Robert Gardner - Dead Birds

Me parece que este documental tiene cosas interesantes, pero siento una manipulación muy evidente

ya que la narración de Gardner es muy explicativa y me hubiera gustado que la imagen tenga mas fuerza

por si sola, tiene muy buenas tomas y se logra ver a los documentados en acción, pero nunca se nos permite

escucharlos si no a través del narrador.

Me pareció muy interesante ver como viven con esa presión y ese intercambio en la guerra, me hizo refleccionar

sobre la idea que tenía de sociedades que viven en un ambiente menos influenciados por occidente, me doy cuenta

de que no es mas bonito ni pacifico de lo que nosotros vivimos hoy en día.

Robert Gardner was born in 1925 in Brookline Massachussets, and is one of the most famous ethnographic filmmakers in the world. Over the zears he has been making athnographic films, teaching, writings on documentary films and ethnography and supporting filmmakers and their projects. His film focus on specific people and specific places, including Niger, Ladakh, Sudan, Eritrea, and New Guinea.

Robert Gardner is seeking the unknown, images, the haunting moments and new flavours of beauty. In the past forty years, his approach and style in filmmaking have proviked much discussion among anthropologists. He was criticized on many occasions: " Those who are strongly concerned with a single identity for the discipline of anthropology, and a well-maintained frontier post which marks out hostile neighbouring states called Art and Science, cannot be comfortable with people who move freely between them, with either several passports, or the 'wrong' one." (Peter Loizos)

Dead Birds is a film about the Dani, a people dwelling in the Grand Valley of the Baliem high in the mountains of West Irian. “When I shot the film in 1961, the Dani had an almost classic Neolithic culture. They were exceptional in the way they focussed their energies and based their values on an elaborate system of intertribal warfare and revenge. Neighboring groups of Dani clans, separated by uncultivated strips of no man's land, engaged in frequent formal battles. When a warrior was killed in battle or died from a wound and even when a woman or a child lost their life in an enemy raid, the victors celebrated and the victims mourned. Because each death had to be avenged, the balance was continually being adjusted with the spirits of the aggrieved lifted and the ghosts of slain comrades satisfied as soon as a compensating enemy life was taken. There was no thought in the Dani world of wars ever ending, unless it rained or became dark. [...]” (R. Gardner). Dead Birds has a meaning which is both immediate and allegorical. In the Dani language it refers to the weapons and ornaments recovered in battle. Its other more poetic meaning comes from the Dani belief that people, because they are like birds, must die.

Gardner established film at Harvard as a subject of university concern when he taught the first courses dealing with the subject while still a graduate student. For forty years he was Director of the Film Study Center which he founded in 1957. While working alone or with collaborators, he has encouraged innovation and experimentation in all aspects of film. Gardner was, for ten years, the Director of Harvard's Visual Arts Center and also served as Chairman of the Visual and Environmental Studies Department.    Outside the University and apart from his own filmmaking, he undertook in the early seventies a major commitment in television by producing and hosting nearly one hundred, ninety-minute programs for a commercial broadcasting station. Each program presented an interview with a significant figure in the arena of independent filmmaking. This series represents a concentrated history of important experimental and documentary filmmaking of the 1960's, 70's and '80's.    Following his retirement from teaching and administration at Harvard, Gardner established a small cooperative called studio7arts in Cambridge Massachusetts. There he collaborates in the production of films, videos, DVDs and books with a number of prominent writers and artists such as, Sharon Lockhart, Samina Quraeshi, Susan Meiselas, Alex Webb and others. Two new books are in progress including one of photographs made by Gardner and 7 photographer friends. Both will be published in 2009 by the Peabody Press at Harvard. Two new films are in preparation and expected to be ready for screening by the beginning of 2009.    Gardner is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He is also the recipient of numerous film awards and prizes including the Flaherty Award twice. In 2005 he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Anthropological Association. 

"I'll confess, I always wanted to be a poet.  I knew tons of poets.  They were who I gawked at, admired, hero-worshipped, everything." 

-- Robert Gardner

Fuentes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb5cJrM5fLA

http://invisiblecinema.typepad.com/invisible_cinema/2006/10/xoxoxo.html

http://www.der.org/films/filmmakers/robert-gardner.html

http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/photographer/Robert__Gardner/A/