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On a Boulder in the River

If I were a film critic I’d be giving five stars becauseVoices of the Rainforest (Feld 2019b) is ethnographically brilliant. In this review, I’ll pay attention to how Feld and colleagues draw our attention to ways in which Bosavi people connect with the jungle, the passage of time and the film techniques Feld and colleagues use to achieve each. Voices of the Rainforest is a visual and auditory feast of weather, birds, foliage, water, tools and Bosavi people in Papua NewGuinea (PNG). Is it ethnographic film? Is it art? Is it a melancholic poem or a song or visual time diary? In the opening minutes of this film I asked these questions and my brain tried to categorise the film into known categories of meaning. I watched as photos from PNG jungle in the 1970s merged in and out of each other. One photo of a tree is slowly superimposed onto a photo of a jungle bird [7.11] and then that merges back into a photo of the jungle. The journey between photos is slow, giving a sense of the slowness of dawn transitioning into day, and of days, weeks, months and years passing, barely noticed. Birds are calling and their sounds ring constant while the images blur in and out of one another. By the fifth or sixth minute I started noticing similarities between this film and other traditional ethnographic film such as Forest of Bliss (Gardner 1986), which Heider (2006) suggests is successful because there is no narration. As with Forest of Bliss, Voices of the Rainforest uses natural synchronous sound including forest sounds and people’s voices to offer an ethnographically rich story. In Voices of the Rainforest the audience is immediately guided by a slow tempo into contemplation of the PNG forest and its inhabitants. We see a vast jungle and are encouraged to contemplate this vastness through the tempo that Feld has so masterfully created. And there in the ninth minute [9.04], ever so surreptitiously, blurring into focus are trees lying on their sides. This is the first shot that alerted me to Feld’s narrative of forest clearing. As the film progresses we are introduced to photos of Bosavi people in the 1970s, living in the jungle, going about their business, chopping wood and raising children. At [15.17] an old photo of a woman with six young children morphs into the jungle in which they stand as though the jungle—like history— has enveloped them. They are the jungle. There is nothing Cartesian about it. We hear distant chopping and men singing and suddenly this photographic montage morphs into present day, with two men chopping a tree down with hand axes. Two short shots are followed by photos of men chopping jungle trees in the 1970s, and just as quickly the film returns to present day (2018) men chopping.