ROBERT GARDNER made his first film while living in the American Northwest and reading for the first time such writers as Ruth Benedict (Patterns of Culture) and Edward Sapir (Language). It was the start of his lifelong interest in Anthropology as an intellectual perspective. In 1950 Gardner visited British Columbia with the idea of making a feature about the few remaining and once glorious Kwakiutl Indians but managed only to make a short called Blunden Harbour from footage shot by a co-worker, William Heick.
Following his return to Cambridge for graduate study in anthropology in 1955, Gardner collaborated with John Marshall in making The Hunters. He abandoned graduate work to devote his time entirely to filmmaking. In a new position as lecturer at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard, he became one of three running the program of the institution. During these many years, he made his widely known non fiction films, Dead Birds, Rivers of Sand, Forest of Bliss, The Nuer (with Hilary Harris), Deep Hearts, and Ika Hands while at the same time writing and producing a television series (Screening Room) for a local ABC affiliate. These programs are currently in great demand for courses involved with the teaching of independent film history and are made available by Studio7Arts here. Many of Gardner’s films may also be found at the Documentary Educational Resources website: www.der.org.
Gardner’s hope of making a feature narrative film never materialized though he was close to realizing Isle of Dogs about an inexplicable murder on a small French island in the North Atlantic, Cooper’s Creek about a fatal expedition through the interior of Australia in the 19th Century and Waiting for the Barbarians about a remote imperial outpost from a novel written by John Coetzee.
Accounts of all of Gardner’s films can be found in numerous published books, reviews and essays. His own account of much of his life as a filmmaker can be found in a book he has written called The Impulse to Preserve: Reflections of a Filmmaker (Other Press NYC), made available by Studio7Arts here.
Much of his time at present is being given to the completion of a cinematic examination of his own life called Still Journey On.
Blunden Harbour
In the late 1940′s Blunden Harbour was a small village on the coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia inhabited by a handful of impoverished families of Kwakiutl Indians who gained their meager livelihood from fishing and gathering.
Robert Gardner, then a graduate student of Anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle, went to Blunden Harbour to do research for a major film project about the Kwakiutl about whom Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas had written so eloquently. In the course of his stay in the village, he he saw an opportunity to do a short, black and white sketch for a larger portrait of a people and a place. For this he invited William Heick to do the photography. The larger work was never done and Blunden Harbour remains one of the few authentic accounts of this once majestic people.
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Dances of The Kwakiutl
Dances of the Kwakiutl is composed of fragments filmed in 1950 in Fort Rupert, British Columbia. They were made during a performance by those still familiar with the tradition of ‘Hamatsa’ or cannibal dancing. This type of dance was brought to impressive artistic heights by the Kwakiutl people of the Northwest coast.
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Mark Tobey
Mark Tobey was made while the painter lived in Seattle Washington early in the 1950′s. It is the second film made by Robert Gardner and it shows in cinematic language how this man looked at the world. It is a document in which Tobey himself both performs and is observed. The style is related to certain experimental tendencies of the period especially those of Maya Deren.
A unique film in the Gardner ouvre, the film not only presents an experimental portrait of Tobey but serves as a window into the American art, avant garde film, and poetic movements of this period.
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Dead Birds
Dead Birds is a film about the Dani, a people dwelling in the Grand Valley of the Baliem high in the mountains of West Papua. When I shot the film in 1961, the Dani had a classic Neolithic culture. They were exceptional in the way they dedicated themselves to an elaborate system of ritual warfare. Neighboring groups, separated by uncultivated strips of no man’s land, engaged in frequent battles. When a warrior was killed in battle or died from a wound and even when a woman or a child lost their life in an enemy raid, the victors celebrated and the victims mourned. Because each death needed to be avenged, the balance was continually adjusted by taking life. There was no thought of wars ever ending, unless it rained or became dark. Wars were the best way they knew to keep a terrible harmony in a life that would be, without them, much drearier and unimaginable.
Dead Birds has a meaning that is both immediate and allegorical. In the Dani language the words refer to the weapons and ornaments recovered in battle. Their other more poetic meaning comes from the Dani belief that people, because they are like birds, must die.
Dead Birds was an attempt to film a people from within and to see, when the chosen fragments were assembled, if they could speak not only about the Dani but also about ourselves.
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Marathon
The Marathon, run every year in Boston Massachusetts, is one of the oldest races in the United States. In 1964 the documentary film class taught by Robert Gardner undertook to make a film about the race as a cultural institution. The race in this film is a physical and emotional test or ordeal for certain participants including the author of Love Story who at the time was a young instructor in Classics at Harvard. It is an early example of the use of Cinema Verite filmmaking.
People and Particles
This film was produced to make the life of science more appealing to school children in America. It was intended to tell the story of purpose and even drama that scientists experienced in the world of experimental physics. The film recounts the long and complicated life cycle of a high energy physics experiment.
distributed by American Association of Physics Teachers
The Great Sail
Alexander Calder’s La Grande Voile was erected on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in 1966 with the artist directing the work. As the spectacular steel forms of this monumental stabile rise, it is filmed with time lapse and verite photography. One can see that the structure owes its spare elegance to the precision of its design and construction. Calder remains absorbed in quiet concentration as skeptical students and bemused bystanders observe the somewhat improbable event.
Imaginero
“I am just a tool in the hands of God”, explains Hermogenes Cayo, a religious image maker living on the high Argentine plateau. Hermogenes sees his art and life not as self expression but as a way of honoring God, Jesus and the Virgin Mary. In the thinly populated Altiplano where he lives, Hermogenes is famous for his cactuswood crucifixes, miniature shrines, religious paintings and church decorations. He began painting in his youth. Soon the religious aspect of his work affected other parts of his life. He performs all religious duties in the region when the priest is absent. He marries a woman he has lived with for decades. This is but another step into a life of service to God. He is a deeply spiritual man who lives with the supreme confidence the power of faith has given him. For his country he wants peace and tranquility, for his family the life God designed for them, and for himself to be of even greater use to his Maker.
The Nuer
The Nuer call themselves Naath. Only their immediate neighbors, the Dinka, Shilluk and Arabs, call them Nuer. Most foreigners, which includes those with whom the Nuer neither fought nor traded, are called Bar which means ‘almost entirely cattleless’. Those foreigners who live even more remotely and include Europeans are called Jur which means ‘entirely cattleless’, a most unthinkable state indeed.
The people of Ciengach, where the film was made, are the Eastern Jikany, one of about a sixteen distinct tribes of Nuer. Twenty-five years ago E.E. Evans Pritchard estimated the total population of Nuer to be around a quarter of a million. Since then the number has undoubtedly dwindled considerably due to warfare, civil strife, sickness, drought and the general abandonment of traditional lifeways.
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Land-divers of Melanesia
To ensure a good yam crop, men of Pentecost Island in Melanesia attach vines to their ankles and dive headlong from a wooden tower over 100 feet tall. Those who dive say the fall clears their mind. The vines are relatively elastic and the ground is softened so injury is rare. For Pentecost Islanders the annual dive takes an appropriate place among other rituals and ceremonies such as blessing the taro crop, circumcising young boys and feasting with relatives, all of which keep them in touch with the forces that control the world in which they live.
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Mark Tobey Abroad
The great American painter Mark Tobey is visited Robert Gardner in Basel Switzerland where he lived for the last years of his life. He discusses his work and that of fellow artists and does so with remarkable candor and objectivity. Throughout, his keen wit lends humor and bite to his critiques of painting and painters. Mark Tobey’s own vitality and spirit make an important statement on his work and on Art itself.
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Rivers of Sand
My first choice as a title for the film that became Rivers of Sand was Creatures of Pain. Though it seemed at the time to evoke most aptly the central theme of the work, I was persuaded by friends not to use it. They felt, perhaps correctly, that it was too somber, too susceptible to wrong interpretation. But what I heard in those words is what I felt as I made the film: the anguish of an ordeal and a process by which men and women accommodate each other in the midst of conflict and tension caused by fidelity to their culture’s values.
The people portrayed in this film are called Hamar. They dwell in the thorny scrubland of southwestern Ethiopia, about one hundred miles north of Lake Rudolph, Africa’s great inland sea. They are isolated by some distant choice that now limits their movement and defines their condition. At least until recently, it has resulted in their retaining a highly traditional way of life.
Part of that tradition was the open, even flamboyant, observance of male supremacy. In their isolation, they seemed to have refined this not uncommon principle of social organization into a remarkably pure state. Hamar men are masters and their women are slaves. The film tries to disclose the effect on mood and behavior of lives governed by the idea of sexual inequality.
The 2008 Special Edition DVD includes:
- The film optimally remastered for sound and image from a new 35mm blow up
- Audio commentary track by Robert Gardner and Robert Fenz
- Photo gallery featuring still images and journal entries read by Robert Gardner
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Moving Pictures
When the famous Polish graphic artist and animator Jan Lenica came to Harvard in 1974, it was decided that a film about him and about his work should be made. In this film, Lenica is examined as an artist and as a human being. His work is seen in extracts drawn from his many extraordinary short films including Landscape, the film he made while he was at Harvard.
African Carving
The Kanaga mask is used in deeply sacred rituals by the Dogon people of Mali. Carving this mask is as important a ritual as the ceremonies in which the mask is used. The carver, a blacksmith, finds the proper tree and, in a secret cave outside the village, he shapes the mask with gestures which repeat the movement of the dancers who will wear it. When a dancer wears the Kanaga mask he becomes the Creator symbolically. He touches the ground with his mask and directs a soul to Heaven. Although these dances are now frequently performed for the public, the meaning of Kanaga is retained by the Dogon who fear, respect and depend on the power of the mask.
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Altar of Fire
This film records a 12 day ritual performed by Mambudiri Brahmins in Kerala, southwest India, in April 1975. This event was possibly the last performance of the Agnicayana, a Vedic ritual of sacrifice dating back 3,000 years and probably the oldest surviving human ritual. Long considered extinct and never witnessed by outsiders, the ceremonies require the participation of seventeen priests, involve libations of Soma juice and oblations of other substances, all preceded by several months of preparation and rehearsals. They include the construction, from a thousand bricks, of a fire altar in the shape of a bird.
Around 1500 B.C., nomads who spoke an Indo-European language entered India and evolved a complex ritual involving the cults of fire and Soma, a hallucinogenic plant that grew in the Western Himalayas. Their Vedic language developed into Sanskrit, the classical language of Indian civilization. Among the later religions of India, Hinduism accepted and Buddhism rejected the Vedic culture. But both retained many of its ritual forms and recitations. Some of these have traveled all over Asia. Agni, the fire, is still worshipped with the help of Vedic mantras in Japanese Buddhist temples. In India itself, the preservation of the Agnicayana, though partly explained by the extraordinary conservatism of the Vedic Brahmins and their dedication to the culture of their spiritual ancestors, remains one of the miracles of history.
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Cost of Living
This film was made by Richard Rogers as a television special and was intended to explore the issue of money in America. The lives of several individuals are examined in some detail in an attempt to uncover their feelings about making and using money.
The Shepherds of Berneray
This film is a portrait of the lives and crafts of the shepherds and fishermen on one of the smallest inhabited islands of the Outer Hebrides. The film attempts to reveal the texture of life on Berneray, where the yearly cycle and the stability born of tradition are of utmost importance.
Deep Hearts
Deep Hearts is a film about the Bororo Fulani, a nomadic society located in central Niger Republic and the title is a reference to an important aspect of these people’s thought and demeanor.
The Bororo are immensely beautiful. They are also extremely envious of each other’s looks. This envy accounts for their truly suspicious nature; one which leads quickly to feelings of fear. They are particularly fearful of being ‘devoured’ by both the eyes and mouths of those around them with whom they compete as beautiful creatures. The concept of a ‘deep’ heart is useful to them because it provides a metaphysical space in which to hide their true feelings.
Deep Hearts describes the Gerewol, an occasion during the rainy season when two competing lineages come together to choose the most ‘perfect’ Bororo male. It is something of a physical and moral beauty contest in which the winner, selected by a maiden of the opposing lineage, is acclaimed the ‘bull’. The film is also an attempt to use this ceremony of the Bororo as a way of speaking to the larger question of choice itself, something that confronts all human beings in innumerable ways.
An online exhibition of Gardner’s Bororo Polaroids accompanied by fieldnotes is viewable at www.luminous-lint.com
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Sons of Shiva
Sons of Shiva is a sustained attempt to film a four day ceremony concerned with the worship of Shiva. Devotees of the God Shiva are shown from the initial taking of the Sacred Thread through gradually intensifying action to a culmination in a variety of ascetic and self-denying practices. Devotees are also shown in informal activities such as preparing food and listening to recitals of devotional songs by the famous mendicant Bauls of Bengal.
Among the specific devotional practices is the fulfillment of vows to please the gods. Many devotees resolve to roll in prostration through the field to the shrine of Shiva. Others participate in the nightly processions that involve falling in trance while dancing and holding a symbol of Shiva on one head. One of the highlights of the film is a performance by a group of Bauls (wandering holy men and religious troubadours) who sing devotional songs for the resting devotees. This film belongs to the Pleasing God series of films about how Hindus worship.
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Serpent Mother
Serpent Mother is about devotion to the Goddess of Snakes and the importance of divine female power in the lives of townspeople in West Bengal India. This film concentrates on the Jhapan Festival, the great celebration of snakes. It presents the preparations for the festival, the participation of traditional arts and crafts in the worship of the Goddess, devotional singing, and an exposition of ritual action. Throughout the film the difficult and complex symbolism of the ritual is explained by the participants themselves and this, with the commentary, makes accessible what might seem, at first glance, exotic and inexplicable behavior.
This film belongs to the Pleasing God series of films about how Hindus worship. These films are studies of the devotional practicies associated with three major deities of the Hindu pantheon. They were made in the small, historic town of Vishnupur, West Bengal – a town of temples, crafts and markets, the center of an old kingdom, and a place where daily life and worship are closely intertwined.
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Loving Krishna
Loving Krishna is about the worship of Krishna and the meaning of devotion. It explores the rural and urban character of the town of Vishnapur in West Bengal by examining the royal past, everyday life, work in traditional arts and crafts, bazaar exchange, and sacred rituals and festivals. Public and private devotional life is represented by detailed visual narratives of the Chariot Journey of Krishna, celebrated by the whole town, and the Birthday Festival commemorated on a much smaller scale of intimate family worship.
This film belongs to the Pleasing God series of films about how Hindus worship. These films are studies of the devotional practicies associated with three major deities of the Hindu pantheon. They were made in the small, historic town of Vishnupur, West Bengal – a town of temples, crafts and markets, the center of an old kingdom, and a place where daily life and worship are closely intertwined.
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Forest of Bliss
Forest of Bliss is intended as an unsparing but ultimately redeeming account of the inevitable griefs and frequent happinesses that punctuate daily life in Benares, one of the world’s most holy cities. The film unfolds from one sunrise to the next without commentary, subtitles or dialogue. It is an attempt to give anyone who sees it a wholly authentic though greatly magnified view of the matters of life and death that are portrayed.
Of the multitude at work, at play and at prayer, three indivividuals are seen in somewhat greater detail than others. They are a healer of great geniality who attends the pained and troubled, a baleful and untouchable King of the Great Cremation Ground who sells the sacred fire, and an unusually conscientious priest who keeps a small shrine on the banks of the Ganges.
Seeing Forest of Bliss completed, I am quite certain that the animals, especially the dogs, have an importance I merely glimpsed while I was filming. The dogs and, of course, the river.
In 2001, the book entitled Making Forest of Bliss was published. And released summer 2008, a Special Edition DVD contains the film optimally re-mastered for sound and image from a new 35mm blow up, Looking at Forest of Bliss (a feature-length program with Robert Gardner and Stan Brakhage), and a photo gallery featuring still images and journal entries read by Robert Gardner.
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Ika Hands
In the highlands of Northern Colombia the Ika live a strenuous and isolated life economically dependent on small gardens and a handful of domestic animals. They are thought to be descendents of the Maya who fled from the turmoil of Central American High Civilization’s warring states to the remote valleys of Colombia’s Sierra Nevadas. The Ika still inhabit a spectacular but demanding terrain extending between five and fifteen thousand feet, an almost vertical geography through which they move with prodigious ease.
Their lives are filled with a multitude of tasks which they perform with rare dexterity and purpose. Their labors, though they belong to two quite separate realms, the practical and the spiritual, contribute equally to the well being of everyone. Both days and nights are long and arduous. Indeed, the central figure in Ika Hands , Mama Marco, is a man whose priestly calling is simply another career undertaken in addition to that of farmer and householder.
Ika society is the result of quite distinct cultural choices, of what seem to have been decisions by generations of individuals to persevere with tradition and to resist the compelling alternatives offered by an ubiquitous modernity. There is something almost melancholy about these stubborn heroes of a doomed way of life.
“At one level the film shows the rounds of daily life while at the same time it tries to disclose the interior life of a leading figure in the community. What is seen is a man who is part mystic, part priest, and part ordinary householder who performs rituals and offers prayers in lonely and seemingly painful meditation.”
—Peter Allen
The American Anthropologist
The 2008 Special Edition DVD includes:
- The film Ika Hands (58 minutes)
- A conversation with Octavio Paz (27 minutes)
- Photo gallery featuring still images and journal entries read by Robert Gardner (14 minutes)
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Blue Danube Waltz
The story takes place in the present, in Budapest, Hungary’s capital. The Hungarian Prime Minister has invited a financier (a former Hungarian actor) representing an American financial group to visit his country. The Americans hope to start a business and would like to buy some old buildings.
The Prime Minister’s cousin, also a politician, is against the project. According to him, it is not the right time to invest in Hungary because of the chaos caused by the policies of the Prime Minister. According to him, the Prime Minister represents a real danger to Hungary’s future. For this reasons, he thinks of killing the Prime Minister’s wife to do it. The wife, it turns out, has had a deep and longstanding hatred of her husband. During an official visit by the financier to an abandoned factory, the Prime Minister’s wife, under the influence of drugs, shoots her husband with a pistol. There is an immediate investigation led by the chief of police, the Prime Minister’s wife, and a priest who happens also to be related to the Prime Minister. The cousin is himself shot dead and in the end one is not sure whether all is just his dream or an actuality.
This is a Hungarian Film. Hungary is a little country beside the Danube. The film ends with a song about the beautiful blue Danube, an irony which may help one arrive at some conclusions regarding the politics of love and power.
Dancing with Miklos
When Michael Fitzgerald and I decided to help Mikos Jansco make The Blue Danube Waltz neither of us even considered the possibility of not watching him do it. We both loved his work and we both, perhaps for our own reasons, wanted to know how he managed to make films of such immense visual power so quickly and so inexpensively.
It was not long before I had succumbed to the by now banal idea of filming filmmaking. In due course I also proceeded to betray my deepest aesthetic principles by agreeing to shoot it in (Hi8) video. Dancing with Miklos is the outcome, greatly enhanced by Zsuzsi Csakany (Jansco)’s sharp eye for her husband’s craft. It is, though admittedly lighthearted, a deeply felt tribute to a fellow filmmaker’s grace.
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Passenger
Passenger is the title of a painting by Sean Scully, the well-known American artist. It was done in his studio in Barcelona in the early summer of 1997. A friend, the filmmaker Robert Gardner, made what he calls “an observation in four movements. The intent of the piece is to impart an experience of the engagement by Scully with the work in question, an engagement which is both physical and emotional. The only sounds are those made by the artist as he works and, occasionally, musical passages from tapes Scully listens to while he is painting.
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Scully in Malaga
A short film acknowledging the efforts of those responsible for installing the exhibition Sean Scully 1987-1997 in Malaga. Equally important, the film captures Scully’s parents dancing their beloved ‘paso doble’ in the midst of their son’s work.
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Good to Pull
This short video is about a collaboration between the artist Michael Mazur and his master printer, Robert Townsend, as they work on a suite of etchings drawn from the celebrated monotypes Mazur made for Dante’s Inferno. The monotypes were published in an earlier collaboration between Mazur and Robert Pinsky, the poet and translator. The etchings will become part of a remarkable history of similar undertakings by such other illustrators as Botticelli, Blake, Dore, Lebrun and Phillips.
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Screening Room
Jean Rouch appeared on Screening Room in July 1980 and screened Les Maitres Fous as well as several film excerpts including Rhythm of Work and Death of a Priest. Over a period of five decades Jean Rouch made many films about the Songhay and Dogon of West Africa.
Screening Room was a 1970s Boston television series that for almost ten years offered independent filmmakers a chance to show and discuss their work on a commercial (ABC-TV) affiliate station. This unique program dealt even-handedly with animation, documentary, and experimental film, welcoming such artists as Derek Lamb (1973 & 1975), Jan Lenica (1973), John & Faith Hubley (1975), Emile de Antonio (1973), Jean Rouch (1980), Ricky Leacock (1973), Jonas Mekas (1975), Bruce Baillie (1975), Yvonne Rainer (1977) and Michael Snow (1975). Frequently, guests such as Octavio Paz, Stanley Cavell, and Rudolph Arnheim appeared as well. The filmmakers presented on the show are now considered the most influential contributors to their respective genres.
Nearly 100 programs were produced during the years Screening Room was broadcast. Recently, The Museum of TV and Radio in New York City offered to copy the two-inch master tapes that had been given to the Film Study Center. Thirty programs have been edited for release as DVDs. In 2008 Gardner received an Anthology Film Archives Film Preservation Honor for this series.
Les Blank (1975)
Stan Brakhage (1973 & 1980)
Robert Breer (1976)
James Broughton (1977)
Ed Emshwiller (1975)
Hollis Frampton (1977)
Robert Fulton (1973 & 1979)
George Griffin (1976)
Hillary Harris (1973 & 1979)
Peter Hutton (1977)
Standish Lawder & Stanley Cavell (1973)
Caroline Leaf & Mary Beams (1975)
Alan Lomax (1975)
Suzan Pitt (1975)
Richard P. Rogers (1975)
John Whitney Sr. (1972)
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Testigos
Testigos is a small painting done when Gardner and Scully worked together in Barcelona. The title, which means ‘witnesses,’ is the name of a small island in the Caribbean. Testigos, and at least one other painting, was made on the days that the larger canvas Passenger was drying.
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