American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

and films can offer to thoughtful audiences. To paraphrase what Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell said, long ago—about books—in “Film in the University,” I know that the films I discuss here are better than anything I say about them, but I also believe it is one, perhaps after all the fundamental, value of a scholar-teacher to put such films before possible viewers to show that this adult human being takes them with whatever seriousness is at his disposal.¹⁶

      It should be mentioned, of course, that Cavell’s fascination with movies and moviegoing as a subject for philosophy was deeply influential in the development of a filmmaking community in Cambridge and on the thinking and work of Robert Gardner and Alfred Guzzetti, in particular—as well as on William Rothman, who was Cavell’s student at Harvard, then taught at Harvard, and has made important scholarly contributions to thinking about documentary films produced in Cambridge. Of those who have explored the accomplishments of Cambridge documentary filmmakers, Rothman has been the most alert both to particular contributions and to the nature of the filmmaking community that has nurtured them.¹⁷

      THE MISSION OF AMERICAN ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM AND PERSONAL DOCUMENTARY: THE CAMBRIDGE TURN

      Scholarship on documentary cinema has proliferated during recent decades in the wake of Erik Barnouw’s still estimable Documentary (Oxford University Press, 1974) and the prolific work of Bill Nichols, beginning with Ideology and the Image (Indiana University Press, 1981) and Representing Reality (Indiana University Press, 1991). The establishment of the annual Visible Evidence Conference by Jane Gaines and Michael Renov in 1993 was instrumental in establishing a community of scholars interested in exploring both the long history of documentary and the burgeoning production of new documentaries and new documentary forms around the world; these scholars have produced, under the guidance of Gaines and Renov, the Visible Evidence series of books on documentary, published by the University of Minnesota Press. If for many years, little substantive commentary could be found on documentary in general and/or on particular documentary films, it has become a considerable task to keep up with new work in the field. Of course, any number of scholarly explorations of documentary filmmaking have been important for the discussions in American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn . The inventive selection of films discussed in Catherine Russell’s Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Duke University Press, 1999), and in Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski’s Documenting the Documentary (Wayne State University Press, 1998), for example, confirmed my growing interest in moving beyond my interest in avant-garde film to explore more fully the variety of nonfiction film practices.

      More specifically and more recently, Stella Bruzzi’s New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2000) has been useful in drawing my attention to the fact “that documentaries are inevitably the result of the intrusion of the filmmaker onto the situation being filmed, that they are performative because they acknowledge the construction and artificiality of even the non-fiction film and propose, as the underpinning truth, the truth that emerges through the encounter between filmmakers, subjects and spectators.”¹⁸ And Dai Vaughan in For Documentary (University of California Press, 1999), a collection of essays based on Vaughan’s experiences working as a documentary cinematographer, has helped me understand that, while fiction cannot lie (“How would you set about telling a lie in fiction?”), our experience of documentary film is defined by our assumption that documentary can lie, can betray our expectation that an image represents “what, within its given context, it may reasonably be taken as representing.”¹⁹ Both Bruzzi and Vaughan recognize that whatever distortions of “reality” are inevitable in the process of representation, sometimes “it seems necessary to remind writers on documentary that reality does exist and that it can be represented without such a representation either invalidating or having to be synonymous with the reality that preceded it.”²⁰ Without a sense that the experience of documentary film can reveal something worth knowing about “reality,” we cannot learn from it—and yet, clearly we do learn from these experiences, even if what we learn is that we cannot be sure of what we understand, that all truth is tentative and evolving.

      Documentary has become theorized in recent decades, and as a result we have come to more clearly understand the many issues raised in attempts to represent reality, but a good many of the most interesting contributions to documentary history have remained underappreciated. The fundamental mission of this volume is not to engage in the ongoing debate about the potentials and limitations of documentary in general, but to bring long overdue attention to specific Cambridge-based filmmakers who have made major contributions to ethnographic filmmaking and personal documentary and to explore what seem to me their most interesting films. Both genres have received some critical and scholarly attention (this will be evident in subsequent chapters), but for the most part commentary on particular films has been constricted by their categorization as “documentary”: to treat the films discussed in The Cambridge Turn solely as instances of traditional and ongoing debates about documentary filmmaking is to miss much of what the films have to offer as contributions to the history of film art.

      In certain instances my approach will seem to fly in the face of filmmakers’ own senses of themselves. Both John Marshall and Timothy Asch resisted thinking of their work as “artistic.” Their conscious goal was education, not the production of works of film art. And yet, looking at their films now, it is clear that whatever the educational value of their work (and in some cases it is considerable), their films are in fact interesting aesthetically, and they themselves can be, and in my view should be, understood as visual artists whose work relates in a variety of ways to the work of filmmakers who are generally regarded, and who have regarded themselves, as visual artists. My discussions of particular filmmakers and films offer what I hope are new and useful insights into the accomplishments of particular films and the shapes of individual careers; and in general American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn is an attempt to situate the considerable achievements of these filmmakers and their work within a larger sense of film history and in some instances the histories of literature and painting. Of course, given my decades-long fascination with what (for better or worse) continues to be called “avant-garde” cinema, it is probably inevitable that I see a good many intersections between the films I discuss here and films usually identified with that category.

      The overall trajectory of my discussions is meant both to suggest how ethnographic filmmaking and personal documentary have evolved during the past half-century and to reveal some of the ways in which what originally may have seemed quite different approaches to filmmaking have influenced each other, sometimes becoming imbricated with each other. While John Marshall initially attempted to provide what he understood as a detached, objective depiction of the lives of the !Kung, his developing awareness of how the lives of these people were transforming—indeed, how his family’s involvement with these people had hastened this transformation—caused Marshall to become personally involved in the !Kung struggle to retain something of their culture and their dignity as a people. Conversely, while Ross McElwee’s films about the American South seem to focus on his own family and his filmmaking, the resulting films provide viewers with a considerable panorama of southern life during a particular era—not a formal ethnography, of course, but a fascinating and engaging set of cultural insights.

      

      The extent of my commentary on individual filmmakers and films has depended both on my sense of the longevity of particular careers and contributions and on the complexity of specific films. Early chapters of The Cambridge Turn are focused on careers that have evolved over a period of sometimes more than half a century. Later chapters focus on selected contributions by often-younger makers. In some instances, important but limited accomplishments—limited meaning either that a filmmaker made one specific contribution to Cambridge filmmaking, or that a particular contribution is historically important but less than remarkable aesthetically—by individual filmmakers are included within overviews of longer careers. Of course, I have tended to write in more detail about films that I have found especially complex, enlightening, and useful.

      A note on terminology: throughout this project I have used film to refer to moving-image art and document, whether the individual “films” were shot or are available on 35mm, 16mm, or 8mm celluloid, or as video in the ever-proliferating