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Robert Gardner

While John Marshall spent much of his filmmaking life rethinking and revisiting his earlier filmmaking experiences in the Kalahari Desert, learning what he could from the ongoing transformations of San life and from what he saw as his limited understanding and his filmmaking mistakes, Robert Gardner’s career has been focused on an expansive engagement with the ways in which the human need to make life meaningful and beautiful despite the inevitability of physical death has been expressed both in far-flung cultures and by artists working in cultural environments closer to home. Gardner’s important, if controversial, contributions to ethnographic cinema have taken him to various parts of Africa (in one instance into the Kalahari with the Marshalls), to New Guinea, to the Andes, and to the Indian subcontinent. In each instance, he has thrown himself into the experience of recording what has seemed of interest to him in these cultures, not simply because the events he films are crucial within the lives of those he has documented, but also because of the relationships he sees between these events and transformations in his own culture and his own life.

Throughout his long career, Gardner has braided his fascination with exotic cultural practices that seem unusual but are sometimes surprisingly relevant to the lives of most film audiences with a fascination with artistic sensibility in general and with the particular accomplishments of writers, painters, sculptors, as well as other film artists. The result is a panorama of image making and writing within which Gardner has attempted, again and again, to confirm his commitment to the ritual of art and the art of ritual as a means of negotiating the passages of human experience.

EAST COAST/WEST COAST: EARLY EXPERIMENTS

Robert Gardner is a formative figure in the evolution of Cambridge documentary and in the emergence of Cambridge as a center of film activity. An accomplished and influential filmmaker in his own right, he was crucial in the development of the Film Study Center at Harvard, and in 1964, when the Film Study Center moved from the Peabody Museum to the new Carpenter Center, which Gardner helped to design, he managed the Film Study Center, assisting filmmakers in producing films and overseeing the programming of events at the Harvard Film Archive’s cinematheque. He was, so far as I am aware, the first to teach courses in film production and film history/theory at Harvard (in what, early on, he called the Department of Light and Communications), and over the years his teaching nurtured a number of filmmakers. Beginning in 1972 and continuing for ten years, he hosted Screening Room on channel 5 in Boston, for which he interviewed major contributors to independent filmmaking—animators, documentary filmmakers, and film artists identified with the avant-garde—and broadcast their films to the local television audience.

Gardner was director of the Carpenter Center from 1975 to 1994 and continued to teach in what had become the Visual and Environmental Studies Department until 1997, when he retired from his formal connection with the university. He has continued to contribute to film culture and the arts at Harvard, and in 2003 he established Studio7Arts, which offers monetary support and facilities to individual artists working to mine the potential of still and moving images to provide “visible evidence that testifies to our shared humanity.”¹ The 2000s saw Gardner turn his attention to writing, in particular to the journals he compiled during the making of his films: The Impulse to Preserve: Reflections of a Filmmaker (New York: Other Press) appeared in 2006; Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film (Cambridge: Peabody Museum), in 2007; and Just Representations (Cambridge: Peabody Museum/Studio7Arts) in 2010.

Gardner’s diverse career has been punctuated with the production of independent documentary films, though his original interest in cinema was more conventional. As a Harvard undergraduate, and a sometime college roommate of Jack Lemmon, he was drawn to theater; he and Lemmon acted together in The Proof of the Pudding at the Hasty Pudding Theatrical Society. Upon graduation, the two friends traveled together to Hollywood to seek fame and fortune, neither of which was immediately forthcoming for either man, though Gardner was offered the part of Mark Trail in a proposed TV serial based on the famous comic strip. Returning to Cambridge, Gardner became an assistant to Thomas Whittemore of Harvard’s Fogg Museum and traveled to Turkey to assist with conservation work on mosaics in Istanbul’s Church of the Chora (Karije Jami): “These were transformative experiences during which I learned, among other things, that I knew nothing and that I had little time to lose correcting that appalling truth.”²

FIGURE 6. Sidney Peterson and Robert Gardner in Kwakiutl outfits sometime in the early 1950s. Courtesy Robert Gardner.

In 1949 Gardner moved to Seattle and for a time taught medieval history at the College of Puget Sound in Tacoma. Reading Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture moved Gardner toward anthropology, which he studied briefly at the University of Washington and later on at Harvard. During his years in Seattle, Gardner became involved with the film society at the University of Washington’s Henry Gallery, and in 1951–52, made his first foray into filmmaking, working for a time with avant-garde surrealist Sidney Peterson on a feature about an interracial romance between a Kwakiutl princess and a white man (fig. 6). While Gardner and Peterson did do some shooting on Vancouver Island, nothing came of their work. However, Gardner’s visit to Vancouver Island’s Blunden Harbour would soon instigate his first two films: Blunden Harbour (1951) and Dances of the Kwakiutl (1951).

Gardner’s Kwakiutl films seem to have been inspired by the lyrical documentaries he was seeing at the Henry Gallery, and especially Henry Watt and Basil Wright’s Night Mail (1936), which Gardner remembers watching about twenty-five times.³ Watt and Wright’s combination of image and spoken poetry (by W.H. Auden) also seem to have influenced Gardner’s third film, an evocation of the person and work of painter Mark Tobey, with whom Gardner became friends while in the Northwest. For both Blunden Harbour and Mark Tobey Gardner wrote poetic narrations; the text in Blunden Harbour was spoken by poet Richard Selig; the texts in Mark Tobey by Gardner and Tobey (Tobey contributed some of his lines). Blunden Harbour and Mark Tobey seem generally representative of film society films of the 1950s, in their interest in other cultures and in art, in their use of poetic imagery and narration, even in the ways in which Gardner worked with sound and image in the years before sync sound was an option for independents.

Blunden Harbour is an effective portrait of a place. Heinck’s and Jacquemin’s cinematography is lovely, evocative sometimes of Frank Stauffacher’s Sausalito (1948) and Bruce Baillie’s To Parsifal (1963), and Gardner’s editing is capable, and sometimes powerful: for instance, a shot of one older man doing painstaking work on a mask is followed via a direct cut by a shot of the same man during a Kwakiutl ceremony; for a moment we don’t realize that this is the same person, though once we do, we are reminded how participation in a traditional ceremony can transform an individual. The voice-over is carefully controlled, limited to four instances when poetic lines are spoken by Selig; each of the four stanzas of the voice-over vary or build on the original phrase, “From the water: food; from the wood: a way of life,” until we hear “A way of life, a way of death, a way of dreams, and a way to remember” at the beginning of the ceremony (the cut from the man as craftsman to participant in the ceremony occurs just at the phrase “a way to remember,” foregrounding the idea of ceremony as cultural memory).⁴

Dances of the Kwakiutl is a more straightforward document of Kwakiutl dancers performing in part for the camera, introduced with Gardner’s voice-over: “Fifty years ago, the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia held their winter ceremonial in order to bring back the youth who were staying with the supernatural protector of their society. The songs and dances which belonged to this ritual were vital to the success of the ceremony. Lately, both the intention and performance of the winter ceremonial have been substantially altered. The dances are no longer significant within the ceremonial complex and their performance depends now on an individual and spontaneous will to recreate a very old, syncopated dance form.” In the voice-over, one can sense Gardner’s disappointment with the changes he describes, but the dancing and the enthusiasm of the dancers are effectively documented.

Mark Tobey was of special importance to Gardner in two ways. First, he did his own (color) cinematography for the first time, and this portrait of Tobey and his Seattle environment is visually impressive. Second, in Mark Tobey Gardner’s fascination with art and his own poetic urge is unbridled: while the poetic voice- over is rather overwhelming—these days it feels strident and pretentious—one can feel Gardner’s enthusiasm for his subject and his excitement that this important artist has trusted him fully enough to be an active participant in the film. If the two Kwakiutl films are early premonitions of the films that would, beginning a decade later, establish Gardner’s reputation as a pioneer in ethnographic filmmaking, Mark Tobey seems a premonition not only of Gardner’s subsequent films about artists (including a second film about Tobey), but of the focus and approach that would dominate his better-known features about the Dani, the Hamar, the Bororo (Gardner spells the name of this group “Borroro”) Fulani, and the Ika. For Gardner the making of art is a fundamental, perhaps the fundamental, function of culture; and the job of filmmaking, especially nonfiction filmmaking within our culture, is to sing the variety of art making across the globe and the ways in which particular art objects and ritual performances have functioned within particular groups as a form of cultural memory and as a spiritual basis for daily life.

GARDNER AND THE MARSHALLS

Between the completion of Mark Tobey and the release of Dead Birds in 1964, Gardner studied anthropology at Harvard, immersed himself in the community of poets and artists in Cambridge, and became involved with the Marshall family’s project of documenting the !Kung, assisting John Marshall with the editing of The Hunters (1957). Gardner was in touch with Laurence Marshall as early as 1953. When J.O. Brew sent the elder Marshall a copy of a seminar talk on film that Gardner had given, Marshall wrote back to Brew, expressing his appreciation of Gardner’s talk: “As to the use of film in anthropology, I still feel that it ought somehow to be essential in any study of man. . . . I think my feeling is based on some of the ideas that Bob brings out; the importance of sight in perception, the ability of film to represent the eye and to portray events in actual time so that one can perceive interaction and tempo, and not least in importance, the fact that film can be studied repeatedly and by many people.”⁵ However, Marshall remains a bit dubious about the significance of the films that have come out of the expedition and assures Brew that the costs of the film that John Marshall has been shooting would not be paid for with the money Harvard had granted the expedition, but by the Marshalls themselves.

Brew apparently shared Laurence Marshall’s letter with Gardner, who responded, on April 16, 1953, with a seven-page letter, exploring more fully his ideas about cinema: “Through very complicated psysio-psychic processes involving principles of identification, association and learning, the net effect possible with film is to impart a credible experience to a spectator.”⁶ Defining experience as “the acquiring of knowledge by the use of one’s own perceptions of sense and judgment,” Gardner (basically paraphrasing John Dewey’s ideas about experiential learning) goes on to explore “what is meant by learning and experience”:

In a larger sense it could also be thought to be an experiment in the use of one’s perceptions in the process of learning. In this light the old saw about experience being the best teacher gains a little luster. . . . It may already be clear that what I wish to make is a distinction between two kinds of learning, one kind which is the result of rote memorization which has a minimal participation of perceptual organs, and the other which involves multiple senses and promotes experimental participation within the learning process. Although the relative value of these two general types of learning situations depends on the individual learning and the reasons for learning at all, in a broad sense the advantages of what might be called “experience learning” have been dramatically attested in such contexts as training for war. It is now general practice, I am told, to subject trainees to maneuvers under actual fire, the supposition being that out of this experience will result a more dependable . . . soldier than the one who reads in a manual that someday he may be shot at. . . . It might seem that the point which should be brought in here as justification for the use of films in anthropology is that a film can provide a close approximation to otherwise unavailable field experiences.

Ultimately, Gardner argues that since experiential learning requires considerable integration of information from various senses, “the film which best achieves the ‘experience’ type learning effect must be left in the hands of creative artists.”

By 1954, when Gardner began working with John Marshall on the editing of what would become The Hunters, he had had some experience in producing, directing, and editing film; he had developed his thinking about documentary filmmaking as a creative enterprise; he had earned the confidence of the administration at the Peabody Museum; and he had been in touch with the Marshall family for more than a year. Especially given that Gardner was seven years John Marshall’s senior when they began working together (Gardner was twenty-nine; Marshall, twenty-two), it would not be surprising if Gardner had substantial input into The Hunters, though over the decades there has been some question about the nature and extent of this input (fig. 7). According to Gardner, his contribution was to collaborate with Marshall at the Peabody’s Film Study Center (the !Kung footage was the original film to be studied at the center) in expanding a 45-minute edit that Marshall had produced into the 75-minute film that was released in 1957.

In his description of the process, however, Marshall claims that “The Hunters was edited on the third floor of our family home on Bryant Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts between 1954 and 1956,” and he would later seem to express frustration with the presumption that Gardner had had a major role in the film: when asked about his sense of the way “The Hunters was being taken up” during the years following its release, he comments, “Yes, well, we got an award. They gave Bob an award for it.”⁷ In what remains the most critical essay on Gardner’s filmmaking, Jay Ruby questions what he sees as Gardner’s tendency to take excessive credit for some of the projects he has been involved in: “John Marshall’s name does not even appear in the 1957 article Gardner wrote discussing the activities of the Film Study Center. Unless you knew otherwise, the article would lead you to believe that Robert Gardner made The Hunters by himself.”⁸ In The Impulse to Preserve (2006) Gardner claims only “a minor role [in] collaborating with John Marshall” on The Hunters; and in his introduction to Making Dead Birds (2007), Gardner calls Marshall “The Hunters’ principal and talented young author.”⁹

FIGURE 7. John Kennedy Marshall (left foreground) and Robert Gardner during the early days at Harvard's Film Study Center. Courtesy Robert Gardner.

The Peabody Museum’s accession of the !Kung footage and Gardner’s collaboration with Marshall on The Hunters, whatever the precise nature of this collaboration, established the Film Study Center; and despite the fact that Marshall and Gardner parted ways after The Hunters was finished, it seems likely that Gardner’s collaboration with John and his participation in the 1958 Marshall expedition to Nyae Nyae (an experience he found frustrating),¹⁰ helped to confirm a desire to produce his own film about a far-flung cultural group and to assemble the Harvard-Peabody expedition to the Baliem region of western New Guinea in 1961. This expedition, led by Gardner, included Dutch anthropologist Jan Broekhuyse; Harvard anthropology graduate student Karl G. Heider; photographer and sound technician Michael Rockefeller; and writer Peter Matthiessen, whose Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in Stone Age New Guinea (New York: Viking, 1962) was, along with Gardner’s Dead Birds, the best-known and most widely admired product of the expedition.

DEAD BIRDS

Along with The Hunters, Dead Birds, which premiered at Harvard in 1963, confirmed the Peabody Museum as the primary sponsor of ethnographic filmmaking in this country; and together, the two films came to epitomize what has become a genre of documentary filmmaking. As different as Marshall’s and Gardner’s overall attitudes and approaches to making documentary turned out to be, and may already have been in 1957 and 1963, the two films that established their reputations have a great deal in common. Both films focus on peoples and ways of life that seem unaffected by the onslaught of modern life and modern technology (except, of course, by implication, filmmaking); in this, both filmmakers are children of Flaherty—though both The Hunters and Dead Birds are more thorough in their suppression of the realities of contemporary life than Flaherty was in Nanook of the North: early in Nanook, after all, the Inuit family visits the trading post, where Nanook is introduced to the phonograph. Moana is the more relevant Flaherty film here (though Gardner has indicated that of the Flaherty films, he most admires Man of Aran).

Both filmmakers were faced with two challenges, one of them impossible to meet, the other difficult. Since no previous feature film had been made about either the !Kung or the Dani, both filmmakers had to decide how much and what to reveal to audiences about these groups: that is, how to depict a people in a single film; and, especially since both filmmakers were coming to cinema at a time when the idea of cinema seemed to necessitate entertainment, both wanted to find a way of being interesting as they presented the wealth of new information they decided on. Not surprisingly, both The Hunters and Dead Birds are organized according to a storytelling logic, and in both, the filmmakers provide relatively continual narration that contextualizes and interprets what we see. Further, both films feature expansive landscapes, sometimes reminiscent of the landscapes the earlier Flaherty films and in classic Hollywood westerns as well as unusually intimate looks at family and social life. Both The Hunters and Dead Birds were filmed beautifully in color; and both are reasonably effective in approximating the feeling of sync sound.

Seeing The Hunters and Dead Birds now, viewers may forget how different the experience of these films would have been fifty years ago. In 1957 and 1963 the nudity in both films was radical: it was not until 1965 that the first moment of female frontal nudity, in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, would challenge the Hays Office rules. According to Stan Brakhage, his Window Water Baby Moving (1959) could cause moviegoers to faint;¹¹ and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) could get its exhibitors arrested. Both The Hunters and Dead Birds also include moments of “violence” that would have shocked most moviegoers of the era, even those studying anthropology in college classes: the death and butchering of the giraffe in The Hunters and, especially, the killing of pigs and the corpse of a dead child being prepared for cremation in Dead Birds. The deaths of the animals remain powerful even for jaded contemporary audiences.

Further, both films reflect an attitude that must have seemed surprising to many of those who saw The Hunters and Dead Birds during the 1950s and 1960s. Both Marshall and Gardner present aspects of !Kung and Dani culture that would have seemed strange, even bizarre, to most Americans, but without indulging in disparaging comments about them. In Bitter Melons, for example, Marshall shows how the !Kung collect water from the rumen of certain antelope, and in The Hunters, we see the men drink the blood of the dead giraffe. The voice-over presentation of these events is entirely matter-of-fact, even though Marshall had to have experienced surprise, perhaps even disgust, when he first saw these things done and would know how his viewers could be expected to react.

This same matter-of-fact delivery of information is evident in both filmmakers’ presentation of the belief systems of the !Kung and Dani. In Dead Birds, when Weyak’s lookout tower is repaired, Gardner tells us, “Weyak magically cleans the hands that have done the potent work with the feather of a parrot,” as we see a close-up of Weyak’s hands brushing another man’s hands with a small feather. Gardner frequently describes the Dani’s consistent concern about the ghosts of the departed: as a warrior is carried back from the front, we learn that he will not have to walk, “but he must be covered to protect him from the gaze of ghosts which wounded men are careful to avoid.” And during a religious ceremony, we learn that “of great importance is the little fenced enclosure, put up as a resting place for wandering ghosts.” Nothing in Gardner’s manner of delivering any of this information suggests that he finds these ideas and activities absurd, illogical, “exotic.” It is clear that he and Marshall mean for us to see these activities and beliefs as legitimate ways of dealing with life and death. I am surprised that the combination of nudity, visceral violence, and what would have seemed a complete lack of outrage and disapproval at cultural practices that many Americans would have found repugnant did not earn both films entries in Amos Vogel’s canonical Film as a Subversive Art.¹²

There are also significant differences between The Hunters and Dead Birds that have to do not only with the very different peoples represented but also with differences in attitude between the two filmmakers. These differences are signaled by the two titles. “The Hunters” is a straightforward indication of Marshall’s focus in the film, a focus that, later on, would embarrass him because of its overemphasis on the importance of hunting to the !Kung. “Dead Birds” refers to the ancient fable presented during the opening of Gardner’s film. As we watch a continuous, elegant, 36-second shot of a hawk in flight, Gardner’s voice-over tells of a contest between a snake and a bird to decide whether men would be like snakes, who shed their skins and have eternal life, or birds, who die: “The bird won, and from that time, all men, like birds, must die.” This opening (both the beauty of the shot of the hawk and the poetic phrasing of the fable) makes clear that Gardner sees himself as a film artist and storyteller, fascinated not simply with what this particular group does but with the idea of culture in general: Gardner is producing not simply an informational film about Dani ways of facing death but a cultural artifact, a work of art, about the idea of confronting death. After all, it is not simply the Dani who die, but all of us; and we all deal with this reality by producing the artifacts of the cultures that simultaneously distinguish and unite us.

Both The Hunters and Dead Birds are structured in ways familiar from narrative literature and earlier cinema. Marshall’s film is framed as an epic quest narrative that leads finally to the killing of a giraffe and the reinvigoration of the hunters’ band through the distribution of the meat. Gardner chooses a different, more expansive strategy: he provides a panorama of what he had come to understand about the Willihiman-Wallalua clan of the Dani by focusing on the activities of two very different characters: the distinguished warrior Weyak and the young swineherd Pua. In general, Dead Birds intercuts between Weyak and Pua, whose days are spent in very different sectors of Dani daily life, but Gardner brings them into proximity during moments when the band or several bands join together in celebration or mourning.

Throughout Dead Birds, Gardner’s attempt at expansiveness is reflected in his use of intercutting. He intercuts not simply between Weyak and Pua but in a variety of circumstances: between scenes where men are doing battle and women are climbing to a salt lick to bring salt back to the village; between warriors attending to a comrade’s wounds and a group of younger warriors, still at the front, shouting humorous insults at the enemy; between Weyak weaving and participating in battle; even, during the preparation for a cremation, between wood being piled for the fire and wind blowing the leaves of trees—a suggestion, perhaps, that the burning of the body will free the soul to wander on its own. In general, Gardner’s voice-over confirms the transitions between one activity and another (from time to time, these vocal confirmations seem both awkward and a bit too rote; Gardner has admitted that his reading of the text in Dead Birds was not what he had hoped for: “In fact, in recent years I have been greatly tempted to both rewrite the text and ‘re-voice’ the narration”),¹³ though at times the imagery and the soundtrack diverge.

As depicted in Dead Birds, virtually the entirety of Dani life is focused on the ritual warfare carried on between the men of the Willihiman-Wallalua clan and the men of the Wittaia clan (women garden and tend to home and children); and the consistency with which Gardner frames his shots so that the Warabara (the small mountain near which the ritual battles are fought) is visible expresses this: the visual motif of the Warabara suggests the clan members’ continuing consciousness of the current state of the warfare. In fact, the most dramatic moment Dead Birds occurs during the religious ceremony called “Pig Treasure,” which brings several neighboring villages together for a feast—a rare moment in Willihiman-Wallalua life when the war seems momentarily forgotten. As the feast culminates, news arrives that a young boy, Weaké, has been killed near the Aikhé River by the Wittaia, transforming the balance of power in the war. The arrival of this news is dramatized by a 26-second, nine-shot montage that interrupts the previous steady flow of the depiction of the feast and leads into the extended funeral ceremony for the boy. The remainder of Dead Birds focuses on the various effects of Weaké’s death: the victory celebration of the enemy, the sacrifice of two joints on the fingers of several young girls; Weyak’s and Pua’s ritual ways of coming to terms with their loss; and finally, on this group’s restoring momentary balance by killing an enemy and mounting their own celebration, which is presented in considerable detail at the conclusion of the film.

While John Marshall’s focus in The Hunters is on the hunters’ skill in tracking and killing the giraffe and on the democracy represented by their careful distribution of the meat among their band, Gardner’s focus in Dead Birds involves a kind of double consciousness: he is committed to representing the Dani as distinct and separate from his own world—paradoxically so that he can suggest general parallels between their lives and ours. As the phrase, “the impulse to preserve,” the title of an early essay and of his recent book, suggests, Gardner means to create a vision of a culture before its (by then, inevitable) transformation by modern life and modern technology: he means to preserve at least a cinematic memory of a culture that has endured for many centuries. In the preface to Under the Mountain Wall, Peter Matthiessen, who shares Gardner’s attitude, puts the purpose of the Harvard-Peabody Expedition of 1961 this way: “Its purpose was to live among the people as unobtrusively as possible and to film and record their wars, rituals, and daily life with a minimum of interference, in order that a true picture of a Stone Age culture . . . might be preserved.”¹⁴

Gardner goes even further than Matthiessen, however, in suppressing the degree to which Dani culture was already in a process of transformation. Though Under the Mountain Wall focuses on traditional Dani culture, and indeed, depicts many of the specific events recorded in Dead Birds, it is framed very differently from Gardner’s film. The first words in Matthiessen’s text are “One morning in April, in the year when the old history of the Kurelu came to an end . . .”; and his chronicle concludes with Weyak (in Under the Mountain Wall, his name is “Weaklekek”) climbing into his watch tower and seeing “a strange smoke” drifting on the wind “from down the valley,” where “the remnants of Wako Aik’s Mokoko tribe clustered for protection around the village of the Waro; this people had come out of the sky to live on the Mokokos’ abandoned lands”: “The first Waro had come to the Kurelu just after the last mauwe, through the land of the Wittaia. He had white skin, and he was accompanied by black men dressed like himself. The strangers had been stopped at the frontier, and a warrior named Awulapa, brother of Tamugi, had been shot down and killed by a Waro weapon with a noise that echoed from the mountains. . . . The Waro had not left the valley; already they were building huts among the river tribes throughout the valley.”¹⁵ The only evidence in Dead Birds that the transformation of Dani life is already occurring is implicit: the film could not have been shot had modern life not already arrived in New Guinea. Further, the final celebration sequences in Gardner’s film seem clearly performed for the camera, so perhaps Gardner means to end the film by drawing attention to the intersection of two ways of life.

Both Gardner and Matthiessen participate in what now seems a presumptive brand of historicizing by assuming that the Willihiman-Wallalua and Wittaia clans have been in a kind of stasis since the Stone Age, and that no fundamental change in their history has occurred until very recently, that is, until the arrival of Western white men. The very diversity of lifestyles on New Guinea would seem to give the lie to this assumption: surely, there have been a variety of historical developments on the island, some of them considerable enough to produce a range of subcultures—though the absence of a written record keeps these changes from being more than conjectural, at least for these white visitors. Of course, the idea that Matthiessen and Gardner are depicting Stone Age people was probably useful in promoting the book and film, but I think Gardner’s determination to depict the life of the Willihiman-Wallalua clan as a form of cultural integrity, not yet affected by modern history, has two particular functions.

First, Gardner’s commitment to the depiction of a way of life that, on the surface, seems radically, even shockingly different from our own allows him to raise a deeper question, a question that is suggested by what Gardner has called “a certain despair” about his own culture: “I grew up thinking that much of what America stood for was not particularly noble or uplifting. These feelings were exaggerated by events like the war in Viet Nam, various assassinations and so on. Going far away was cowardly but attractive in that it offered the prospect of refuge.”¹⁶ The expedition to New Guinea might have begun as an escape from American culture (fig. 8), but Gardner’s exploration and witnessing of the lives of the Willihiman-Wallalua revealed fundamental patterns that seemed increasingly to speak to the life he had escaped: Was not the United States involved in its own forms of periodic ritual warfare; did not men determine the national agenda; were we not at pains to assuage our own “ghosts”; and did not some of our nation’s most widely held beliefs—the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, for instance—challenge simple logic and common sense?

FIGURE 8. Robert Gardner with New Guinea men, during the shooting of Dead Birds (1964). Courtesy Robert Gardner.

Second, Gardner’s interest in the commonalities implicit within disparate cultural practices is evident in a particular motif in Dead Birds: one of the first things we learn about Weyak is that, when he is not standing guard in his tower or actively at war with the Wittaia, he entertains himself by weaving a shell band, a long woven strip on which shells are mounted at regular intervals. Indeed, weaving is the first thing we see Weyak doing, and Gardner returns to this weaving periodically (the narration makes clear that these shell bands have a ritual function: they are used to commemorate birth, marriage, and death). During the final minutes of Dead Birds, Gardner intercuts between the Willihiman-Wallalua dancing and chanting and Weyak’s finishing the shell band he has been working on and then rolling it up. The shell band is clearly a metaphor for filmmaking and for Gardner’s film in particular. Both the shell band and Dead Birds commemorate moments of death, and both are means, as Gardner’s final voice-over in the film suggests, “to ease the burden of knowing what birds will never know, and what . . . [the Dani], as men, who have forever killed each other, cannot forget”: the inevitability of death itself. For Gardner, the fundamental human issue is mortality, and what unites all men and women, across the globe and from the Stone Age until the present, is their production of cultural artifacts and rituals—jewelry, dances, music, films—as a means of simultaneously distracting them from the inevitability of mortality and of materially transcending it.¹⁷

THE EXPERIENCE OF FILMMAKING AS THOUGHT PROCESS

What can I possibly mean by saying that going to the ends of the world has been a way for me to understand myself better? Hidden in the answer are ideas such as it is presumptuous to try and explain other people without bothering to explain oneself.

ROBERT GARDNER¹⁸

During the twenty years that followed the release and reception of Dead Birds, which was widely admired and won the Robert Flaherty Award in 1963, Gardner’s career moved in a variety of directions. His first project was a cinema verite film made for local television: Marathon (1965), co-directed with Joyce Chopra, a still-engaging half-hour film on the Boston Marathon. Stylistically, with its in-close engagement with three individuals (Erich Segal, the author of Love Story, then a Harvard professor; a Harvard student, and an African American pastor) within a public event, its black-and-white cinematography (some of it provided by D.A. Pennebaker), and its conventional narrating voice (Gardner himself), Marathon recalls such breakthroughs as Primary (1960) and Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963). Marathon remains an engaging film, though what seems most obvious now is the growth of distance running as a participant and spectator sport over the past fifty years: as depicted in Marathon, the Boston Marathon seems quaint. Gardner has never been enthusiastic about this kind of sync-sound observational cinema, usually preferring to construct his films as extended montages without assuming sync sound as an essential, but Marathon demonstrates his ability to work in what had become, by 1965, an important new direction in nonfiction filmmaking.

Beginning in 1966 Gardner’s attention alternated between films on artists and art making and further filmmaking adventures in far-flung cultures. The Great Sail (1966) documents the installation of a large Alexander Calder sculpture at MIT. Gardner’s fascination with Calder himself and the workers assembling his La Grande Voile is in counterpoint with his wry depiction of the smug complaints about the non-artistry of the piece on the part of (mostly student) onlookers; the film seems a premonition of the Maysles brothers’ films about Christo’s projects, and particularly Christo’s Valley Curtain (1973) and Running Fence (1978). In Gardner’s depiction of the event as a kind of American ritual, in this case around the public presence of modern art, the film recalls Ricky Leacock and Joyce Chopra’s Happy Mother’s Day (1963).

In February 1968, Gardner was in Ethiopia, contributing cinematography to what would become Hillary Harris’s The Nuer (1971), a feature on a group of nomadic cattle herders with, as Gardner would later describe them, “arresting cultural expressiveness,” who were famous in anthropological literature but virtually unknown beyond those confines.¹⁹ Approaching this project as part of a larger, Film Study Center–sponsored survey of three forms of indigenous life: hunter-gatherers (The Hunters), warrior farmers (Dead Birds), and pastoralists (The Nuer), Gardner asked Harris to direct the film. Gardner was back in Africa in June 1968 to begin working with the Hamar, another pastoralist group—work that would eventually produce his next feature, Rivers of Sand (1974). In between the shooting for The Nuer and Rivers of Sand and the editing of the latter, Gardner returned to the subject of art, and in particular to Mark Tobey, for Mark Tobey Abroad (1973), a lovely portrait of the painter in his later years (Robert Fulton contributed much of the cinematography) and one of Gardner’s finest films. Mark Tobey Abroad alternates between interviews with Tobey and montage explorations of the painter’s Basel apartment and his walks in town—a structure that predicts the organization of Rivers of Sand, completed the following year.²⁰

Gardner has always been reasonably astute about the cultural currents evolving around him, and the emergence of a powerful feminist transformation in American society in general, and in American academe in particular, during the 1970s is reflected in Rivers of Sand. Indeed, Gardner’s decision to focus on the Hamar seems to have reflected his own developing gender awareness. Rivers of Sand is basically an 85-minute montage, organized according to three general principles, the most basic of which has been described by Gardner himself: “The film was intentionally conceived as a collection of impressions of a frequently fragmentary nature threaded together to comment on the notion of sexual injustice.”²¹ In this, Rivers of Sand echoes Peter Kubelka’s Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to Africa, 1966), a Gardner favorite, without that film’s exhilarating and brilliant terseness; Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1959), which recycles a wide range of moving-image material to create a reflection on modern life; and the Russian Artavazd Peleshian’s Nash Vek (Our Age, 1982, 1990). Gardner works with something like what Peleshian calls “distance montage,” where particular images or sequences and specific sounds and sound sequences are repeated in changing contexts, so that they accumulate meaning as the film develops.²²

FIGURE 9. Omali Inda addresses the camera in Rivers of Sand (1974). Courtesy Robert Gardner.

The most obvious organizational principle in Rivers is Gardner’s intercutting between an extended interview with Omali Inda, a mature Hamar woman who speaks candidly and eloquently about gender relations among the Hamar (fig. 9), and a general survey of Hamar life (Gardner’s translators were Ivo Strecker, Jean Lydall (Strecker), who also functioned as anthropologist-advisors, and Eric Berinas). Omali is filmed in close-up (indeed, as she speaks, Gardner often includes a stylistic flourish; he begins in close-up and then zooms in to a closer view of her face). Like N!ai in John Marshall’s N!ai: the Story of a !Kung Woman, Omali is beautiful and charismatic; indeed, Gardner was later to say “that was more than just an interview. She was an actress in the film, in the sense that she took it over in many ways. I wish I’d let her take it over more.”²³ A final organizational principle echoes Flaherty’s Moana: after Gardner’s survey of Hamar life during the first hour or so of the film, Rivers of Sand culminates with a major celebration among the Hamar, when young men and young women are initiated into adulthood, and when many of the elements we’ve grown familiar with during the film come together.

Jay Ruby has reviewed the controversy over Rivers of Sand within anthropological literature, reporting that the Streckers were upset with that “the artistic vision of Gardner as auteur dominated the project with little competent ethnographic assistance.”²⁴ The assumption of the film’s critics, however, is that Rivers was meant to be a film primarily in service to the field of anthropology. While it is true that all of Gardner’s early features were originally understood under this rubric, and while Gardner often represented himself as an ethnographic filmmaker, the elements that seem to define Rivers of Sand this way—its look at the cultural practices of a group unfamiliar to most in the industrialized world, Gardner’s narrative commentary about particular elements of the culture—are simply major elements in a film that is quite different in tone and purpose, even from The Hunters or Dead Birds.

I see Rivers as an amalgam of feminism and surrealism. Gardner is less interested in providing an ethnographic analysis of Hamar culture (though it would be foolish to pretend that we don’t learn anything about the Hamar from the way they look and move, from their living spaces, and from the evidence of the cultural practices we do see) than in using what he believed he had seen in two visits to the Hamar as a way of considering, on the one hand, the nature of gender relations between men and women in most of the world, and on the other, the surreality of “normal” life, regardless of where it is lived.

The Hamar women, as portrayed in Rivers of Sand, are second-class citizens: they seem to do a majority of the work (though Gardner does seem to undervalue the labor of men, who tend the herds; we see the men at work from time to time, but there is little emphasis on whatever challenges they must face); they own nothing; they do not choose their marital partners; and they are married for life, even if their husbands die. Most obviously, the women must put up with a variety of forms of physical abuse, some of them ritualized. Gardner focuses in particular on the women’s job of grinding grain, which is both a part of everyday life and symbolic of gender relations: at the very beginning of Rivers of Sand Omali says, “A time comes when a Hamar woman leaves her father’s house to live with her husband. It’s like smoothing the grindstone with a piece of quartz. The quartz is his hand, his whip, and you are beaten and beaten.” We see and hear women at work grinding millet as a motif throughout the film, and in each instance, we are reminded of what Gardner sees as its larger implications. A second, related motif is the ritual whipping of women, which we get hints of early in Rivers and then see in some detail during the ceremonies that conclude the film. From what Gardner shows us, a woman ritually requests a man to whip her, and when she is struck, she is expected to act as if the whipping, which is powerful enough to create open wounds, has not fazed her.²⁵ A third, related motif is the decoration of women with ankle and wrist bracelets: seen as status symbols of beauty by the Hamar, they evoke the shackles of slaves.

In many ways, the gender relations Omali describes echo those Gardner would have been familiar with from his own society, and from his own life. As he told Ilisa Barbash:

Indeed, Rivers of Sand does owe something to the climate of thought about the situation of women in the late 60s, but it also owes something to what was happening in my own life as a father and husband. Here I would like to say I think this film is not just about how women feel or behave but also about what happens to men as they make their lives with women. I made the film at a time when my own long-standing marriage was coming to an end and when there were accusations, if not good evidence, of certain kinds of abuses—I don’t mean physical abuses—I mean troubling circumstances which were distorting our life together. I would go off for a long time to make a film. For example, I left everyone at home for six or seven months when I went to do the shooting for Dead Birds. And that’s not fair. It caught up with me and it seemed quite natural and helpful to be going about the making of Rivers of Sand at that particular time.²⁶

It seems clear that for Gardner, shooting and editing Rivers was both an experience in itself and a way of using the film production process as a way of coming to terms with the transformations occurring within his personal life. As an audience, our experience of Rivers occurs on both levels: we explore Omali’s version of her own experiences as a Hamar woman, as contextualized by Gardner; and we experience Gardner’s wrestle with the question of how fully what seem to be the gender experiences of Hamar women and men match the experiences of American women and men, including his own.

For much of Rivers of Sand Omali seems to echo the American feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s—indeed, her testimony evokes the many feminist films of the 1970s and 1980s in which women testified about their cultural oppression—but near the conclusion of the film, her narration takes what feels like a surprising turn. Omali describes to us, and speaks to Hamar girls about, the ritual of removing the two central incisors from the lower jaws of girls—theoretically to demonstrate Hamar girls’ courage and provide what the Hamar consider a beautiful look. Omali indicates that removal of the teeth is not required, but it is clearly preferred, and her comments are supportive of the ritual. Omali’s apparent approval of what seems to us still another form of oppression is confirmed at the conclusion of Rivers of Sand when she says, “Beating is our custom; we were born with it. . . . So how can it be bad?” Although on one level, this seeming acceptance of oppression as normal—something to be complained about, perhaps, but not eliminated—is reminiscent of a similar pattern of self-abnegation and acceptance of lower status that feminists have challenged in many Western countries in recent decades, it is also an instance of what Gardner sees as a larger reality, and not just for the Hamar.

All organized social life seems to involve strange combinations of logic and absurdity. This is clear in Dead Birds, where ritual war seems to have no particular function other than to provide an organizational framework for two Dani groups; it is clear in Rivers of Sand, where women seem to accept forms of oppression that seem to do little but provide a form of social continuity; and it is clear in American society, where we build ever-more-expensive new forms of weaponry to maintain peace and where each generation seems to find new ways of colonizing the body in order to create societal standards of “beauty.” In Rivers Gardner frequently shows several male elders spraying coffee with their lips, seemingly in order to maintain the spiritual health of their community. As presented in Rivers, this ritual is rather comic, though when it is juxtaposed with the continual labor of women, which it always is in the film, this all-male “spiritual” activity seems a further confirmation of the gender inequity of Hamar society. The coffee ritual is also representative of religious rituals around the world that depend on what seem (at least to nonbelievers, and perhaps even to some of those who profess their faith in these religions) to be utterly absurd activities—eating a wafer and drinking a bit of grape juice and “believing” it’s the body and blood of Jesus Christ; wearing a beard and a particular form of payot (sidelock) in order to conform to a book of the Old Testament; refusing to use electricity or automobile transportation in a culture where they are ubiquitous—as a means of maintaining a sense of community and continuity. Indeed, the more obvious the apparent absurdity of these activities, the more commitment they require, the more faith they seem to demonstrate, and the more respect they demand, both from believers and nonbelievers. This strange surreality of social life has been explored by a number of filmmakers over the decades: Buñuel, most obviously of course, but Gardner too, especially in Dead Birds, Rivers of Sand, and Deep Hearts (1981).

Like Rivers of Sand, Deep Hearts seems, at least to current audiences, focused on the issue of gender—though in a different sense. During the 1970s the feminist project of rethinking gender relations between men and women was increasingly interwoven with what we have come to understand as “Queer,” and particularly the Queer understanding of gender as a form of performance, a set of distinctions and practices not determined by sex (or not entirely by sex), but largely by cultural assumptions and societal expectations, and reflective of the complexity and contradictions of personal identity. Few scenes in any motion picture demonstrate this idea more effectively than the opening moments of Deep Hearts, when a large group of men is seen in a long line, moving sensuously in unison and chanting a dirge, outfitted in facial makeup and dress that, from our perspective, seem obviously feminine (fig. 10). These are the Bororo Fulani, a nomadic society located in the central Niger Republic, at “the Gerewol, an occasion during the rainy season when two competing lineages come together to choose the most ‘perfect’ Borroro 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.’”²⁷

It seems clear that in both Dead Birds and Rivers of Sand Gardner chose the Dani and the Hamar as subjects because the nature of these cultures resonated with issues he himself was working through; making these films was his way of personally coming to terms with warfare and with gender relations between the sexes. The opening of Deep Hearts foregrounds Gardner’s fascination with the “cross-dressing” Fulani men and presumably his interest in coming to terms with a deeper cultural questioning of gender assumptions. While this theme does not seem to have been foremost in his consciousness during the month he spent shooting in the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa—a month that, judging from Gardner’s journal entries, was almost entirely unpleasant—Gardner’s journal does make clear that what most powerfully caught his eye about the Gerewol was seeing “accomplished males applying rouge and lipstick under a full moon.”²⁸ And like other cinematic contributions to the evolution of Queerness—Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’amour (1952), Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963)—the finished film destabilizes gender, in this case by revealing that these men, who live in a nomadic culture that faces considerable challenges from its desert environment, define themselves in part by competing to see which of them can be the supreme exemplar of sensual beauty. For an American filmgoer, it is difficult not to think of Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1991)—despite the obvious differences in cultural contexts of the Black and Latino transgender ball culture documented in the Livingston film and the Gerewol—or the Gerewol’s surreal inverse in American culture: the Miss America pageant.

FIGURE 10. Two Bororo Fulani men, looking beautiful, in Robert Gardner's Deep Hearts (1981). Courtesy Robert Gardner.

The overall structure of Deep Hearts evokes that of Rivers of Sand, though in this instance the dancing of the men is the central motif: Gardner intercuts between this dancing and other aspects of Bororo Fulani life, many of which provide a clearer context for the dancing: early in the film a woman is scouring what look like golden pots, which, later in the film, are revealed to be decorative tubes worn on one woman’s legs during that part of the Gerewol ceremony when several women indicate who the “bull” is. Like Rivers of Sand, Deep Hearts culminates in a large-scale celebration, and it concludes with the ritual activities that allow the various Bororo Fulani clans to leave the large gathering and move back into their nomadic lives.

Gardner’s decision to collaborate with Robert Fulton on Deep Hearts seems to have had a considerable impact on the compositional style of the film. The camera is a good bit more mobile in Deep Hearts than it is in any previous Gardner film; in the catalog produced for an Anthology Film Archives retrospective of Gardner’s work in 1995, Thomas W. Cooper describes Fulton’s camera work as full of “moving point-of-view shots taken from irregular heights and angles while Fulton was running, speed-walking, or ‘dancing’ with his camera. . . . Fultonian motion images propel us across sand, under camels, and close to the earth, as if from a running child’s perspective.”²⁹

While Fulton’s camerawork is often engaging as camerawork, it does not seem particularly relevant to the events portrayed, but despite Cooper’s contention that Gardner has normally added visible cinematic effects “only when they best served the film’s intentions,”³⁰ I see this gap between content and style as less than unusual in Gardner’s early films. In Dead Birds, Rivers of Sand, and Deep Hearts Gardner sometimes includes moments of stop-action and other formal devices that are not motivated by anything in the action. These devices seem to me little more than affectations—”arty,” rather than artful—and I suspect they are a product of Gardner’s decades-long wrestle with the idea of being both documentarian and poetic filmmaker. This struggle has also been reflected in Gardner’s use of narration. Film by film, at least in those of his films that Gardner seems to take most seriously, narration has become less pervasive.³¹ Early in his career, Gardner was under the influence of the poetic voice-overs of such films as Night Mail and Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon (1934) and presumably of Marshall’s narration for The Hunters;³² but in part as a result of his own increasing dissatisfaction with his own voice-overs in Dead Birds and Rivers of Sand, and perhaps because of the increasing prestige of detached observational cinema and its proponents’ hostility toward the overdeterminism of narration of any kind, Gardner has used voice-over less and less. Deep Hearts is less fully narrated than Dead Birds and Rivers of Sand; nevertheless, the voice-over Gardner does include is often less than persuasive—it too seems something of an affectation. It would not be until Forest of Bliss (1986) that Gardner would finish a feature devoid of visual or poetic affectations.

ROBERT FULTON: REALITY’S INVISIBLE—“SERIOUS PLAYING AROUND”

In 1971 Gardner hired Robert Fulton (the great grandson of the inventor of the steamboat), to teach filmmaking at the Carpenter Center for the 1971–72 year; and during his brief tenure, Fulton produced Reality’s Invisible, one of the remarkable experimental documentaries of the era—and (as is true of Fulton’s entire oeuvre) one of the most underappreciated. Fulton would go on to make a substantial body of work—though as yet, no one has compiled anything like a definitive Fulton filmography—and to make major contributions to films by others, including Gardner: Fulton contributed cinematography to Mark Tobey Abroad (1972) and to both Deep Hearts (1981) and Ika Hands (1988). He taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1974 to 1976, where he vied with Stan Brakhage for the most remarkable commute (like Brakhage, Fulton commuted from Colorado, but unlike Brakhage, who traveled by train, Fulton flew his own plane). Filmmaker and longtime Canyon Cinema director Dominic Angerame, then a student at the Art Institute School, remembers Fulton as a powerful influence.³³ Until his death in 2002, Fulton remained a productive film artist, working both on personal films and on sponsored projects, and he was widely known as an accomplished aerial cinematographer. Indeed, Fulton died when his Cessna crashed during a storm near Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Reality’s Invisible was Fulton’s eighth film (if we trust his own informal filmography). By the time he produced it, he had won Cine Golden Eagles for his cinematography on Outward Bound (1968), Portrait of Paul Soldner (1969), The Great Ski Chase (1969), and Nzuri: East Africa (1970);³⁴ and his television commercial for Eastern Airlines, The Wings of Man (1971; narrated by Orson Welles), was, according to Fulton, “estimated to have been seen by over four hundred million people and is considered the longest running commercial in the history of television.”³⁵ According to Fulton’s filmography, Path of Cessation, completed in 1972, is the first film he produced and directed (he also did the cinematography and the editing). It is an evocative portrait of Tibetan religion, beginning with an 8-minute, black-and-white shot of a Nepalese monastery waking up, framed inventively so that we see individuals from a distance through windows and doorways as the morning’s mundane events begin to unfold. The second and third sections of the film are in color: a sequence of mountain imagery leads to a shot of a bridge that provides a transition into a montage of color superimpositions of mountains, a stream, animals, people, time-lapsed clouds . . . Path of Cessation ends with a group of monks chanting, superimposed with imagery of mountains. Fulton’s fascination with Buddhism continued to inform his filmmaking in the following years, including the hour-long Reality’s Invisible, his portrait of life and creativity at the Carpenter Center, the facility designed by Le Corbusier and completed in 1963 (it is the only Le Corbusier building in North America).

FIGURE 11. Robert Fulton in motion, filming. Courtesy Robert Gardner.

In keeping with the Carpenter Center itself, which is described on the Center’s website as a reflection of Le Corbusier’s belief that “a building devoted to the visual arts must be an experience of freedom and unbound creativity” and must represent a “‘synthesis of the arts,’ a union of architecture with painting, sculpture,” Fulton’s film provides a cinematic experience as far from the conventional as the Carpenter Center is from the Harvard buildings that surround it. Indeed, the experience of Reality’s Invisible often verges on the overwhelming; it combines myriad kinds of imagery and approaches to shooting with dizzying editing to provide a phantasmagoria of life in and around the building and a paean to unbounded cinematic freedom (fig. 11). Reality’s Invisible has the celebratory energy of Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) but without the structure provided by that City Symphony’s composite day—though as Reality’s Invisible unfolds, we do begin to recognize a variety of motifs in addition to the Carpenter Center building itself: particular individuals (including Robert Gardner), kinds of activities, editing rhythms.

Fulton begins the film with a series of brief shots—in a small stream with light flickering on the surface, a flattened Budweiser can floats by; this is followed by several flecks of light, then by a lovely color shot of sunrise; then a brief passage of light flickering through a woods, apparently filmed (in black and white) from a moving vehicle—and with this halting statement, spoken by Fulton himself: “I just feel like there’s a lot that I have to say, and I haven’t been able to say it yet. And it won’t be . . . and I don’t want to write it, because I’m . . . and I try to paint it, but maybe I could, maybe I could film it” (“could film it” is matched with the flickering light through the trees). Again, as in Path of Cessation, Fulton signals that this is the “morning” of his personal filmmaking.

Fulton’s montage in Reality’s Invisible combines three forms of dense editing. First, any particular strand of visual investigation tends to be made up of constant shifts in subject and method—and often includes wildly unpredictable camera movements as well as analogously edited sound. Second, Fulton works with a variety of forms of split screen. In a good many instances the film frame is divided into four separate images (and sometimes into three or two), within each of which a different image is visible; sometimes, the imagery in one or more of these inner frames is heavily edited. There are also instances where a single frame-within-the-frame is revealing one activity, while the full-frame image around the frame-within-the-frame is revealing another.

Third, Reality’s Invisible is full of multilayered imagery: we are regularly seeing one image and one kind of image through others. Fulton uses more, and more complex, layers of superimposition than any other filmmaker I am aware of, with the possible exception of Brakhage, whose Dog Star Man (1964) seems a particularly important influence on Fulton. Since each layer of Fulton’s superimposition is made up of quickly shifting imagery, or is interrupted by split screen imagery of one design or another, the effect of Reality’s Invisible is something like a cine-kaleidoscope. To use a phrase of one of the students, Fulton’s epic celebration of the Carpenter Center is a form of “serious playing around”: it reflects on and embodies the high-spirited, deeply serious work and play that the building represents to him.

Reality’s Invisible includes on-the-street sync-sound interviews with students in, around, and passing by the Carpenter Center, many of whom question Fulton about what he is doing (in one instance we hear a student say, “Reality’s invisible”); and statements by men and women who were teaching in the center or who had considerable connections with it, including then-young filmmakers Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti, theorist Rudolf Arnheim, and Gardner, then director of the Carpenter Center, whose presence expands during the final section of the film. Sometimes, the faculty talk directly to Fulton; in other cases, we see them speaking to classes or offering individual students one-on-one critiques. Reality’s Invisible also documents a very wide range of art projects—in architecture, painting, drawing, sculpture, design, filmmaking—that were underway as Fulton was shooting; these include a variety of forms of experimental animation: passages of visuals and sounds scratched directly into dark leader, colorful sequences of imagery painted directly onto clear leader, cutout animation, “light writing” (that is, filming lights at night with a gestural camera so that streaks and curlicues of color fill the screen—it is unclear to me whether these sequences were filmmaking experiments that Fulton conducted himself or works by Carpenter Center students that he recycled into his film (my guess is the latter). And of course, the Carpenter Center itself is featured as an artwork; Fulton visually explores and documents every facet of the building, seemingly in every way he can think of.

The soundtrack is analogous to the image track, a mix of sync-sound statements by individuals, moments of silence, and passages of music, especially jazz (Fulton features jazz saxophone played by a musician we see several times during the film). In several instances the combination of freeform jazz and Fulton’s wild montage results in a kind of freeform “visual music.” And from time to time, Fulton includes sequences of several different speakers saying bits of what become constructed meta-statements: for example, a series of voices say “gradual narrowing down”/“two-dimensional experience”/“no continuity, no connection”/“live with it”/“my image”/“just exploded.” These meta-statements are prescient of language experiments that Abigail Child would include in her multipartite Is This What You Were Born For? (1981–89).³⁶

From time to time we hear Fulton speaking behind the camera. When one young man asks what kind of picture is going to be on the screen when Fulton is done with his film, Fulton replies, “You tell me”; and when a young woman asks, “Can you tell me anything more about this?,” Fulton says, “Not much.” And in a few instances we hear Fulton in voice-over, presumably commenting on the filmmaking process he’s involved in: “Correlating what you see with what you do with your hands. Considering what’s important and what isn’t. Flowing with the movement of the universe as opposed to against it. All the natural movements. You can’t talk about a beginning because everything is circular, but all those things interrelate. It doesn’t begin without any of those.” In his editing, Fulton does maximize “flow”; indeed he positions his exploration of the Carpenter Center and those who are studying and working there within a much larger context, so that their activities are seen as part of “the movement of the universe.” Not only does Fulton include views of the larger Harvard campus, including the green areas that lie near the Carpenter Center, but in frequent instances he embeds his imagery of art and artists within a much broader panorama: he films mountains from a plane; there are frequent shots of a woods, and of ocean surf, and imagery of a stream running, and of a field of grain. What goes on in this center of artistic creativity is seen as an extension of the larger world of natural forces.

One can hope that Reality’s Invisible—and Fulton’s work in general—will become more widely known and appreciated. At the moment, the film exists in a single 16mm print housed at the Harvard Film Archive. Fortunately, it is also available, in a reasonably good version, as part of a discussion with Robert Gardner in April 1973 that was recorded for a new television experiment, Screening Room.

SCREENING ROOM: MIDNIGHT MOVIES

In the late 1960s, Gardner was part of a group of Boston area businessmen and educators who took over Boston’s channel 5, an ABC affiliate, in order to offer the region a more educationally engaging alternative to standard television programming. After the takeover, Gardner initiated and hosted the long-running interview show, Screening Room, which presented films by independent filmmakers, contextualized by discussions with the filmmakers (and sometimes visiting scholars). The first Screening Room episode was an interview with John Whitney Sr., aired in November 1972; the series lasted until 1981. Around a hundred episodes were aired, and thirty of them are currently available on DVD from Studio7Arts. Screening Room was dedicated to a reasonably wide range of independent cinema; and Gardner’s selection of Screening Room programs for the original Documentary Educational Resources release reflected this: included were independent and experimental animators Robert Breer, George Griffin, Faith and John Hubley, Derek Lamb, Caroline Leaf and Mary Beams, Jan Lenica, Suzan Pitt; documentarians Les Blank, Emile de Antonio, Hillary Harris, Ricky Leacock, Alan Lomax, Richard P. Rogers, and Jean Rouch; and a range of avant-garde filmmakers: Bruce Baillie, Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, Ed Emshwiller, Hollis Frampton, Robert Fulton, Peter Hutton, Standish Lawder, Jonas Mekas, Yvonne Rainer, and Michael Snow.³⁷ Each Screening Room episode intercuts between the presentation of short films or excerpts from longer films and Gardner and the filmmaker (and sometimes other guests), sitting in chairs around a coffee table, talking about the work.³⁸

Screening Room remains interesting on a number of levels—some of these, I assume, not originally anticipated. As educational entertainments, the best episodes tend to be those during which complete short films were shown—especially when these films are reasonably well served by presentation on television—and when the filmmaker guests were comfortable speaking about their work. The inaugural episode, with John Whitney Sr., is an excellent introduction to his work. The first Derek Lamb program (June 1973) is an informative introduction to animation in general and to Lamb’s engaging teaching style. The James Broughton and Robert Breer shows (April 1977 and November 1976, respectively) remain enjoyable, in large measure because Broughton and Breer were articulate and comfortable speaking about their films. The Jean Rouch Screening Room (July 1980) provides a rare and valuable moment with a major force in the development of provocational filmmaking and of ethnographic documentary. And the first Stan Brakhage Screening Room (June 1973; Brakhage returned in June 1980) is an excellent record of Brakhage’s legendary passion and clarity about his work; indeed, his reaction to the broadcast of Window Water Baby Moving (1959) remains poignant: immediately after the film is aired, Brakhage comments, “My god, isn’t that wonderful that that can finally be shown on television. I’m so happy about that.”

To Gardner’s credit, Screening Room aired a good many films—Window Water Baby Moving and Jean Rouch’s Les Maîtres Fous (Mad Masters, 1954)—that, even today, are often considered outrageous and would be unlikely to find their way to television audiences. This was possible in large measure because Screening Room was aired at midnight, though in 1970s Boston, this did not mean no one was watching: the Screening Room audience was estimated at a quarter of a million people, many of them students at the Boston area’s many colleges and universities. Indeed, Brakhage’s excitement at having Window Water Baby Moving aired is poignant not only because Brakhage had waited fourteen years to see the film reach a television audience, but because his implicit assumption that the film could now reach a wider public via broadcast has not been confirmed; these days, Window Water Baby Moving is still seen almost exclusively in educational institutions; and even its release on the By Brakhage DVD hardly guarantees a large public audience.

Demanding in a very different sense, the excerpts from Michael Snow’s “Rameau’s Nephew” by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974) that were the focus of a March 1977 Screening Room would confound most any viewer not familiar with Snow’s earlier work; and one passage from that film, of a nude man and a nude woman, each standing and peeing into a bucket, was the only moment from a Screening Room episode that was censored: a black rectangle was superimposed over the offending body parts, though, despite this, the shot remains effective and amusing because of the sound of the urine hitting the buckets: the focus of “Rameau’s Nephew,” after all, is sound’s relationship to image in cinema! Gardner remembers “getting called around two o’clock in the morning from the head of the station: ‘Jesus, Gardner, are you trying to get our license taken away! A movie with somebody peeing in a bucket!’ I said, ‘It’s a work of art!’ He thought that was a big joke.”³⁹

From our perspective in the 2010s, we can forget that during the 1960s and 1970s, filmmakers often needed to develop their own technology for making the films they were interested in producing. Few independents had access to sound studios or to high-grade equipment. The result was that individuals jerry-rigged a variety of systems, some of which proved quite effective. During the early years of Screening Room, Gardner often asked filmmaker guests to bring their filmmaking equipment to Boston and to demonstrate its uses. Standish Lawder demonstrated his homemade optical printer in the January 1973 episode; in the March 1973 episode, Hillary Harris showed how he created a variety of effects with a 36-inch, 1000mm lens (a camera was mounted onto the lens) and how his time-lapse shooting was done; and in June 1973 Ricky Leacock, with the assistance of Jon Rosenfeld and Al Meklenberg, demonstrated the Super-8mm, sync-sound, cable-less rig he had designed for student film courses and hoped to market widely, including in underdeveloped areas of the world. Robert Fulton’s first visit to Screening Room in April 1973 was largely dedicated to his film Reality’s Invisible, an homage to the Carpenter Center, but Fulton also demonstrated the unusual approach to camera movement, partly balletic and partly athletic, that characterizes much of his work. Gardner’s interest in the do-it-yourself aspects of independent filmmaking in the early 1970s, as film was working its way into academe, have become a useful historical resource, in some cases, perhaps, the only motion picture documentation of this dimension of some filmmakers’ activities.

Some Screening Room episodes are interesting not because they are effective or entertaining television programs, but because, forty years later, they provide an index of the kinds of challenges that so many of us faced during the 1970s as we were first coming to terms with radically new approaches to cinema; and because they provide a glance at the ways in which independent filmmakers understood and related to media exposure during a complex and volatile decade. While Gardner plays the knowledgeable, worldly host, it is obvious as he engages Michael Snow and Yvonne Rainer (March 1977) that he has no clear idea of what they mean to accomplish in their work; his questions and comments are quietly desperate attempts to relate their films to filmmaking approaches with which he is familiar. The same is true of his second Brakhage show in 1980, where Brakhage’s increasingly abstract approach seems to stymie Gardner. Even in the case of the Hollis Frampton Screening Room (January 1977), an excellent record of Frampton as theorist and raconteur, it is evident that Gardner remains wedded to the idea of cinema as the production of well-crafted meaningful or beautiful artifacts and/or of autobiographical expressions of the artist. The idea that cinema itself can be a theoretical enterprise in which film artists explore their fascinations with little regard for the immediate reactions of audiences, seems foreign to Gardner. At the same time, his persistence in inviting filmmakers whose work was a challenge both to him and to his audiences reveals a commitment to a broad sense of film history, a commitment honored by Anthology Film Archives in 2008 with one of that year’s Film Preservation Honors awards.

During the 1970s a good many independent filmmakers, and particularly avant-garde filmmakers, were suspicious of both the commercial media and academe; and some filmmakers were resistant to speaking about their work. This sometimes produced Screening Room episodes that can only have frustrated the host. Despite Gardner’s obvious admiration of the Polish animator Jan Lenica, Lenica was a difficult, largely unresponsive guest. Even Robert Fulton, a Gardner favorite and lifelong close friend, seems awkward during his 1973 visit to Screening Room. And the Bruce Baillie episode (April 1973) begins without Baillie, who is late for the show—a bit defiantly, one assumes: when Baillie does arrive, he barely utters a word (Gerald O’Grady, who Gardner had asked to participate in the episode, works at speaking for Baillie, but comes across as stuffy and pretentious). Adding insult to injury, at the end of the show Baillie critiques Screening Room itself and his co-hosts: “Without this kind of classroom obligation to surround the thing itself [by “thing itself” Baillie means filmmaking], maybe we in this country can lead to some good broadcasting. I am thinking about TV a lot.” Despite Baillie’s critique, however, Screening Room was, all in all, a worthy experiment in television: Gardner’s willingness to include an unusually broad range of cinematic accomplishment; his willingness to pay filmmakers for their appearances on the show; and his courage in airing films that few others would have brought to public audiences make it a distinctive contribution to the history of independent cinema.⁴⁰

That the first major film Gardner completed after the nearly ten-year run of Screening Room was Forest of Bliss (1986) seems no accident. Like most filmmakers of his generation, Gardner had entered filmmaking without professional training and without anything like a coherent immersion in film history. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1960s he found himself in a position of some responsibility with regard to the production and exhibition of film as director of Harvard’s Film Study Center and of film operations at the Carpenter Center. Screening Room was, on one hand, an outgrowth of his professional life at Harvard, and, on the other, a form of self-education. If he couldn’t always make sense of what some of the filmmakers he hosted were doing, he clearly learned from their commitment to their own ways of doing things and to the films they wanted to make, regardless of what others might think about these films and regardless of how these new cinematic forms might conflict with traditional expectations. Early on, Gardner’s own films were weakened by his sense that to be a film artist he needed to imitate what a poet might do or what an accomplished film artist might have done, and the result was a tendency toward affectation. Gardner seems to have approached Forest of Bliss with a new kind of confidence and from within a more complete awareness of film history. The film would become a landmark contribution to an important genre—a genre claimed by both documentary and avant-garde film.

CITY SYMPHONY: FOREST OF BLISS

The City Symphony—the cinematic depiction of a composite day in the life of a major city—has become one of the most recognizable and prolific forms of independent cinema. After a series of premonitions, including many Lumière films about Lyon and Paris and much documentation of Manhattan during the 1890s as well as, two decades later, Charles Sheeler’s and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921), the form emerged with a triad of European features: Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (Nothing but Time, 1926); Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Sinfonie einer Grosstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Big City, 1927), the film that gave the form its name; and Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (Cheloveks kinoapparatom, 1929). Each of these films focuses on the life of a modern city—respectively, Paris, Berlin, and the post–Revolutionary Russian “city,” a composite of Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa—as it unfolds from before dawn until night (or the following dawn); and in each instance, the city chosen is understood as the quintessential city of a particular culture: France, Germany, communist Russia. Within this general formal contour, however, the films vary a good deal. While Rien que les heures seems ambivalent about the modern metropolis, Berlin and The Man with a Movie Camera reveal a fascination with industrialization, and Vertov’s film in particular is an all-out celebration of modernization and cinema’s crucial place within modernization’s transformation of a traditional culture. By the end of the 1920s, the City Symphony had become one of the two major forms of nonfiction filmmaking, the other being its inverse: the depiction of preindustrial cultures and ways of life: Nanook of the North (1921) and Moana (1926), Merian C. Cooper’s and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s Grass (1925).

The City Symphony soon became a mainstay in American independent cinema. The early 1930s saw the completion of Jay Leyda’s A Bronx Morning (1931), Irving Browning’s City of Contrasts (1931), and Herman G. Weinberg’s Autumn Fire (1933), all of them focusing on New York; and during the 1940s, Rudy Burckhardt began what was to become a long series of New York City films. The following decades added Frank Stauffacher’s City Symphony of San Francisco, Notes on the Port of St. Francis (1952); Weegee’s New York (c. 1952), by Weegee (Arthur Fellig) and Amos Vogel; Francis Thompson’s N.Y., N.Y. (1957); Marie Menken’s Go! Go! Go! (1964); and Hilary Harris’s Organism (1975), as well as a wide range of other forms of city film. More recent years have seen the appearance of a series of remarkable feature-length City Symphonies that, in scope and accomplishment, compare favorably with the European films of the 1920s: most notably, Pat O’Neill’s pop surrealist depiction of Los Angeles, Water and Power (1989); Spike Lee’s day in the life of a Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, Do the Right Thing (1989); and Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss. These last two radically revise our sense of what the City Symphony can do.

Ruttmann and Vertov firmly established the City Symphony form by celebrating the modern city as culmination of the industrial revolution, and whatever reservations Ruttmann had about the problems that industrial progress might also be creating (Vertov seems to have had none) were minor compared with the excitement of the speed and power of the new, mechanized society.⁴¹ This attitude has characterized nearly all subsequent city films. I have argued elsewhere that Spike Lee’s fiction feature is the finest American City Symphony—though to be fair, Forest of Bliss is equally deserving of this designation. While Lee’s insight was to see that the intermixture of people that the mechanized city had produced was of more interest than the mechanical wonders of industry themselves, Gardner’s approach in Forest of Bliss is to question the very notion that energy and excitement are products of industrial transformation by delving into a very particular cultural tradition and embodying it within a spectacular and beautiful form. While other filmmakers who have contributed to the City Symphony have documented their own cities or the cities they see as emblematic of their own cultures, Gardner focuses on Benares (Vāranāsi), India, a city utterly distinct from either Boston or any other American metropolis. However, what we find familiar is determined by what we find strange, and one can also understand Gardner’s fascination with Benares, which he sees as wildly different from any city he has known, as fully a reflection of his American-ness as is Lee’s depiction of Brooklyn.

Forest of Bliss is exciting and full of energy (and it produced an energized response from the academic anthropological community)⁴²—but not because of the transformations of modern life. Indeed, Gardner is at pains to eliminate evidence of modern technology from his vision of Benares. He cannot do this entirely, of course (and perhaps wouldn’t if he could): early in the film, in the background of several shots, we see a major bridge with automobile traffic, and in a few instances the film depicts street scenes that include some automobile traffic or the sound of distant traffic. In general, however, Gardner’s fascination is with the way in which Benares has continued to emblemize tradition: this city may be the quintessence of a culture, but it is interesting precisely because of those elements that are not modern and do not adhere to modern assumptions about what a city should be (fig. 12). While nearly all City Symphonies celebrate life, Forest of Bliss celebrates a culture’s ways of dealing with mortality and with the dead themselves: the focus of Benares (or at least Gardner’s Benares) is the burning of bodies and/or the disposal of the dead in the Ganges: that is, on the city’s cremation grounds, which are sometimes called the “Forest of Bliss” in sacred texts.⁴³ In the end, however, the film’s very distinctiveness from other city films allows Forest of Bliss to function as a metaphor for the inevitability of mortality and the ways in which human beings come to terms with it.

The focus of Forest of Bliss is the many rituals that surround the disposal of corpses; in fact, the daily round of Benares is depicted as an ongoing meta-ritual, made up of countless ritualized activities. This meta-ritual is depicted in an immense montage, held together in three of ways: by the temporal trajectory of dawn to dawn, by the repetition of particular details of image and sound; and by the presence of three men. As in other City Symphonies, Forest of Bliss creates the illusion of a single day, clearly a composite day, filmed over a period of months during 1984 when Gardner lived in Benares on a Fulbright Fellowship. The daily cycle is most evident at the beginning and end of the film, though it is clear that particular activities occur during specific moments throughout the day.

Within the structure provided by the movement from morning to night and the arrival of another morning, Gardner develops a wealth of image and sound motifs: dogs, marigolds, men carrying corpses, stairways, birds flying, boats passing on the river, men transporting wood and sand onto and off of boats, people sweeping with small brooms, and the sounds that accompany these tasks: men chanting, the loads of wood crashing onto cement, hammering, the ritual ringing of bells and striking of gongs, the squeak of oars on wooden boats—Forest of Bliss is truly a City Symphony: its sound montage is as complex and as memorable as its imagery. These visual and auditory motifs accumulate and often intersect and interact (various animals eat marigolds and spiritual men use them in ritual activities), so that, over the 90 minutes of the film, a powerful sense of being inside this strange city evolves. Earlier in this chapter, I mentioned Artavazd Peleshian’s “distance montage” in conjunction with Rivers of Sand, but Forest of Bliss is an even better example of the approach; indeed, it exemplifies distance montage as well as Peleshian’s own films.

FIGURE 12. Man rowing along the Ganges, from Robert Gardner's Forest of Bliss (1986). Courtesy Robert Gardner.

A final structuring device involves three men, each of whom is seen periodically through Forest of Bliss, though none of them is identified within the film. On Gardner’s website, they are described as “a healer of great geniality who attends the pained and troubled [this is Mithai Lal]”; “a baleful and untouchable King of the Great Cremation Ground who sells the sacred fire [the Dom Raja]”; and an unusually conscientious priest who keeps a small shrine on the banks of the Ganges [Ragul Pandit].” As Gardner indicates in his book-length conversation with Ákos Östör, these three “main figures are never portrayed in any depth. In fact, they are never even named. But they do get sufficient attention to emerge as fairly well-rounded individuals.”⁴⁴ The men and their various activities through the day become another set of motifs that also intersect at times: the class difference between Mithai Lal and the Dom Raja is sometimes emphasized in the editing.

Gardner’s compositional strategy in Forest of Bliss contributes much to the epic quality of the film. Gardner’s Benares is a complex maze of tiny, crowded streets that open onto the broad river, the many architectural approaches to the shore, and the myriad activities taking place on and near the river. As Forest of Bliss develops, each of these activities grows increasingly familiar, and we understand them more and more fully in their multileveled relation to one another. One particularly obvious instance is the early images of the making of what look to be ladders; why would the men be making ladders? Soon it becomes clear that in fact these are devices on which dead bodies are carried—though the original assumption that these are ladders remains implicitly relevant, suggesting the near-universal desire for transcendence of mortality. A typical composition late in Forest of Bliss involves activities taking place in close-up and at various distances from the camera simultaneously, as well as implicit intellectual intersections of multiple motifs. In this, Gardner’s City Symphony is reminiscent of Warren Sonbert’s montage films, where each image is a nexus of motif and implication.

As is true in Dead Birds, Forest of Bliss is punctuated by moments of shock value. The précis before the opening title and director credit concludes with a horrifying moment when several dogs attack, and presumably kill, another dog (the impact of this moment comes from the screams of the dying dog). And at various times, we see decaying corpses floating in the Ganges (a dog eating one; another, ass-up in the water), a dead donkey and a dead dog being dragged down the steps to the river, a dog seemingly so weak it can barely climb stairs, another lying dead among garbage—this in addition to the many corpses being burned and the bones collected, an old woman in a hospice on the verge of death (we see her a few moments later, dead, on her way to the cremation ground), the bodies of two children launched into the river. . . . These shots create a nervous attention and a kind of dread.

This dread is, no doubt, the residue of Gardner’s confrontations of death and dying in Benares. In the conversation between Gardner and Stan Brakhage, an extra on the most recent DVD edition of Forest of Bliss, Brakhage, who claims to have seen the film fifty or sixty times, invokes The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), his shocking film of autopsies performed in a Pittsburgh morgue, in commending Gardner on having the courage and stamina to make his film, courage presumably not only to shoot on and around the cremation grounds in Benares, but in owning the imagery and shaping it into a feature film.⁴⁵ Of course, the dread created by this imagery is our confrontation of mortality within the film experience, though throughout Forest of Bliss this shock value is carefully balanced by the film’s many remarkably beautiful shots: boats in the mist, a field of marigolds, a gorgeous sunset . . . moments reminiscent of the work of Peter Hutton, Bruce Baillie, and James Benning (fig. 13).

FIGURE 13. Men barely visible, rowing on the Ganges in early morning fog, from Robert Gardner's Forest of Bliss (1986). Courtesy Robert Gardner.

The unusual balance of the horrifying and the gorgeous in Forest of Bliss is itself a kind of metaphor. It reflects the reality of Gardner’s Benares, and it offers a theoretical perspective on the art of cinema. Throughout his filmmaking, Gardner’s primary fascination has been with what he sees as the two ways in which individuals and societies come to terms with mortality: through ritual and the making of art. The emphasis in Gardner’s depiction of Benares is, of course, ritual. From what we see, the industry of the entire city is in service of the various rituals surrounding death. Further, the daily cycle evoked in this film, and in all City Symphonies, foregrounds the idea that the very existence of cities requires that they function as immense, complex rituals that render what may at first look like chaos into a precise and productive order. In other words, Benares itself is a daily ritual, and the only way in which it differs from other cities—and for that matter from other social units of whatever density—is that its primary industry is (or at least in Forest of Bliss seems to be) a continual direct confrontation with the materiality of death itself. Wherever we are and whoever we are, our daily round is our way of ignoring and avoiding mortality and the implication that in the long run death renders everything meaningless. Gardner’s Benares is a holy city because its denizens have the courage to face the fact of mortality while simultaneously transcending its implications: they continue to live and work and to demonstrate, day after day, that the fact of death instigates the passion of life.

On another level, our cinematic experience of Benares is also, as Gardner himself has suggested, “a kind of ceremony.”⁴⁶ Of course, it is not merely Forest of Bliss that is a ritual, but both filmmaking and cinemagoing. Both have been ritualized experiences fundamental to our society for more than a century. And both filmmaking and cinemagoing share with all rituals the fundamental goal of helping us to come to terms with mortality. If the overwhelming majority of commercial films repress the fear of mortality by redirecting it into heroes and superheroes who transcend mortality or who conquer the representatives of mortality; and, more fundamentally, into the conflict resolution pattern nearly all Hollywood films employ, Forest of Bliss reminds us that the inevitability of death has always been the basic motor of all culture and all art. Forest of Bliss celebrates both the daily cycle of “the holiest city in the world” and (implicitly) the daily labor of the filmmaker documenting this place; and through its power and beauty, the finished film celebrates the way the art of cinema can transform even a subject terrifying to most of us into an engaging, illuminating, even transcendent—of place, of time, of death itself—experience, a literally transcendent experience of death, because the life of the film can be reincarnated, over and over, merely by rewinding the film or starting the DVD again.

THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: IKA HANDS

Among other things I have asked is: why didn’t I put myself in those films? It would have been so easy. Why did I leave something of such interest to me now out when it would have been so simple to do? I could also have imagery of the people who were with me. I could also have documented a process over time which is not uninteresting in itself about how I worked. But I was ultra scrupulous about leaving myself out, thinking it would compromise my intentions to preserve my objectivity.

ROBERT GARDNER⁴⁷

Forest of Bliss is Gardner’s most “objective” film, in the sense that throughout that film we remain comparatively unaware of his presence as filmmaker. It is difficult not to be aware of his presence in his earlier feature films, because of his narration most obviously, but also because of the very intimacy of so much of his imagery. In an urban setting like Benares, filming doesn’t seem unusual, but in the midst of a battle between Dani groups or during the funeral of a young boy, we can hardly fail to become aware of the fact of Gardner filming, even when the filming doesn’t seem to affect the Dani. The irony is that while it is Forest of Bliss, more than any other film, that has sustained Gardner’s reputation as a film artist, it was completed during a period when Gardner was becoming increasingly dubious about his methods and goals as a filmmaker, a period that would lead to a new motif in his work: his appearance within his films as a character.⁴⁸

Before beginning Forest of Bliss in 1984, Gardner had already recorded most of the imagery and sound for what would become, two years after the release of the Benares film, Ika Hands (1988), his depiction of the Ika, whose “rich and complex culture,” as Gardner explains in his opening voice-over, was thought “to be a survivor of pre-Colombian high civilization.”⁴⁹ He had visited the village of Mamingeka in 1980 and returned with Robert Fulton to shoot in 1981. While he did consider further visits to the village, the only additional footage shot for Ika Hands was a conversation recorded in Cambridge in 1985 with Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, whose writing had originally lured Gardner to the Sierra Nevada mountains in northern Columbia. After an opening shot/countershot interchange, Reichel-Dolmatoff’s comments on the Ika and on Gardner’s footage provide a kind of voice-over narration to the finished film. We see Gardner himself—silver haired and in profile—in two close-ups near the beginning of the film, and Reichel-Dolmatoff once; but Gardner’s appearance is suggestive: it is clear that he is unsure how to proceed with his film. He asks Reichel-Dolmatoff what the function of filming the Ika might be—especially since what he feels is of interest, their spiritual life, is an internal psychic state; Reichel-Dolmatoff suggests that the justification for making the film is that the way of life of the Ika offers “an option” to those of us living within what Gardner describes, in his early (and only) voice-over, as “the turmoil of a relentless modernity.” Gardner’s second close-up suggests that he’s not entirely convinced by Reichel-Dolmatoff’s comments.

Ika Hands is a montage of life in Mamingeka held together by three general motifs: everyday village activities introduced by textual titles (“Greeting in the men’s house by/exchanging coca leaves”; “The work of prayer is quotidian”; “Making rope”; “Fetching water” . . . ); the spiritual ministry of Mama Marco, who seems the most influential elder in the village; and the conversation between Gardner and Reichel-Dolmatoff. The montage is punctuated by seven passages of sunrises, clouds moving through the mountains, a distant lightning storm, shot by Fulton—Gardner’s way of suggesting both the passage of time in the village and the idea that these Ika live with a more macrocosmic sense of time than most people do. Increasingly the focus is on Mama Marco’s spiritual activities within the village as other everyday routines are playing out and on his solo excursions and activities. Often, Gardner intercuts between daily activities and Mama Marco chanting or doing other ritual actions. While Mama Marco is the primary character in Ika Hands, we get little sense of him beyond his spirituality; and while the other Ika men, and the women and children, seem comfortable with Gardner and his camera, they are not distinguished as characters the way Pua and Wayek are in Dead Birds.

While in some ways, Ika Hands seems of a piece with Dead Birds, Rivers of Sand, and Deep Hearts, there is a basic difference: the Ika seem to remain more of a mystery to Gardner than the other groups he has filmed (the puzzlement evident in the early close-ups of Gardner is a premonition). There were practical reasons for this: judging from Gardner’s journals written during the time he spent in Mamingeka, translation, especially of Mama Marco’s chantings, was problematic at best. Since Gardner’s original interest in the Ika was primarily their spiritual life and the ways in which a shaman might be serving his community, not being able to know what is being said seriously inhibits understanding. Though Gardner films Mama Marco often, most of the shooting confirms the distance between Gardner and this priest, along with Gardner’s respect for him: often Mama Marco is seen in low-angle shots, mostly from behind or from the side; and the final shot of the film shows Mama Marco walking away from the camera into the mountain mist: he, and his spiritual reality, will remain a mystery to Gardner and to the viewer.

The publication of The Impulse to Preserve in 2006 made available Gardner’s journal entries recorded during his time in Columbia (November 15–30, 1980; May 28–July 24, 1981), and his comments reveal dimensions of Ika Hands that force us to see the film both as a depiction of the Ika and as an evocation of a pivotal moment in Gardner’s career. That Ika Hands is as much about Gardner as about the Ika is obvious two-thirds of the way though the film when this interchange takes place between Reichel-Dolmatoff and Gardner:

REICHEL-DOLMATOFF: You capture this essential loneliness. In a way, I’m impressed by the absence of your filming social relationships. You don’t have people relating to each other, or very rarely you have a scene where someone greets someone or . . .

GARDNER: This says more about me than it does about the Ika. . . .

REICHEL-DOLMATOFF: This is very possible. . . . This shows man alone, man in a tremendous tension, very, very, there’s a tremendous anxiety in this film, you know?

Gardner’s journals dramatically expand our sense of Gardner’s struggle in Mamingeka.

While the primary focus in the film is the pervasive spirituality of Mama Marco and the other Ika, the focus of Gardner’s journal entries is the physical challenges of living in Mamingeka. Everything seems difficult, from defecating (“Maintaining a squatting position takes great concentration of mind,” even “with no [feces eating] pigs in attendance”)⁵⁰ to sleeping (“I write lying in a sleeping bag liberally sprayed with insecticide in an effort to resist an invasion of fleas that have kept me awake for the last two nights. Both of my arms are swollen from their attentions and I’m told bedbugs are next. This experience is uncomfortable so far and one for which I admit having wavering enthusiasm”).⁵¹ And though Gardner does adjust to these hardships, he must also deal with his flagging spirits; this has to do with “the interminable coughing, retching, spitting, whining, and tantrums I hear from all directions. . . . It is in my face, sitting, standing, or lying down. Mucous and vomit pour forth. Gobbits of expectorate fly in all directions. . . . I wheel and dodge, duck and run. I recoil a hundred times a day. . . . The work suffers as I suffer. I don’t feel centered, forgiving, or even interested. . . .” The sickness in the village (it also claims Fulton) is so exhausting that at one point Gardner is led to write, “Why isn’t that sick child dead? It should be and will be. The film could use it”!⁵² And filming itself was bringing its own challenges: “I managed to fall into a substantial torrent rushing past some of the outlying houses of San Sebastian. It might not have happened had I not been trying to cross it carrying a number of things I wanted to keep dry. Twenty years ago in the Baliem Valley I had no difficulty overcoming such obstacles.”⁵³

That the village’s struggle with illness is evident in only a single sequence in Ika Hands, as a mother deals with her sick son, and that Gardner’s struggle with shooting his footage is not evident in the film says a good bit about Gardner’s commitment to the idea of the spiritual. Gardner’s fascination with Mama Marco has much to do with the priest’s unflagging activity in his spiritual enterprise—“the mama’s work never ends”—but Gardner’s activity in filming Mama Marco and his environment is also unflagging and full of hardship; when Mama Marco makes the exhausting climb to the sacred lakes, Gardner walks with him, carrying a thirty-pound camera. That is, Gardner’s own cine-spiritual quest not only reflects on, but mirrors the physical and psychic challenges demanded by Mama Marco’s commitment.

That Mama Marco remains quite distant from Gardner (and from us), that he is ultimately a figure walking away into the mist, also implies that shooting Ika Hands made clear to the once-indefatigable Gardner that he could no longer commit to making films the way he once did. Even as he was beginning his investigation of the Ika, Gardner had wondered, “But why do I even consider another desolate geography to probe another disappearing remnant of humanity?”⁵⁴ And the fact that he could not finish this film for seven years confirms that this particular kind of cinematic quest can no longer be his; in making Ika Hands he himself was the man walking into the mist; his earlier ethnographic filmmaking was now a “disappearing remnant” of his cine-humanity.

The triumph of Forest of Bliss, occurring midway through the process of making Ika Hands, demonstrated the value of eliminating one form of filmmaker presence (narration), and it seems to have opened the way for Gardner’s fuller acceptance of his own filmmaking process. While Ika Hands does include vestiges of Gardner’s earlier uses of narration—Gardner’s opening voice-over and Reichel-Dolmatoff’s commentary—it also represents a change, because Gardner is present primarily as a character (the filmmaker struggling with his film) in conversation with a narrator who is also a character: we develop a sense of Reichel-Dolmatoff before he becomes an off-screen voice.

The character of Robert Gardner as filmmaker would become a good deal more prominent in the two films that followed Ika Hands, both of which focus not on disappearing ways of life but on artistic creation. In Dancing with Miklos (1993), his film about filmmaker Miklos Jansco at work on The Blue Danube Waltz (1991; the film was produced by Gardner and Michael Fitzgerald), and Passenger (1997), a depiction of the artist Sean Scully at work, Gardner is a major character. As the title Dancing with Miklos suggests, Gardner’s filmmaking is interwoven with Jansco’s (which itself portrays the press covering a set of events: there is filmmaking within filmmaking within Gardner’s filmmaking); and in Passenger, Gardner is simultaneously the director of the film about Scully and the filmmaker depicted shooting footage in Scully’s studio.

STILL JOURNEYING ON: UNFINISHED EXAMINATIONS OF A LIFE

I am a great admirer of writers and writing and would have been one had I more talent and courage.

ROBERT GARDNER⁵⁵

During recent years, Gardner’s primary energies have been directed to revisiting his career in cinema, a career that, he hopes, can survive his own passing. He has explored his personal archive, bringing into print writings that help us to understand the achievements, challenges, and compromises of his earlier cinematic adventures. And he has produced film experiences that recycle moments from his filmmaking and sometimes from the filmmaking of other filmmakers he has admired as a way of thinking back through the decades. Gardner’s exploration of his cinematic past in prose and in film has retrieved moments from his filmmaking career that had gotten lost in the lifelong shuffle of film projects and other obligations—it also seems to betray a deep-seated concern that his filmmaking accomplishments remain underappreciated.

Gardner’s history in publishing began with Gardens of War: Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age (New York: Random House, 1968), the book-length photo essay coauthored with Karl Heider that, along with his own Dead Birds and Matthiessen’s Under the Mountain Wall, was the most important product of Gardner’s first expedition to New Guinea. Gardens of War is an inventively organized volume, a compendium of imagery and text about the Dani; both Margaret Mead and Elizabeth Edwards argue that it is a landmark in the history of the anthropological photo essay, largely because of the manner in which the volume’s 346 photographs are presented.⁵⁶ Gardens is structured rigorously, alternating regularly between Gardner’s essays about Dani culture and Heider’s captions for the photographs, and groupings of photographs, both black and white and color. Gardens of War not only includes much the same information as Dead Birds, but depicts many of the same people and moments.

During the 2000s Gardner returned to writing and to the writing he had been doing during earlier decades—though his first foray back into publishing was a book-length interview. Making Forest of Bliss: Intention, Circumstance, and Chance in Nonfiction Film: A Conversation between Robert Gardner and Ákos Östör was published by the Harvard Film Archive in 2001; it is a sustained, virtually shot-by-shot conversation about Forest of Bliss, one of two shot-by-shot discussions of the Benares film (the other is Gardner’s conversation with Stan Brakhage, “Looking at Forest of Bliss,” included on the 2008 DVD produced by Studio7Arts).⁵⁷ The Impulse to Preserve: Reflections of a Filmmaker (New York: Other Press) was published in 2006; it is a collection of Gardner’s journal entries during the production of many films plus a variety of short essays. Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film, published by the Peabody Museum in 2007, is a nonfiction novel, largely made up of journal entries and letters to and from Gardner written during the production of Dead Birds. And Just Representations (2010), a collaboration of the Peabody Museum and Gardner’s own Studio7Arts, is a collection of previously unpublished journals, essays, and other writings focusing on Gardner’s films and various aborted filmmaking projects (it includes his adverse reactions to working with Laurence and John Marshall in the Kalahari Desert).⁵⁸