Ethnographic video

January 17, 2010

Alexander Street Press held its always-interesting customer appreciation breakfast Sunday morning, January 17,  at the Boston Public Library.

The venue in Copley Square was a good choice, as it was nearer to most of the hotels rather than the Convention Center.

In anticipation of the launch of its new Ethnographic Video Online collection in February, Alexander Street offered Cynthia Close, executive director of Documentary Educational Resources, as its breakfast speaker. DER is a documentary film distributor best known for its series on the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in Namibia. The company was cofounded in 1968 by filmmaker John Marshall (1932-2005), whose 1957 film The Hunters follows the hunt of a giraffe by four Bushmen over a five-day period.

Close provided an intriguing overview of Marshall's work in the Kalahari, adding that his films, including the 1980 documentary N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman, was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in late 2009. It all started in 1950 when he was a teenager and his father, Laurence Marshall (the founding president of Raytheon Corporation), decided to take his family on a vacation to the remotest part of the world that he could find. Young John's job was to operate the camera, a responsibility that continued through several other trips–expeditions, really–as the entire family became fascinated with the hunting and gathering lifestyle and the unique click language of the Bushmen.

Marshall's work will be included in Alexander Street's ethnographic video collection, which will contain more than 750 hours of footage from every continent and hundreds of cultures.

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