American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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      The Peabody Museum’s accession of the !Kung footage and Gardner’s collaboration with Marshall on The Hunters, whatever the precise nature of this collaboration, established the Film Study Center; and despite the fact that Marshall and Gardner parted ways after The Hunters was finished, it seems likely that Gardner’s collaboration with John and his participation in the 1958 Marshall expedition to Nyae Nyae (an experience he found frustrating),¹⁰ helped to confirm a desire to produce his own film about a far-flung cultural group and to assemble the Harvard-Peabody expedition to the Baliem region of western New Guinea in 1961. This expedition, led by Gardner, included Dutch anthropologist Jan Broekhuyse; Harvard anthropology graduate student Karl G. Heider; photographer and sound technician Michael Rockefeller; and writer Peter Matthiessen, whose Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in Stone Age New Guinea (New York: Viking, 1962) was, along with Gardner’s Dead Birds, the best-known and most widely admired product of the expedition.

      DEAD BIRDS

      Along with The Hunters, Dead Birds, which premiered at Harvard in 1963, confirmed the Peabody Museum as the primary sponsor of ethnographic filmmaking in this country; and together, the two films came to epitomize what has become a genre of documentary filmmaking. As different as Marshall’s and Gardner’s overall attitudes and approaches to making documentary turned out to be, and may already have been in 1957 and 1963, the two films that established their reputations have a great deal in common. Both films focus on peoples and ways of life that seem unaffected by the onslaught of modern life and modern technology (except, of course, by implication, filmmaking); in this, both filmmakers are children of Flaherty—though both The Hunters and Dead Birds are more thorough in their suppression of the realities of contemporary life than Flaherty was in Nanook of the North: early in Nanook, after all, the Inuit family visits the trading post, where Nanook is introduced to the phonograph. Moana is the more relevant Flaherty film here (though Gardner has indicated that of the Flaherty films, he most admires Man of Aran).

      Both filmmakers were faced with two challenges, one of them impossible to meet, the other difficult. Since no previous feature film had been made about either the !Kung or the Dani, both filmmakers had to decide how much and what to reveal to audiences about these groups: that is, how to depict a people in a single film; and, especially since both filmmakers were coming to cinema at a time when the idea of cinema seemed to necessitate entertainment, both wanted to find a way of being interesting as they presented the wealth of new information they decided on. Not surprisingly, both The Hunters and Dead Birds are organized according to a storytelling logic, and in both, the filmmakers provide relatively continual narration that contextualizes and interprets what we see. Further, both films feature expansive landscapes, sometimes reminiscent of the landscapes the earlier Flaherty films and in classic Hollywood westerns as well as unusually intimate looks at family and social life. Both The Hunters and Dead Birds were filmed beautifully in color; and both are reasonably effective in approximating the feeling of sync sound.

      Seeing The Hunters and Dead Birds now, viewers may forget how different the experience of these films would have been fifty years ago. In 1957 and 1963 the nudity in both films was radical: it was not until 1965 that the first moment of female frontal nudity, in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, would challenge the Hays Office rules. According to Stan Brakhage, his Window Water Baby Moving (1959) could cause moviegoers to faint;¹¹ and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) could get its exhibitors arrested. Both The Hunters and Dead Birds also include moments of “violence” that would have shocked most moviegoers of the era, even those studying anthropology in college classes: the death and butchering of the giraffe in The Hunters and, especially, the killing of pigs and the corpse of a dead child being prepared for cremation in Dead Birds. The deaths of the animals remain powerful even for jaded contemporary audiences.

      Further, both films reflect an attitude that must have seemed surprising to many of those who saw The Hunters and Dead Birds during the 1950s and 1960s. Both Marshall and Gardner present aspects of !Kung and Dani culture that would have seemed strange, even bizarre, to most Americans, but without indulging in disparaging comments about them. In Bitter Melons, for example, Marshall shows how the !Kung collect water from the rumen of certain antelope, and in The Hunters, we see the men drink the blood of the dead giraffe. The voice-over presentation of these events is entirely matter-of-fact, even though Marshall had to have experienced surprise, perhaps even disgust, when he first saw these things done and would know how his viewers could be expected to react.

      This same matter-of-fact delivery of information is evident in both filmmakers’ presentation of the belief systems of the !Kung and Dani. In Dead Birds, when Weyak’s lookout tower is repaired, Gardner tells us, “Weyak magically cleans the hands that have done the potent work with the feather of a parrot,” as we see a close-up of Weyak’s hands brushing another man’s hands with a small feather. Gardner frequently describes the Dani’s consistent concern about the ghosts of the departed: as a warrior is carried back from the front, we learn that he will not have to walk, “but he must be covered to protect him from the gaze of ghosts which wounded men are careful to avoid.” And during a religious ceremony, we learn that “of great importance is the little fenced enclosure, put up as a resting place for wandering ghosts.” Nothing in Gardner’s manner of delivering any of this information suggests that he finds these ideas and activities absurd, illogical, “exotic.” It is clear that he and Marshall mean for us to see these activities and beliefs as legitimate ways of dealing with life and death. I am surprised that the combination of nudity, visceral violence, and what would have seemed a complete lack of outrage and disapproval at cultural practices that many Americans would have found repugnant did not earn both films entries in Amos Vogel’s canonical Film as a Subversive Art.¹²

      There are also significant differences between The Hunters and Dead Birds that have to do not only with the very different peoples represented but also with differences in attitude between the two filmmakers. These differences are signaled by the two titles. “The Hunters” is a straightforward indication of Marshall’s focus in the film, a focus that, later on, would embarrass him because of its overemphasis on the importance of hunting to the !Kung. “Dead Birds” refers to the ancient fable presented during the opening of Gardner’s film. As we watch a continuous, elegant, 36-second shot of a hawk in flight, Gardner’s voice-over tells of a contest between a snake and a bird to decide whether men would be like snakes, who shed their skins and have eternal life, or birds, who die: “The bird won, and from that time, all men, like birds, must die.” This opening (both the beauty of the shot of the hawk and the poetic phrasing of the fable) makes clear that Gardner sees himself as a film artist and storyteller, fascinated not simply with what this particular group does but with the idea of culture in general: Gardner is producing not simply an informational film about Dani ways of facing death but a cultural artifact, a work of art, about the idea of confronting death. After all, it is not simply the Dani who die, but all of us; and we all deal with this reality by producing the artifacts of the cultures that simultaneously distinguish and unite us.

      Both The Hunters and Dead Birds are structured in ways familiar from narrative literature and earlier cinema. Marshall’s film is framed as an epic quest narrative that leads finally to the killing of a giraffe and the reinvigoration of the hunters’ band through the distribution of the meat. Gardner chooses a different, more expansive strategy: he provides a panorama of what he had come to understand about the Willihiman-Wallalua clan of the Dani by focusing on the activities of two very different characters: the distinguished warrior Weyak and the young swineherd Pua. In general, Dead Birds intercuts between Weyak and Pua, whose days are spent in very different sectors of Dani daily life, but Gardner brings them into proximity during moments when the band or several bands join together in celebration or mourning.

      Throughout Dead Birds, Gardner’s attempt at expansiveness is reflected in his use of intercutting. He intercuts not simply between Weyak and Pua but in a variety of circumstances: between scenes where men are doing battle and women are climbing to a salt lick СКАЧАТЬ