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Directed by Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati.
US, 2020, DCP, color and b&w, 78 min.
English and Hubula with English subtitles.
DCP source: Cinema Guild
Well known to Harvard Film Archive audiences as a guest performer, sound composer/designer on numerous films, and former mainstay of the Film Study Center, Ernst Karel (b.1970) is most closely associated with that department’s Sensory Ethnography Lab for his cinematic sound work as well as his course in “sonic ethnography.” For his most recent adventure, he collaborated with another SEL affiliate, Veronika Kusumaryati (b.1980), a political and media anthropologist focused on West Papua. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology with a secondary field in film and visual studies from Harvard and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University.
Four years in the making, Expedition Content is an exploration in “decolonizing the archive” through deep listening. The nearly imageless film is constructed from recordings made in 1961 in West Papua by Michael Rockefeller, heir to the legendary Standard Oil family who had been involved in early oil exploration in New Guinea. Rockefeller made the recordings as part of an expedition organized by another figure familiar to HFA frequenters: filmmaker, professor, and HFA co-founder Robert Gardner. Understanding the complex power of cinema, Gardner was instrumental in developing and nurturing film studies and film production at Harvard. Many of his films would enter the ethnographic canon, though he strived to set himself apart from that rigid categorization by taking a distinctly poetic, philosophical approach.
Presented by the Harvard Film Archive in collaboration with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University.