John Marshall (filmmaker)
| John Marshall | |
|---|---|
| Born |
November 12, 1932 Cambridge, Massachusetts |
| Died | April 22, 2005 (aged 72) Boston, Massachusetts |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | anthropologist, filmmaker |
John Kennedy Marshall (November 12, 1932 – April 22, 2005) was an American anthropologist and acclaimed documentary filmmaker best known for his work in Namibia recording the lives of the Ju/'hoansi (also called the !Kung Bushmen).
Marshall was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Lorna Marshall and Laurence Kennedy Marshall and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Peterborough, New Hampshire. His sister, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, is a writer. Marshall had one daughter, Sonya. He married Dr. Alexandra Eliot, who had two sons from a previous marriage, Frederick and Christopher Eliot. Marshall held a B.A. and M.A. in Anthropology from Harvard University. Marshall died of lung cancer in April, 2005.
Marshall first traveled to the Kalahari Desert and met the Ju/'hoansi of the Nyae Nyae area in 1950 on a trip initiated by his father to search for the "Lost World of the Kalahari." Before his second trip to the Kalahari, one year later, Marshall received a 16mm Kodak camera and advice from his father, "Don't direct, John, don't try to be artistic, just film what you see people doing naturally." Marshall employed this advice during the 1950s, his films anticipated the cinema verite movement of the 1960s. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s members of the Marshall family - John Marshall, his sister Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Lorna Marshall, and Laurence Marshall - returned to the Kalahari Desert numerous times to conduct an ethnographic study of the Ju/'hoansi and document one of the last remaining hunter gatherer cultures. From 1950-1958 Marshall filmed the hunting and gathering life of the Ju/'hoansi. His first edited film, The Hunters, was released in 1957. "The Hunters" told the story of a Ju/'hoansi giraffe hunt. Marshall later realized he had unintentionally romanticized Ju/'hoan life. "The Hunters," portrayed the Ju/'hoansi as if they continued to live as they always had, where their main conflict was a struggle with nature. But when Marshall filmed them, they were actually suffering from having collided with the modern world and were subsisting primarily on gathered food and struggling to find enough to eat. Recognizing this discrepancy between reality and the portrayal of Ju/'hoansi life in "The Hunters," Marshall was determined to produce more objective, and less mediated films about the Ju/'hoansi. He produced a series of short films designed to educate without exoticizing or "imposing western narrative structures on the subjects."
...
Wikipedia