Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Scott MacDonald. American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. 424 pp.

Review by Charles Warren

8 March 2016

This large book addresses a large and important subject: the impressive array of creative nonfictional filmmaking centered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, ever since the late 1950s. Filmmakers there have shared a filmmaking philosophy and approach and have maintained among themselves an artistic and intellectual community—centered particularly in the filmmaking programs of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ethnographic film and personal documentary might seem quite separate realms, but Scott MacDonald argues rightly that in Cambridge the two have been deeply related. Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds (1963), about warring tribes in New Guinea, or Rivers of Sand (1975), about the abuse of women in an Ethiopian village, reflect Gardner’s sense of violence within himself and within human culture at large. In his anxiety over mortality, Gardner identifies with the anxiety of those he films and their striving through ritual and art to transcend death. Gardner’s poetic films form his gestures of creativity in consort with those he films. We are very far here from detached or academic observation. And so it goes with the self-awareness and passion of John Marshall’s many films about the !Kung hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari in southern Africa, or Timothy Asch’s The Ax Fight (1975), about the Yanomamo of South America, or Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s Sweetgrass (2009), about Montana sheep herders, or Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan (2012), about New England commercial fishermen. Conversely, films about the filmmaker’s family and personal relationships, such as Ed Pincus’s Diaries: 1971–1976, or Miriam Weinstein’s Living with Peter (1973), or Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March (1986), or Robb Moss’s The Same River Twice (2003), provide an ethnography of the New England counterculture of a certain era, or the New South, or the transition from youthful California river rafting to middle age and its responsibilities.

MacDonald’s procedure is to take up individual films one by one, filling in the Cambridge history of interactions and teacher/student relationships as he goes along. The accounts of films are mainly descriptive rather than analytical, but it is a description that makes one want to go out and see films, and there are many shrewd remarks on the structure and voice of films.

MacDonald frequently quotes William James and ties the Cambridge work to James’s idea that reality is fluid and ever changing, and that the knowledge of it comes best through experience and engagement. The Cambridge film practice answers to this idea of a way of knowing. A more immediate presence for Cambridge filmmakers, whom MacDonald might have said more about, has been Stanley Cavell, who co-taught with Gardner at Harvard in the 1960s, and whose lectures McElwee attended while editing Sherman’s March and beginning to teach filmmaking. Cavell’s zeal for the integrity of film as an art form, his analytic powers, and his concept of “acknowledgment” as a way of knowing alternative to rational knowledge, affected everybody in the filmmaking world around him.

This book does justice to a significant and extensive body of documentary filmmaking. It should be read along with MacDonald’s subsequent Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (2015), which collects interviews with many of the Cambridge filmmakers.