American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ through economic dependence, alcohol, and broken promises as parallel to the transformation of Native America wrought by the arrival of Europeans and the establishment of the American nation. Nyae Nyae is just one of those Other worlds that were sacrificed, that continue to be sacrificed, to make modern life seem “normal.”

      In “The Regional Writer” Flannery O’Connor argues that for her to declare herself a Georgia writer is “to declare a limitation, but one which, like all limitations, is a gateway to reality. It is perhaps the greatest blessing a writer can have, to find at home what others have to go elsewhere seeking.”⁶⁶ Marshall, of course, went elsewhere seeking, but he found in that elsewhere a kind of home for himself, and, over a period of half a century of visits to this new home, he transformed the limitations of his own cultural background and his own assumptions about cinema into a gateway to reality: specifically, the reality that life for “us” and for “them” (and for the relations between “us” and “them”) is always a process of personal and social transformation. And this is true if the “us” means Americans from Cambridge and “them,” the Ju/’hoansi in Nyae Nyae, and if “us” means filmmakers and “them,” their subjects, and if “us” means film audiences and “them,” filmmakers and/or their subjects.

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      Robert Gardner

      While John Marshall spent much of his filmmaking life rethinking and revisiting his earlier filmmaking experiences in the Kalahari Desert, learning what he could from the ongoing transformations of San life and from what he saw as his limited understanding and his filmmaking mistakes, Robert Gardner’s career has been focused on an expansive engagement with the ways in which the human need to make life meaningful and beautiful despite the inevitability of physical death has been expressed both in far-flung cultures and by artists working in cultural environments closer to home. Gardner’s important, if controversial, contributions to ethnographic cinema have taken him to various parts of Africa (in one instance into the Kalahari with the Marshalls), to New Guinea, to the Andes, and to the Indian subcontinent. In each instance, he has thrown himself into the experience of recording what has seemed of interest to him in these cultures, not simply because the events he films are crucial within the lives of those he has documented, but also because of the relationships he sees between these events and transformations in his own culture and his own life.

      Throughout his long career, Gardner has braided his fascination with exotic cultural practices that seem unusual but are sometimes surprisingly relevant to the lives of most film audiences with a fascination with artistic sensibility in general and with the particular accomplishments of writers, painters, sculptors, as well as other film artists. The result is a panorama of image making and writing within which Gardner has attempted, again and again, to confirm his commitment to the ritual of art and the art of ritual as a means of negotiating the passages of human experience.

      EAST COAST/WEST COAST: EARLY EXPERIMENTS

      Robert Gardner is a formative figure in the evolution of Cambridge documentary and in the emergence of Cambridge as a center of film activity. An accomplished and influential filmmaker in his own right, he was crucial in the development of the Film Study Center at Harvard, and in 1964, when the Film Study Center moved from the Peabody Museum to the new Carpenter Center, which Gardner helped to design, he managed the Film Study Center, assisting filmmakers in producing films and overseeing the programming of events at the Harvard Film Archive’s cinematheque. He was, so far as I am aware, the first to teach courses in film production and film history/theory at Harvard (in what, early on, he called the Department of Light and Communications), and over the years his teaching nurtured a number of filmmakers. Beginning in 1972 and continuing for ten years, he hosted Screening Room on channel 5 in Boston, for which he interviewed major contributors to independent filmmaking—animators, documentary filmmakers, and film artists identified with the avant-garde—and broadcast their films to the local television audience.

      Gardner was director of the Carpenter Center from 1975 to 1994 and continued to teach in what had become the Visual and Environmental Studies Department until 1997, when he retired from his formal connection with the university. He has continued to contribute to film culture and the arts at Harvard, and in 2003 he established Studio7Arts, which offers monetary support and facilities to individual artists working to mine the potential of still and moving images to provide “visible evidence that testifies to our shared humanity.”¹ The 2000s saw Gardner turn his attention to writing, in particular to the journals he compiled during the making of his films: The Impulse to Preserve: Reflections of a Filmmaker (New York: Other Press) appeared in 2006; Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film (Cambridge: Peabody Museum), in 2007; and Just Representations (Cambridge: Peabody Museum/Studio7Arts) in 2010.

      Gardner’s diverse career has been punctuated with the production of independent documentary films, though his original interest in cinema was more conventional. As a Harvard undergraduate, and a sometime college roommate of Jack Lemmon, he was drawn to theater; he and Lemmon acted together in The Proof of the Pudding at the Hasty Pudding Theatrical Society. Upon graduation, the two friends traveled together to Hollywood to seek fame and fortune, neither of which was immediately forthcoming for either man, though Gardner was offered the part of Mark Trail in a proposed TV serial based on the famous comic strip. Returning to Cambridge, Gardner became an assistant to Thomas Whittemore of Harvard’s Fogg Museum and traveled to Turkey to assist with conservation work on mosaics in Istanbul’s Church of the Chora (Karije Jami): “These were transformative experiences during which I learned, among other things, that I knew nothing and that I had little time to lose correcting that appalling truth.”²

      

      FIGURE 6. Sidney Peterson and Robert Gardner in Kwakiutl outfits sometime in the early 1950s. Courtesy Robert Gardner.

      In 1949 Gardner moved to Seattle and for a time taught medieval history at the College of Puget Sound in Tacoma. Reading Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture moved Gardner toward anthropology, which he studied briefly at the University of Washington and later on at Harvard. During his years in Seattle, Gardner became involved with the film society at the University of Washington’s Henry Gallery, and in 1951–52, made his first foray into filmmaking, working for a time with avant-garde surrealist Sidney Peterson on a feature about an interracial romance between a Kwakiutl princess and a white man (fig. 6). While Gardner and Peterson did do some shooting on Vancouver Island, nothing came of their work. However, Gardner’s visit to Vancouver Island’s Blunden Harbour would soon instigate his first two films: Blunden Harbour (1951) and Dances of the Kwakiutl (1951).

      Gardner’s Kwakiutl films seem to have been inspired by the lyrical documentaries he was seeing at the Henry Gallery, and especially Henry Watt and Basil Wright’s Night Mail (1936), which Gardner remembers watching about twenty-five times.³ Watt and Wright’s combination of image and spoken poetry (by W.H. Auden) also seem to have influenced Gardner’s third film, an evocation of the person and work of painter Mark Tobey, with whom Gardner became friends while in the Northwest. For both Blunden Harbour and Mark Tobey Gardner wrote poetic narrations; the text in Blunden Harbour was spoken by poet Richard Selig; the texts in Mark Tobey by Gardner and Tobey (Tobey contributed some of his lines). Blunden Harbour and Mark Tobey seem generally representative of film society films of the 1950s, in their interest in other cultures and in art, in their use of poetic imagery and narration, even in the ways in which Gardner worked with sound and image in the years before sync sound was an option for independents.

      Blunden Harbour is an effective portrait of a place. Heinck’s and Jacquemin’s cinematography is lovely, evocative sometimes of Frank Stauffacher’s Sausalito (1948) and Bruce Baillie’s To Parsifal (1963), and Gardner’s editing is capable, and sometimes powerful: for instance, a shot of one older man doing painstaking work on a mask is followed СКАЧАТЬ