American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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