Programme 3

Surveillance cameras and cameras on our phones are like flies watching us. Microphones are flies that listen to us and, in doing so, they also record a historical unconscious of the practices of direct documentary cinema.

The film Expedition Content, by Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati, follows an expedition by Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in which Robert Gardner participated —and from which Dead Birds (1963), his classic of ethnographic cinema, emerged—. But while Gardner's film observed the Hubla —the people of the great Baliem Valley— through telephoto lenses and an omnipresent voiceover, Karel and Kusumaryati's film focuses on the off-screen life of the expedition.

Expedition Content is an augmented sound work for cinema that uses the 37 hours of “discarded” sound archives recorded by the young Michael Rockefeller, the expedition’s sound recordist, before he disappeared. By almost entirely creating it without images, the film forces us to listen to the hum of history: the arrogance, the banal noises, and the power relations of the explorers, ultimately inverting the gaze so as to no longer observe the indigenous person but the white expedition that was holding the cameras and microphones.

Xavier Nueno