'And he siad they were Ju/Wasi, the people...':History and Myth in John Marshall's 'Bushmen Films' 1957-2000

This article is an examination of a filmmaker whose films have captured and collided with fragments of southern African history over half a century. The filmmaking of pioneering, American documentary filmmaker John Marshall constitutes a 50-year filmic record of the Ju/Wasi Bushmen of northern Namibia. Marshall's films reflect history by recording the physical, political and social changes amongst a group of people from the 1950s up until, and into, the 2000s, in the changing context of southern Africa's convulsive colonial and postcolonial, historical landscape. His films also constitute a visual record of changing discourses about the limits and potential of documentary filmmaking. In this article, both of these strands of film-as-historical-record will be examined. Furthermore, by considering two of John Marshall's major films historically, it shows how the process of documentary filmmaking can produce ‘primary source’ material, which can become a metonym for the subject matter it depicts. For John Marshall, who spent much of the second half of the twentieth century trying to undo mythical perceptions about Ju/Wasi Bushmen, the intractability of the visual image, once embedded in popular conceptions of its subject matter, was motivation for a lifetime of activism. Yet, it is argued, Marshall's films reveal a complex interplay between filmmaker and subjects, which qualifies the idea that the tenacious and still popular myth of Bushmen as pristine primitives is merely one imposed by filmmakers and academics.