John Kennedy Marshall

Of Belmont, died on April 22 of cancer. Mr. Marshall was a world renowned ethnographic & documentary filmmaker whose career began in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia, in Southern Africa in 1951. There he and his family met a small group of Ju/'hoansi Bushmen. His work with and for them became a lifelong relationship which included the completion of a film series in 2003 entitled "A Kalahari Family". Marshall developed an approach to documenting the life and culture of these people that incorporated sound and subtitles. His subjects began to speak for themselves. Marshall produced 26 films from the vast amount of footage that be collected over the years. He worked to document the life of the Ju/'hoansi and to promote grassroots development projects that support agriculture and recognition of Ju/'hoan land rights. In 1968, in collaboration with Timothy Asch, John Marshall founded Documentary Educational Resources (DER). Their work forms the core of DER's film archive as well as the basis for the creation of the Human Studies Film Archive at the Smithsonian Institution. Marshall's films have been used worldwide for education and research and he has been honored by film retrospectives in New York, Washington, D.C., Mexico, and Germany. He received the lifetime achievement award from the American Anthropological Association in 2003. Mr. Marshall received a B.A. from Harvard in 1955, a Master's in Anthropology from Yale University and an Honorary degree in Fine Arts in 1995 from the Rhode Island School of Design. He also studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School and in Fontainbleau, France. He is survived by his wife Alexandra Eliot Marshall, his daughter, Sonya, two step sons, Frederick & Christopher Eliot, five grandchildren, & his sister, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. Funeral arrangements are incomplete. Brown & Sons Funeral Home 617-484-2534