Movies: Robert Gardner

Started as a class project in what was likely the first filmmaking course ever taught at Harvard, Marathon documents the running of the 1964 Boston Marathon....

The film's title is borrowed from a Dani fable that Gardner recounts in voice-over. The Dani people, whom Gardner identifies mysteriously as "a mountain people," believe that there was once a great race between a bird and a snake, which was to determ...

An ethnographic film that documents the efforts of four !Kung men (also known as Ju/'hoansi or Bushmen) to hunt a giraffe in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia. The footage was shot by John Marshall during a Smithsonian-Harvard Peabody sponsored expediti...

“In the middle of the twentieth century, Blunden Harbour was a small village on the coast of Vancouver Island in British Colombia inhabited by a handful of impoverished Kwakiutl Indians who gained their meagre livelihood from fishing and gathering......

In the highlands of Northern Columbia the Ika live a strenuous and isolated life, economically dependent on small gardens and a handful of domestic animals. They are thought to be descendants of the Maya who fled from the turmoil of Central American ...

"When Michael Fitzgerald and I decided to help Mikos Jansco make The Blue Danube Waltz neither of us even considered the possibility of not watching him do it. We both loved his work and we both, perhaps for our own reasons, wanted to know how he man...

Portrays the Nuer, Nilotic herdsmen of the Nile basin. Shows how their daily lives revolve about their cattle, and depicts the psychological bonds between them. Includes extensive use of Nuer music and poetry....

Exploration of the way of life of the Q’eros Indians of Peru, who have lived in the Andes for more than 3,000 years....

Sons of Shiva is a sustained attempt to film a four-day ceremony concerned with the worship of Shiva. Devotees of the God Shiva are shown from the initial taking of the Sacred Thread through gradually intensifying action to a culmination in a variety...

This film records a 12 day ritual performed by Mambudiri Brahmins in Kerala, southwest India, in April 1975. This event was possibly the last performance of the Agnicayana, a Vedic ritual of sacrifice dating back 3,000 years and probably the oldest s...

The people portrayed in this film are called Hamar. They dwell in the thorny scrubland of southwestern Ethiopia, about one hundred miles north of Lake Rudolph, Africa's great inland sea. They are isolated by some distant choice that now limits their ...

Deep Hearts is a film about the Bororo Fulani, a nomadic society located in central Niger Republic and the title is a reference to an important aspect of these people’s thought and demeanor....

Constructed from the audio archive of the 1961 Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea: In the encounter with the Hubula people, this work reflects a parallaxing image of the histories of field recording, ethnographic film, and coloniali...

This short documentary was made while the painter lived in Seattle, Washington, early in the 1950s. It is only the second film made by Robert Gardner and tries to show in cinematic language how this man looked at the world; Mark Tobey himself both pe...

A documentary about a legendary American film maker/aviator Robert Fulton who was contracted by the BBC to film aerial cinematography throughout South America....

Director Robert Gardner and legendary filmmaker Stan Brakhage share an in-depth viewing of Gardner's ethnographic masterwork, Forest of Bliss. The film is shown in its entirety, with Gardner occasionally pausing to elucidate, and Brakhage brilliantly...

On the island of Pentecost in the New Hebrides archipelago, a few hundred Melanesians maintain a traditional life thanks to their geographic isolation and to the leaders who have resisted Christianity, schools and cooperatives....

"Good to Pull" is a 10 minute film by Robert Gardner, produced by the Film Study Center at Harvard University. Watch Michael Mazur’s printmaking process and techniques as he develops the intaglio plates for his Dante’s "Inferno" portfolio which is on...

In 1980, Jack Shae and Allen Moore, two ethnographic filmmakers from Harvard University, moved their families to the island of Berneray in the Outer Hebrides. Over the course of 18 months they documented the everyday lives and struggles of the crofte...

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