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Dead Birds Migrating: DVD Reinvigorates Classic Ethnographic Film
ABSTRACT The DVD release of Robert Gardner's Dead Birds exemplifies the added value of extra features and the improvement in viewing quality when existing ethnographic films are distributed in this new medium. Whereas in the past, ethnographic films have been experienced as transitory performances, a nonlinear medium like DVD makes it possible to read a film the way one reads a book, stopping, reflecting, and reviewing. The inclusion of multiple soundtracks, additional sequences, and associated texts affords a density of content that has not previously been possible in either films or books. [Keywords: DVD, Dead Birds, archives, Gardner, film]
I was always a little bit amazed by the very term visual anthropology. I try to imagine a non-visual anthropology; is anthropology anything but a visual undertaking?
-Robert Gardner (Prins and Bishop 2000:2 tape 202)
I FIRST SAW DEAD BIRDS IN BERKELEY a few years after its 1964 release. Karl Heider screened it in a hot, overcrowded, windowless room, with the projector clattering soporifically in the back. I leaned off the edge of my seat and craned my neck to see around the people in front. It was a bad viewing experience, but not an uncommon one. The film itself was profound and affected me deeply. It was in the grand narrative tradition-a documentary brilliantly photographed and observed, driven by deep subtexts of life, death, and survival, and poetically narrated by the filmmaker. In that performance of the film, I experienced something both real and allegorical.
Robert Gardner's Dead Birds (1964) was the first ethnographic film identified by the U.S. National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, as critical for preservation as a significant U.S. film (in the company of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane [1941] and D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation [1915]). Dead Birds presents a rich account of ritual warfare among the Dani in the Balim Valley of Irian Jaya. The bold camera work, the complexity of the editing, the mythical subtext, the eloquent narration, and its unique subject set it apart from anything that came before (see Figure 2). In addition to evoking the physical and emotional reality of warfare and the rituals in which it is embedded, the film builds portraits of...