American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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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 to bring salt back to the village; between warriors attending to a comrade’s wounds and a group of younger warriors, still at 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