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Robert Grosvenor Gardner (November 5, 1925 – June 21, 2014) was an American academic, anthropologist, and documentary filmmaker who was the Director of the Film Study Center at Harvard University from 1956 to 1997.
Oct 29, 2013 · At the invitation of the Dutch government, Gardner and a small team spent six months in 1961 filming what were then thought to be the world’s last practitioners of Neolithic culture, with stone tools, clan-sized villages, pervasive magic, and ritual warfare.
As a filmmaker and founding director of the Harvard Film Study Center, he championed film as an aesthetic medium of poetic interpretation and sensuous experience, directing films in Ethiopia, India, and New Guinea working alongside regional anthropological specialists.
Robert Gardner is the author of A Human Document (1965), Gardens of War (with Karl Heider, 1968), Making Forest of Bliss: Intention, Circumstance, and Chance in Nonfiction Film (with Ákös Öster, 2002),The Impulse to Preserve(2006), and Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film (2007).
Robert Gardner was already recognized as an important ethnographic filmmaker by the time he premiered Dead Birds in October 1963 at Harvard’s Loeb Drama Center. Fifty years later, the film stands as a turning point in Gardner’s career and indeed in the field of visual anthropology.
May 5, 2009 · Robert Gardner's landmark film Forest of Bliss (1985) spawned much criticism and debate in the domain of visual anthropology, articulated through a spate of writing during the years 1988–89 in the Society for Visual Anthropology Newsletter.
Robert Gardner occupies an influential and controversial place in the history of ethnographic film. As a filmmaker and founding director of the Harvard Film Study Center, he championed film as an aesthetic medium of poetic interpretation and sensuous experience, directing films in Ethiopia, India, and New Guinea working alongside regional ...
