-
3. Timothy Asch
- University of California Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
111 In the films he completed in Cambridge during the 1970s, Timothy Asch rigorously avoided reference to his personal experiences in the interest of foregrounding the experiences of those he documented. Ed Pincus remembers a visit Asch made to his filmmaking class at MIT: Asch came to show some Yanomamo films to my class at MIT—this would have been some time before 1975. We had lunch before going to class (Tim was an old friend; I’d known him for years), and he was describing his experiences filming the Yanomamo. Maybe you remember how the Yanomamo tribesmen tie a string around their foreskins so that their penises are belted up on their belly? Well, Tim told me that it was so hot in the jungle that he had to go naked, and since he was circumcised, his penis couldn’t be tied up, and as a result, it flopped around. The Yanomamo men thought this was funny, disgusting, even sexually threatening, and there was a hostile relationship between him and the tribesmen from then on. Tim said they would take him into the woods and try to lose him, or they would climb a tree and spread their cheeks and fart down on him—stuff like that. Incredible stories. So when we went into class, I said, “Tim, tell them about what you were telling me at lunch,” and he looked at me blankly, as if we’d not had this conversation. He had put on his ethnographic hat. At that time it was not okay for ethnographers to talk about their process of interacting with other peoples; they were supposed to remain detached. But the conflict Asch described was more revealing than anything we would understand from just observing the Yanomamo.1 While Asch avoided revealing how working with the Yanomamo affected him personally and what these experiences might have taught him about himself, he was increasingly clear about what the process of making ethnographic film was teaching 3 Timothy Asch 112 chapter 3 him about the cinematic depiction of other cultures. Further, while he joined with John Marshall in presenting himself not as a film artist but as a filmmaker in the service of anthropology, even his earliest films reveal his earlier training as an artist, and his The Ax Fight is a masterwork of film art that demonstrates how each new experience of a cinematic record of events can reveal something new about subject, filmmaker, and viewer. DODOTH MORNING AND THE ETHNOGRAPHIC DEADPAN Unlike John Marshall and Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch was not a Boston-area native, and he spent most of his life in other parts of the world. However, his presence in Cambridge during the late 1950s and the 1960s, when he helped John Marshall come to terms with the immense backlog of Marshall family footage about the Ju/’hoansi, was formative both in his own development as a filmmaker as well as for John Marshall’s. Further, the first film Asch completed, Dodoth Morning (1963), developed from his experiences working with Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who was doing the research that would result in Warrior Herdsmen, her book about the Dodoth herdsmen of northeastern Uganda (Asch supplied photographs for the book).2 Dodoth Morning was produced by the Peabody Museum in collaboration with John Marshall and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and completed while Asch was teaching in the anthropology department at Brandeis University. Beginning in 1968, his collaboration with John Marshall in the founding and formation of what became Documentary Educational Resources (DER) made a crucial contribution to the distribution of ethnographic cinema that has lasted for more than forty years. And while a research fellow in the anthropology department at Harvard from 1973 to 1979, he finished the films he is best known for, a series of collaborations with anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon on the Yanomamo people living around the headwaters of the Orinoco River in southern Venezuela and northern Brazil. Having become fascinated with still photography as a student at the Putney School in Vermont, Asch studied with Ansel Adams, Minor White, and Edward Weston at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), then did seven months of photographic fieldwork on Cape Breton Island before working as a photographer for Stars and Stripes during military service in Japan. He was continually in communication with White during these years.3 Asch received his B.A. in anthropology from Columbia University in 1959, and when Robert Gardner contacted Margaret Mead, looking...