Robert Gardner Movies

Kwakiutl, Kwakwaka'Wakw, potlatches. British Columbia tribe as a civilization in decline as assimilation has almost obliterated native culture. Fort...

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

Director Robert Gardner and legendary filmmaker Stan Brakhage share an in-depth viewing of Gardner's ethnographic masterwork, Forest of Bliss. The...

"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...

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...

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...

On the island of Pentecost in the New Hebrides archipelago, a few hundred Melanesians maintain a traditional life thanks to their geographic...

Dances of the Kwakiutl is composed of fragments filmed in 1950 in Fort Rupert, British Columbia. They were made during a performance by those still...

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...

“In the middle of the twentieth century, Blunden Harbour was a small village on the coast of Vancouver Island in British Colombia inhabited by...

This film was produced to make the life of science more appealing to school children in America. It was intended to tell the story of purpose and...

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...

Robert Gardner has known Boltanski since the 1970s, when he invited him to the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard as a visting artist, and...

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

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...

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...

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...

Short film photographed by Robert Gardner

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...

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...