I saw Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds this weekend, when Gardner received and honorary degree at Bard College. A panel preceding his award featured Stanley Cavell, Luc Sante, Ian Buruma, Susan Meiselas and Gardner himself. The panel (d)evolved into a celebration of Gardner the Man (he mentioned, casually, that he flies his own plane) and a defense of Gardner the high humanist, who operates with the utmost respect for the autonomy of his subjects, never interfering in the world he records. Gardner, everyone seemed to agree, was a prophet of the objective camera.

Dead Birds is a portrait of the Dani people, inhabitants of the Grand Valley of the Baliem in the mountains of West Papua. In his notes on the film, Gardner describes the Dani as “exceptional in the way they dedicated themselves to an elaborate system of ritual warfare.” Watching the film, one understands that the Dani’s enemy—a group that, appealingly, remains nameless—is more important to their existence than their homes or their fields. The Dani, as presented to us by Gardner, are a people whose warfare and existence are inseparable. They appear both eternal and distant. Eternal in their perpetual violence; distant in how removed their way of life is from ours.

Walter Benjamin remarked that modern society was concerned more and more with pushing death away from us. In the 19th century, it was understood that a home would have been a place where someone had died–today, such a death is enough to render a place haunted. Bearing witness to the Dani way of life is to understand that death is not merely present in their lives: it is, in fact, the very condition of their life. In Gardner’s film, the Dani have nothing but death: even their methods of creation are in the service of death, as when they create their ornate battlefield outfits or fashion valuables to be entrusted to corpses. The Dani, too, are concerned with satisfying the ghosts that wander amongst them.

For us, death is the end of a narrative that gives the scattershot events that have preceded it meaning (“She went to the supermarket, bought a gallon of milk, and died”). This means that death, its distance from us, becomes the endpoint that renders life meaningful. The perpetuity of the circle is closed, making it both complete (read: “meaningful”) and empty. The Dani, on the other hand, never complete the circle: it is never closed, and thus death is truly perpetual, truly present.

Dead Birds doesn’t yet reach the height of Gardner’s work, when he abandoned narrative entirely and became interested only in the texture of what he filmed. Yet despite Gardner’s controlling narration, the film does show a hint of Gardner’s later work in the language of the Dani, which is never translated and thus never understood. It could be criticized as a kind of exoticism, but the richness that Gardner grants their speech allows us to hear honestly, more honestly than if the words had been codified into English—an act that would have robbed it of its own uniqueness. Gardner here shows the seed of his ability to preserve this reality without the construction of narrative. This was, perhaps, the reason Stan Brakhage was such an admirer of Gardner: his films preserve, on some level, the innocence of initial experience.

There remain, though, some unsolved problems. In the early 60s, Gardner could not have shot sync-sound, so all the sound was dubbed in post, including the voices of the Dani, whose language is spoken by an imitator. Furthermore, the film’s magnificent battle sequences are themselves culled together from disparate battles: the film has formed battles that never happened from the realities that did.

Gardner’s objective camera, then, is not so pure after all; the same Robert Gardner that was celebrated for his refusal to tamper with the natives he recorded is, in fact, a forger. Gardner’s forgery is the essential forgery of the film medium itself, which is not objective but rather metonymic.  What’s important is that this lack of what some may call legitimacy in no way hinders the honesty of experience to found in Gardner’s work. Gardner the humanist was being celebrated by the experts before me for the wrong reasons.  It was Brakhage’s admiration that was well placed: it isn’t the creation of the film that is innocent, but rather the experience in the theatre. My own experience with the film led to a reflection on death, its distance and its closeness, its meaning and meaninglessness. Despite the film’s artificiality, it remains honest: Gardner’s films have an honesty of experience which is perhaps the only honesty to be found in the dark space of the move theater.