A Joking Relationship

A very short film worth mentioning on this blog is John Marshall and Tim Asche's A Joking Relationship. It is a very simple format; 13 minutes of observational film. The two characters are N!ai, the young woman who is the "star" of Marshall's !Kung series, and her great-uncle /Ti!kay. Though, without the contextual knowledge of who these characters are, the film still has surprising amount of charged subjective quality, enabling a viewer to catch a glimpse of an intimate relationship, fostering an amount of cultural understanding. The observational style creates at first an objective perspective then an experiential sense of "being there." This movement from invisibilty to visibilty is creatively done in the editing of the film (as well as the way it was shot). It begins with extreme close ups of their faces, creating a sense of ulterior space, one never really gets to be that close with someone without knowing them intimately. But we do, we are privileged to be this close, it simultaneously evokes a level of voyeurism and comfort. The shots go from extreme close up of faces to hands and different parts of the body, all the while the two are carrying on a casual dialogue which subtitles allow us to follow. These scenes convey a genuine moment, they are being playful with each other, joking.

Later the shots move to medium, now we can see the space around the two bodies. A giant rock and some trees, savannah grass in the distance. The teasing persists, N!ia tells her uncle, "My neighbor's a snake in a tree" and her Uncle replies, "I have a lion at my fire." Both cultural idioms, expressive of a world view. A world we are now serendipitously more aware of as the shots begin to move further away. Once we are at a wide shot, the subject matter of the discussion moves from teasing each other, to talking about the filmmaker. They discuss what they think "he wants" them to do. This moment the filmmaker/film-making goes from strictly observational, to participant observational. It changes the whole ethos of the film. It forces an audience to reflect upon the happenings on screen, are these characters indeed engaging in these casual moment of intimacy because John Marshall is filming them, or would it all have taken place regardless? Even if we had not had a sense of being a part of the !Kung culture up to this point, surely "overhearing" their diatribe regarding the filmmaker gives us a phenomenological tickle as to what it might have been like to be there, filming from that spot in the universe.

The final shot is an extreme wide, hinting that the filmmaker had been faraway all along. Had N!ia and her Uncle known just how closely they were being observed? Had they known their voices were being picked up from that far away? Probably not, making this exchange of teasing, comforting and joking an almost private affair. As though they were posing for still photographs as a part of the environment, and maintaining a casual conversation to pass the time.

cheers

A Joking Relationship (John Marshall and Timothy Asche, 1962)