21
Electronic Book Review: Australasia and the Pacific Region
MAKING "DEAD BIRDS": Chronicle of a Film. By Robert Gardner;
foreword by Phillip Lopate; edited by Charles Warren; designed by Jeannet
Leendertse. Cambridge (MA): Peabody Museum Press (Harvard Univ. Press),
2007. xvii, 137 pp. (Photos.) US$35.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-83765-823-2.
Dead Birds is one of the best-known ethnographic motion pictures of all time.
Set in the highlands of New Guinea in 1961, the film recounts events in the
lives of the Dani people, for whom revenge killing was a central tenet. The
plot centres on a few key protagonists, including the warrior Weyak, who
stood lookout atop a tower for an enemy appearance while women of his
tribe gardened, and a small boy, Pua, who daydreamed as he watched over
his family’s pigs. Against the backdrop of everyday life was the constant fear
of tribal warfare (graphically depicted in the film) and payback killing. As a
central metaphor for his story of violence and mortality, Gardner employed
the Dani identification with birds as totems and their reference to the
captured possessions and bodies of their victims as “dead birds.” The film
invites viewers to ponder the nature of human aggression as it unfolds in a
highly ritualized tribal cultural environment.
This well-illustrated volume chronicles the process of making the film.
Phillip Lopate provides an informative overview, while Gardner furnishes
the background for the extensive quotes from letters, journals, telegrams,
newspaper clippings, camera notes, interviews, reviews and articles that
constitute much of the text. The reader is led from the film’s conception
through the extensive planning, fund-raising and securing permissions stages
to the actual filming and the shaping of the picture and its story. Of historical
significance is Michael Rockefeller, youngest son of then New York Governor
Nelson Rockefeller, the soundman and photographer for the expedition.
Shortly after the shoot, Michael, on a separate expedition, was lost off the
south coast of New Guinea. The volume deals with his time in New Guinea
and the aftermath of his death.
Ethical dilemmas are revealed. For example, Margaret Mead cautioned
Gardner against making a film about warfare. “Her point was that in
photographing or even just observing hostile behaviour of this kind, we
would be condoning it and thus letting down the administration, ‘making it
unsafe for every white man,’ as she put it” (22). Mead’s words were prophetic,
because rumours spread that Gardner and his team were provoking warfare in
order to film it. Documents reveal how strongly he denied these allegations,
although he did insist that police and other visitors stay out of the area so as
not to interfere with the project. And in a startling revelation, Gardner admits
that the crew “closely held the intelligence that Michael was grazed in the
leg by an arrow in a battle…. Were it to become known... [there would be]
... unpredictable consequences for our work” (71). Another choice involved
the possible theatrical allure of filming the amputation of young girls’ finger
joints as part of a mourning ritual.
