American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ the front, shouting humorous insults at the enemy; between Weyak weaving and participating in battle; even, during the preparation for a cremation, between wood being piled for the fire and wind blowing the leaves of trees—a suggestion, perhaps, that the burning of the body will free the soul to wander on its own. In general, Gardner’s voice-over confirms the transitions between one activity and another (from time to time, these vocal confirmations seem both awkward and a bit too rote; Gardner has admitted that his reading of the text in Dead Birds was not what he had hoped for: “In fact, in recent years I have been greatly tempted to both rewrite the text and ‘re-voice’ the narration”),¹³ though at times the imagery and the soundtrack diverge.

      As depicted in Dead Birds, virtually the entirety of Dani life is focused on the ritual warfare carried on between the men of the Willihiman-Wallalua clan and the men of the Wittaia clan (women garden and tend to home and children); and the consistency with which Gardner frames his shots so that the Warabara (the small mountain near which the ritual battles are fought) is visible expresses this: the visual motif of the Warabara suggests the clan members’ continuing consciousness of the current state of the warfare. In fact, the most dramatic moment Dead Birds occurs during the religious ceremony called “Pig Treasure,” which brings several neighboring villages together for a feast—a rare moment in Willihiman-Wallalua life when the war seems momentarily forgotten. As the feast culminates, news arrives that a young boy, Weaké, has been killed near the Aikhé River by the Wittaia, transforming the balance of power in the war. The arrival of this news is dramatized by a 26-second, nine-shot montage that interrupts the previous steady flow of the depiction of the feast and leads into the extended funeral ceremony for the boy. The remainder of Dead Birds focuses on the various effects of Weaké’s death: the victory celebration of the enemy, the sacrifice of two joints on the fingers of several young girls; Weyak’s and Pua’s ritual ways of coming to terms with their loss; and finally, on this group’s restoring momentary balance by killing an enemy and mounting their own celebration, which is presented in considerable detail at the conclusion of the film.

      While John Marshall’s focus in The Hunters is on the hunters’ skill in tracking and killing the giraffe and on the democracy represented by their careful distribution of the meat among their band, Gardner’s focus in Dead Birds involves a kind of double consciousness: he is committed to representing the Dani as distinct and separate from his own world—paradoxically so that he can suggest general parallels between their lives and ours. As the phrase, “the impulse to preserve,” the title of an early essay and of his recent book, suggests, Gardner means to create a vision of a culture before its (by then, inevitable) transformation by modern life and modern technology: he means to preserve at least a cinematic memory of a culture that has endured for many centuries. In the preface to Under the Mountain Wall, Peter Matthiessen, who shares Gardner’s attitude, puts the purpose of the Harvard-Peabody Expedition of 1961 this way: “Its purpose was to live among the people as unobtrusively as possible and to film and record their wars, rituals, and daily life with a minimum of interference, in order that a true picture of a Stone Age culture . . . might be preserved.”¹⁴

      Gardner goes even further than Matthiessen, however, in suppressing the degree to which Dani culture was already in a process of transformation. Though Under the Mountain Wall focuses on traditional Dani culture, and indeed, depicts many of the specific events recorded in Dead Birds, it is framed very differently from Gardner’s film. The first words in Matthiessen’s text are “One morning in April, in the year when the old history of the Kurelu came to an end . . .”; and his chronicle concludes with Weyak (in Under the Mountain Wall, his name is “Weaklekek”) climbing into his watch tower and seeing “a strange smoke” drifting on the wind “from down the valley,” where “the remnants of Wako Aik’s Mokoko tribe clustered for protection around the village of the Waro; this people had come out of the sky to live on the Mokokos’ abandoned lands”: “The first Waro had come to the Kurelu just after the last mauwe, through the land of the Wittaia. He had white skin, and he was accompanied by black men dressed like himself. The strangers had been stopped at the frontier, and a warrior named Awulapa, brother of Tamugi, had been shot down and killed by a Waro weapon with a noise that echoed from the mountains. . . . The Waro had not left the valley; already they were building huts among the river tribes throughout the valley.”¹⁵ The only evidence in Dead Birds that the transformation of Dani life is already occurring is implicit: the film could not have been shot had modern life not already arrived in New Guinea. Further, the final celebration sequences in Gardner’s film seem clearly performed for the camera, so perhaps Gardner means to end the film by drawing attention to the intersection of two ways of life.

      Both Gardner and Matthiessen participate in what now seems a presumptive brand of historicizing by assuming that the Willihiman-Wallalua and Wittaia clans have been in a kind of stasis since the Stone Age, and that no fundamental change in their history has occurred until very recently, that is, until the arrival of Western white men. The very diversity of lifestyles on New Guinea would seem to give the lie to this assumption: surely, there have been a variety of historical developments on the island, some of them considerable enough to produce a range of subcultures—though the absence of a written record keeps these changes from being more than conjectural, at least for these white visitors. Of course, the idea that Matthiessen and Gardner are depicting Stone Age people was probably useful in promoting the book and film, but I think Gardner’s determination to depict the life of the Willihiman-Wallalua clan as a form of cultural integrity, not yet affected by modern history, has two particular functions.

      First, Gardner’s commitment to the depiction of a way of life that, on the surface, seems radically, even shockingly different from our own allows him to raise a deeper question, a question that is suggested by what Gardner has called “a certain despair” about his own culture: “I grew up thinking that much of what America stood for was not particularly noble or uplifting. These feelings were exaggerated by events like the war in Viet Nam, various assassinations and so on. Going far away was cowardly but attractive in that it offered the prospect of refuge.”¹⁶ The expedition to New Guinea might have begun as an escape from American culture (fig. 8), but Gardner’s exploration and witnessing of the lives of the Willihiman-Wallalua revealed fundamental patterns that seemed increasingly to speak to the life he had escaped: Was not the United States involved in its own forms of periodic ritual warfare; did not men determine the national agenda; were we not at pains to assuage our own “ghosts”; and did not some of our nation’s most widely held beliefs—the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, for instance—challenge simple logic and common sense?

      FIGURE 8. Robert Gardner with New Guinea men, during the shooting of Dead Birds (1964). Courtesy Robert Gardner.

      Second, Gardner’s interest in the commonalities implicit within disparate cultural practices is evident in a particular motif in Dead Birds: one of the first things we learn about Weyak is that, when he is not standing guard in his tower or actively at war with the Wittaia, he entertains himself by weaving a shell band, a long woven strip on which shells are mounted at regular intervals. Indeed, weaving is the first thing we see Weyak doing, and Gardner returns to this weaving periodically (the narration makes clear that these shell bands have a ritual function: they are used to commemorate birth, marriage, and death). During the final minutes of Dead Birds, Gardner intercuts between the Willihiman-Wallalua dancing and chanting and Weyak’s finishing the shell band he has been working on and then rolling it up. The shell band is clearly a metaphor for filmmaking and for Gardner’s film in particular. Both the shell band and Dead Birds commemorate moments of death, and both are means, as Gardner’s final voice-over in the film suggests, “to ease the burden of knowing what birds will never know, and what . . . [the Dani], as men, who have forever killed each other, cannot forget”: the inevitability of death itself. For Gardner, the fundamental human issue is mortality, and what unites all men and women, across the globe and from the Stone Age until the present, is their production of cultural artifacts and rituals—jewelry, dances, music, films—as a means of simultaneously distracting them from the inevitability of mortality and of materially СКАЧАТЬ