The Impulse to Preserve: Reflections of a Filmmaker

By Robert Gardner

Filmmaker Robert Gardner reflects on a life spent observing, recording and illuminating the human condition in some of the most remote regions of the world. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590512367
• ISBN13: 9781590512364
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: Peabody Museum Press
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 3.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 11.0" x 1.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Brian L. Frye - Bomb Magazine

by Brian L. Frye Robert Flaherty invented ethnographic filmmaking, and Jean Rouch transformed it into sociology. But Robert Gardner made it an art form. If his predecessors created films of practical beauty, Gardner infused his own with an exquisite aesthetic rigor. While documenting life in pre-modern--sometimes nearly primeval--societies, they preserve something of the pleasures peculiar to such a life, sacrificed for the pleasures of modernity. Over nearly 50 years, Gardner has assembled an eclectic collection of documentaries, notably DEAD BIRDS, on the primitive Dani of Papua New Guinea, RIVERS OF SAND, on the Hamar of southern Ethiopia, and FOREST OF BLISS, on funeral practices in Benares, India. THE IMPULSE TO PRESERVE: REFLECTIONS OF A FILMMAKER compiles journals Gardner kept while making those films and others, as well as essays on his subjects and documentary filmmaking more generally. Copiously illustrated with photographs, stills, and documents, most created by Gardner himself, the book is a pleasure to browse. And Gardner's spare, lucid prose makes it a pleasure to read, too. Not to mention a perfect complement to his occasionally enigmatic movies. But it's also an elliptical polemic on the ethos of ethnographic filmmaking. Gardner rejects relativism, advocating a kind of aspirational ethnography. "I don't think anthropology is doing its job by being value free. I do think it should accept its responsibility to look for larger truths." And yet his aspirations are less ideological than aesthetic. Rather than merely catalog human existence, Gardner searches for particular expressions of human genius. "I have always thought populations undergoing change were the business of sociologists and of those anthropologists interested in change for its own sake. 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." He finds it in traditions truly born of time immemorial, the remnants of a history as archeological as anthropological. As Isaiah Berlin explained, in admiring the virtues of classical society we recognize their incompatibility with our own. Gardner admires the mythical world of the Dani, despite its brutal violence, and despises the preening puerility of the Hamar. Unlike his postmodern peers, he realizes refusing to judge a society is the profoundest form of contempt. In judging, he testifies to the fantastic truths only history and experience can reveal.

A vision, a prayer, a cry from the heart

I think Wade Davis (AUTHOR: Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), Shadows in the Sun (1998) and Light at the Edge of the World (2001)) said it best: "This book is less a text than a vision, a series of reflections and recollections that come together as a prayer, a cry from the heart of an extraordinary artist and ethnographer who long before anyone else noticed recognised and described the central backdrop of our age. In the year Robert Gardner was born there were 6000 languages spoken on Earth, each a flash of the human spirit, an old growth forest of the mind. Today fully half of these are not being taught to children or whispered into the ears of infants. Within a generation we are, by definition, losing half of humanity's intellectual, social, and spiritual legacy. He saw this unfolding in New Guinea, South Asia, Africa and in the mountains of Colombia, the Kogi heart of the world. He has devoted his life to this tale, inspiring generations of students, firing the heart of scores of young scholars of anthropology. I know this to be true, for I was one of them."