John Marshall (filmmaker)

John Kennedy Marshall was an American anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, born in Boston on 12 November 1932 and died on 22 April 2005. He is best known for more than fifty years of filming the Juǀʼhoansi, also called the !Kung, of Namibia, beginning with a 1950 expedition led by his father to the Kalahari. Working with a 16mm camera and the advice to film what people did naturally, he made The Hunters in 1957 and later a long series of short films, and his observational approach anticipated cinéma vérité. He was the cinematographer on Fred Wiseman's first documentary, Titicut Follies, and he shot and produced a series of short films on police work in Pittsburgh. In 1968 he and Tim Asch founded Documentary Educational Resources, a non-profit distributor of cross-cultural films for classrooms. His footage is held by the Smithsonian Institution's Human Studies Film Archives, and the collection was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2009. The Society for Visual Anthropology gave him a lifetime achievement award in 2003.