‘At the Other End of the camera’: Film through history in John Marshall's documentaries

Abstract

John Marshall's five-part A Kalahari Family (2002) is the subject of this paper. I shall discuss Marshall's film-making techniques, his shift from amateur/adventurer through conventional documentary, cinéma vérité to reflexivity and advocacy. Marshall was part of the Ricky Leacock, Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch and Maysles brothers' generation in the United States and contributed fundamentally to the development of this documentary film movement. A Kalahari Family is Marshall's response to his anthropological critics. John's first footage among people in the Kalahari was exposed in 1950 and his last is in A Kalahari Family (2002). This series is culled from over a million feet of 16mm footage and outtakes, not including Marshall's recent video documentation. Marshall's corpus of released titles and out-takes is truly film in history and film through history, history on film and a chronology of new techniques, technologies and theories, some of which he himself wrote and innovated. Despite his significant aesthetic and reflective theoretical contributions to documentary, John was always more concerned with those ‘in front of the camera’ than he was with those who studied film as film. Herein lay the source of his conflicts with the Kalahari anthropological community and development NGOs, the subject of this study.

Keywords:

• Bushman
• Ju/'hoansi
• John Marshall
• cinéma vérité
• development
• advocacy