Robert Gardner

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 24 NO 2, APRiL 2008  13 

Suppose your favourite ethnographer had kept a diary of 

professional development – wouldn’t you wish to read it? 

Raymond Firth kept a field diary in Tikopia but did not 

publish it. Malinowski kept one; his students were against 

publication, and it was indeed later used to attack his work. 

S.F. Nadel kept a field diary, in Bida, now available on the 

internet; it is strictly for specialists – technical and mostly 

impersonal. 

Robert Gardner, recent winner of the Lifetime 

Achievement Award from the [US] Society for Visual 

Anthropology, has offered us a revealing book about 

his life in film.1 Some of his films have been required 

viewing for introductory anthropology students, but have 

been much criticized by visual anthropology’s thought 

police. There were those like Jay Ruby who wanted eth- 

nographic film to aspire to some kind of rigour in relation 

to real-world societies. At that time Ruby believed that 

anthropological films should be made with explicit theory, 

explicit methods and eschew fictions and models from the- 

atrical filmmaking. Karl Heider, who was to collaborate 

with Gardner, sought a kind of scientific ethnographic 

film which would feature ‘whole bodies in whole acts’. 

Asch and Marshall were working towards filming action 

sequences which would be faithful to real-time events 

unfolding. Scientific hypothesis-testing realism was in the 

ascendant. For this movement, Gardner’s work was out 

of synch with orthodox views of ‘best practice’. To some 

extent, the enthusiasts for cinema vérité and observational 

film were equally distant from Gardner. For them there 

was cinematic truth to reality, and it could be had through a 

certain mode of filmmaking, but explanatory commentary 

was out, whereas for Ruby and Heider it was essential. 

(Loizos [1993] reviews the disputes and cites the main 

contributors to this debate.) 

Gardner stood apart from both these movements. Those 

who most liked his films were not realist anthropological 

filmmakers but poets, painters, and the kind of people who 

would be found in London more often at the Institute of 

Contemporary Arts (ICA) than the Royal Anthropological 

Institute (RAI). Gardner was clearly not sympathetic to 

the claims of scientific realism, nor the radical inductive 

empiricism of the Ruby-Heider-Asch-Marshall axis. He 

was sure that the most powerful and visually arresting 

films were image-driven, and he was forever looking for 

symbols which in some important sense ‘summed up’ 

what a society was about. Since Geertz was to get so much 

mileage from the idea that a society could be grasped 

through some central visible performance – such as the 

Balinese cockfight – Gardner’s intellectual position was 

hardly an isolated one. And Gardner had a painter’s per- 

ceptiveness – he could find arresting images in the socie- 

ties he chose to film in. 

Gardner now offers us a richly illustrated and frank 

account of his major filming expeditions. The 500 photos 

are often arresting. The book is not about how the films 

were made technically, except to mention frequent camera 

breakdowns and ruined film batches. Nor does Gardner 

start with the germ of the idea, the background reading, 

expedition preparations, and he says little about editing. 

Mostly, the diary entries are about where he was, how it 

was, how he felt. It’s a journal which conveys the emo- 

tional difficulty of trying to shoot memorable films, far 

from capital cities, and the voice is intensely personal. 

The films involve long trips in unreliable Land Rovers, 

strenuous climbs, extreme weather, obstructive officials 

and distracted collaborators. But the greatest difficulties 

are internal to Gardner, the ambition to do something out- 

standing and the continual sense of falling short, of dif- 

ficulty, of ambivalence, of wishing he knew more, and of 

Fig. 2. Gardner, Robert 

2006. The impulse to 

preserve: Reflections of a 

filmmaker. New York: Other 

Press (distributed by Harvard 

University Press). 

PETER LOIZOS 

Peter Loizos began his 

career in documentary film, 

then taught anthropology 

at London School of 

Economics  from 1969 until 

2002. He has conducted 

fieldwork in Cyprus, and 

has also researched issues 

surrounding the appreciation 

of film by anthropologists. 

His monograph Iron in 

the soul: Displacement, 

livelihood and health in 

Cyprus will be published 

shortly by Berghahn Books. 

Fig. 1.  Eastern Jikany Nuer 

living at Ciengach, southwest 

Ethiopia, February 1968. The 

child had died of smallpox. 

A filmmaker’s journal 

An appreciation of Robert Gardner’s  

The impulse to preserve: Reflections of a filmmaker

14 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 24 NO 2, APRiL 2008 

great uncertainty as to whether the filming would result in 

anything worth watching. With appropriate substitutions, 

anthropologists should be able to recognize the sometimes 

painful experience of fieldwork. 

The filmmaker’s intentions 

The modern anthropological strategy of long immer- 

sion, and sustained language-learning was not the road 

Gardner took. It has been taken by some ethnographic 

filmmakers – the MacDougalls, Melissa Llewelyn-Davis 

and Ian Dunlop come to mind. Gardner describes himself 

at one point as ‘a lapsed graduate student trying to invent 

an anthropology that used film and photography instead 

of words’ (Gardner 206:73). He considered becoming a 

professional anthropologist and was decisively put off by 

some of the required reading, and aspects of disciplinary 

training. His book contains occasional dismissive remarks 

about academics, although he has time for those whose 

work he admires. Professional anthropology, as we noted 

above, has been equally ambivalent towards his films, 

almost as if he had been contracted to make the films 

the academy might have wanted, and had then somehow 

broken his contract. This ambivalence was partly based on 

a misunderstanding of Gardner’s intentions, and partly on 

a sense of anthropology as the moral guardian of the peo- 

ples Gardner filmed, with a duty to censor representations 

insufficiently grounded, explicit, relativist in style. 

Gardner’s films will endure because of the strength 

of their management of sustained images, images which 

transport us, take us somewhere we would otherwise never 

have been. They will also endure because he has had the 

courage to offer us films which pose questions about vio- 

lence, gender relations, death and religious mysticism. His 

choice of title for this book (taken from poet Philip Larkin), 

after various other choices had been rejected during a long 

working life, suggests his mature sense of what he has 

been doing. But one of the rejected titles was ‘Creatures of 

pain’, which seems to be the way he viewed humanity in 

his early life, a view that comes through strongly in early 

films but is no longer dominant. In what follows, I shall 

quote extensively from just two of the accounts of expedi- 

tions in the book, hoping that this will give the reader a 

stronger sense of it than if we tried to cover them all. 

Baliem Valley expedition: Dead birds 

The first major journal section concerns the expedition 

which resulted in the film Dead birds. In the Baliem 

Valley in Papua, in March-August 1961, the Dutch were 

still notionally in charge. Gardner had with him as advisor 

Jan Broekhuijse, a Dutch government anthropologist 

who had studied the Dani, and Karl Heider, just starting 

his doctoral research. The expedition brought major and 

minor shell valuables to gain acceptance: 

We tried to explain our intentions were completely unrelated 

to any government or religion. We told them they were entirely 

free to do as they wished and that we hoped they would. This 

included conducting their wars or stealing enemy pigs and 

women. They were relieved to hear this because these activities 

have central meaning in the Dani scheme of things. Without 

war they would cease being the kind of men they were sup- 

posed to be, according to the precepts of their culture. (p. 13) 

Gardner’s journal is full of complex ambivalences. 

First, he feels the expedition will change the locals, in a 

way that will take the heart out of their world. He also 

fears that although the filming team has received a friendly 

welcome, their local hosts might turn dangerous at any 

moment. After being among them six weeks Gardner com- 

plains to himself that he has made poor progress in their 

language. But his observations of their ritualized fighting 

encounters and the still photographs he took at the time are 

full of power and insight. In the journal he speculates on 

the meaning of Dani fighting. It is much more than ludic – 

people were getting badly wounded, and sometimes killed. 

There is a religious element: 

What is clear is that this is a phenomenon of enormous com- 

plexity central to their scheme of life. Fighting is what men do, 

even what they must do, in order to be men, in the same way 

toiling in the gardens is what women must do to be women. 

Fig. 3. Dani warriors, 

Baliem Valley, Papua, 1961. 

The man being carried has 

been slightly wounded. 

Fig. 4. Dani girls. They have 

each recently had a finger 

joint removed to mark the 

death of a male kinsman. 

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 24 NO 2, APRiL 2008  15 

If there were no wars, the shape of Dani society would surely 

change, if not cease to exist. (p. 29) 

Gardner thought he had escaped from functionalism 

when he dropped out of graduate school, but it was still 

giving him a basic framework as he watched the per- 

plexing fighting. By late April he feels relaxed with the 

locals, even though he is not convinced of having won 

their full trust. 

Curiously, I feel that if there was to be a war tomorrow, I might 

experience some reluctance about going. Now that I know 

many of them, I am involved in their fates and it would be quite 

terrible to see one of them killed or even badly hurt. (p. 32) 

These thoughts stay with him, but a day or so later he 

writes: 

I even wonder if it may not be true, that to take a life is the most 

intense, possibly ultimate human experience there is. (p. 34) 

If many people in the middle of a war have asked 

themselves this, relatively few have put it on paper, but 

the recent book Jarhead, about the US Marines, has the 

author regretting at the end that he had seen no action. 

Three days after Gardner had written the above, he saw at 

close quarters a badly wounded young warrior who would 

take 16 days to die in great pain. His feelings and percep- 

tions shifted again. On 10 June, in a new twist, a small boy 

is slain in an ambush, not in face-to-face adult battle, and 

Gardner is brought close to Dani funeral customs: 

As custom has it when someone is killed, a few of the victim’s 

relatives are mutilated. Several joints of the fingers of three 

girls and part of an ear of a young boy were cut off. To accept 

my offering of a shell, one of the little girls extended a bloody 

hand she had just used to cup the elbow of her wounded limb. 

She and the others were wide-eyed but not undone by pain or 

grief over their recent losses. We, on the other hand, are more 

prosaically exhausted by the week just ended (p. 54). 

The facing page shows two small girls who have clearly 

just undergone a mutilation. The small girl’s mask of pain 

seems at odds with ‘wide-eyed but not undone’: she looks 

undone to me. I would hate her to have been one of my 

children feeling that pain (Fig. 4). 

Sometimes, the entries are too taciturn: the Dutch anthro- 

pologist Jan is ‘apprehensive about what is to happen to 

him when we leave’ (p. 56), but we cannot guess exactly 

why: rebukes from his bosses? Danger from the locals? 

Gardner’s filming starts to frustrate him. He receives an 

inadequate lab report, wonders about going to Tokyo to get 

better information and then asks himself if he is not trying 

to find relief from the ‘discomforts and frustrations of my 

Highland Dani life?’ (p. 56). 

And always, there is the struggle, which appears in film 

after film, to make sense of it all: 

As yet I have no storyline for the film, and no clear develop- 

mental structure either, only some motifs and a few thematic 

notions like the bird/man business. I feel an approach should, 

indeed must, come together in my mind before too long. (p. 

57) 

The rain continues and so there are no flights. I used the day 

trying to sketch the film. The coverage seems vast and some- 

times the scale feels appropriately epic. But more material 

with a little humor and common appeal would help balance the 

spectacular. Pua looms more and more important as a sympa- 

thetic figure and counterweight to the heaviness of death and 

misfortune. I want to do closer work with pigs. Holy stones 

and sacred practice of all kinds. Everything is tied together 

somehow. (p. 57) 

7 July: I wish some things were not part of this culture and 

cutting off joints of a little girl’s fingers with a stone ax is one 

of them. (p. 62) 

He writes on 10 July of the third funeral in ten days: 

Everyone is exhausted by them and the bloodiness of it all is 

beginning to cloud my mind. (p. 63) 

If you take the view, as well you might, that to set out to 

make a film about tribal fighting is a risky pact with the 

devil, then it is easy to guess that what Gardner had seen, 

filmed and felt was nearly enough to regret the deal within 

a few months. When the devil turned up at the crossroads, 

he was not the suave impresario expected – he was much 

nastier, something of a sadist. 

I see no moral difference between a field anthropologist 

getting it all down into her notebooks, and a filmmaker 

struggling with camera jams and poor light. Gardner left 

feeling the expedition had contributed to the ‘corruption’ 

of the Dani – that in contrast with the previously despised 

missionaries, the expedition was an ‘unholy enterprise’. 

The Dani, seduced by trinkets, became ‘pitiful’ to him: ‘I 

have a horror of the pain they will someday know.’ 

So there is the paradox which has been felt by many 

who encountered such societies, from the Lévi-Strauss 

of Tristes tropiques through to current doctoral students. 

Some things shock and distress, others charm and fasci- 

Fig. 5. A Dani boy at play 

Baliem Valley. Boys were also  

occasional targets for inter- 

group revenge attacks. 

Fig. 6. Dusk in the village 

of Ciengach, southwest 

Ethiopia. 

16 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 24 NO 2, APRiL 2008 

nate, still others puzzle deeply, but at the same time, we 

are troubled by the speed with which the outside world will 

turn these lives upside down. 

Into Africa 

After the Dani shoot, there is a brief account of a visit 

somewhere near Sokoto, northern Nigeria, in February 

1965, to see a ritual called sharo in which young men 

invite each other to trade blows. He goes with a young 

local man studying maths at London University, who is 

fluent in Fulani. The trip lasts a couple of days. Some film 

was apparently shot, some stills taken. Gardner gives a 

vivid description of the encounters, and how these men 

take pain without showing fear or reluctance. It was part of 

a film which didn’t get made about a Fulani group known 

as the Uda. Gardner explains that the film was abandoned 

partly because a civil war broke out in Nigeria. But his 

comment on his own state of mind is interesting: 

Just as importantly, I was never able to find Uda in the state of 

simple innocence I had allowed myself to imagine them. My 

present view of those days is that I wandered too mindlessly in 

that particular desert, trusting that luck would prevail and that 

I would be able to attach myself to these astonishing exam- 

ples of the husbanding life. In the end, the very elusiveness of 

the Uda that first caught my fancy was what defeated my best 

intentions. (p. 78) 

In February 1968 Gardner was filming among a Nuer 

group just inside Ethiopia (Fig. 1). He was working in 

collaboration with a filmmaker called Hilary Harris, 

whom Gardner had encouraged to take on the Nuer, while 

Gardner himself tried to film among the Afar, another 

project which didn’t come off. There was smallpox among 

the Nuer, and they were not dancing, the activity Harris 

was most interested in. The Americans had some vaccines, 

but these did not seem to stop children dying. 

Gardner finds his time among the Nuer frustrating in 

various ways. It is 100° Fahrenheit, the insects are a drag, 

there is no chair or table to be had, and he can’t take care of 

his camera properly. He films a girl making a pot, in order 

to calm himself down. He sees the collective adoration of 

cattle as producing a harmony of deep values: 

I look at the orderliness of the Nuer world and find mine 

wanting [...] of course, I am not thinking about the larger polit- 

ical issues that hang over these people. The Nuer are refugees 

from Sudanese tyrants and from modernity itself. Maybe I, too, 

am a refugee. (p. 95) 

Although the Afar film was not made, owing to ‘Afar 

misanthropy’, Gardner was in Ethiopia in June 1968 when 

he started preliminary research among the Hamar – but 

to get to them required a major trek from Addis. He saw 

various agricultural groups on the way, and decided that 

while they might be interesting anthropologically, he was 

not interested in them pictorially: 

Is this way I have of viewing appearances a result of being a 

purist? (p. 111) 

The difficulties of the journey stir his imagination: 

I have begun to think the film to make should be about this 

struggle, not my own necessarily but that of those who drive the 

Fiats. The story, if one were to join them up and see what hap- 

pens, is about tearing up the countryside hauling freight from 

one market town to the next. Formally speaking, all the neces- 

sary narrative elements exist, including a cast of characters and 

an element of the chase for tension and suspense [...] Instead, 

I keep chasing the chimera of isolated people offering meta- 

phors for pondering not only their isolation but my own. As a 

graduate student, I remember repeating to incredulous profes- 

sors that what I liked about anthropology was that it would help 

me understand myself in more ways than the people observed. 

About this I have not changed my mind. (p. 112) 

Reading between these lines, I infer that Gardners’ pro- 

fessors were so full of the scientific seriousness of their 

anthropology that they could not make sense of what 

Gardner was really telling them. So they lost an anthropol- 

ogist, and the world gained a filmmaker. The first piece of 

writing in this book, describing an ‘old lady’ close to death 

in the Kalahari, shows that had he stayed the anthropology 

course, Gardner might have written a powerful monograph 

about actually observed people. Having myself dropped 

out of the Harvard Social Relations Department a couple 

of years after Gardner, I can say that there was such a 

deadly seriousness in the locked-down belief in social sci- 

ence that I turned to film with a sense of relief: films were 

usually about people, while sociology, criminology and 

anthropology seemed then to be about bloodless, incor- 

poreal abstractions – and besides, I couldn’t cope with the 

compulsory stats course! Gardner took me in, helped me 

forward. 

Filming the Hamar 

When after many adventures, the expedition meet some 

Hamar, their reception is friendly, and Gardner feels he 

can work with them. His impatience soon starts to make 

him doubt if things will work out. He compares the Hamar 

with the Nuer – ‘altogether a more compelling people’. He 

writes that he is too ready to dismiss the Hamar as ‘inex- 

pressive’. He tells himself he will have to be patient with 

them. He worries about their interest in non-local clothes: 

Appearances are more important in filmmaking than they are 

in life, which forces one to wonder how much filmmaking has 

to do with life. What is clear to me is that the less the group I 

choose to film is influenced by modernity, the greater will be 

my freedom from having to explain such matters [...] My own 

interests are to look for that which is an apt symbol or sign and, 

at the same time, is distinctive in and of itself. (p. 116) 

He finishes filming in late June 1968, and realizes he 

has got useful material, but has a lot more to learn. To that 

end, he makes contact with a young German doctoral stu- 

dent from LSE, Ivo Strecker, offering financial support in 

exchange for advice and interpreting on a second filming 

trip. Later he complains about difficulties in their working 

relationship – unsurprising, given the individual drive of 

both men. 

Forty-five days into his stay, Gardner starts to feel less 

warmth between himself and the Hamar. He has doubts 

about whether they are a ‘nice people’. By mid-August 

1971 he writes: 

The light was clear but my feelings about the Hamar male were 

not. I find little that is admirable in their character. Much of the 

time they seem exclusively absorbed in themselves as members 

of a dominant gender. On the other hand, I have noticed that 

Fig. 7. Hamar people, 

southwest Ethiopia. Whipping 

of unmarried girls by boys 

occurs in several different 

contexts. One is during male 

initiation, where girls who 

are kin to the initiand are 

whipped; another is during 

social dances, when a girl 

encourages a boy to whip 

her because she is interested 

in him. 

RO 

B 

ER 

T 

 G 

AR 

D 

N 

ER 

1. For a review of another 

of Robert Gardner’s works 

see Loizos, P. 1995, ‘Robert 

Gardner’s Rivers of sand: 

Towards a reappaisal’. 

In: Devereaux, Leslie and 

Hillman, Roger (eds) Fields 

of vision: Essays in film 

studies, visual anthropology 

and photography, pp. 311- 

325. Berkeley: University of 

California Press.

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 24 NO 2, APRiL 2008  17 

when two of them are talking, they project a sense of them- 

selves as almost free spirits. I don’t know what I’ll do with 

these undigested thoughts when I set about editing a film. I am 

sure I will not romanticize these men, or portray them as stub- 

born individualists eking out a meagre livelihood in a jungle 

of thorns. (p. 157) 

In other words, he would not follow the path of Flaherty, 

or of John Marshall’s The hunters. 

On the next page he is writing of ‘social and domestic 

fascism’ (p. 158). Although that actual phrase did not get 

into the final edited film, his unease with Hamar men came 

through strongly. Interestingly, this is the same man who 

had found the Dani warriors impressive in all kinds of 

ways, and was taken with the Nuer. Warrior societies with 

strong agnation are hard on women, full stop: there would 

seem to be little to choose between being a Hamar woman 

or a Dani woman. Gardner has implied that his own per- 

sonal life – a relationship was coming to a painful end 

– fed into how he filmed and edited the Hamar, and this 

honesty about how one thing works on another illuminates 

the book all the way. 

The book contains substantial journals for three other 

Gardner expedition films – Deep hearts (Bororo), Forest 

of bliss (Benares) and Ika hands (Sierra Nevada) – as well 

as material about his filming of painters. Similar kinds of 

emphases continue in the journal on the later expedition 

films – the need to understand, dependence on people 

who have presented themselves as knowledgeable, and 

disappointments with the quality of this field assistance 

in two shoots. Gardner addresses the physical difficulties 

of roughing it, and the humbling experience of seeing the 

locals coping with the conditions while you are so easily 

wiped out. There is also the anxiety about coherence – is 

there really a film? Is he finding the all-important meta- 

phors about the society? When as happened several times, 

a trip fails to take flight into a film, there is remorse. After 

one such sojourn in Ladakh, he wrote : 

N.B. I have transcribed the last of these notes in the Hotel 

Prinsengracht in Amsterdam where I have been invited to a ret- 

rospective of my films. I am struck by the similarity of feelings 

I had in Ladakh, particularly in the latter stages of that journey, 

and my feelings now of wanting to be on my way almost from 

the moment I arrived. I think it is a reluctance to engage, as 

Camus would say, that prevents me from having deeper layers of 

experience. New Guinea may have been a time when I was able 

to put aside urges to disengage, but even then I can remember 

moments when my craw was so full of spilled blood and the 

smell of death, I badly wanted to be elsewhere. (p.179) 

Some of these feelings may be familiar to anthropologists 

whether or not they happen to make films. Those who do 

not like Gardner’s films will find new grounds in the journal 

for believing they were right all along. But they would be 

wrong to excommunicate him from the company of ‘respon- 

sible’ filmmakers – not that he ever tried to join it. 

In 1986 Gardner decided to sponsor a prize to be awarded 

in RAI film festivals, the Basil Wright Prize. Wright was 

an outstanding British ‘poetic’ documentarist who flour- 

ished from the 1930s on into the 1950s, and made an unu- 

sual film about Sri Lanka called Song of Ceylon. Gardner 

believed that when Wright looked at the world through the 

camera, he could make an audience see it in a different way, 

as some of the most powerful painters have done. Gardner 

described Wright’s skill as ‘a transforming vision’. 

By choosing Wright, rather than his rival John Grierson, 

the agit-prop social realist, Gardner was making his peace 

with anthropology as a discipline. He wasn’t making peace 

with his critics, who he thought had largely failed to see 

what he was trying to do. The Wright Prize is awarded 

‘for a film in the ethnographic tradition, in the interests of 

furthering a concern for humanity and in order to acknowl- 

edge the evocative faculty of film as a way of commu- 

nicating that concern to others’. Thus RAI festivals can 

award a prize for a well-crafted film with high mainstream 

ethnographic fidelity, in a literalist-empiricist-obser- 

vational sense, a Womens’ Olamal kind of film, and an 

alternative prize, the Wright prize, for films which take 

different kinds of imaginative and narrative risks. Now 

that we have lived with the ‘experimental’ ethnographies 

of Taussig and the post-Geertzian ‘free the literary spirit’ 

auteurs, Gardner’s symbolist films should make new 

friends. He is a filmmaker’s filmmaker, who hopes his 

films will interest anyone who observes fellow humans, 

and remains a devotee of a ‘larger anthropology’ to which 

he hopes to have contributed. Like Wright, he has always 

had his own ‘transforming vision’, which is what makes 

his films truly distinctive. l 

Fig. 9. Hamar men cutting 

up a dead ostrich. In the film 

Rivers of sand the role of men 

as hunters is given strong 

emphasis, and in the ostrich 

scene the drinking of blood 

was made almost lyrical. 

However, in his journal, 

Gardner notes that there 

was little to hunt locally, and 

generally wrote of  Hamar 

men as idle and lacking in 

purpose, in contrast to the 

many-tasked women. 

Fig. 8. Hamar girls’  beauty 

preparations.