Making <i>Dead Birds</i>

the long version

"Robert Gardner's classic Dead Birds is one of the most highly acclaimed documentary films ever made. In this detailed and candid account, the filmmaker looks back at the process of making Dead Birds, from the birth of the idea through months of fieldwork and filming in New Guinea to editing and releasing the finished film. More than a chronicle of planning and labor, the book is a thoughtful examination of what it meant to film the moving and violent rituals of life and death among a group of warrior farmers in the New Guinea highlands and to present a graphic story of their behavior as a window onto our own. Letters, journals, telegrams, newspaper clippings, and images are assembled to recreate with vivid immediacy a chronology of events that are woven together and illuminated by Gardner's searching and reflective commentary." "The Harvard-Peabody Expedition that Gardner led to Netherlands New Guinea in 1961 included a remarkable cast of participants - among them novelist and naturalist Peter Matthiessen, Life Magazine photographer Eliot Elisofon, anthropologist Karl Heider, and the young and ill-fated sound-recordist/photographer Michael Rockefeller. All of them brought back extraordinary bodies of work. Probably most influential of all was Dead Birds, which marked a sea change in nonfiction filmmaking. This book takes the reader inside the creative process of making that landmark film and offers a revealing look into the heart and mind of one of the great filmmakers of our time."--book jacket.