American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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fire, the supposition being that out of this experience will result a more dependable . . . soldier than the one who reads in a manual that someday he may be shot at. . . . It might seem that the point which should be brought in here as justification for the use of films in anthropology is that a film can provide a close approximation to otherwise unavailable field experiences.
Ultimately, Gardner argues that since experiential learning requires considerable integration of information from various senses, “the film which best achieves the ‘experience’ type learning effect must be left in the hands of creative artists.”
By 1954, when Gardner began working with John Marshall on the editing of what would become The Hunters, he had had some experience in producing, directing, and editing film; he had developed his thinking about documentary filmmaking as a creative enterprise; he had earned the confidence of the administration at the Peabody Museum; and he had been in touch with the Marshall family for more than a year. Especially given that Gardner was seven years John Marshall’s senior when they began working together (Gardner was twenty-nine; Marshall, twenty-two), it would not be surprising if Gardner had substantial input into The Hunters, though over the decades there has been some question about the nature and extent of this input (fig. 7). According to Gardner, his contribution was to collaborate with Marshall at the Peabody’s Film Study Center (the !Kung footage was the original film to be studied at the center) in expanding a 45-minute edit that Marshall had produced into the 75-minute film that was released in 1957.
In his description of the process, however, Marshall claims that “The Hunters was edited on the third floor of our family home on Bryant Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts between 1954 and 1956,” and he would later seem to express frustration with the presumption that Gardner had had a major role in the film: when asked about his sense of the way “The Hunters was being taken up” during the years following its release, he comments, “Yes, well, we got an award. They gave Bob an award for it.”7 In what remains the most critical essay on Gardner’s filmmaking, Jay Ruby questions what he sees as Gardner’s tendency to take excessive credit for some of the projects he has been involved in: “John Marshall’s name does not even appear in the 1957 article Gardner wrote discussing the activities of the Film Study Center. Unless you knew otherwise, the article would lead you to believe that Robert Gardner made The Hunters by himself.”8 In The Impulse to Preserve (2006) Gardner claims only “a minor role [in] collaborating with John Marshall” on The Hunters; and in his introduction to Making Dead Birds (2007), Gardner calls Marshall “The Hunters’ principal and talented young author.”9
FIGURE 7. John Kennedy Marshall (left foreground) and Robert Gardner during the early days at Harvard's Film Study Center. Courtesy Robert Gardner.
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.”