American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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