The Cinema of Robert Gardner

by Lucien Taylor & Ilisa Barbash

This is the first volume of essays dedicated to Gardner’s work—a corpus of aesthetically arresting films which includes the classic Dead Birds, Rivers of Sand, and Forest of Bliss. Eminent anthropologists, philosophers, film theorists, and fellow artists assess the innovations of his films as well as the controversies they’ve spawned.
Published by Berg, 2007

This book came about through a collaboration between Tom Cooper, once a student of Robert Gardner’s at Harvard, and Samina Quraeshi, a designer and writer with far flung interests in the arts. It was intended as a sort of primer for Gardner’s film work, picking up where a number of reviews and critical essays left off. Tom Cooper is a professor of film at Emerson College and takes particular interest in the relation between Media and Ethics.
Published by Anthology Film Archives, 1995 (nearly out of print)

Harry Tomicek became absorbed in Cinema as a writer and thinker about metaphysical issues in art. He has been a frequent contributor to important periodicals concerning the philosophy of art and in film reviews in important newspapers and magazines. His book Gardner was written during the Österreichisches Museum of Vienna’s retrospective of Robert Gardner’s films. It has been said to have made interesting and complex observations on the actuality film particularly in regard to large human matters such as warfare. It is this issue which caught his attention early in his writing when he saw Dead Birds for the first time.
Published by Österreichisches Film Museum, 1991

Trickster Verlag in Munich has been known as a source of some interesting books about film, especially documentary film. This book collects a few articles on Gardner’s films and fits them under the theme of ritual, a dimension of life (and death) that has particularly interested Gardner. With the exception of Jay Ruby who manages to bare his teeth in a particularly vicious manner, the book served well as an accompaniment to a retrospective of Gardner’s work in Freiburg Germany.
Published by Trickster Verlag, 1989 (out of print)