From Sweetgrass to Leviathan to Manakamana to El Mar La Mar to Caniba, Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab is responsible for some of the most fascinating non-fiction cinematic work of the century thus far. Their latest project is Expedition Content, directed by Ernst Karel, a master of sound works including some of the aforementioned titles, and Veronika Kusumaryati, a political and media anthropologist working in West Papua. Following a premiere at last year’s Berlinale, the film will open at NYC’s Anthology Film Archives on January 7 and we’re pleased to exclusively debut the trailer.
An immersive sonic journey, the film is culled from 37 hours of audio recordings made in 1961 on the so-called Harvard-Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea by recent college graduate and Standard Oil heir Michael Rockefeller to study the indigenous Hubula (also known as Dani) people. Using almost no images, Karel and Kusumaryati’s film documents the strange encounter between the expedition and the Hubula people. “The work explores and upends the power dynamics between anthropologist and subject, between image and sound, and calls into question the whole ethnographic project,” the description notes.
See the exclusive trailer below, with headphones recommended.
Expedition Content opens at Anthology Film Archives on January 7.