American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

appearance is suggestive: it is clear that he is unsure how to proceed with his film. He asks Reichel-Dolmatoff what the function of filming the Ika might be—especially since what he feels is of interest, their spiritual life, is an internal psychic state; Reichel-Dolmatoff suggests that the justification for making the film is that the way of life of the Ika offers “an option” to those of us living within what Gardner describes, in his early (and only) voice-over, as “the turmoil of a relentless modernity.” Gardner’s second close-up suggests that he’s not entirely convinced by Reichel-Dolmatoff’s comments.

      Ika Hands is a montage of life in Mamingeka held together by three general motifs: everyday village activities introduced by textual titles (“Greeting in the men’s house by/exchanging coca leaves”; “The work of prayer is quotidian”; “Making rope”; “Fetching water” . . . ); the spiritual ministry of Mama Marco, who seems the most influential elder in the village; and the conversation between Gardner and Reichel-Dolmatoff. The montage is punctuated by seven passages of sunrises, clouds moving through the mountains, a distant lightning storm, shot by Fulton—Gardner’s way of suggesting both the passage of time in the village and the idea that these Ika live with a more macrocosmic sense of time than most people do. Increasingly the focus is on Mama Marco’s spiritual activities within the village as other everyday routines are playing out and on his solo excursions and activities. Often, Gardner intercuts between daily activities and Mama Marco chanting or doing other ritual actions. While Mama Marco is the primary character in Ika Hands, we get little sense of him beyond his spirituality; and while the other Ika men, and the women and children, seem comfortable with Gardner and his camera, they are not distinguished as characters the way Pua and Wayek are in Dead Birds.

      While in some ways, Ika Hands seems of a piece with Dead Birds, Rivers of Sand, and Deep Hearts, there is a basic difference: the Ika seem to remain more of a mystery to Gardner than the other groups he has filmed (the puzzlement evident in the early close-ups of Gardner is a premonition). There were practical reasons for this: judging from Gardner’s journals written during the time he spent in Mamingeka, translation, especially of Mama Marco’s chantings, was problematic at best. Since Gardner’s original interest in the Ika was primarily their spiritual life and the ways in which a shaman might be serving his community, not being able to know what is being said seriously inhibits understanding. Though Gardner films Mama Marco often, most of the shooting confirms the distance between Gardner and this priest, along with Gardner’s respect for him: often Mama Marco is seen in low-angle shots, mostly from behind or from the side; and the final shot of the film shows Mama Marco walking away from the camera into the mountain mist: he, and his spiritual reality, will remain a mystery to Gardner and to the viewer.

      The publication of The Impulse to Preserve in 2006 made available Gardner’s journal entries recorded during his time in Columbia (November 15–30, 1980; May 28–July 24, 1981), and his comments reveal dimensions of Ika Hands that force us to see the film both as a depiction of the Ika and as an evocation of a pivotal moment in Gardner’s career. That Ika Hands is as much about Gardner as about the Ika is obvious two-thirds of the way though the film when this interchange takes place between Reichel-Dolmatoff and Gardner:

      REICHEL-DOLMATOFF: You capture this essential loneliness. In a way, I’m impressed by the absence of your filming social relationships. You don’t have people relating to each other, or very rarely you have a scene where someone greets someone or . . .

      GARDNER: This says more about me than it does about the Ika. . . .

      REICHEL-DOLMATOFF: This is very possible. . . . This shows man alone, man in a tremendous tension, very, very, there’s a tremendous anxiety in this film, you know?

      Gardner’s journals dramatically expand our sense of Gardner’s struggle in Mamingeka.

      While the primary focus in the film is the pervasive spirituality of Mama Marco and the other Ika, the focus of Gardner’s journal entries is the physical challenges of living in Mamingeka. Everything seems difficult, from defecating (“Maintaining a squatting position takes great concentration of mind,” even “with no [feces eating] pigs in attendance”)⁵⁰ to sleeping (“I write lying in a sleeping bag liberally sprayed with insecticide in an effort to resist an invasion of fleas that have kept me awake for the last two nights. Both of my arms are swollen from their attentions and I’m told bedbugs are next. This experience is uncomfortable so far and one for which I admit having wavering enthusiasm”).⁵¹ And though Gardner does adjust to these hardships, he must also deal with his flagging spirits; this has to do with “the interminable coughing, retching, spitting, whining, and tantrums I hear from all directions. . . . It is in my face, sitting, standing, or lying down. Mucous and vomit pour forth. Gobbits of expectorate fly in all directions. . . . I wheel and dodge, duck and run. I recoil a hundred times a day. . . . The work suffers as I suffer. I don’t feel centered, forgiving, or even interested. . . .” The sickness in the village (it also claims Fulton) is so exhausting that at one point Gardner is led to write, “Why isn’t that sick child dead? It should be and will be. The film could use it”!⁵² And filming itself was bringing its own challenges: “I managed to fall into a substantial torrent rushing past some of the outlying houses of San Sebastian. It might not have happened had I not been trying to cross it carrying a number of things I wanted to keep dry. Twenty years ago in the Baliem Valley I had no difficulty overcoming such obstacles.”⁵³

      That the village’s struggle with illness is evident in only a single sequence in Ika Hands, as a mother deals with her sick son, and that Gardner’s struggle with shooting his footage is not evident in the film says a good bit about Gardner’s commitment to the idea of the spiritual. Gardner’s fascination with Mama Marco has much to do with the priest’s unflagging activity in his spiritual enterprise—“the mama’s work never ends”—but Gardner’s activity in filming Mama Marco and his environment is also unflagging and full of hardship; when Mama Marco makes the exhausting climb to the sacred lakes, Gardner walks with him, carrying a thirty-pound camera. That is, Gardner’s own cine-spiritual quest not only reflects on, but mirrors the physical and psychic challenges demanded by Mama Marco’s commitment.

      That Mama Marco remains quite distant from Gardner (and from us), that he is ultimately a figure walking away into the mist, also implies that shooting Ika Hands made clear to the once-indefatigable Gardner that he could no longer commit to making films the way he once did. Even as he was beginning his investigation of the Ika, Gardner had wondered, “But why do I even consider another desolate geography to probe another disappearing remnant of humanity?”⁵⁴ And the fact that he could not finish this film for seven years confirms that this particular kind of cinematic quest can no longer be his; in making Ika Hands he himself was the man walking into the mist; his earlier ethnographic filmmaking was now a “disappearing remnant” of his cine-humanity.

      

      The triumph of Forest of Bliss, occurring midway through the process of making Ika Hands, demonstrated the value of eliminating one form of filmmaker presence (narration), and it seems to have opened the way for Gardner’s fuller acceptance of his own filmmaking process. While Ika Hands does include vestiges of Gardner’s earlier uses of narration—Gardner’s opening voice-over and Reichel-Dolmatoff’s commentary—it also represents a change, because Gardner is present primarily as a character (the filmmaker struggling with his film) in conversation with a narrator who is also a character: we develop a sense of Reichel-Dolmatoff before he becomes an off-screen voice.

      The character of Robert Gardner as filmmaker would become a good deal more prominent in the two films that followed Ika Hands, both of which focus not on disappearing ways of life but on artistic creation. In Dancing with Miklos (1993), his film about filmmaker Miklos Jansco at work on The Blue Danube Waltz (1991; the film was produced by Gardner and Michael Fitzgerald), and Passenger (1997), a depiction of the artist Sean Scully at work, Gardner is a major character. As the title Dancing with Miklos suggests, Gardner’s filmmaking is interwoven with Jansco’s (which itself portrays the press covering a set of events: there is filmmaking within filmmaking within Gardner’s filmmaking); and in Passenger, Gardner is simultaneously the director of the film about Scully and the filmmaker depicted shooting footage in Scully’s studio.