Robert Gardner Movies

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...

In 1980, Jack Shae and Allen Moore, two ethnographic filmmakers from Harvard University, moved their families to the island of Berneray in the Outer...

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...

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

Loving Krishna is about the worship of Krishna and the meaning of devotion. It explores the rural and urban character of the town of Vishnapur in...

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...

The people portrayed in this film are called Hamar. They dwell in the thorny scrubland of southwestern Ethiopia, about one hundred miles north of...

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 active in the programming of ABC affiliate Channel 5 in Boston, Gardner was permitted to make a few short one-minute vignettes illustrating the...

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...

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

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...

Robert Gardner interviews Frances H. Flaherty about the production of The Fishermen of Aran.

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...

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...

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...

Short by Robert Gardner

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...

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 film records a 12 day ritual performed by Mambudiri Brahmins in Kerala, southwest India, in April 1975. This event was possibly the last...