The FSC is excited to kick off the spring semester of Nonfiction Workshops with a project and makers deeply connected to the history of the FSC: Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati will be with us to discuss their film/sound work Expedition Content.

Expedition Content
2020, DCP, 78 minutes

In 1961, filmmaker Robert Gardner organized the Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea (current day West Papua). Funded by the Dutch colonial government and private donations, and consisting of several of the wealthiest members of American society wielding 16mm film cameras, still photographic cameras, reel-to-reel tape recorders, and a microphone, the expedition settled for five months in the Baliem Valley, among the Hubula (also known as Dani) people. It resulted in Gardner’s highly influential film Dead Birds, two books of photographs, Peter Matthiessen’s book Under the Mountain Wall, and two ethnographic monographs. Michael Rockefeller, a fourth-generation member of the Rockefeller (Standard Oil) family, was tasked with taking pictures and recording sound in and around the Hubula world. Expedition Content is an augmented sound work composed from the archive’s 37 hours of tape which document the strange encounter between the expedition and the Hubula people. The piece reflects on intertwined and complex historical moments in the development of approaches to multimodal anthropology, in the lives of the Hubula and of Michael, and in the ongoing history of colonialism in West Papua.

This spring, the FSC will be hosting (remotely) a series of visiting filmmakers as part of our Nonfiction Workshop. Invited filmmakers will circulate links to their films in advance so that we can watch them on our own, and we will get together as a group to have a conversation about their work. As many of these works are in progress or yet to be released theatrically, we have limited capacity in terms of the number of participants we are able to accommodate. If you are interested in attending (and are not currently a FSC fellow or CMP student), please email Cozette Russell.