The Sky Above, the Mud Below

The Sky Above The Mud Below is an absolutely stunning film. This was made about 1960. It is basically one of the last journeys of its kind: A trek into unexplored territory meeting uncontacted tribes in New Guinea. Where can you go today this remote? As our world grows closer and closer in its current media saturated configuration the possibility of real geographic and ethnographic discovery by anyone is becoming more and more remote. The tribes are all accounted for. This film is the only real glimpse we can get of what it was like for explorers of the past to encounter the UNKNOWN. Yes as it is modern times they do have a radio. But no plane can land anywhere to find them. As their rickety little boat motors up river suddenly the voyagers come up a huge band of cannibal headhunters chanting intensely in canoes downstream straight towards them, hundreds and hundreds. It is compelling and eerie, Truly Other. One of the blessings of this film is that it is NOT made by anthropologists or any of the politically correct interpreters of the present, the kind of people who say "Well everyone has their own culture you know." Thus the tribal natives appear truly other in a way that preserves their mystery and uniqueness. The explorers may not understand what they are seeing but then again neither do we. The rites are truly hard to enter from the outside. Men sleep on skulls. Human skin is cut to seal a lizard skin drum. Young boys are readied to spend a night alone with a freshly cut head. Tribal warfare lurks everywhere. Malarial jungles invade the explorers' minds with frightening efficiency. Ghosts and spirits haunt everything. This film captures the dream of the exotic, the fear of the jungle as a central archetype better than any film I can think of. This is a glimpse of the true heart of darkness. This is a chance to look into a cannibal's face and to see both the humanity and that which lurks within us all. As we move towards our own neo-pagan dreams of burning men in the Nevada desert and frat house orgies captured for the Internet. New Guinea whispers to us. Paganism isn't just a few incantations of cosmic energy. There is always the blood. It must return if we move that way. Our postmodern cargo cults need to look to this part of the world to understand many things. Otherwise our rituals will bring fear lest we perform them the wrong way. I am so glad this film exists to leave a cracked door open on a world that has nearly completely vanished. They do listen to rap music now in New Guinea. You can take a tour. But New Guinea requires deep thought.

(By the way it is available on DVD now. It was made to be watched in French with English subtitles. It is on the same DVD as Black and White in Color. I wish it had a DVD of its own. A triple bill of The Sky Above The Mud Below with Dead Birds and Cannibal Tours would be outstanding.)

'Sky Above, Mud Below' by today's standards would not qualify as a documentary despite its Academy Award for best documentary feature in 1961. The film is painfully patronizing, while simultaneously insulting and embarrassing. The narration is a constant irritant in both it's tone and content. At one point the narrator even whispers as if standing just out of sight of the camera with a microphone in hand, ala Howard Cosell. Much of the film is quite obviously staged and many things are mentioned to be going on while never shown. The only use for this documentary now after nearly 40 years is to be the next victim of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

There is a scene towards the end of this documentary that shows a woman with a baby suckling on one breast and a piglet on the other. That is just one of the many bizarre images that this really quite fascinating film delivers as it follows a team trying to cross the narrowest part of Dutch New Guinea. Assembling a small team, some bearers and half a dozen soldiers, three intrepid Europeans start off to cross four hundred-odd miles of dense, seemingly impenetrable, jungle where the white man has never been before. Initially using the navigable rivers, they meet villagers who are friendly enough to their visitors and who show them many of their festivals, religious and fertility ceremonies adorned with shrunken heads, human bones, tattoos and ancient mysticism. As the column moves inland, their progress becomes laboriously slow but there is still no shortage of tribesmen but many are often less friendly. They never appear threatening, more exuding a "please leave us alone" type of reaction. What does seem a little curious amidst all this wilderness, is that they run out of food! Luckily, they are in radio contact with their base and so can call in for resupplies of food and medicine. Perfectly willing to share the latter with the people they meet, they do appear to have a far more trouble-free journey than you might have expected amongst peoples who were as unfamiliar with them as with their technology, their cameras, guns and radio. Nature, on the other hand, was not always so benign and as they struggles across peaks over ten thousand feet high, their team shrinks, but they are determined to make it to the safety of the northern coast and for many, their first ever sight of the ocean. The photography is really quite astonishing, not least because it's sterling quality and it conveys so much of these people's behaviour in what looks like an entirely natural fashion. From large scale community activities to far more intimate childbirth rites; bodies covered in birthmarks and scars; villages beside rivers that survived as they had for generations, we seem to inconvenience them all as minimally as possible. This is one of those films that really emphasises man's mortality. Without their equipment, and the kindly and curious intervention of their various hosts, these travellers would almost certainly have perished at the hands of a vibrant, colourful and perilous environment that could quite literally have swallowed them all up. It's the kind of place that I hope we never revisit, and that these traditions are left to continue for many years to come - undisturbed by modern society.

The title under which the English language version of this Academy Award-documentary was released was particularly apt since it contains occasional aerial shots from the point of view of an aeroplane that punctuate this record of a 1959 French expedition to the heart of darkness in Dutch New Guinea.

Seen now many of the narrator's comments seem condescending in the extreme - its talk of "real savages as Captain Cook saw them", for example, would today receive few defenders - especially as as the explorers brought along a few barbaric customs of their own, notably smoking tobacco.

I had meant to see this film when I was a teenager, but I seem to never have gotten around to it, as high school was full of beckoning activities. The filming of this adventure was quite impressive; the entire trip took seven months. Each day of those seven months, or over 200 days, were 200+ days of various challenges, tortuous marches and several unknown dangers. These explorers were facing millions of flies and mosquitoes, treacherous jungle paths (when there was a path; most times there weren't any), endless vegetation and rivers flowing at 30 knots; enough to carry away even the strongest swimmer. There were pygmy tribes, friendly tribes, and mostly cautious tribes, who had never seen a Westerner. The cameraman did a fantastic job getting and developing footage in a part of the world where keeping film dry was a major challenge. You have to see the film to believe that men would put themselves through such adversity, just to explore some new areas of New Guinea. You wouldn't find me there for ten grand a month.