Over the years much has been written about Robert Gardner's films and the manner in which they are made. Given their nature it is understandable that the critical writing has gone in at least two directions, that of film as 'art' and that of film as 'document'.  The books cited on this page relate to both tendencies.

Possibly the best book about Gardner's work is his own The Impulse to Preserve (Peabody/Harvard Press 2006) in which he relates his experiences as a filmmaker working under a variety of circumstances and exploring a variety of approaches.
 
Presently Gardner is finishing another book containing writing about projects that he completed and others that he wasfor different reasons unable to finish. It is expected in 2009 under the title Just Representation.

Books about Robert Gardner

This is the first volume of essays dedicated to Gardner's work—a corpus of aesthetically arresting films which includes the classic Dead Birds, Rivers of Sand, and Forest of Bliss. Eminent anthropologists, philosophers, film theorists, and fellow artists assess the innovations of his films as well as the controversies they've spawned.
Published by Berg, 2007

This book came about through a collaboration between Tom Cooper, once a student of Robert Gardner's at Harvard, and Samina Quraeshi, a designer and writer with far flung interests in the arts. It was intended as a sort of primer for Gardner's film work, picking up where a number of reviews and critical essays left off. Tom Cooper is a professor of film at Emerson College and takes particular interest in the relation between Media and Ethics.
Published by Anthology Film Archives, 1995 (nearly out of print)

Harry Tomicek became absorbed in Cinema as a writer and thinker about metaphysical issues in art. He has been a frequent contributor to important periodicals concerning the philosophy of art and in film reviews in important newspapers and magazines. His book Gardner was written during the Österreichisches Museum of Vienna's retrospective of Robert Gardner's films. It has been said to have made interesting and complex observations on the actuality film particularly in regard to large human matters such as warfare. It is this issue which caught his attention early in his writing when he saw Dead Birds for the first time.
Published by Österreichisches FilmMuseum, 1991

Trickster Verlag in Munich has been known as a source of some interesting books about film, especially documentary film. This book collects a few articles on Gardner's films and fits them under the theme of ritual, a dimension of life (and death) that has particularly interested Gardner. With the exception of Jay Ruby who manages to bare his teeth in a particularly vicious manner, the book served well as an accompaniment to a retrospective of Gardner's work in Freiburg Germany.
Published by Trickster Verlag, 1989 (out of print)