Robert Gardner

In Passenger, Robert Gardner made what he calls “an observation in four movements.” The intent of the piece is to impart an experience of the engagement by Sean Scully with the work in question, an engagement which is both physical and emotional. The only sounds are those made by the artist as he works and, occasionally, musical passages from tapes Scully listens to while he is painting.

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Robert Fulton asked me to join him to do aerial photography in the Southern Chilean Andes. We rigged microphones to record what we were saying to each other as we flew among these extraordinary formations.

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A short film acknowledging the efforts of those responsible for installing the exhibition “Sean Scully 1987-1997” in Malaga. Equally important, the film captures Scully's parents dancing their beloved 'paso doble' in the midst of their son's work.

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Testigos is a small painting done when Gardner and Scully worked together in Barcelona. The title, which means 'witnesses,' is the name of a small island in the Caribbean. Testigos, and at least one other painting, was made on the days that the larger canvas Passenger was drying.

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"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 managed to make films of such immense visual power so quickly and so inexpensively. It was not long before I had succumbed to the by now banal idea of filming filmmaking. In due course I also proceeded to betray my deepest aesthetic principles by agreeing to shoot it in (Hi8) video. Dancing with Miklos is the outcome, greatly enhanced by Zsuzsi Csakany (Jansco)’s sharp eye for her husband’s craft. It is, though admittedly lighthearted, a deeply felt tribute to a fellow filmmaker’s grace." - Robert Gardner

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The coastal Danakil in Northeastern Ethiopia have found an environmentally suitable way of life netting sharks far out to sea which they export to the south Arabian states.

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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 High Civilization’s warring states to the remote valleys of Colombia’s Sierra Nevadas. The Ika still inhabit a spectacular but demanding terrain extending between five and fifteen thousand feet, an almost vertical geography through which they move with prodigious ease.

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Forest of Bliss is an unsparing yet redemptive account of the inevitable griefs, religious passions and frequent happinesses that punctuate daily life in Benares, India's most holy city. The film unfolds from one sunrise to the next without commentary, subtitles or dialogue. It is an attempt to give the viewer a wholly authentic, though greatly magnified and concentrated, sense of participation in the experiences examined by the film.

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One of my thoughts while shooting Forest of Bliss was to see and hear what poets might have to say about their surroundings. These scenes recount some of their thoughts.

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While shooting in Benares for Forest of Bliss, I stumbled upon a temple visited by women who came to it with a variety of ailments including love sickness and problems with their families. This fragment begins to indicate the extent of their despair.

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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 of ascetic and self denying practices.

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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.

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I went to Ladakh in the vain search for a shaman. What I found was a species of Buddhist healing that involved trance and a variety of magical tricks of the healing trade.

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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 surviving human ritual. Long considered extinct and never witnessed by outsiders, the ceremonies require the participation of seventeen priests, involve libations of Soma juice and oblations of other substances, all preceded by several months of preparation and rehearsals. They include the construction, from a thousand bricks, of a fire altar in the shape of a bird.

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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 movement and defines their condition. At least until recently, it has resulted in their retaining a highly traditional way of life. Hamar women eagerly accept their ritual whipping when boys come of age. Part of that tradition was the open, even flamboyant, observance of male supremacy. In their isolation, they seemed to have refined this not uncommon principle of social organization into a remarkably pure state. Hamar men are masters and their women are slaves. The film tries to disclose the effect on mood and behavior of lives governed by the idea of sexual inequality.

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Early in the seventies I was involved in the programming of an ABC affiliate TV station in Boston (Channel 5). I was given the opportunity to make what I called "non commercials" to be shown between programs just like a conventional advertisement but consisting instead of a 60 second look at a commonplace social activity. Policeman was one of several such "non commercials" that aired on this station to many peoples' astonishment.

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Short film photographed by Robert Gardner

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While active in the programming of ABC affiliate Channel 5 in Boston, Gardner was permitted to make a few short one-minute vignettes illustrating the working lives of relatively ordinary people. These vignettes were meant to be used by the TV station as ‘non commercials’ or unexpected looks at ordinary lives.

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While active in the programming of ABC affiliate Channel 5 in Boston, Gardner was permitted to make a few short one-minute vignettes illustrating the working lives of relatively ordinary people. These vignettes were meant to be used by the TV station as ‘non commercials’ or unexpected looks at ordinary lives.

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Robert Gardner visits the great American painter Mark Tobey in Basel, Switzerland, where he lived for the last years of his life. With remarkable candor and objectivity, Tobey discusses his work and that of fellow artists including Picasso.

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Independent filmmakers are given a chance to show and discuss their work on a commercial (ABC-TV) affiliate station.

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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.

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In 1967 I was hoping to make a film about sheepherders in Nigeria. Civil War intervened and I had to be content with a few days attending a ritual called “sharo” in a small village near Kano. It qualified as a true ‘ordeal’, a contest of endurance to pain.

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One of my filmic interests in Ethiopia was to see and film the salt trade between the Highlands and the Dallol Depression, a wondrous environment of unbearable heat and intense color. I managed a start only and these are the bits that emerged.

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Alexander Calder's La Grande Voile was erected on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in 1966 with the artist directing the work. As the spectacular steel forms of this monumental stabile rise, it is filmed with time-lapse and verité photography. One can see that the structure owes its spare elegance to the precision of its design and construction. Calder remains absorbed in quiet concentration as skeptical students and bemused bystanders observe the somewhat peculiar event.

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In the late sixties I picked up my seldom used Arri 35mm camera and set off for the famous tidal flats of Nova Scotia. This fragment is of an elderly farmer who fished a weir using his horse and carriage to go out to it with the ebbing time and home with the incoming tide. I thought I saw a nice structure for a film that even included the element of chase, that old standby of film narrative. Would the carriage get home before being engulfed by the incoming tide, would the fog appear and obscure all points of reference?

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Short by Robert Gardner

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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.

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An ethnographic documentary documenting the ritual warfare cycle, social life, and belief systems of the Dani people of the Baliem Valley in western New Guinea.

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The only film except for helping John Marshall with The Hunters that I did when I went to the Kalahari in 1957. I became entranced by an old lady about whom I photographed and made this little film.

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An ethnographic documentary following four Ju/’hoansi (!Kung) men during a multi-day giraffe hunt in the Kalahari Desert, filmed during the Smithsonian–Harvard Peabody expedition of 1952–53.

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