Cruelest Island

The Sky Above--The Mud Below.

In September 1959 a seven-man French explorer-adventurer task force headed by Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau, together with 60 native bearers, began a south-to-north, coast-to-coast trek across Netherlands New Guinea from the Arafura Sea over the central barrier through a 150-mile pocket of jungle which no white man had ever charted. Seven months and 1,000 winding miles later, having logged temperatures from near freezing to as high as 132DEG Fahrenheit and altitudes of up to 12,000 ft., Gaisseau and his radio engineer, Herve de Maigret. staggered out to the mocking serenity of the Hollandia coast and an orange-tinted postcard sunset among swaying palm fronds. Five of the explorers, including the photographers (Gaisseau had to take over the camera), had dropped out, some of them being rescued by helicopter. Three of the native bearers were dead, 30 men were ill with dysentery and malaria. But their heroic physical ordeal had been a journey in time, back to the Stone Age, that will leave viewers wrung out and shirt-drenched in an air-conditioned movie house.

One tribe practices the cult of the severed head. Young boys entering warrior-hood spend an initiation night in the men's communal hut cradling a freshly cut enemy head between their knees--a ceremony that requires a new crop of heads each time. The headhunters, photographed in the same general territory where 23-year-old Michael Rockefeller was lost last year, wear skulls dangling from their necks as magic charms against evil, and they tuck skulls under their heads as pillows at night. Despite the archly ominous narration of the sound track, the headhunters prove curiously unsavage. Poling their dugout canoes like racing shells along the jungle streams, decked in white-feathered headdresses, and holding their spears in light-fingered readiness, they are pictorially and organically in harmony with their elemental surroundings. Among the sociological curios filmed by the expedition, a mock birth ritual is the most dramatic, with two peacemaking clans rhythmically grunting out the labor pains over two couples covered with sago leaves who are each being "reborn" into the other's neighboring tribe as a peace pledge.

The terrain itself provides the ultimate drama, beauty and terror of the film: cascading rock-strewn rivers that can smash an outrigger like a coconut shell, the green deep-pile carpeting of the rain forest, so dense that only needles of sunlight ever filter through to the dank jungle floor, the incessant droning whine of insects, and the voracious, slimy leeches, the size of amputated little fingers, that have to be burned off the skin. In New Guinea, the cruelest headhunter is still Nature.

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