Warm Ghosts: Review Essay on Robert Gardner's Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film

The Australian Journal of Anthropology (201 0) 21, 246-262 doi:1 0.1111/).1757-6547.201 0.00096.x

BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

Warm Ghosts Lorraine Mortimer School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University

Gardner, Robert, 2007, Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film, Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press and Harvard University, 137pp. + figs., ISBN: 978 0 87365 823 2.

Dead Birds is a translation from the Dani term for weapons, ornaments, and other articles captured in warfare. They represent, magically, victims on the other side. In fact they sometimes are referred to not as sue warek (dead birds) but ap warek (dead men) ... A Dani is a plumed warrior in his most desirous state ... I saw the Dani peo-ple, feathered and fluttering men and women, as enjoying the fate of all men and women. They dressed their lives with plumage, but faced as certain death as the rest of us drabber souls. The film attempts to say something about how we all, as humans, meet our animal fate.

Robert Gardner, in Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film (2007)

Soon both men and birds will surrender to the night. They will rest for the life and death of days to come. For each, both wait, but with the difference that men, having foreknowledge of their doom, bring a special passion to their life. They will not simply wait for death, nor will they bear it lightly when it comes. Instead, they will try with measured violence to fashion fate themselves. They kill to save their souls and, per-haps, to ease the burden of knowing what birds will never know and what they as men, who have forever killed each other, cannot forget.

Robert Gardner's narration at the end of the film, Dead Birds (1964)

A resource as rich as Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film does not often come along. Within it, much can be learned about the film-before, during and after pro-duction. For contemporary students of anthropology, the book gives one window onto the history of the discipline from the mid-1950s to the present. It contains still photographs, letters between film-maker/writer Robert Gardner and 'totem ances-tors' of ethnographic film such as Tim Asch and John Marshall, as well as anthro-pologists and officials connected to what was Netherlands New Guinea, and Gardner's camera and journal notes from the time, which are interspersed with his reflections more than 40 years later.1 We have an unusual interweaving of words and images, of technical and human background, and of banal and existential observations and questiQnings. Crafted by an individualist artist who filmed ritual warfare in an exotic place, the book presents evidence of engagement, cooperation and exchange and is an attempt to present the 'seemingly alien Dani' of the Baliem

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Valley as 'actual and accessible people' (66); as 'personalities and not as curiosities' (19). Included in the book's unfolding story is the 'tragic irony' of sound recordist Michael Rockefeller's notes on recording an old man with 'death in his voice', who announced that a river 'has eaten' a small boy, not knowing that his own death at sea was only five months away (86); and the fate of the latter 'pacified' Dani partici-pants from the perspective of anthropologist Karl Heider's letters in the 1960s, and Gardner himself on his return in 1989, and since. Gardner's images in the book, as in the film, are stunning. His voice, across two worlds and more than forty years, is clear and distinctive throughout.

I need to establish at the outset something of my own relationship to the con-troversial film. The irony for me, on every viewing of Dead Birds, a film constructed over years of debate as one kind of object (about men and violence, by a high-handed artist who does not learn the language of people he films, who puts his own thoughts into their heads with his narration, and uses 'them' to talk about 'us', or perhaps about himself), is that it contains and reanimates some of the most tender scenes I know on film-on any kind of film. Roland Barthes might have called this series of scenes the punctum, the wound, 'the element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me', if he had believed that much of his account of the experience of photography were also applicable to film.2 While Weyake, the little dead boy who had been 'eaten' by the river (mentioned by Rocke-feller), sits in his funeral chair, decorated by the woven shell-bands used only for births, marriages and deaths, and people cry around him, Gardner's voiceover con-denses a sea of sentiment into a few simple and perfectly apt words when he con-cludes that it is: 'the end of all the work and love to make a little boy'. One of the stills in this book, which is packed with arresting photographs, is of the child deco-rated and slumped over a dignified woman, probably his mother, holding one small ankle, her clay-coloured net on her back, and the netted heads of other women in the foreground of the frame.

In Making Dead Birds, Gardner tells us about choosing his 'principal child personage' for the film, Pua, who was a friend of Weyake, and of a similar age and disposition. Pua was not a good fighter and 'could represent the frailty and vulnera-bility' he thought so necessary to his 'emerging story' (75). Gardner wanted 'some humor and common appeal', a 'sympathetic figure and counterweight to the heavi-ness of death and misfortune' (87-88) in a film that would focus on human aggres-siveness in a society that puts 'an enormous premium on masculinity' (44), where ritual warfare and violent behaviour are intimately entwined with religious cosmol-ogy and 'magnificent specimens' of warriors play the leading men, while women, pigs and children are necessary, but secondary, characters (51). (The kind of thing that has annoyed many anthropologists, for over forty years, is that while we are looking at Pua in the film, Gardner tells us that the child is 'waiting for manhood' or thinking 'about the day he himself will be a farmer'.3) In Making Dead Birds, there is a still photograph of Pua's mother rendering salt. Accompanying this, in his 1961 camera notes, Gardner talks of the little mound of ashes created by the salt

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burning reminding him of 'how easy it is to reduce to almost nothing a tremendous effort, beginning with the gathering of the materials needed to make salt, and end-ing with the work of raising a son to be a warrior' (98, 100). Metaphor, material and existential processes, the inseparability of the practical-empirical and human drama, are at the heart of the film Gardner put together-which generates, in the context of his encounter with one particular group of people, some fundamental questions: what makes us, what do we make, and how does the tendency to violence and destruction, the necessity for and celebration of dead enemies, fit into our picture of life?

Gardner believes himself to have been 'born a melancholy person'; one for whom film 'incarnates death' (xiii), the certain end of all our narrative endeavours. And like many others, he knows the particular way that film can capture ephemeral beings and matter on the way to their demise. In his foreword to the book, Phillip Lopate suggests that, in the end, Dead Birds has 'less to do with killing than with mourning' (xiv), and in his own introduction, Gardner makes the link to Levi-Strauss, who had published Tristes Tropiques while Gardner was at graduate school in the 1950s, and where he had felt himself to be part of an embattled minority embracing humanistic tendencies considered 'soft' by those pursuing the 'certainties' of 'scientific' anthropology (4). In a 1960 letter to Gardner, Dutch anthropologist Adrian Gerbrands (who would become a helper with the Dead Birds project) recalls his 'fellowship' with him at the 1958 UNESCO Conference in Prague, where dele-gates debated what they considered the 'spurious dichotomy' between art and sci-ence. Gardner was convinced there was 'no substitute for competence in the field ("science", if you please) and inspiration in the editing room ("art", if I may be permitted)'. He added: 'Without both there can be no significance to the employ-ment of the film medium. One must be both an accurate observer and a sensitive interpreter' (17). Clyde Kluckholn, Sigmund Freud, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, along with a work like Tristes Tropiques ('perhaps betokening [his own] obsession about the essential melancholy of life'), 'kept hope alive for an anthropol-ogy that welcomed intuitive, even subjective, casts of mind' (4-5).4

Gardner's kinship with Levi-Strauss is apt, but they are distant, rather than close cousins. As writers like Susan Sontag and Simone de Beauvoir have noted, Levi-Strauss's oeuvre, his 'geometric spirit', is like part of a life discipline, a spiritual exercise, a learning to let things go. Though Tristes Tropiques is far less severe than much of his oeuvre-and here he does not turn his passion into algebra, as it were-it is still, with a 'cool look' and contemplation, that he writes the best ending to any book I know. Gardner, on the other hand, is no heir to the French rational-ist tradition, a scholar who could be mistaken for a public servant; so moved by Descartes's clarte, that reading his Discourse on the Method (of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Searching for Truth in the Sciences) brings tears to his eyes.5 He is more an American alpha-male, loaded with cultural capital, a 'Yankee Brahmin', as Jay Ruby pejoratively calls him, in his highly personalised contribution to the debates over Gardner's Forest of Bliss (1998).6 Long-time friend, Lopate, more


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admiringly describes Gardner as a man with a 'puritanical Yankee conscience', intri-gued by 'the problematic, impure, and unresolved nature of experience: the impos-sibility of avoiding "dirty hands'" (xiii). What strikes Lopate 'is the contrast between his tremendous competence and his profound self doubt. Blessed with movie-star good looks, a privileged background, and an inherited social ease, he also betrays at times a surprisingly fragile and vulnerable emotional make-up' (xiii). What we call 'the personal' is unavoidable with Gardner, not only because his work is unashamedly so, but because scholarly response to it has so often, seemingly unavoidably, been related to him as a figure. Adding to what Lopate says, I think there is an ambivalence about masculine power and belligerent splendour in Gard-ner's films and authorship, a certain male masochism, perhaps ritual penance, of the kind that film-maker Werner Herzog suggests is part of the territory of film-making in general, 'humiliation and strain' being 'essential parts' of the vocation. Sharing something of the ambivalence of a Stanley Kubrick about masculinity, Gardner would appear to share with Herzog 'the premise of moviemaking as a self-imposed ordeal' (xvi, in Lopate's foreword).?

Readers will find evidence of the well connectedness that was a crucial ingredi-ent of Gardner's career and helped keep him in what, for many scholars and artists, was an enviable place (among other things, Gardner was the Director of the Film Study Center from 1957-1997 and remains an Associate in Visual and Environmen-tal Studies at Harvard). In mid-1950s Cambridge, wanting to portray 'the inner and outer lives of human beings at the margins of society' and at that time 'captivated as much by words as imagery', he was in the company of poets like Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes and Theodore Roethke. Harold Coolidge was a distant cousin who ran the Pacific Science Board in Washington and first let him know about a Nether-lands New Guinea tribe that was still making ritual war. When he returned from filming in New Guinea, he (unsuccessfully) urged McGeorge Bundy, former Dean of the Faculty at Harvard and later President Kennedy's national security advisor, 'not to purchase rapport with Sukarno's Indonesia by using New Guinea as a hos-tage to fortune' (8). When Gardner shows his answer-print of Dead Birds at writer William Styron's home in Connecticut, in 1963, the audience reads like a listing of civic-artistic royalty, with people like Lillian Hellman, Robert Penn Warren and Mike Nichols giving feedback in a convivial setting (see 121-122, where he explains that an 'answer-print' is a kind of proof made from the original film stock). Revisit-ing the film itself, the amount of empirical detail the images and narration provide is surprising-the lie of the land, the battlegrounds, gardens and watchtowers, peo-ple's tasks and movements, which include fears of venturing out after dark in case they meet unavenged ghosts. We hear in Gardner's narration that when Weyake's funeral occurred, three little girls each lost most of two fingers, and in the book, read of his own shamelessness once back from the field, in writing to Heider to see if he can film an iki palin (amputation) sequence in case there is a theatrical release (which does not eventuate). The paradox of the way sympathy is combined with chance and ruthlessness-of getting the shots, whatever is done with them-is


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known to all documentarians, and while we learn about the pig fat put on Weyake's dead body, about his ghost being freed by the shooting of an arrow, and footage is gotten of his aunt fishing out 'his little bones' from the fire, Gardner's camera notes comment on the fact that he had missed the body being carried to the fire before-hand 'by the perhaps cruel justice of having to change film magazines' (86). Inter-estingly, the reality of the custom of amputating female fingers is captured most eloquently in the film itself by shots without commentary of Lakha, the wife of We-yake, his principal adult male, doing everyday work with hands whose missing fin-ger joints make them look like the webbed feet of a bird or duck. The 'ordinary' can appear astounding.

One of the privileged group who saw the answer-print was novelist and natural-ist, Peter Matthieson, who accompanied Gardner to the field, wrote his own book, and shared a sensibility. After that Connecticut viewing, Matthieson wrote to Gard-ner in relation to making the final cut of the film, about the inadequacy of words, suggesting film might not be able to instruct, but it might 'illuminate' what words cannot convey-the cruel beauty of what is (124), as James Agee put it so beauti-fully. (The book brings out the way the colonial government, protesting missionar-ies, the film-makers and the Dani themselves, end up knowing that the filming provides a certain stasis, a halting of history, because the police will move in once the film-makers go, and the lives of the 'pacified' Dani will undergo 'rapid and dev-astating change' (106).8) Said Matthieson: 'Do you remember how we felt in those first few weeks, when we first saw? ... If this film can make the audience feel one twentieth of our excitement, our astonishment, it will be a classic' (124). In 1961, Gardner had written to Tim Asch and John Marshall that things had been ing that he could not let go by without 'at least trying to comprehend them in film' (65). In the light of developments, he planned to tell a 'story about warrior-farm-ers', already interesting for the film-literate, the compound noun going against both American Western and Japanese Samurai genres, where 'farmer/gardener' and 'warrior' are archetypally opposed. Just as Asch would later balance Napoleon Chagnon's presentations of the Yanomamo as The Fierce People (1968), and their films like The Ax Fight (1975) and Magical Death (1973), with short films like A Father Washes his Children (1974) and A Man and His Wife Weave a Hammock (1975), early in Dead Birds Gardner showed the warrior-farmer Weyak weaving, 'like all [Dani] men'. He thought he would soon make up his mind about how he felt about these men and 'how best to convey these feelings in a film'. He was 'counting on the culture, or rather these [three particular male] individuals, to write the story themselves. I shall try to set up limits within which their own actions and the actual events as they transpire will fit. I will not ask them to act beyond the possibilities their own behaviour suggests. In a general way I hope that the film will treat the theme of violence' (65).

After months of anticipation and the killing of an enemy warrior in battle, Gardner was attracted to the 'extraordinary theatricality and raw energy' of the etai, the post-battle victory dance, the 'spectacle' of '300-500 decorated and armed war-


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riors dancing against 8,000-foot peaks' (xii).9 He was breathless about 'the power of the experience' of seeing his first ritual war, with its 'clashing of arms and din of exultations, too overwhelming to comprehend', and concerning the shipment of confidential and potentially controversial material to Asch, back at the Film Study Center in Harvard, he commented: 'I was almost paranoid in thinking how 1 might be deprived of my good fortune, of how this first seemingly gratuitous few hours of outrageous luck might never return. This is the thinking of a filmmaker more than a disinterested observer-should there be such creatures-and I needed to swear my friends to silence lest I tempt the Fates' (55). Concerning a later etai, 'the most intense battling yet': 'I am not sure that the title Dead Birds had yet occurred to me, but I do remember dwelling on the happy coincidence of feathers, colored mud decorating weapons, and bloodshed that permeated the scene in front of me' (76 and 79). (He also tells us in the chronicle that in the DVD version of Dead Birds, we can see footage which did not fit into his ruling metaphor of mortality and revenge killing.)

Given Tim Asch's later attitudes to the films he made with Chagnon-before the end of his life, he felt that they should, perhaps, be locked away in archives where they could do no harm-it is fascinating from a human and scholarly per-spective to read of his excitement, his response to seeing Gardner's first colour slides when he was a younger man and less experienced film-maker, yet to be entrenched in the political-ethical considerations of ethnodocumentary representa-tion, of working with 'others,.lO He believed the material Gardner had:

is going to be even more dramatic-the colorful regalia of the warriors and their seem-ing preparation for battle is likened in my own experience to the wonderful, battle scene of [Laurence] Olivier's Henry V, where the technology of warfare wasn't so far in advance of what you are seeing now. One of the most impressive things is that some men, who apparently are leaders, are wearing the emblems of their personality with them into battle, in much the same way that [Sergei] Eisenstein's Swiss-German knights wore the emblems of their lineage into battle to fight the Russians in Alexander Nevsky. In both cases there is this awesomeness and terrifying countenance which belongs to one personality-the stage is magnificent. (66)

Here is the rub, in fact. Dead Birds and Making Dead Birds both make manifest and vivid to us theatres of war-intellectually and emotionally, cognitively and vis-cerally. And we cannot not think about gender, because the we and us involved in Gardner's shaping of the film, narration and recent book, beg to be unravelled. At the etai, the people whose side have made the kill are happy, coming together, jumping up and down. They are often ecstatic and noisy (Gardner's use of ambient sound and lack of inappropriate accompaniment is good here, as it is throughout the film). Women are among those smiling, dancing and singing-which is in this context, as for all participants, regarded as reviving of the soul, because to cause the death of an enemy is regarded as a tonic, a restorer of necessary vigour. The film tells us that at Weyab?s funeral, his name is yelled out for the enemy, so they can


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appropriately perform their etai, and enemies' dead bodies are routinely taken to where their friends can retrieve them. It is as if there is a kind of deadly reciprocity between groupings of people, and women are at least associate members of the groupings involved. But much of Gardner's questioning, many propositions and wonderings about 'human' proclivities, such as 'aggressiveness' (71) and a 'taste for blood' (45), most likely refer to patterns of male behaviour, and generic males. In his final utterance in the film, quoted in the book and at the outset of this essay, it is surely Nietzsche's male warriors who will not passively accept their fate but try 'with measured violence to fashion fate themselves' (125). As in his controversial film, Rivers of Sand (1974), in his 1961 journal entry in Making Dead Birds, Gardner speaks of the inequality between the sexes and the lot of women-in this instance, of the 'enormous premium' placed on masculinity in Asmat society, caus-ing women 'to have a dreadful and secluded time of it'. There seems, he says, to be little communication between the sexes, and he foresees 'difficulties for anyone wanting to show some form of affection' (44). He describes men 'in their ample spare time', sleeping, carving, eating, talking, and doing ceremonies in the men's house, where they 'seem not to be interested in work except when it is absolutely necessary', noting that there 'was a time when their efforts were periodically devoted to hunting heads' (44-45). Without the literal head-hunting, this description has a certain commonsense purchase for analysts from Germaine Greer to Jane Doe, the generic nextdoor neighbour, complaining about having to nag her husband to do domestic work he has agreed to do but does not get around to. Whatever his dispo-sition, perspective and interpretation, Gardner is ambivalently aware of the 'man problem', which has critical implications for society(-ies), at this point in time, for all of our futures. II

But instead of the future, for some comparison and contrast to Gardner and his position, we can go briefly to the past, to 1935, when anthropologist Reo For-tune arrived in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, in an area undergoing 'pacification'. Here, existing conventions of warfare had broken down and a num-ber of whites, some of whom had provoked war for purposes of profit, had been killed. Fortune was a meticulous ethnographer and gifted at language learning. However, he was allowed to enter the village in which he had chosen to do field-work among the Kamano on condition that he sleep at a police post, rather than in a native village. The sergeant at this post was soon to declare it untenable and leave, and within 6 months, encircled by warring communities, Fortune's permis-sion to work in the area was withdrawn, cutting short his fieldwork. Fortune left very little of a personal nature on record for future scholars. However, when he burned many of his unpublished papers, refraining from publishing material based on research with too many gaps and possible misinterpretations, some unpublished material remained, including drafts of articles, lectures and a book concerning this fieldwork. Accessing this material, Ann McLean notes Fortune's 'horrified fascination' with warfare (1992: 50). She suggests that we can 'almost hear the accelerated heartbeat and sense the surge of adrenalin' when Fortune wrote some


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first impressions about being there and the fighting among the Kamano, ending a letter to Ruth Benedict:

With repeated warnings I'm taking some care not to get killed-they are however cer-tainly fair devils run riot on the masculine & patrilineal virtues carried as near social perdition as it is possible to carry them-with sanity delegated to women & despised accordingly. (1992: 43)12

Fortune, says McLean, wrote of his 'Kamano friends' and tried to work out how to 'render an account of their culture which made it intelligible in its own terms' (44-45). In overview, she suggests that he would probably have concurred with New Guinea prospector, Jack O'Neill: 'They were just men; most very like-able, a few nasty bastards, just like our own kind. A few were very real friends' (45).

McLean believes that the unifying theme of Fortune's work for the rest of his life was that of human motivation, finding the need, for example, 'to find some sat-isfactory explanation for the bitter and apparently pointless fighting he witnessed' (56), but he was nevertheless committed to what would later be labelled 'emic' accounts (58). Many decades later, Gardner, with his own 'moral earnestness' and 'tendency to preach' (Gardner, in interview with Barbash 2007: 110) and at odds with 'the cultural relativism and orientation to cultural difference' of much anthro-pology (Barbash & Taylor 2007: 3), believed the discipline was 'avoiding its respon-sibility to find larger truths' (Gardner, interview with Barbash 2007: 108). Some of our response to Gardner's work depends, of course, on how we define the 'notori-ously protean domain of intellectual activity' that can be considered anthropology (Henley 2007: 33). But whatever our definition, it is unlikely that the shuttle move-ment at the heart of anthropology between the interpreted particular and the hypothesised universal will or should cease. Among others, Barbash and Taylor have noted the likelihood that film may have a particular affinity with the 'sensorial' shift in a 'postsemiotic' anthropology 'that foregrounds the phenomenological priority of embodiment in our apprehension of the world' and 'the relatively limited role that it appears language-especially in its sentential logical form-plays in cognition and social life' (2007: 9). At the same time, they note Paul Henley's comments on Gard-ner's 'relative indifference' to what he calls 'indigenous exegesis' of experience (10). Henley notes that it is normally the tone and style of delivery of his subjects' speech that carries significance in Gardner's films, rather than the substantive content of what they are saying (Henley 2007: 35). And many anthropologists, himself among them, understandably have qualms about the lack of indigenous voice in Gardner's creations, where people, filmed agents, comprise part of his living raw material. Per-haps the best encapsulation of Gardner's approach is something he said in relation to the subject of Dead Birds: 'I seized the opportunity of speaking to certain funda-mental issues in human life. The Dani were less important to me than those issues' (quoted by Henley 2007: 43). If Gardner relies less on words these days, as an artist, he still calls and arranges the shots.


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In Dead Birds, Gardner talks about the warrior Weyak losing his taste for war, feeling responsibility for the child Weyake's death because he had not been on his tower lookout when he should have been. (Heider characterised the Dani as 'peace-ful warriors'. Chagnon, it should be noted, reported that some Yanomamo men reflected on feuding and wanted nothing to do with raiding, and later researchers found the same thing among the 'fierce people'.13) In his book, over forty years after the making of Dead Birds, Gardner writes of his own 'growing lack of appetite for violence' near the end of his stay with the Dani, rooting his distaste, sensuously and emotionally. In a 1961 journal entry, he had recorded the following: 'Tonight I wanted to film Pua eating a pretty yellow-faced bird. Instead a man was killed, and Pua put his little spear into his lifeless body just the way some others did, symboli-cally sharing in the homicide'. Then, he explained the circumstances leading up to the death: 'All the Willihiman-Wallalua were downcast and suffering spiritual decline. Their etai-eken (seeds of singing) were in a depleted and sickened state. There had to be a death among their enemy in order to restore their health and vigor' (100). In his contemporary notes, he elaborates on making his way to the corpse in the moonlight and how troubled he was by the sight:

This death was a classic, almost predictable, bit of Dani revenge and retaliation. I won-dered if it resonated with revenge in other societies, and I wondered more acutely than ever how the scenes I had shot might be used and whether they would contribute to an understanding of the phenomenon of human violence. The occasion of the murder persuaded me that our inquiry could, even should, come to end, and that we would have to go home to consider the full meaning of what we had been witness to for almost half a year. (100)

Here is another rub. A major one which I have already gestured towards. From what we see and hear of Dani warfare, whatever the cruelty, pain and 'superstitious' thinking involved in its continuation, it seems such a relatively civilised affair com-pared to whatever 'warfare' is today. The actual battles in Dead Birds, despite the magnificent landscape, warriors and paraphernalia, appear noisy, semi-organised, messy and contained. What we see and hear in the film, in the 'civilised barbarity' of the battle breaks, we cannot help but compare to half-time at one or another aggressive male sports, except that fatalities are an expected part of the proceedings, and some few non-participants are involved in these. During breaks, some men stand and posture, others smoke and 'relax', a 'surgeon' removes an arrow lodged below the neck of a man whose toughness and valour are evident and will be remembered. All of these before resumption of battle and then the walk home after-wards force the question of how much less toxic this ritual warfare is compared to what is happening today, depending on where one happens to be situated in our seriously ailing, but addicted-to-growth world system. As far as 'understanding' is concerned, Gardner suggests in the Coda to Making Dead Birds that despite the fact that his film has been a 'staple visual experience' for a couple of generations in Anglo-American society, he has seen 'little evidence of the slightest diminishment in


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human bellicosity and obsession with violence' (129). During his time in the Baliem Valley, he had wanted to know what warfare meant to those who made it, 'or what it could mean to deprive [the DaniJ of it' (75), but apart from learning of its embeddedness in the religious belief system, there remains an opaqueness to answers to his questionings about the warrior's 'feelings' and, by inference, 'human' proclivities here and elsewhere. Gardner is usually told that it is the people's cus-tom, the way things have been, and the way things are done (see, for example, 83). There are no epiphanies, no revelations here.

While shaping his film in 1962, and before going back to New Guinea to visit Heider for suggestions and points of fact about the culture he knew less well than the anthropologist, Gardner wrote a letter to Matthiessen, in which he sounds naIve in hindsight, though reality can always exceed our imaginings, and 'documentary' text or film can usually outdo fiction, in both horror and strangeness: 'In ... general terms I am trying to portray a mood of watchfulness and aggressiveness which is based on different aims than our own, but also convey, despite this, that the blood involved is a high price to pay (even when it gives the men such pleasure and the society its coherence), (119). While with Heider, he tells us in his present account, he was already and still is 'engrossed in solving the dilemma' he saw 'gathering strength' concerning his 'intentions as a filmmaker and ... his scruples as an anthropologist' (119). Gardner had hesitancies regarding the role of 'fiction' in depicting human behaviour, about finding the right balance between the 'fabulist' and the 'witness', suggesting that as he worked, he came to think that anthropology itself was 'engaged in making things up', including the very notion of the 'ethno-graphic present', still used at the time in almost all monographs. He comes to a strong statement, which for me, in the contemporary world at least, has a great deal of truth to it: 'I suffered also the misgiving, provided us all by even the faintest immersion in surreality, of thinking that anything that is not absurd and, I would add, ambiguous is probably not real' (119). We are in Jean Rouch territory here, though without the child-like, 'full-of-wonder' quality that is part of Rouch's crea-tive filmic endeavour. And it takes us away from Jay Ruby's calls for what amounts to an impossible 'full disclosure', to give an anthropologically solid context to films that could be called 'ethnographic'; as if things might somehow become transparent if we just try hard enough and provide enough information. 14 Ruby does link Gard-ner to Rouch in his attack on Forest of Bliss, mentioned earlier, and in this context, it is well worth remembering that differences in approach, and different conceptions of anthropology in its broadest sense, are at stake here. In his discussion of the 'Birth of Visual Anthropology' in his recent 'Brief History of the Comite interna-tional du film ethnographique', Luc de Heusch chronicles the way that in the late 1950s, he and young Turks like Rouch were weary of their mistress, Reason, who had severely betrayed them in their experience of the 'civilising' processes in Belgian and French colonies, and in their experience of the Second World War when they were young men (2007). In their endeavours in visual anthropology, they were not modest in their undertakings. They were looking 'for all sources of life itself


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(367)-a quest which is a far cry from English or American Anthropology or Rouch's own written ethnographies. And these 'sources', never found in some pure, or laboratory state, do not necessarily taste sweet. There are always degrees of bitter-ness. They can even poison you.

There is little need to elaborate here on the horror of the ways that old barbarisms, combined with new ones and high-technology capacities, can spoil envi-ronments and contemporary lives, including those of large numbers of non-combat-ants. In the same way, we know that some people from what were colonial centres pay specialist instructors to help curb their consumption of an abundance (of food and goods at their disposal, for example), while others, in 'postcolonially underde-veloped' situations, can eat dirt, lack clean water and die during 'peacetime' in impossible economies. IS Gardner's 'coherence' in the Baliem Valley, for which a high price in bloodshed is paid, is scarce on the ground, though child soldiers, 'eth-nic' warriors and militias, intoxicated by drugs and hatred, doubtlessly for limited periods of time, experience pleasure, intensity, drama and a feeling of belonging. While war can be hell for people wanting to maintain and persevere in their lives, it can be a temporary heaven for participants. So along with the 'opaqueness' of our psyches, the 'patchworks' Michel de Montaigne believed us to be ('crazy quilts' is the metaphor that makes some sense to me), Cornelius Castoriadis's notion of the generic man as a mad animal who in his madness invented reason, is relevant here, as is his friend and colleague, Edgar Morin's added homily that the worst madness would be to think we could banish madness. I6 The point is surely, and Dead Birds and the recent book about its making highlight this, that the way that channels for and limits to 'mad' and destructive behaviour, the paradoxes and ambiguities, the structuring political-economic and expressive processes involved, have consequence; they matter. In our society, based on 'the manufacture of progress', as Levi-Strauss put it, the reality is that we all may be done in by a combination of the worst of human and technological possibilities. The religion of 'progress' has become more delirious, I think, since his inaugural lecture at the College de France in 1960, where he thanked heaven that anthropologists were not expected to predict man's future (while putting forward his own hopes and suggestions).I7 It is in the 'fantasy' of series television, like The West Wing, that an admiral and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says to the US President: 'I don't know who the world's leading expert on warfare is, but any list of the top has got to include me, and I can't tell when it's peacetime and wartime anymore'.

Gardner said that the origin of the effort and trouble involved in making Dead Birds was an 'immodest hope that the film might persuade viewers that the people in it are not so different from themselves and that the central concerns of the film, human violence and mortality, are as important to everybody as to the people in the film' (9). He continues to think that it is time to be aware of the necessity of learning from the lessons of each other's experiences, sharing Rouch's conviction that you and I are different (and similar) and that we can therefore learn from each other. At the end of Making Dead Birds, Gardner notes that, despite ongoing


Book Review Essay

warfare in the present world, the opening of eyes to 'otherness' as a way of showing evidence of 'oneness' is a hope he continues 'to cherish' (129). In 'The Camera and the Man', Rouch reported that at the meeting of the 1972 International Committee of Ethnographic and Sociological Films, a decision was taken to create, with UNESCO's help, a network 'for the conservation, documentation, and distribution of «films of Man". Why? Because we are people who believe that the world of tomorrow, the world we are in the process of building, cannot be viable without a regard for cultural differences; the other cannot be denied as his image transforms' (45). Decades after this, in 'Transcultural Cinema', David MacDougall suggested that, while a photograph is just as much a social and cultural construction as a written statement, because it is framed by aesthetic conventions, power relations, ideology, etc., 'in photographs and films, cultural particularities may be only the modulations and oddities that we see worked on the mantle of human existence' (252 and 254). And he poses the questions: 'What cultural reifications and distin-ctions should we treat with suspicion in ethnographic writing; what evidence of cultural distinctiveness would we search for beneath the transcultural surfaces of film? When, too, should we set aside the practices of Western rationalism and open ourselves to the patterns of resemblance we think we see' (254-5)?

Such questions do have purchase each time I experience Dead Birds, though the relationship we can have with its subjects and their environment cannot be mea-sured or rendered any more cognitively than our real relationships in everyday life. As our real life, like our 'viewing' life, is semi-imaginary, our inter-subjective rela-tionships with people who are present, and of flesh and blood, are also constituted by processes of projection and identification. 18 Counting himself among them, Barthes suggested that realists 'do not take the photograph for a «copy" of reality, but for an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art' (88). It was the chemists who invented photography, not the painters, he said,

when a scientific circumstance (the discovery that silver halogens were sensitive to light) made it possible to recover and print directly the luminous rays emitted by a var-iously lighted object. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed. (80-81)

Gardner told Barbash that what he thinks is left, 'long after the act of film-making, is a form of fiction composed of ... magical, quasi-real fragments'. He believes that 'what we call a film' depends on the artist/director's choice and arrangement of these fragments-so he feels 'accountable for the particular arrange-ments' of films like Dead Birds and Rivers of Sand, 'but not for the meanings they engender' (Barbash 2007: 113). When we, the 'viewers', engage in a film like Dead Birds by way of mechanical and other technologies, we have the strange phenomenon


Book Review Essay

of congealed and preserved life-of humans, animals, birds, vegetation and lands-cape-unleashed and resurrected. Human and natural 'somethings' are up on the screen, like warm ghosts, somehow restored in their organic matrix. There is a wealth of discussion in anthropology about Gardner's film, but it should not take the place of experiencing the film itself and reading its director's chronicle of its making (and we have the opportunity to trust the tale more than the teller here, if we wish-Making Dead Birds would be interesting even if Gardner were not a good writer and it did not include superb stills). Our library's 16-mm copy of Dead Birds is now faded and pink (because of the particular film stock, much in use at the time of its making). But seeing it again, and reading this book about its making, forced me to put aside more pressing tasks to think about forms of 'chaleur humaine' (human warmth) and morality, of such importance to Durkheim. And I had to revisit questions about the force of the relationships we can have with people and places across time and space. By a strange alchemy, the ontological and epistemo-logical questions they bring up shape my approach to doing anthropology, theoris-ing being in the world, and testifying to what has been, what is, and what may just be possible. I have had enough students who wish they could be exposed to these questions via film earlier in their studies. Many others believe that they would not have been ready for what gets called 'Visual Anthropology', and testimonial chroni-cles about it, until they have more anthropological 'basics' under their belt. I do not have answers to such a quandary. I know, however, that young and old scholars should have exposure at some point. Dead Birds, and this book of its making, could provide a wonderful place to start.

NOTES

1 Among the communications are letters from archaeologist, J. O. Brew, Director of the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Brew had advised Marshall's retired businessman father, Laurence, concerning the family trips to the Kalahari Desert from the beginning of the 1950s and had gotten Gardner and John Marshall together to work on what would become The Hunters (1957). Fortunately, during this last decade, other illuminating work on Dead Birds, Gardner, and his oeuvre have been published. Among materials available are Heider (2001-2002); Gardner (2006); and Barbash and Taylor (2007). Gardner's notes 'from the time' are, of course, never 'raw' and unworked. Compare, for example, what appears in Making Dead Birds and 'Dead Birds' (7-71), in The Impulse to Preserve.

2 See Barthes (2000: 26). Barthes himself most likely related to cinema in a very different way to photography. His friend and colleague, Edgar Morin, had, in fact, written about film and the imaginative, emotional, and physical man in The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man: an Essay in Sociological Anthropology, in 1956. This book shares Camera Lucida's phenomenological (and anti-reductive) and Barthes had admired it at the time.

3 Heider's answer to the challenges relating to Gardner's narration is that overall, Gardner, 'like any other ethnographer ... knew what [people] were thinking because he asked


Book Review Essay

them in his many interviews' (2001-2002: 67). In relation to Gardner not learning the indigenous language, Heider writes that when they first arrived amongst the Dani, he and Gardner both worked on the language. As Heider stayed on, however, he worked hard at and learned Dani, which turned out to be very difficult. In his own 3 years with the Dani, he never achieved fluency (66).

4 See Heider on Kluckhohn and American anthropology of the period (2001-2002: 62). As Heider notes, J. O. Brew was also a pivotal influence on Gardner. The Peabody housed the Department of Anthropology and established the Film Study Center in the museum's basement. Gardner became Director of the Centre. After Kluckhohn died and Brew retired, says Heider, none among the anthropology faculty showed interest in working with Gardner and the Film Study Center (62). Whatever the personal and other politics of the situation in the elite institution of Harvard at that time, I suggest that what we inadequately call 'ethnographic film' or 'visual anthropology' seems to have been 'born' semi-legitimate, then undernourished and, with its legitimacy questioned, 'died' several times over, since the beginnings of both film and the discipline of anthro-pology.

5 Levi-Strauss spoke about this on a French television programme devoted to his work which I saw in 1991. See, however, Ursula K. Le Guin's use of The Scope of Anthropology (1967) and what Levi-Strauss says about Descartes in Structural Anthropology II (1976), in Le Guin (1989: 80-100). An essayist and science fiction and fantasy writer, the 'K' in Le Guin's name is short for 'Kroeber'. She grew up with experience of other people and cultures as a child of Alfred L. and Theodora Kracaw Kroeber.

6 See Jay Ruby (1989: 9-11), along with his chapter on Gardner (2000). 7 See Gardner, cited in Barbash (2007: 102-104). 'Dead Birds', in The Impulse to Preserve,

is worth reading here too. Gardner writes, for example, 'We are not really so different from the missionaries in long-term effect on the Dani. We cannot leave with clean hands. Ours is, by contrast with the missionaries' holy undertakings, an unholy enter-prise in which the Dani have begun to lose their way as they learn about ours' (63). The loaded nature of any exchange in relation to colonisation processes is acknowledged in sentences like, 'I took Wali to Wamena on a journey that should be a short story. I will call it "Down the River", to imply that his proud moment is also the tragic deception by me of him, his people and their traditions' (67). Gardner and the team brought with them large Cymbium shells as gifts, which turned out to be 'worth an enormous amount in rapport' (14), but the 'big shells from Massachusetts' which are 'important reasons why we can stay ... also account for much of the friction and jealousy among those with whom we want to live and work' (50). Here, we get into moraVethical territory and dilemmas in the practice of anthropology generally, whether it is a question of precious shells or medicines brought and dispensed. See, for example, John Marshall (1980) and his attempt to acknowledge being implicated in what has happened to N!ai and the JU/'hoan.

8 In 'Dead Birds', in The Impulse to Preserve, Gardner writes that he is dispirited by the news that police have been telling the Dani that the filming team is composed of 'people of no importance' and that they have been telling certain Dani men they will go to jail if they make war. If this news is true, says Gardner, it 'means the agreement [he has] made with the Netherlands government may have been broken' (2006: 57).


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9 Note that this is Lopate here, drawing on the language used in Gardner's essay above, and slightly misquoting. (See 'Dead Birds': 16.) The extraordinary spectacle, however, is attested to in both of Gardner's accounts.

10 See the collection of articles that form a tribute to Asch in Visual Anthropology Review (1995: 2-91). See also, in relation to John Marshall and his work, the collection of essays in Visual Anthropology Review (2003: 102-165), particularly Shankar (1995: 139), who concludes that the films bring rich material context to important themes that can be expanded on in a fertile way, such as 'the politics of development in emerging nations, minority and indigenous rights in new nation-states, the legacies of colonialism and apartheid, the position of the ethnographer, narrative strategies, and the art of visual storytelling. To paraphrase Levi-Strauss, A Kalahari Family is good to think' (139). Marshall's full-hearted and long-term engagement, nevertheless, came at no small cost to him personally. Whatever his own personal demons, advocacy and involvement in Namibian and JU/'hoan politics, along with academic politics around issues of ethics and ethno-documentary representation, exacted a high price. I would like to testify here to what I saw to be the sincerity of the older John Marshall in discussions of the films and the people who participated in them.

11 I think that some of Gardner's discussion on the way male domination of women is played out by both sexes, collectively and personally, is stronger in his 'Dead Birds' essay, in The Impulse to Preserve (2006). See also his comments on his own feelings about Hamar males during his filming of Rivers of Sand in Ethiopia (in his interview with Barbash 2007: 107-108).

12 See Ann McLean (1992: 27-67). Little justice can be done to Fortune, his work and story here. However, he was embedded in complex intellectual, personal, and power relation-ships to Benedict and Margaret Mead, having been married to the latter. Fortune ended up being regarded as difficult and cantankerous by colleagues in New Zealand and was contemptuous of academia, which is encapsulated in the suggestion that 'The truth in anthropology does not travel first class' (see McLean: 63). See also Lois W. Banner (2003). Whatever else was going on, Fortune was at the 'periphery', as opposed to Gard-ner, at the 'centre' in so many ways, including the centre of academic publication.

13 Gardner and Chagnon were doing their work in the 1960s, when their own society was divided over the Vietnam war. Certain theories about humans as an aggressive species were popular at the time of the making and editing of Dead Birds. It is worth remem-bering, however, that young men's commitment to peace movements and resistance to the draft, in the United States and Australia, did not necessarily mean a commitment to gender equality. Slogans such as 'girls say yes to boys who say no' appeared on many posters at the time. In his interview with Barbash, after speaking of the 'masculine flavor' of Dead Birds, Gardner talks about the switch of emphasis in Rivers of Sand, the feminist movement and the situation of women in the late 1960s and 1970s. He also talks about what was happening in his own life as a husband and father at that time and the end of his marriage (Barbash 2007: 106-108).

14 On this kind of demand, see David MacDougall (1998). MacDougall often composes his own essays so well that a reader can miss the fact that he is making strong and critical arguments against particular critical positions. If Heider was far more of a 'proper' anthropologist than Gardner, his 1976 book, Ethnographic Film, already pointed to bitter disputes about what constituted a film that could be called 'ethnographic'. See Ruby's


Book Review Essay

very partisan' (in his own words) reVIew of Ethnographic Film: http://astro.temple. Accessed 16 November 2008. Contention in the field

goes on. 15 A must-see documentary-fiction film constructed around these realities is Bamako

(2006), written and directed by Abderrahmane Sissako. Situated in the Malian city, civil society takes the International Monetary Fund and The W orId Bank to court.

16 See Cornelius Castoriadis (1997) and Edgar Morin (1981) in relation to these notions. In a seminar in Paris some time ago, Castoriadis insisted he meant 'mensch', the generic human of either sex, when he said 'man'.

17 See The Scope of Anthropology (1967), and Le Guin's discussion (1989), referred to in note 5.

18 See Edgar Morin (2005) on our 'semi-imaginary' reality and 'projection-identification' processes.

REFERENCES

Banner, L. W. 2003. Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Barbash, I. 2007. Out of words: A conversation with Robert Gardner. In I. Barbash, L. Taylor (eds) The Cinema of Robert Gardner, pp. 93-118. Oxford: Berg.

Barbash, I., L. Taylor 2007. Introduction: Resounding images. In I. Barbash, L. Taylor (eds) The Cinema of Robert Gardner, pp. 1-13. Oxford: Berg.

Barthes, R. 2000. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. R. Howard (trans.) London: Vintage.

Castoriadis, C. 1997. The Imaginary Institution of Society. K. Blarney (trans.) Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Chagnon, N. A. 1968. Yanomamii: The Fierce People. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. De Heusch, L. 2007. Jean Rouch and the birth of visual anthropology: A brief history of the

Comite du film ethnographique. Visual Anthropology 20: 365-386. Gardner, R. 2006. The Impulse to Preserve: Reflections of a Filmmaker. Cambridge, MA:

Peabody Museum, Harvard. Heider, K. G. 1976. Ethnographic Film. Austin: University of Texas Press. Revised Edition

2006. Heider, K. G. 2001-2002. Robert Gardner: The early years. Visual Anthropology Review 17:

61-70. Henley, P. 2007. Beyond the burden of the real: Anthropological reflections on the technique

of a 'masterful cutter'. In I. Barbash, L. Taylor (eds) The Cinema of Robert Gardner, pp. 33-57. Oxford: Berg.

Le Guin, U. K. 1989. A non-Euclidean view of California as a cold place to be. In U. K. Le Guin Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, pp. 80-100. London: Victor Gollancz.

Levi-Strauss, c. 1967. The Scope of Anthropology. S. Ortner Paul and R. A. Paul (trans.) London: Jonathan Cape.

Levi-Strauss, c. 1983. Structural Anthropology II. M. Layton (trans.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.


Book Review Essay

Lutkehaus, N. (ed.) 1995. Special Section: Tribute to Timothy Asch. Visual Anthropology Review 11(1): 2-91.

MacDougall, D. 1998. Transcultural Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McLean, A. 1992. In the footprints of Reo Fortune. In T. E. Hays (ed.) Ethnographic Presents:

Pioneering Anthropologists in the Papua New Guinea Highlands, pp. 37-67. Berkeley: University of California.

Morin, E. 1981. Pour Sortir du Vingtieme Sieele. Paris: Fernand Nathan. Morin, E. 2005. The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man: An Essay in Sociological Anthropology.

L. Mortimer (trans.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ruby, J. 1989. The Emperor and his clothes: A comment. Society for Visual Anthropology

Newsletter 5: 9-11. Ruby, J. 2000. Robert Gardner and anthropological cinema. In J. Ruby Picturing Culture:

Explorations of Film and Anthropology, pp. 95-113. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shankar, G. 2003. The Kalahari family: John Marshall's films and the promise of partial

ethnography. Visual Anthropology Review 19: 135-140. Filmography Asch, T., in collaboration with N. Chagnon 1973. Magical Death. Pennsylvania State Univer-

sity. Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources. Asch, T., in collaboration with N. Chagnon 1974. A Father Washes His Children. Distributed

by Documentary Educational Resources. Asch, T., in collaboration with N. Chagnon 1974. A Man and His Wife Weave a Hammock.

Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources. Asch, T., in collaboration with N. Chagnon 1975. The Ax Fight. Pennsylvania State Univer-

sity. Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources. Gardner, R. 1986. Forest of Bliss. Produced by Film Study Center, Harvard. Distributed by

Film Forum. Gardner, R. 1964. Dead Birds. Produced by Film Study Center, Harvard. Distributed by

Phoenix Films. Gardner, R. 1974. Rivers of Sand. Produced by Film Study Center, Harvard. Distributed by

Phoenix Films. 2-disc DVD version, 2004. Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources.

Marshall, J. 2002. A Kalahari Family. (Five part series documenting lives of a group of JU/'hoansi [Bushmen] from 1951-2001.) Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources.

Marshall, J. 1957. The Hunters. Produced by Film Study Center, Harvard. Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources.

Sissako, A. 2006. Bamako. Produced and distributed by Christian Aid, Q News, Film Educac

tion, Louverture Films, and Curzon Cinemas. URL http://bamako-themovie.com The West Wing. 1999-2006. Created by A. Sorkin. Produced by Warner Brothers Television.


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Warm Ghosts: Review Essay on Robert Gardner's Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film

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