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Jane
Author(s) -
Segal Daniel A.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1111/aman.13249
Subject(s) - citation , history , library science , media studies , sociology , computer science
Jane Goodall first became a widely known public figure—a persona would be more precise—back in the 1960s. In 1963, National Geographic published her dramatic first-person account, “My Life among Wild Chimpanzees,” with photos just as polished and compelling as one would expect. Two years later, there was a second article and, with it, a National Geographic television special, “Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees,” with the narrator played by Orson Welles. Goodall started her work with chimpanzees at twenty-six, and was thirty-one when the television special aired across the United States. Some fifty-plus years later, Jane provides what is probably the final significant construction and circulation of the Goodall persona during the biographical Goodall’s lifetime. This new film is crafted from more than one hundred hours of previously unused footage from the 1960s, which the film itself introduces more dramatically as having been “lost” and then recently “rediscovered.” Lacking audio, the footage is combined with recordings from interviews with Goodall by the film’s director, Brett Morgen, along with a Phillip Glass soundtrack. Jane also makes spare but powerful use of what the credits call “ephemera”—telegrams, letters, and pages of Goodall’s fieldnotes—without telling us which are historical artifacts and which have been re-created (or made) for the film. A final element is the use of closeup shots, some extreme, of various animals (insects, birds, snakes) to mark section breaks in the narrative—as if to underscore that the wild of nature, where Goodall famously ventured, is wild indeed. Jane’s archival footage was shot by Goodall’s first husband, Hugo van Lawick, and it establishes beyond any question that Hugo was an enormously talented photographer, of both nonhuman animals and the young Goodall; the footage thus makes clear that Hugo was an important factor in the making and triumph of the early Goodall persona. Morgen, for his part, has skillfully woven Jane’s diverse ingredients into an absorbing, compelling whole. Its boldest claim for itself is that it strips away the cheesiness and sexism of National Geographic’s 1960s representations of Goodall, thereby providing an unvarnished account of the real “Jane.” This Jane, we learn, was a feminist pathbreaker