the first decades of film history; and from the beginning, the Marshalls’ films revealed the “bushmen” not simply as interesting, but exemplary. As John Marshall says in his voice-over at the beginning of Playing with Scorpions, “!Kung people by and large are not excited by the thought of dangerous encounters with each other or their environment. They do not respect the warrior or admire the struggle against nature. Such follies, they believe, are provoked by the senseless and characterize the red people (Europeans) and the animals without hooves (the Bantu).” What Marshall felt he had witnessed during the 1950s in Nyae Nyae must have seemed all the more remarkable in the late 1960s and early 1970s during the throes of the war in Vietnam. Indeed, there has been some conjecture that the Marshall family’s involvement with the !Kung was originally instigated by Laurence Marshall’s feeling of complicity with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: at Raytheon he had overseen the production of the trigger mechanism used in the original atom bombs. According to John Marshall, the elder Marshall “went into a kind of shock when atomic bombs were used against Japan.”²⁷

I see A Group of Women, A Joking Relationship, and Baobab Play as personal films, not in the sense of the “personal documentary” explored later in this volume, but in the sense that Stan Brakhage made personal films about his family and as a means of expressing his personal concerns and ecstasies. But within the canon of Marshall’s films about the Ju/’hoansi, these three films are anomalies, precisely in their refusal to be openly instructive. Laurence Marshall’s assumption that “truth could be discovered by objective means in any field” and that “most art was mushy” had a lasting impact on John, even once he had learned new ways of seeing from his friend ≠Toma and other Ju/’hoansi.²⁸ Laurence’s influence, when combined with the fact that John’s shooting had been done under the auspices of the Peabody Museum and the Smithsonian, resulted in a decision to work with the footage he had recorded so that it might be useful in academic contexts, and in the 1960s and early 1970s, this meant within the traditional conventions of documentary cinema: that is, Marshall came to feel that his sequence films needed to provide, insofar as feasible, teachable information about the !Kung and about hunter-gatherers—though the resulting films do offer moments that evoke the earlier, more personal films.

After A Group of Women and A Joking Relationship, which forgo narration entirely, Marshall returned to voice-over, sometimes using it in a manner not very different from the pervasive commentary in The Hunters—this is the case in Bitter Melons (1971), A Rite of Passage (1972), and Debe’s Tantrum (1972)—but more often, employing a general formula that seems to have been a compromise between the desire to let his interaction with the Ju/’hoansi generate his films and the need to make the material he had collected usable within an academic context. Beginning in 1969–70 with N/um Tchai: The Ceremonial Dance of the !Kung Bushmen (1969), An Argument about a Marriage (1969) and N!owa T’ama: The Melon Tossing Game (1970), and continuing through The Wasp Nest (1972), Playing with Scorpions (1972), Men Bathing (1973), and The Meat Fight (1974), Marshall opens each film with a précis, a voice-over introduction providing information about a certain event or ritual, supplemented with still images of the people and actions Marshall describes. After this précis, the body of the film is presented without voice-over. This strategy allows Marshall to offer information about the Ju/’hoansi but also demonstrates an implicit commitment to careful looking and listening on the part of the audience. Marshall’s resistance to transforming the complex San culture into information is sometimes evident in the way he speaks of this two-part structure within the films. In N/um Tchai: The Ceremonial Dance of the !Kung Bushmen, for example, the informational précis is not preceded by a formal title, and Marshall makes clear that the longer body of the film that follows is “the film proper”; only once the précis is complete do we see the film’s formal title.²⁹

N/um Tchai: The Ceremonial Dance of the !Kung Bushmen and N!owa T’ama: The Melon Tossing Game, as their similarly arranged titles imply, can be understood as a diptych, not only in the sense that both focus on San rituals, but because Marshall’s way of depicting these activities reveals a variety of parallels and interrelationships. Both films focus on dancing and singing, in N/um Tchai as part of a curing ceremony that includes men moving into trance (the Ju/’hoansi call it “half- death”), and in N!owa T’ama as part of symbolic game that women play, which can also cause a participant or an observer to enter trance. In both films women sing and clap, creating energy for the ceremonies. Both films provide an extended review of events that take place over a period of time, and that include some of the same characters, most notably N!ai and /Gunda, whose betrothal is a subject in N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman (and is referred to in A Joking Relationship).

Indeed, in retrospect, we can see that the two films play out a bit of marital melodrama, though this was not clear for audiences until 1980, when N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman was finished. During the section of N/um Tchai focusing on /Gunda’s movement into trance (both in the précis and in the film proper), we see close-ups of N!ai, who seems either bored or unhappy. Since N!ai is a recognizable figure, her facial expressions seem noteworthy, if obscure in this case. In N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman we learn that N!ai was frightened of /Gunda’s going into trance (“Your face looked so crazy,” she says to /Gunda, then to Marshall, “I was so scared of this man”). Her fear comes into play during the latter part of N!owa T’ama: when an older woman is inspired to go into trance by /Gunda’s dancing, N!ai harasses the woman—as if to demonstrate her fear and resistance to trance in general and to /Gunda’s involvement in it.

Marshall’s manner of depicting the two rituals confirms the thematic and implicitly narrative relationships between the two films, and it suggests that while he was trying to make films that would have practical pedagogical value, he had not foresworn the personal and aesthetic engagement that characterizes A Group of Women and A Joking Relationship. In both N/um Tchai and N!owa T’ama the move from précis to film proper (and this is true of other films using this two-part structure) is essentially a move from Marshall’s observing events from the outside to his cinematically joining in the rituals. In N/um Tchai the précis is presented in live action, but generally in long shot and especially at the beginning, using downward angles: that is, we see the Ju/’hoansi literally from a distance and below us. As soon as the “film proper” begins, the camera is closer and at a ground level, looking up or across at the participants. In N!owa T’ama the précis is presented differently, but to the same effect. As we hear Marshall in voice-over, explaining the melon-tossing game, we are seeing freeze frames of moments in the ritual. As David MacDougall has suggested, freezing the moving image “returns film to the status of still photography, from which cinema was born. Seized out of the flow of events, the photograph excludes us from the film and bears us away from the story. . . .”³⁰ But once the film proper begins, we are seeing live action, and we feel instantly more involved.

In N/um Tchai Marshall’s black-and-white cinematography, especially at the beginning of the film proper, is elegant and evocative. The men dancing are seen in silhouette from a position slightly below; this evokes morning (Marshall has explained that the dancing has continued all night and into the morning) and implicitly suggests the mythic beauty of this event and its power for him. The changing chiaroscuro of the cinematography throughout the day functions as a clock. As the curing ritual becomes more involved, Marshall’s camera movement expresses the participants’ growing excitement and his own—essentially he is dancing with his camera in conjunction with the ritual; and the pace of the editing speeds up as the ritual grows more intense and slows down as the ritual concludes: a final 54-second shot concludes the film. A similar strategy is evident in N!owa T’ama, where in the film proper (here, the title comes at the very beginning, before the précis) Marshall’s color cinematography records the women throwing the melon not simply from a detached distance, but from within the dance and in a manner that expressionistically communicates the excitement of the game. In several sequences Marshall positions the camera so that when one woman throws the little melon to the next woman, the melon stays roughly in the center of the frame, while the first woman runs out of the frame, and the next runs in. The movement of women and men running and dancing quickly into and through the frame expresses the ritual as a kind of controlled wildness. When the men momentarily interrupt the ritual, Marshall interrupts his focus on the game and uses intercutting to emphasize the friendly collision of genders. Both films use sound in much the same way; the singing and clapping of the !Kung women, and in N/um Tchai, the rhythm of the men’s stamping feet, provide a continual background for the action; the singing dies out near the end of each film, signaling the conclusion of both the !Kung ritual and the cinematic ritual that allows us to engage it.

In other films Marshall’s combination of teaching and artistic expression works in somewhat different ways. In An Argument about a Marriage, for example, the précis combines live action and freeze frame. As Marshall explains how members of a group of Ju/’hoansi who had been captured by white farmers were reunited with other members of the group (several of whom had escaped soon after capture), in part through the Marshalls’ intervention, we see a truck wending its way through the trees and the moment when the groups are reunited. Then, when he explains the complex situation that has resulted from /Qui’s having a child with Baou during captivity, we see the relevant parties in freeze frame. Then once the film proper begins, we are back in live action, and as usual, inside the events: much of the ongoing action is in close-up, sometimes extreme close-up, generally filmed so that we are looking slightly up at the participants: Marshall and his filmmaking are in a submissive position with regard to the experience of the !Kung. More fully than any other of the sequence films, An Argument about a Marriage communicates the complexity, indeed the near-chaos, of this moment in the lives of the Ju/’hoansi. During the film proper, Marshall uses subtitles to translate, but often so many people are speaking at once that it is clear that we’re getting only a fraction of what is being said. The forced interplay of the !Kung and the white farmers has thrown these lives into crisis: as ≠Toma says, near the close of the film, “When we act like ourselves, these things don’t happen.” The film ends with a freeze frame on ≠Toma, who has negotiated a momentary stalemate, as Marshall explains how this volatile situation resolved itself.

Marshall’s strategy for presenting information about the !Kung allows for a wide range of moods. Men Bathing, for example, could not be more different from An Argument about a Marriage either in tone or in presentation. The précis of Men Bathing begins in live action and with John Marshall’s voice-over, as we see several men arrive at a lovely pan on a gorgeous day. Then the film shifts to freeze frame as Marshall explains who these men are and how they are related to each other. A return to live action and the increased volume of environmental sounds signal the beginning of the film proper, during which little happens: the men bathe, make jokes,³¹ and enjoy the moment; and Marshall’s camera meditates on this idyllic scene, on the gorgeous landscape, and on the bodies of these men. Men Bathing is the most serene of all Marshall’s films and one of the most beautiful—a final vestige, perhaps, of the filmmaker’s fast-fading innocence.

EXPULSION FROM EDEN: BITTER MELONS AND N!AI, THE STORY OF A !KUNG WOMAN

But things had changed; it came out that . . . two entire bands of Bushmen whom we had known at Gautscha, and many Bushmen from Gam, including the husband of Beautiful Ungka, had been taken away by Europeans to work on the farms. Three times European farmers had come, having followed in the tire tracks we ourselves had left behind the last time. They came all the way to Gam, where they had found the Bushmen, no longer shy of Europeans, and had “offered to take them for a ride on their trucks but had promised to bring them back.” The Bushmen had believed them, had gone for the ride, and of course were never seen again.

ELISABETH MARSHALL THOMAS, THE HARMLESS PEOPLE³²

Seen as a whole, however, John’s “Bushmen” films reveal the expanding of a sensitive consciousness not only to a gestalt of life but to the complexity of filmic (re)presentation and to the limitations of audiences to comprehend what is presented. He alone of the 1950s–’60s recorders of “Bushmen” has expressed his changed views in uncompromising terms; he deserves applause for this. Collectively, his films constitute important ethnographic documents. They are not, however, dependable documents of the objectified peoples made subjects in the films, but faithful documents of the filmmaker/ethnographer situated in the discourse of a distorted modernity at the time they were made.

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

During roughly the first third of the (30-minute) film, we hear a series of songs Oukwane has learned, some of them his own, others passed onto him by other musicians; Marshall provides information about the songs in voice-over. The second third of the film briefly reviews general aspects of Kalahari San life: gathering food and water, planting melons, hunting, the etiquette of sharing or not sharing various foods, the slaughtering of meat. During the final third of the film, a distant grass fire is spotted, and two men walk to the fire in the hope of meeting their relatives and bringing them back to their camp; their journey is accompanied by relevant songs played by Oukwane. After a cutaway to several boys performing traditional animal songs and playing the musical porcupine game, the two men return with the visitors and the film climaxes with men and boys dancing to various tunes. The film ends with the bands dispersing; Oukwane and his wife Kutera decide to stay where they are, being “old and finished.”

Bitter Melons is a lovely and engaging film, in large measure because of Marshall’s obvious respect for and refusal to patronize Oukwane’s music and the traditional musics of the Khwe San: “I wanted to celebrate the wealth of music, musical traditions and games which the people supported with their marginal economy.”³⁶ Oukwane’s songs are a pleasure to hear, and the young boys’ enjoyment of their songs and games and the dancing of the men and boys near the end makes for a high-spirited experience. The landscape imagery, especially during the walk to the distant grass fire, is reminiscent of Nanook of the North; here too, we see men tiny against vast spaces, working to create a subsistence and a life against considerable odds. In general, Bitter Melons is an idyll—poignant because of Oukwane and Kutera’s decision to remain behind, alone, at the end of the film, adding a final emphasis to the challenges of the Kalahari from which all this music and enjoyable social interplay has come. Marshall’s affection and admiration for these people are evident in the general functionality of his editing and in his use of extended shots during the dancing, one of them nearly two-and-a-half-minutes long. Like Flaherty in much of Nanook, Marshall makes himself invisible as an act of respect; their art is what is interesting to Marshall, not his own.

For anyone who has enjoyed Bitter Melons, the fact that Marshall later discredited the film might come as a surprise. But his experience in first making Bitter Melons and then coming to terms with what he saw as its failures models the central trajectory of his career from the early 1970s on. Like The Hunters, Bitter Melons is an attempt to create a general view of a people and inevitably can be faulted for leaving out as much as it includes, both in the specifics of the activities it reveals (in The Harmless People Elizabeth Marshall Thomas explains that the dance seen at the end of Bitter Melons was part of a far more complex ritual than is evident in the film),³⁷ and in a more general sense: whatever sense we have of Khwe life from the film doesn’t include the kinds of complex interaction Marshall’s Nyae Nyae films reveal.³⁸ Further, Marshall echoes Flaherty in not including those aspects of the activities we see that were affected by the filming itself: for example, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas explains, “Dances are usually held at night, but this time, out of consideration for us, they agreed to hold it [the dance we see in Bitter Melons] during the day so we could film it.”³⁹ And Marshall himself has indicated that when the visitors came to visit Oukwane, “we gave everybody water. . . . Before and after the final dance in the film everybody had a good drink. No one would, or could, have danced in the sun with only tsama melons to relieve their thirst. Everybody’s stay at /Ei hxa o was strictly limited by the water supply.”⁴⁰

John Marshall’s discrediting of Bitter Melons, however, has less to do with these issues than with how the poignant idyll he so carefully created, and that we viewers enjoy, turned out to falsify the historical realities that occurred after the film was shot and the Marshalls had left. He has explained:

In 1972, while working on Bushmen of the Kalahari, I searched the Ghanzi farms for Oukwane’s people.⁴¹ I found !Gai, whom I called “the fulcrum of the little band” in Bitter Melons, and Oukwane’s youngest son, /Gaiamakwe. !Gai was staying on a farm where an exceptional white farmer allowed a few Khwe to drink water and gather bushfoods. !Gai told me what happened when our expedition pulled out of /Ei hxa o in 1955. Of course Oukwane and his wife, Kutera, did not stay at /Ei hxa o as my narration suggests. The group lived on roots and melons for as long as possible, then they tried to get back to their permanent waters at Ghanzi.

Oukwane died of thirst somewhere between /Ei hxa o and Ghanzi. When the group reached the farms, they were driven off. /Twikwe and Da si n!a, another old woman, died of thirst along the fences. The survivors reached Ghanzi. In the town commons, the people could drink water from a municipal tap but there was nothing to eat. Kutera died of hunger. The two older boys, Wi!abe and Wi!e, disappeared. While trying to beg for corn meal, !Gai’s wife Tsetchwe was raped. She got syphilis and died. The disease had already killed their small son, N!oakwe, and riddled !Gai.

I found /Giamakwe, the other survivor, failing to get a job on another farm. I asked him if he remembered his father’s music. He said, “What music?” . . . In 1955 it did not occur to me to find out what would actually happen to the people I filmed at /Ei hxa o.⁴²

For Marshall, whatever satisfaction the artistry of Bitter Melons (or for that matter, the artistry of Oukwane and the other musicians and dancers in the film) gave him, and whatever pleasure audiences might take from his film, were rendered pointless, once one understood the historical realities within which this film was made. And, rather than ignore those historical realities any further, Marshall committed the remainder of his filmmaking life, or at least that portion of his filmmaking life that had to do with the peoples of the Kalahari, to a direct engagement with them. The result was a series of films that not only have a very different function from the films of the 1950s through the 1970s, but that re-present material from earlier films in ways that provide this material with the context that was beyond the frame during the shooting and unacknowledged during the editing. This new context allows those of us who know Marshall’s early films to reexperience them in new ways.

N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman, at 59 minutes, was the longest film about the !Kung that Marshall had finished since The Hunters. It was made following Marshall’s long exile from Nyae Nyae; in 1958 the government of South Africa refused to renew his visa, and as a result, he was denied contact with the !Kung for twenty years, including the entire period during which he was editing the !Kung films that followed The Hunters. In retrospect, we can imagine that working with the footage that recorded what he considered the happiest experiences of his life was a way of revisiting his friends during the first years of his exile.

Like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, Marshall returned to the Kalahari in 1978, to the village of Tshumkwe on the border of Botswana and what in 1990 would become the independent nation of Namibia, now the administrative center of a reservation established in 1970 for the !Kung. Here, he discovered the dramatic changes that had occurred in his absence. He also discovered that a feature film, The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), was being shot in the area, and that N!ai, among the most frequent participants in his films, had a role in Jamie Uys’s feature. N!ai became the focus of Marshall’s shooting (fig. 4).

N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman opens with a sequence revealing the inhumane conditions on the reservation: the Ju/’hoansi can no longer gather or hunt and are sustained only by “mealy meal” (a kind of cornmeal porridge). Further, their health has deteriorated; N!ai says, “We’re all TB people [people with tuberculosis].” Marshall uses close-ups of N!ai, who is still very beautiful, speaking to the camera, as a visual motif (her comments are presented in voice-over translation by Letta Mbulu). During the first third of the film, N!ai reviews the experiences that have brought her, and her neighbors, to their current situation. N!ai’s memories are interwoven with voice-overs by Marshall, and their dual commentary is illustrated with sequences from earlier Marshall films. We see imagery of N!ai as a young girl in The Hunters and helping to gather berries in First Film; and Marshall reviews the action in The Hunters as we see moments from that film.

FIGURE 4. N!ai in John Marshall’s N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman (1980). Courtesy Documentary Educational Resources.

As N!ai’s reminiscence continues, we also learn information not in the earlier films about the marriage of N!ai and /Gunda and see footage of N!ai and /Gunda not included in earlier films: details of the marriage ritual that betrothed N!ai to /Gunda, for example. N!ai also recalls the events recorded in A Curing Ceremony (1969), where a woman gives birth to a stillborn baby; and we see a moment from A Joking Relationship when /Ti!kay chides N!ai for teasing /Gunda; and finally, moments from N/um Tchai, when /Gunda is in trance, learning to be a healer (in N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman these moments are presented in color). And N!ai and /Gunda comment on these past events themselves. N!ai talks about resisting the marriage (“I just didn’t want a husband”), and /Gunda, in good humor, remembers, “You gave me such a hard time!” Both remember how N!ai left /Gunda for other men: “My husband did not know for years. . . . I tormented him.” We find out that they did come to live as man and wife and had several children together.

Seeing imagery of N!ai and /Gunda’s past while they comment on the events from twenty-plus years later is, on one level, amusing and engaging, particularly because of their apparent good humor about their youthful struggles—indeed, the sequence of N!ai and /Gunda together is reminiscent of the couples talking about how they met and came to marry in Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally (1989)! Further, as suggested earlier, this information allows us to understand details of both N/um Tchai: The Ceremonial Dance of the !Kung Bushmen and N!owa T’ama: The Melon Tossing Game that were not yet clear in those films: the meta-narrative of Marshall’s career moves chronologically through the years and, for those familiar with the various segments of this meta-narrative, back in time: we learn what’s new, but also have an opportunity to revise our understanding of the past. Of course, the conditions at Tshumkwe in 1978 seem all the more appalling when contrasted with the imagery from the past, which is quite gorgeous. Indeed, the beauty of this footage from the 1950s and 1960s suggests a golden age, a time when, as N!ai explains, the !Kung went where they wanted to and were not poor, and when Marshall could take unabashed pleasure as a filmmaker in what he understood as an independent and beautiful way of life that, as he explains in his voice-over, had endured in the western Kalahari for twenty thousand years.⁴³

The review of the past, conveyed by N!ai’s story, Marshall’s voice-over, and the footage from the 1950s ends with a dramatic cut from the text, “Tshum!kwi 1958,” superimposed over a shot of a giant baobab tree, to a second text, “Tshum!kwi 1978,” superimposed over a shot of a (white) man and woman, sitting in their living room.⁴⁴ What follows is a more detailed investigation of the current situation at Tshumkwe. N!ai continues to address the camera, but from here on it’s mostly in song (as though the pain of the present is being redirected into art), and Marshall intervenes in voice-over from time to time to situate particular sequences. The imagery, however, is all from the present—though in several instances current activities echo images we’ve seen in the earlier part of the film. The structure of this section of the film is designed to demonstrate the ways in which the various kinds of white intervention into !Kung life are failing the !Kung.

The man and woman, presumably the administrators of the reservation, complain about how lazy the “bushmen” are, how they don’t earn the money they are given. This is juxtaposed with a !Kung servant cleaning their home. The local game warden explains government policy about hunting; his comments on the fact that the giraffe are disappearing are intercut with shots of Tsamko, ≠Toma’s son, chasing a giraffe on horseback, despite the new rules (the giraffe’s fall to the ground echoes the giraffe falling near the end of The Hunters). The game warden then reviews the South African budget for dealing with the San on the reservation (“development of human potential,” including school: 2,000 rand; social services, medical clinic: 2,500 rand; administration: 200,000 rand!), as we see images of the results. A white doctor treats N!ai but doesn’t believe anything is wrong with a baby who has been ill since birth. This is juxtaposed with the !Kung performing a curing ceremony (echoing N!ai’s earlier memory of /Ti!kay’s attempt to assist Sha//ge, documented in A Curing Ceremony) for this baby who, in the end, dies—in the background white tourists are enjoying the scene, taking pictures. Some soldiers arrive to trade tins of meat for !Kung artifacts and to urge !Kung men to join the South African army; this is juxtaposed with a !Kung man working on a painting.

The most surreal aspect of this survey is Marshall’s record of Jamie Uys shooting what would become the final shot of The Gods Must Be Crazy. If I read it correctly, this sequence offers an implicit statement of Marshall’s critique of what is usually called film “art.” Marshall records a series of retakes of a moment when Xi (played by a !Kung, N!xau)⁴⁵ is supposedly returning to his home and family (N!ai plays his wife): his little son runs to him and he lifts the son up, then puts him down and greets the rest of his band. Uys wants the man to lift the boy just once, then put him down; but each time, the man lifts the boy twice before lowering him to the ground. The absurdity of Uys’s apparent preference of a single lift, juxtaposed with N!xau’s seemingly automatic double lift, subtly demonstrates the way in which this white director ignores what seems to be an automatic (and thus comparatively natural) action on the part of N!xau, in the interest of a vague aesthetic preference—an emblem presumably for the film’s failure, for all its possible good intentions, to do anything like justice to !Kung life at the time of the filming.⁴⁶

Marshall’s record of Uys’s creating an idyllic scene for The Gods Must Be Crazy is followed by a sequence of N!ai and the other !Kung on the reservation that reveals the bitterness and conflict that has been created by N!ai’s earning money as an actress: even /Qui, who in The Hunters is described as “a simple, kindly man and an optimist, who tended to remember only the better times of his life,” bitterly complains to N!ai, demanding she buy him blankets and shoes. !Kung society seems to be falling apart.⁴⁷ One of the many ironies here is that, despite N!ai’s charisma and charm, her role in The Gods Must Be Crazy is minor; she is not credited on Uys’s film. Another is that the Coke bottle that seduces the bushmen away from their communal Eden in The Gods could be seen in retrospect to emblemize the process of filmmaking itself, both Uys’s and Marshall’s.

N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman ends first with a visit of a white minister and his black translator to the reservation, then with a sequence of army recruits. The minister’s telling the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well comes across as vague and confusing, and N!ai sees the story as a moral offense to her !Kung ways of doing things. The officer in charge of the recruits assumes that the San believe in the whites, but it’s clear that joining the South African military to fight SWAPO (the guerrilla army fighting for the independence of what was then a South African colony) is the only way of earning a living. In the final sequence, /Qui, now a soldier, says good-bye—we can see it’s probably forever—to his friends, including ≠Toma and N!ai, and N!ai sings, “Death mocks me, Death dances with me.” The !Kung have been expelled from Marshall’s Eden into time, because over time Eden has disappeared around them.

THE PITTSBURGH POLICE FILMS AND BRAKHAGE’S EYES

Within the meta-narrative of John Marshall’s career, it is interesting to remember that, during the same period when he was editing the films I’ve been discussing, he was involved in the other two projects on which his reputation rests: his collaboration with Frederick Wiseman, Titicut Follies (1967), and the series of Pittsburgh Police films that were sponsored by the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence at Brandeis University. Marshall shot most of Titicut Follies (Timothy Asch also did some shooting) and was involved, early on, in the editing, though at a certain point Wiseman told Marshall he wanted to finish the film himself. While this has led to speculation that Wiseman in some sense stole the film from Marshall (early on, the credits listed Marshall as a co-director; this is no longer the case), Marshall seems to have been ambivalent about the experience. While he says that from the beginning he and Wiseman agreed that they would be co-directors and that later he was “kicked out” of the editing room, he also admits that “it was his [Wiseman’s] movie”; “I thought of it as Fred’s movie.”⁴⁸ Of course, Marshall’s contributions to Titicut Follies as cinematographer have never been in doubt, and his in-close shooting is often reminiscent of his early !Kung films.

While the working relationship between Marshall and Wiseman deteriorated once the shooting of Titicut Follies was completed, the two men seem to have worked well together during the shooting. When he was asked whether he and Wiseman developed “some kind of direction system,” Marshall responded, “We didn’t need to. We clicked. We were in tune with each other, we hit it off.”⁴⁹ Their being in tune is also suggested by the fact that both were working on films about police work during the years 1968–69. Wiseman completed Law and Order, his exploration of police work in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1969 (William Brayne shot Law and Order and would shoot nine more films for Wiseman), and Marshall was shooting his Pittsburgh Police films in 1968–69: Inside/Outside Station 9 was released in 1970; Three Domestics and Vagrant Woman in 1971; Investigation of a Hit and Run and 901/904 in 1972; and the remaining fifteen titles in 1973.⁵⁰ The longer films—Inside/Outside Station 9 and 901/904 include films subsequently released, often in slightly different edits, as shorts.⁵¹ The structure of the longest of the Pittsburgh Police films, Inside/Outside Station 9 (78 minutes)⁵² bears some relationship to the structure of Law and Order, though in general, the Wiseman film is more finished and more visceral and is shaped to appeal to a television audience, whereas Inside/Outside Station 9, and the other Marshall films, feel more raw, partly because Marshall was often shooting at night, in situations when lighting was difficult to control. Also, Wiseman seems more detached from the events, Marshall more intimate with them.

As was true of Marshall’s earlier films, the police films were made not as art films—though in many senses, of course, they are artful—but in the hope that the results would be useful in a specific practical sense, as aids in helping to improve police work and as part of courses in law schools. Indeed, although the Pittsburgh Police films were shown to the police, they were not shown to the general public for years. Investigation of a Hit and Run (1972) was followed by A Legal Discussion of a Hit and Run (1973, co-shot with Timothy Asch), in which a Harvard Law School class discusses legal aspects of what is revealed by the earlier film. The 4th & 5th & the Exclusionary Rule (1973) includes sequences from Pittsburgh Police films intercut with a panel discussion moderated by Professor James Vorenberg of Harvard Law School (filmmaker Jacqueline Shearer was a member of this panel).

The Pittsburgh films formally echo the !Kung films after The Hunters and before N!ai in that they are, in Marshall’s terminology, “sequence films”—that is, they are, or are made up of, short films documenting what John Dewey would call particular “experiences.” The differences between the Pittsburgh films and the films shot in the Kalahari are as noteworthy as the similarities, however. The police films include no voice-over or extradiagetic explanation; they were shot in black and white, probably because of the limitations of color film stocks; the result is a gritty, journalistic feel. Most important, the police films are not simply “thick” films (Marshall designates films as “thin” or “thick,” depending on how effectively they reflect the complexity of social interaction),⁵³ they are more ambiguous than the !Kung films: while Marshall came to feel close to the police he traveled with (“Getting to know them is what the film is about. We lived with them. Some of us became very fond of each other”),⁵⁴ neither they nor the citizens they come into contact with represent anything like the idealized community we see in so many of the early !Kung films. Indeed, one might conjecture that the complexity and immensity of the social issues at play in the police films helped to maintain a nostalgia in Marshall for the “small town” innocence, not so much of the Ju/’hoansi (by the early 1970s, he was well aware of what was happening to their traditional way of life), but of his own youthful experiences with them, innocence evoked in A Group of Women and A Joking Relationship and more generally expressed in the lovely color of the early films shot in the Kalahari.

As he was shooting and editing the Pittsburgh Police films, Marshall took a personal interest in sharing the work with the police themselves:

I filmed events of policework for about nine months over the two-year period. On my own, I used the sequences as case studies for discussion with the cops in the loft of Station 9. A number of us would foregather with some six-packs after the four to midnight shift. . . .

Discussion was lively. . . . Many of my sequences showed “domestics” [that is, domestic disputes between marital or live-in partners]. The cops in Station 9 had all three schools of thought: get involved and try to help the family; arrest the man, or everybody; do nothing and maybe call the welfare department. The sequences of real events and specific officers motivated and grounded the discussions. The police appreciated the reality . . . and all said they benefited from arguing their views and airing their feelings.⁵⁵

All in all, Marshall’s personal involvement with the police he worked with to make the Pittsburgh Police Films provides an interesting contrast to another “personal” film about police work shot in Pittsburgh in 1970 and finished in 1971: Stan Brakhage’s Eyes, one of the three films that have become known as The Pittsburgh Trilogy (The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes and Deus Ex, both 1971, are the other parts of the trilogy; The Act was filmed in the Pittsburgh morgue; Deus Ex, in a Pittsburgh hospital).

Marshall’s Pittsburgh films and Brakhage’s Eyes emblemize two radically different approaches to independent filmmaking, to documentary, and to personal filmmaking that were developing during the 1960s and early 1970s. Both projects are radically anticommercial, implicit critiques of standard Hollywood fare. In both cases, there was no scripting: Marshall and Brakhage immersed themselves in the experience of police work, then edited what they’d shot to reflect what they had come to understand so that we could experience their impressions in cinematic form and draw our own conclusions.

Except for the fact that both filmmakers used handheld 16mm cameras, however, the films are formally quite distinct. Eyes is silent and in color, and reflects Brakhage’s fascination with the visual accoutrements of police work: the various symbols (badges, uniforms, name tags) and characteristic gestures of the police he travels with. Marshall’s fascination is with the human interactions between Pittsburgh citizens and the police, especially as these interactions are expressed vocally. While Brakhage demonstrates his feelings for the situations he witnesses (some of them quite graphic: a dead body in the street, an old man whose face has been battered) in his gestures with the camera and in his freeform editing, Marshall works at remaining invisible but within the development of events; in interior shots, his lighting makes his presence obvious, and from time to time a citizen reveals some discomfort with, or at least interest in, his presence—but in general Marshall’s films are as self-effacing as Eyes is self-expressive.

Together, however, the two projects provide a fascinating reflection on Pittsburgh and on the ways in which independent film artists were attempting to engage the urban experience during the early 1970s. Despite the obvious formal distinctions between the work of the two filmmakers, it is clear that certain problems are endemic to Pittsburgh: in both films the police are dealing with homelessness, with young people who have nothing to do; and in both, the police are working across racial lines during an era when racial issues were especially volatile (though this remains mostly implicit in both films). In Eyes and in Marshall’s films the police are nominally, and to some extent actually, the guardians of order, but they also seem a bit at sea in dealing with the complexities of the society evolving around them.

The early responses to the films reflect these complexities. When Marshall’s films were shown at the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence at Brandeis, the reactions to the police work depicted varied widely, as is clear in Marshall’s The 4th, 5th, & Exclusionary Rule; and Brakhage remembers that while the police “loved Eyes . . . , felt that their dignity had been restored,” and used the film “to show how kind and gentle they are,” Black Panthers in Chicago “used Eyes to show what pigs the police are.”⁵⁶ Of course, the fact that these two cinematically radical projects were shot in Pittsburgh at roughly the same time suggests something about both the openness of the city’s police department and the prestige of independent cinema in Pittsburgh at that moment.⁵⁷

PUTTING DOWN THE CAMERA AND PICKING UP THE SHOVEL

The journey from the subsistence to the commercial world has often been devastating, but I think few black people want to reverse the clock. Most Ju/’hoansi, at any rate, would rather go forward in the mixed economy even if it were possible to turn back.

JOHN MARSHALL, “FILMING AND LEARNING”⁵⁸

After his return to the Kalahari and the Ju/’hoansi, and N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman, Marshall’s documentaries of the !Kung saga take a very different form. Indeed, when I contacted Documentary Educational Resources to ask for DVD copies of Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out (1985) and To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report (1991), DER director Cynthia Close sent me the following e-mail: “I can send you N!ai [I had also requested N!ai], but John never considered those other two titles ‘films’—some of the footage from both those ‘reports’ was used throughout A KALAHARI FAMILY and the final chapter there, DEATH BY MYTH, really tells this whole aspect of the story.”⁵⁹ Whatever one calls Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out and To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report (and other related works from the 1980s that are not in distribution), they are certainly parts of Marshall’s meta-film of Kalahari life, which, as Close suggests in her e-mail, concludes with the epic, five-part series, A Kalahari Family (2001).⁶⁰ And if we can see them not only as “field reports,” but also as video works by an accomplished film artist, it becomes evident that through their form and style, as well as their apparent content, they provide a postmodern reflection on the role of filmmaking in the transformation of a way of life.

Especially in Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out but also in To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report the video imagery is fuzzy and washed out, inferior to what one had come to expect from Marshall. But it is obvious in both videos that image quality and other “artistic” dimensions of cinema are irrelevant; composition and editing are entirely functional in these tapes. Marshall’s concern is with the developing crisis faced by the Ju/’hoansi. I’m reminded here of Joris Ivens’s The Spanish Earth (1937), where Ivens sometimes chose to sacrifice conventional concerns with film aesthetics in the hope that the film might make a positive contribution within a flow of events that constituted a political and human emergency. What is visible in Pull Ourselves Up is John Marshall himself, not as an artist documenting what is going on but as an active participant in the events. This is signaled in the titles of both field reports: “Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out” and “To Hold Our Own Ground.”⁶¹

As is standard in Marshall’s !Kung films, we hear his voice-over, and he translates what various men and women say; here, however, he is visible physically, first, arriving in a truck, bringing cattle feed for the kral at N!am Tchoa in 1982 and, cigarette hanging from his mouth (rather like Sigourney Weaver’s character in Avatar), helping to unload the heavy bags.⁶² In the final section of the video, Marshall is visible again, this time in December 1984, at //Xaru pan, where, he explains, “We’re piling rocks around the borehole to hopefully hurt elephants’ feet and keep them off” (a magnificent elephant hovers in the distance). Marshall is then seen among a group of Ju/’hoansi who are installing a water pump. The work is interrupted by government officials who tell the group that they must have written authority to install a pump, and Marshall is heard arguing that traditional water rights in the Kalahari do not require written permission. Tsamko (the eldest son of ≠Toma) tells the officials, “This pump is our business; we just asked John to help”; and later, after an official indicates that Marshall is testing his patience, Tsamko says, “It’s us Ju/’hoansi that are doing this pump, not John Marshall” (a Ju/’hoan Bushman Development Foundation, set up by Marshall with a gift from Laurence Marshall just before his death in 1980, has bought the pump and hired the contractor to install it—though this is not made clear in Pull Ourselves Up). The video ends with the officials leaving, the installation complete, and the pump working—and a final series of informational texts.

The very tenuous optimism of water being pumped in the final shot of the video (optimism immediately tempered by the final texts, which chart the devastating effects of reservation life on those Ju/’hoansi who have not set up their own farms and ranches) is the inverse of a subtle dimension of the review of Ju/’hoansi history that begins the video. In order to contexualize Pull Ourselves Up for those who have not followed his work, Marshall recycles a shot of a column of !Kung walking through the desert, shot in the 1950s; then, several shots from N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman of activities around the reservation offices at Tshumkwe: Jamie Uys shooting The Gods Must Be Crazy, U! going for mealy meal, /Qui marching with the soldiers and leaving. For anyone familiar with Marshall’s earlier work, this recycled imagery is at once familiar and de-familiarized by our recognition that it is faded and fuzzy—not surprisingly, since these shots are from earlier generations of film and video that have been re-recorded with video technology that substitutes convenience (and sync sound) for image quality.

In the early !Kung films, Marshall always remained outside the frame. Even though he felt personally at one with the Ju/’hoansi, and even when he was directly involved in the action (he was part of the group that shoots the giraffe in The Hunters), as a filmmaker he felt obliged to seem detached from their lives. This was, I assume, an act of respect, similar to Flaherty’s suppressing his own physical presence in Nanook of the North, as Marshall made clear even as late as the 1990s:

The problem is to let the audience meet the people in the film instead of just the filmmaker. The films that could help achieve the goal will have to try to show what people do and say, not what filmmakers feel, think and want their audience to know.

Robert Gardner, Fred Wiseman, Ricky Leacock and John Marshall are not particularly interesting. Ju/’hoansi pulling themselves up from the depths of dispossession are interesting.⁶³

Pull Ourselves Up, however, reveals a new kind of presence that signals fundamental changes in Marshall’s thinking as media maker. Our consciousness of the (literal) decay of Marshall’s concern with aesthetic issues, at least as conventionally conceived, in both the film footage shot for N!ai and in that canonical shot of the !Kung walking into the desert (a shot that can be read as an index of Marshall’s idealistic youth), provides a historical context for Marshall’s entering the frame both in body and in voice (not simply in voice-over, but as a voice within the diegesis of the action). Here he is, for the first time in his moving image work, part of a “we”: not exactly the “we” of the Ju/’hoansi, but the “we” of a transcultural group made up of Ju/’hoansi and others working in the present for political change in the Kalahari.

The shifts in Marshall’s position with regard to filmmaking and the Ju/’hoansi continue in To Hold Our Own Ground, which takes roughly the same form as Pull Ourselves Up. Again, Marshall begins with a map and in voice-over reviews the changes in how southern African territory has come to be divided up: “The following visual report shows the Ju/wa struggle to hold on to their last fragment of land and farm for their lives.” Tsamko, who has emerged as a leader of the Ju/’hoansi (this is already evident in Pull Ourselves Up) is seen walking toward the camera, and Marshall’s revelation of Tsamko’s thoughts makes clear that he will be a focus of this video. The appearance of Tsamko leads into a review of the past, conducted both in voice-over (“I first met Tsamko in 1951”) and through recycled imagery from earlier work.

FIGURE 5. Ju/'hoansi on the move, in a Marshall photograph. Courtesy Documentary Educational Resources.

Once again, we see the canonical shot of a column of !Kung walking into the desert, here even less true to the original than the version of the shot seen in Pull Ourselves Up (fig. 5). This is followed by imagery of Tsamko learning to hunt by shooting a beetle with arrows, from The Hunters, then by imagery of the hunters shooting the giraffe and of women gathering roots (this imagery is quite faded and breaks down), and then—after a bit more information about the present political situation—imagery from N!ai (the presence of the South African soldiers at Tshumkwe) and from Pull Ourselves Up, including, in its entirety, the sequence focusing on the way in which alcohol consumption has accelerated the transformation of Ju/’hoansi life on the reservation. Here, the fight between several 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, you left behind those ugly things: roads.”

The real focus of “End of the Road,” however, is Marshall’s attempt to make amends for the damage his family’s visits helped to instigate by forming a foundation with Claire Ritchie to help the Ju/’hoansi learn a new way of life. Since gathering-hunting could no longer support the Ju/’hoansi, Marshall and Ritchie, and some of the Ju/’hoansi, too, have come to believe that the only chance for a decent life is to move away from Tshumkwe and back to Gautscha Pan and learn to garden and raise cattle. The episode ends on the morning of Christmas Eve, when Marshall, who is “pissed in more ways than one” (angry that talk of moving out of Tshumkwe has seemed to be all that was happening, and drunk), discovers that the group left Tshumkwe for Gautscha while he was sleeping. As he stands alone in Tshumkwe, looking lost and befuddled, we understand that Marshall-as-filmmaker is celebrating the initiative of the Ju/’hoansi and recognizing that it is their efforts that make change; he and his foundation can only follow them.

“Real Water” and “Standing Tall” reveal the struggles and successes of the !Kung group at Gautscha, first to get their farms up and going and then to develop a place where the diaspora of bushmen spread across southern Africa can return to and build a new life. Tsamko and G≠kao Dabe become increasingly important figures during these episodes, when wells are drilled, farms started, and as Tsamko and his colleagues work to ensure the political viability of eastern Bushmanland by resisting first a wildlife preserve, then the luring of lions and elephants to the area for trophy hunting. At the conclusion of “Real Water,” we see the Gautscha Farmers Cooperative meeting under a tree—evoking that Edenic tree in Baobab Play and the other early films, but within a new, politically aware, progressive context.

“Standing Tall” is a road movie, focusing on Marshall, Tsamko, G≠kao Dabe, and N!xau, the star of The Gods Must Be Crazy, venturing into Hereroland and Ghobabi in a van (Marshall drives) to locate members of !Kung families and let them know that there is now an option for them, other than the near-slavery of their lives on white farms and their destitution in Hereroland. During their travels, they meet /Ui Chapman, who seems particularly excited about the prospect of having his own place. “Standing Tall” ends with the celebration of the victory of SWAPO and Namibian independence in 1989 and with /Ui Chapman leaving a white farm and coming home to Gautscha with his family to start his own farm.

The look, as well as the overall mood, of the middle episodes of A Kalahari Family could hardly be more different from what we see in Pull Ourselves Up or Die Out and To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report. As mentioned earlier, the fragile optimism evident in those field reports is reflected in their tenuous image quality, but by the end of the 1990s, as Marshall looked back on how events had developed, once his foundation had been established and a group of Ju/’hoansi had come to believe that gardening and ranching (combined with local gathering and hunting) could provide them with a subsistence and move them away from dependent desperation in Tshumkwe, a sense of the rightness and excitement of this moment and these developments seems to have allowed him to see that all was not lost, that the Ju/’hoansi might still recover from the unfortunate cultural transformation exacerbated by his family’s arrival in Nyae Nyae in 1951. In general, the beauty and emotional power of A Kalahari Family, at least up through “Standing Tall,” reflect this new hope and excitement.

During “Standing Tall” we also see Marshall and his Ju/’hoansi colleagues returning to the films of the 1950s, not simply to provide a contrast between a comparatively idyllic past and a desperate present and not to reconfirm Marshall’s earlier naïveté about filmmaking. Marshall and his colleagues look at early !Kung films on a tiny television in order to determine who of those seen in the films might still be alive and where they might be found. As the lives of the Ju/’hoansi are transforming, so is Marshall’s (and our) understanding of the significance of the early films. Instead of being accidental contributors to the demise of a culture, they have become an important resource for those trying to create a new, healthy Ju/’hoansi way of life on a resettled homeland. That the group is watching the films on a tiny black-and-white television is a final confirmation that while these films may be valuable as artful, often gorgeous records of a lost past—as is evident throughout A Kalahari Family—they have also become, even in their most degraded form, a potential force for positive change.

Amid these signs of hope in “Standing Tall,” there are also what, during the final episode of A Kalahari Family, “Death by Myth,” are premonitions of problems to come. Marshall and Claire Ritchie retire as directors of the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation and are replaced by Dr. Marguerite Biesele; and when Tsamko goes to a Herero-DTA rally during the buildup to the vote on Namibian independence, we learn more of what is only hinted at during To Hold Our Own Ground: A Field Report. Marshall himself is attacked by a speaker at the rally: “John, what are you doing to the Ju/’hoansi? You are meddling in my people and their concerns. Does the money from John’s father help everyone? Or a chosen few, including John himself?” It is after this speech that Tsamko tries to access the microphone but is denied the opportunity to refute these charges. The sequence ends with Marshall arguing with a Herero man and asserting that Nyae Nyae is, and has always been, Ju/’hoansi territory: “I was a kid here; I saw with my own eyes!”

Later in “Death by Myth,” Marshall returns to Nyae Nyae after a two-year absence to discover that things have not developed as he had hoped—in large measure because various constituencies in the region, white and black, have been promoting the bushman myth in order to profit from it. The myth, as Marshall explains it and as demonstrated in the film by a considerable range of men and women, is that the bushmen are “natural hunters and gatherers” who remain capable of supporting themselves if they adhere to their traditional ways, and that efforts to assist the bushmen in developing a new way to maintain themselves are misguided: as a people they are more beautiful as nature made them, in their original, primitive, hunting-gathering state. Of course, this is the myth promoted by The Gods Must Be Crazy, which has been a motif in Marshall’s !Kung saga since N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman; but in “Death by Myth” we hear the same ideas expressed by those who want to remake the region as a nature conservancy and/or to promote trophy hunting (and in the case of the Herero, to annex the land for their herds). During Marshall’s absence, assistance to farmers has ceased to be a priority for the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation, which has allocated the funds coming in from donors to building offices at a new town called Baraka, buying trucks, and hiring experts who do studies of the region and produce books about it—an echo of those earlier whites who established Tshumkwe as the political center of Bushmanland and allocated government aid primarily to facilities for the whites. All the decisions relevant to Nyae Nyae are now made in Windhoek by a German administrator and those who answer to him.

During Marshall’s 1994 and 1995 visits, it is clear that the Ju/’hoansi struggle for their Nyae Nyae territory and a practical means of subsistence is failing. Even the baobab tree in the center of Tshumkwe has collapsed as a result of an infection. The original leaders are no longer listened to, and elephants have destroyed many farms. The German administrator is ultimately fired by the Nyae Nyae Farmers’ Coop, but Tsamko, who in earlier films was the leading proponent of the new farming communities, has been persuaded to support the Nature Conservancy, which has promised the Ju/’hoansi money from hunters and from filmmakers; in 1995 Tsamko, furious at whites who have once again taken over Nyae Nyae, refuses to be filmed by Marshall (“You make money from your film!”). Near the end of “Death by Myth,” we learn that the annual payment to each Ju/’hoansi from the conservancy is $10.50 American.

The main body of the episode ends with tourists visiting a fake bushman village, where a group of Ju/’hoansi pretend to be living a traditional way of life. “Epilogue 2000,” which concludes A Kalahari Family, provides a tiny spark of hope: G≠kao Dabe has started farming again; Tsamko is a leader again, settling disputes between his fellow Ju/’hoansi the way his father once did; Tsamko’s sister Bao has become a health worker and the first Ju/’hoan woman to have a driver’s license; and Baraka and its fleet of vehicles has fallen apart. Still, the local road signs are hidden so as not to interfere with the tourists’ fantasies, and !U makes jewelry to sell to them. “Death by Myth,” and A Kalahari Family and the entire Marshall !Kung saga, conclude with a return to the monument to ≠Toma and with the narrator’s indication that in 2001 six members of ≠Toma’s family continue to live at Gautscha. This ambiguous ending is entirely appropriate to this remarkable project and a final demonstration of Marshall’s no longer naïve but always hopeful approach to cinema.

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.