Gardner structured the film as three parallel lives. Weyak is an adult man who farms, guards the frontier between enemy territories, and braids a complex knotted strap that will eventually be presented at a funeral. His wife Laca harvests sweet potatoes and walks with the women to the salt pools, where they scrape mineral-rich plant fibers and carry them home. The small boy Pua tends the family pigs, plays with his friends, and explores the edges of what he's allowed to see. Around them, the Willihiman-Wallalua confederation of the Gutelu alliance fights ritual battles against the Wittaia alliance. A small boy is killed by a raiding party. Men gather at the fighting ground. Women continue to the salt. A warrior is wounded. Rain starts. The battle ends. The film cuts to the funeral of the murdered boy, to a great pig sacrifice, to the voiceover returning to the myth of the bird and the snake.

Robert Gardner was a filmmaker at Harvard's Film Study Center, trained in anthropology but working in a mode closer to poetry than to ethnographic science. His team arrived in the Baliem Valley in early 1961 on an expedition organized through the Peabody Museum and the Netherlands New Guinea administration. Karl G. Heider, then a doctoral student, would spend years among the Dani and write the definitive academic study of the Dugum band. Jan Broekhuijse was a Dutch anthropologist already in-country. Peter Matthiessen - best known then for his nature writing, later for his fiction - kept the field journal that became Under the Mountain Wall. And Michael Rockefeller, son of Nelson Rockefeller, ran the sound recorder. In November 1961, months after leaving the Baliem expedition, Rockefeller disappeared while attempting to swim ashore from a swamped catamaran off the Asmat coast of southern New Guinea. His body was never recovered. His work on Dead Birds stood as part of what he left behind.

Dead Birds has been called the most influential ethnographic film ever made, and also one of the most questioned. The battle sequences are composites, assembled from footage of different battles shot on different days - a fact Heider himself acknowledged in his 1976 book Ethnographic Film. The women-at-the-salt-pools scenes were filmed on separate occasions from the battles they are intercut with. All the sound was post-synchronized; the filming predated lightweight sync-sound equipment. The voice audiences hear as Weyak's is actually Heider speaking Dani in a post-production dub, because Gardner did not speak the language and could not record Weyak directly. None of this was hidden - Gardner wrote about it openly - but subsequent anthropologists have argued that the film foregrounds Dani cosmology at the cost of ethnographic precision. Reviewers have split the same way ever since: poetic, some say; stylized, say others.

Dead Birds premiered at an American Academy of Arts and Sciences evening meeting at Tufts University on 13 November 1963, a bit over a week before the Kennedy assassination would monopolize the national attention. In 1964 it took the Grand Prize 'Marzocco d'Oro' at the Festival dei Popoli in Florence, Italy, and the Robert J. Flaherty Award from the City College of New York. It played at the Melbourne Film Festival. In 1998, it was added to the United States National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, selected each year by the Librarian as 'culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.' It joined a short list of ethnographic films so recognized, and has kept canonical status in anthropology courses and film schools. The Dani still watch it occasionally, when a DVD finds its way back to Wamena.

The battles Gardner filmed were already on their way out. Dutch missionaries and then Indonesian administration suppressed ritual warfare through the 1960s and 1970s; by the time the anthropologist Gardner's team had worked had filmed most of the film, the colonial authorities were actively intervening in Dani raids. When Indonesia took over the territory in 1963 - the same year Dead Birds premiered - the practice was essentially ended. The Dugum Dani still hold Baliem Valley Festival mock battles every August in Wamena, wearing koteka and carrying spears, but what they are performing is a memory, not a raid. The bird still wins its race. Death still arrives. But the particular way the Dani once made peace with that - by keeping the feud alive, by naming the dead, by shedding blood to answer blood - is now a thing historians and anthropologists study rather than describe in the present tense.