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group of !Kung he got to know.²⁴

      That during his early decades as a filmmaker, John Marshall would become attached to the idea that he had discovered an Eden, what at least for him was an Eden, is hardly surprising. It is one of the central conceits of my book, The Garden in the Machine, that within the rapidly transforming America of the late twentieth century, American cinema (filmmaking and filmgoing) became an arena not, of course, for experiencing an actual Eden, but for producing cinematic experiences that provided Edenic moments.²⁵ In a world recovering from a century of warfare, and from the psychic shock of learning the true extent of the Holocaust (an event that seemed to render all ideas of innocence in modern society absurd), any number of filmmakers came to understand that their mission was to recover some sense of innocence, some sense of the world before the Fall. Without even the idea of innocence, how could more humane societies be developed? Marshall’s idylls of the !Kung have come to seem untenable ethnographically, but they are understandable both psychologically and aesthetically—and they remain moving and in their own ways revealing.

      PEDAGOGY

      Making and poisoning arrows is an ingenious application of collected knowledge. There is nothing obvious about the use of the particular grubs in the particular way. The combination of accident and invention that produced the technique would be impossible to reconstruct. Furthermore, the ammount [sic] those people know about their world is phenomenal. They have names for almost every kind of mouse that lives in Nyae Nyae (there are a great many species). They recognize more sub-species of plants than botanists commonly do. Men’s knowledge of the behavior of animals is extraordinary; not all men, of course, but the masters of their profession are masters indeed. Somehow all this knowledge gets, or did get, passed from one generation to another. It is not, however, passed on only as an integrated body of specific knowledge wrapped up in a forgone conclusion. Each man’s experience with his profession is different and no two mixtures of poison that I ever saw had the same ingredients. Also, no two men spoor quite alike. They seem to operate on a few principles which they modify constantly.

      JOHN MARSHALL, “THE ARROW MAKERS”²⁶

      John Marshall’s filmmaking career developed in three distinct phases and reflects three different kinds of experience. During the 1950s, he learned to shoot film and found his way into !Kung practices and rituals with his camera. Beginning in 1957 with The Hunters, he began to edit the material he had collected (first with Robert Gardner at the Peabody Museum, later with Timothy Asch), fashioning individual films, and during the following seventeen years, produced sixteen short films about the Ju/’hoansi. In these short films (Marshall called them “sequence films” and the term has come to mean usually short ethnographic films about particular dimensions of a culture) we can see him trying one, then another editing strategy for presenting !Kung culture to the audience. And finally, developments within !Kung culture that had already begun during the 1950s, though they were not particularly evident to the Marshalls when they arrived in the Kalahari, accelerated during the 1960s and 1970s, forcing Marshall to reconsider his earlier work and, as a media maker, to move in new directions. N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman (1980) represented a radically different approach that Marshall continued to develop through his capstone work, A Kalahari Family (2001). The evolution of Marshall’s career also offers viewers three different kinds of experience, related to Marshall’s own development, but also distinct from it—more on this later.

      This second phase of Marshall’s career has its own contours, determined by Marshall’s quest to find what was most valuable for an audience in the footage he had shot during the 1950s. For a time, he seems to have assumed, as Flaherty apparently did, that, given the widespread stereotyping of indigenous peoples, film experiences that provided an informed but friendly window into indigenous worlds might work to confront stereotypes and to help audiences see these peoples (and themselves) more fully as part of a larger humanity. Certainly Nanook represented a radically different sense of Native Americans than most films offered during the first decades of film history; and from the beginning, the Marshalls’ films revealed the “bushmen” not simply as interesting, but exemplary. As John Marshall says in his voice-over at the beginning of Playing with Scorpions, “!Kung people by and large are not excited by the thought of dangerous encounters with each other or their environment. They do not respect the warrior or admire the struggle against nature. Such follies, they believe, are provoked by the senseless and characterize the red people (Europeans) and the animals without hooves (the Bantu).” What Marshall felt he had witnessed during the 1950s in Nyae Nyae must have seemed all the more remarkable in the late 1960s and early 1970s during the throes of the war in Vietnam. Indeed, there has been some conjecture that the Marshall family’s involvement with the !Kung was originally instigated by Laurence Marshall’s feeling of complicity with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: at Raytheon he had overseen the production of the trigger mechanism used in the original atom bombs. According to John Marshall, the elder Marshall “went into a kind of shock when atomic bombs were used against Japan.”²⁷

      I see A Group of Women, A Joking Relationship, and Baobab Play as personal films, not in the sense of the “personal documentary” explored later in this volume, but in the sense that Stan Brakhage made personal films about his family and as a means of expressing his personal concerns and ecstasies. But within the canon of Marshall’s films about the Ju/’hoansi, these three films are anomalies, precisely in their refusal to be openly instructive. Laurence Marshall’s assumption that “truth could be discovered by objective means in any field” and that “most art was mushy” had a lasting impact on John, even once he had learned new ways of seeing from his friend ≠Toma and other Ju/’hoansi.²⁸ Laurence’s influence, when combined with the fact that John’s shooting had been done under the auspices of the Peabody Museum and the Smithsonian, resulted in a decision to work with the footage he had recorded so that it might be useful in academic contexts, and in the 1960s and early 1970s, this meant within the traditional conventions of documentary cinema: that is, Marshall came to feel that his sequence films needed to provide, insofar as feasible, teachable information about the !Kung and about hunter-gatherers—though the resulting films do offer moments that evoke the earlier, more personal films.

      After A Group of Women and A Joking Relationship, which forgo narration entirely, Marshall returned to voice-over, sometimes using it in a manner not very different from the pervasive commentary in The Hunters—this is the case in Bitter Melons (1971), A Rite of Passage (1972), and Debe’s Tantrum (1972)—but more often, employing a general formula that seems to have been a compromise between the desire to let his interaction with the Ju/’hoansi generate his films and the need to make the material he had collected usable within an academic context. Beginning in 1969–70 with N/um Tchai: The Ceremonial Dance of the !Kung Bushmen (1969), An Argument about a Marriage (1969) and N!owa T’ama: The Melon Tossing Game (1970), and continuing through The Wasp Nest (1972), Playing with Scorpions (1972), Men Bathing (1973), and The Meat Fight (1974), Marshall opens each film with a précis, a voice-over introduction providing information about a certain event or ritual, supplemented with still images of the people and actions Marshall describes. After this précis, the body of the film is presented without voice-over. This strategy allows Marshall to offer information about the Ju/’hoansi but also demonstrates an implicit commitment to careful looking and listening on the part of the audience. Marshall’s resistance to transforming the complex San culture into information is sometimes evident in the way he speaks of this two-part structure within the films. In N/um Tchai: The Ceremonial Dance of the !Kung Bushmen, for example, the informational précis is not preceded by a formal title, and Marshall makes clear that the longer body of the film that follows is “the film proper”; only once the précis is complete do we see the film’s formal title.²⁹

      N/um Tchai: The Ceremonial Dance of the !Kung Bushmen and N!owa T’ama: The Melon Tossing Game, as their similarly arranged titles imply, can be understood as a diptych, not only in the sense that both focus on San rituals, but because Marshall’s way of depicting these activities reveals a variety of parallels and interrelationships. Both films focus on dancing and singing, in N/um Tchai as part of a curing ceremony that includes men moving into trance (the Ju/’hoansi call it “half- death”), and in N!owa T’ama as part of symbolic game that women play, which can also cause

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