American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

      On one level, ethnographic documentary and personal documentary might seem the antithesis of each other: one has traditionally involved the travels of anthropologists to far-flung locations to observe people very different from themselves; the other, the self-conscious investigations by filmmakers of their personal lives. But for all their apparent differences, the two approaches are fundamentally two sides of the same cinematic coin, the inverse of each other. Robert Gardner has said that “going to distant cultures leads to self-examination which in turn refines sensibilities for detecting meaning in the lives of others.”⁷ By the early 1970s, the use of cinema to explore the exotic Other had not only revealed aspects of the Self to particular ethnographic filmmakers, it—along with a variety of other cultural developments—was instigating what soon became a major new avenue for documentary: the cinematic exploration of the patterns and nuances of the filmmakers’ own culture, as exemplified by their personal lives.

      Prime movers in the development of ethnographic cinema were Lorna Marshall, her son John Marshall, and Robert Gardner. Once she and her family had decided to travel to the Kalahari Desert in southwest Africa, longtime Cambridge resident Lorna Marshall studied anthropology at Harvard; she went on to write The !Kung of Nyae Nyae (Harvard University Press, 1975) and Nyae Nyae !Kung Belief and Rites (Peabody Museum Press, 1999). She also produced First Film (shot in 1951; final form 1995), a breakthrough depiction of the lives of gatherer-hunters in the Kalahari Desert. John Marshall began documenting the lives of these same groups on expeditions sponsored by the Peabody Museum and the Smithsonian Institution, and in later years, worked to help those he had filmed maintain some vestige of their culture. The Hunters: A !Kung Bushmen Film (1957) was the first of John Marshall’s dozens of films about these people—a body of work that reveals a wide range of experimentation.

      Robert Gardner, another major figure in the evolution of ethnographic documentary, graduated from Harvard, then, after some years on the West Coast, where he made several short films, returned for graduate study in anthropology. In 1957 the Peabody Museum established the Film Study Center to assist in the management of the Marshall family’s African footage and named Gardner the center’s first director. For several years Gardner worked with Marshall on the editing of The Hunters. In 1963 Gardner finished his own ethnographic classic, Dead Birds, which premiered in Cambridge at Harvard’s Loeb Drama Center. Like John Marshall, Gardner would continue to make important contributions to documentary filmmaking for decades. Dead Birds and The Hunters were the first modern ethnographic films to be included in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, in 1998 and 2003, respectively.⁸

      A third crucial figure in the history of ethnographic cinema was Timothy Asch, who got his M.A. in African Studies at Boston University (with a concentration in anthropology at Harvard). For a time, Asch worked at the Peabody Museum as a production assistant on several of John Marshall’s films, and he reviewed and cataloged the material Gardner sent back from New Guinea during the shooting of Dead Birds. In the late 1960s Asch teamed up with anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon to begin what became a remarkable (and in the end controversial) series of films focusing on the Yanomami people living near the headwaters of the Orinoco River in southern Venezuela. Several of these films, including the landmark The Ax Fight (1975), were finished in Cambridge, while Asch was teaching at Harvard.

      In 1968 John Marshall and Asch teamed up to found Documentary Educational Research, which in 1971 incorporated as Documentary Educational Resources (DER), a nonprofit distribution organization whose mission, as set forth in its certificate of incorporation, was to serve the “needs of educational institutions and of education, in general, in respect of the fields of anthropology, ethnology, ethnography, sociology and all related disciplines and science.” Asch and Marshall hoped to “stimulate, discover, develop, foster, coordinate, plan, improve and encourage all aspects of educational instruction,” specifically, by having the new organization distribute their own films—and in time, films by others committed to using film to explore the diversity of world culture. For some years, Marshall and Asch were DER, and Marshall remained in close touch with the organization until his death; but working within the parameters the two filmmakers had set up, Sue Cabezas, hired as administrative manager in 1974, and Cynthia Close, who became DER’s executive director in 1993 when Cabezas left, developed DER into an effective distributor. Currently based in Watertown, Massachusetts, DER now distributes hundreds of films by nearly three hundred filmmakers, and its collections of John Marshall and Timothy Asch films and papers are the core of the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Studies Film Archive.

      Other accomplished ethnographic filmmakers have visited Harvard and have taught there over the decades: Jean Rouch, for several years during the early 1980s, for example, and more recently, David McDougall. And by the end of the first decade of the new millennium, the Cambridge tradition of ethnographic film production had been revived by Lucien Castaing-Taylor at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. Along with his partner, Ilisa Barbash (currently a curator of visual anthropology at the Peabody Museum), Castaing-Taylor studied visual anthropology at the University of Southern California with Asch, then earned his Ph.D. in anthropology at Berkeley. At Harvard, he and Barbash completed a feature film (Sweetgrass, 2009), documenting the final moments of a century-old practice of herding sheep into Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture, and in 2006 Castaing-Taylor established the Sensory Ethnography Lab, which has nurtured a cadre of accomplished and adventurous filmmakers interested in using cinema to provide sensory experiences of other cultures or cultural practices that are in the process of transformation—experiences that cannot be encoded within written anthropological texts.

      A prime mover in the development of personal documentary was Ed Pincus, whose Diaries: 1971–1976 (1980) reveals the struggles of maintaining a marriage during an era of social experimentation. At MIT, Pincus had considerable influence on a younger generation of filmmakers. Miriam Weinstein, for example, explored her relationship with her father in My Father the Doctor (1972), her marriage with Peter Feinstein in Living with Peter (1973) and We Get Married Twice (1973); and during the 1970s and 1980s, Jeff Kreines, Ann Schaetzel, Robb Moss, Michel Negroponte, Mark Rance, John Gianvito, and other veterans of the MIT Film Section explored a variety of approaches to using their personal experiences as the subject of documentary. The best-known filmmaker to come out of the MIT program is Ross McElwee, whose chronicling of his own life and family—in Backyard (1984), Sherman’s March (1986), Time Indefinite (1994), Six O’Clock News (1996), Bright Leaves (2003), In Paraguay (2009), and Photographic Memory (2012)—is well known and has become widely influential.

      At Harvard, Alfred Guzzetti began making his own contributions to the development of personal documentary first with Family Portrait Sittings (1975), which explores the ways in which families construct mythic versions of their histories, and subsequently with films about his children. In 2012 he returned to the personal mode in Time Exposure, a video homage to his parents’ support of his filmmaking. Joined at Harvard first by McElwee in 1986 and soon after by Robb Moss, Guzzetti and his colleagues have been inspirational to a generation of younger filmmakers, some of whom have explored the personal documentary (Nina Davenport, Alexander Olch), while others have incorporated dimensions of personal documentary into other forms: Andrew Bujalski’s influential “Mumblecore” films, for example, while fictional, owe a good deal to the personal documentary approach.⁹

      PRAGMATISM: LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE

      What is it about the Boston area, and Cambridge in particular, that can account for a continuing preeminence in the production of documentary? Certainly, the area’s remarkable cluster of educational institutions has created not only a context for the production of films that serve the purposes of education but also academic programs that have nurtured prospective filmmakers: Boston University, Emerson College, the Massachusetts College of Art, MIT, and Harvard, in particular, have long served filmmaking students. Further, the steady production of independent documentaries in the Boston area has also been fueled by the strong presence of nonprofit media organizations. In addition to WGBH, the Center for Independent Documentary, Filmmakers Collaborative, the former Boston Film and Video Foundation, and more recently the LEF Foundation have all played important roles by facilitating the production and exhibition of independent nonfiction film. This network of academic and nonprofit organizations remains