An ancient tribe, and change
October marks the 50th anniversary of “Dead Birds,” the groundbreaking documentary of a Stone Age tribe that survived into the 20th century. Its creator was Robert Gardner ’47, the longtime director (1957-1997) of the Film Study Center, the creative arm of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The Harvard Film Archive hosted a recent retrospective screening of “Dead Birds.” Gardner helped to found the archive too, in 1979, and remembered its prototype as “a few shelves in the closet” at the Carpenter Center. “Things have only gotten better as time has gone by,” he said. Time has been kind to “Dead Birds,” a lyrical study of the lives, beliefs, practices, and ritual warfare of the Dugum Dani peoples in the remote Grand Valley in the highlands of western New Guinea. At the invitation of the Dutch government, Gardner and a small team spent six months in 1961 filming what were then...