I learned some Turkish (largely forgotten), developed an appreciation for prayer rugs, investigated tile making in Anatolia and transported Coptic textiles and Greek coins to dealers and collectors from the Fayum to London all in addition to becoming passably adept at cleaning and stabilizing hitherto concealed masterpieces of Byzantine art. I was never again to work in Istanbul, but my path through life would take me into many even more extraordinary landscapes and cultures.

I absorbed a sufficient grasp of medieval art and history to get a job teaching at the College of Puget Sound in the state of Washington. There I was drawn by the writing of Ruth Benedict (Patterns of Culture) to the study of North American Indian societies of the Northwest Coast one of which, the Kwakiutl, I visited and undertook to comprehend by making a short film. This in turn led to graduate school in anthropology, once again at Harvard. While a graduate student, I was asked to join an expedition to the Kalahari Desert to make photographs, films and do elementary research on the Bushmen. Soon after I established a small production and research unit at the Peabody Museum named The Film Study Center. In 1963 I moved with this venture, entirely novel at Harvard, into the just constructed Le Corbusier-designed Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

From that time I have managed an average of a film every two or three years starting in 1964 with Dead Birds and including Forest of Bliss in1985. Dead Birds was made in Netherlands New Guinea among a vital and wholly authentic Neolithic people called The Dani. Later came similar undertakings in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Niger, Ladakh, Colombia and India. In them all I have been instructed by the experience of being among and attempting to understand the meaning of lives different in at least outward appearance from my own. It has been my intention in all instances to discover those meanings in the actualities I witnessed and to set them down in a visual language comprehensible to the widest possible audience.

There were more places I wanted to go, some as close as downtown and others farther away like Korea and Japan. I have also hoped to adapt what has been a career given largely to the genre of nonfiction to the requirements of more conventional storytelling. To this end I have worked on scripts for: a narrative film about the effect of a brutal murder and its aftermath on an isolated community of North Atlantic fishermen, Alan Moorehead's book about Australian aborigines caught up in the exploits of Western adventurers (Cooper's Creek), and John Coetzee's novel (Waiting for the Barbarians) about people living on the margins of civilization. Two of these projects have come tantalizingly close to realization.

Nowadays I am writing as much as filmmaking and have a book appearing in June 2006 (The Impulse to Preserve) and another (Making Dead Birds Chronicle of a Film) in 2007. In preparation is Further Reflections of a Filmmaker and, possibly, a book about ritual warfare. A film (Roads End) is in a state of what sometimes feels like endless editorial limbo. I lead a daily life in Cambridge, MA with a wife who is a psychiatrist (Adele Pressman), two children in nearby universities (Caleb and Noah) and several friends (Kevin Bubriski, Robert Fenz, Sharon Lockhart, Eric Masunaga, Susan Meiselas, Alex Webb, and Michael Hutcherson), in a sort of loose confederation (studio7arts) making books, DVDs, videos and films.

Robert Gardner
Cambridge 2006