“How does Scott MacDonald do it? Every couple of years he produces a work so significant that it would have taken any other scholar at least a decade to produce. This, his newest opus, extends the spatial approach to cinema he pioneered in The Garden in the Machine, but does so by focusing on documentary rather the avant-garde. His exploration of the interlaced traditions of ethnographic and personal documentary filmmaking in the Boston area in the light of American Pragmatism’s commitment to the examination of lived experience is a remarkable addition to his already remarkable oeuvre.” – David E. James, author of The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles

"[American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary] is a superbly original and informative work that takes as its project the creation of a cognitive map of a significant and geographically specific area within the larger field of independent documentary filmmaking. It is fascinating to follow the book's careful articulation of the network of teachers and students, and the institutions where they and their films flourished. This book establishes a new path for documentary studies within a cultural landscape that widens to spatial media studies and beyond.”– Janet Walker, author of Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust

Scott MacDonald teaches film history at Hamilton College and Harvard University and in 2011 was named an Academy Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He is the author of many books for UC Press, most recently Adventures in Perception: Cinema as Exploration (2009).

American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary

The Cambridge Turn

By Scott MacDonald

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27562-1

Contents

Introduction, 1,
1. Lorna and John Marshall, 19,
2. Robert Gardner, 61,
3. Timothy Asch, 111,
4. Ed Pincus and the Emergence of Personal Documentary, 127,
5. Alfred Guzzetti and Personal Cinema, 167,
6. Ross McElwee, 183,
7. Robb Moss, 238,
8. Panorama: Other Approaches to Personal Documentary, 260,
9. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Sensory Ethnography, 314,
Epilogue, 339,
Appendix: Sources for Films, 345,
Notes, 347,
Index, 397,

CHAPTER 1

Lorna and John Marshall

At the outset, the Marshall family expeditions to the Kalahari Desert from 1950 to 1961 to find and learn something about the San peoples living there were conceived as a means to the end of a more intensive, engaged experience of family life—an upscale version of the family camping trips that would become ubiquitous across the country during the following decades. Laurence Marshall's determination that his family's experiences with the San be useful in producing valuable insights into an ancient way of life led (along with his willingness to finance the project) to the Peabody Museum's sponsorship of the Marshalls' early expeditions, which did in fact produce impressive results, including several significant contributions to the written anthropological discourse about the San and a wealth of photographic and cinematic documentation.

John Marshall's particular excitement about the men and women he grew to know during these expeditions had a good deal to do with his wonder at how much his new friends had come to understand about their environment through their long experience with it, but this early fascination was merely the first stage of what became a lifelong process of learning not only about the people he befriended in the Kalahari but about how much his early excitement about being with them had blinded him to the realities of their lives. Indeed, during the following years, as he came to see how quickly San life was transforming and to feel that his family's expeditions into the Kalahari had contributed to the destruction of the way of life that had so impressed him, Marshall transformed his approach to documenting the San over and over. His hope was that each new contact he had with the "Ju/'hoansi" (Marshall came to use Ju/'hoansi to refer to the group of !Kung San he grew to know, since this is how they referred to themselves), 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." 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. 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."

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).

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"), 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"—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...