‘A hunter-gatherer with a movie camera’: two ethnographic films of Robert Gardner

Abstract

This paper argues that Robert Gardner’s ethnographic films, especially
Dead Birds (1963) and Forest of Bliss (1986), aesthetically refuse to serve
just as social scientific documents and visual lectures for anthropology,
and their status remains true to the film’s ability to mimetically
preserve and symbolically evoke the capacity of life under the auspices
of what we have all agreed to, at least on general terms, call ‘culture’.
Although his films break the boundaries of form and narration,
and provide unprecedented method into the representation of ‘other’
cultures in film, it is the way in which his whole cinematic approach
to evoke human condition and human culture in film that makes his
work unique in the genre of ethnographic film. In his approach, Robert
Gardner breaks away with any discipline’s ‘methodological philistinism’
(Gell 1998), meaning that a non-fiction film doesn’t have to necessary
be a didicatically structured ‘filmic ethnography’ to get the license to
be shown in the gallery in the cathedra anthropologia.