American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

      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