Robert Gardner
The films of Robert Gardner have a controversial place in the genre they are most often situated – that of the ethnographic film. This is largely due to the poetry that he injects into a field that favours scientific methodology over aesthetic qualities. Indeed, Gardner’s lush and detailed camerawork owes as much to his desire for precise documentation as it does to his commitment to film as an art form (a commitment he most notably publicized in his longstanding Boston television series, The Screening Room, which featured hour-long discussions with film artists like Hollis Frampton, Jonas Mekas and Yvonne Rainer).
Dead Birds is perhaps his most challenging film, both in its production and reception. Made in the heart of the Cold War, Gardner and his small crew of anthropologists (including the ill-fated Michael Rockefeller) engaged with the Dani people of Dutch New Guinea to study the ritualized warfare practice they had developed in isolation over thousands of years. Perhaps overburdened with the weight of a culture threatened with nuclear annihilation and looking for clues amongst the stone age it may return to, Dead Birds is an investigation suffused with a graceful formal beauty, from the way in which Gardner maps out the space of a battlefield to his focused attention on the intimate spaces where we encounter the more lasting rituals of day to day life.
Programme:
Treefall, David Rimmer, 16mm, 1970, Canada, 5 min.
Dead Birds, Robert Gardner, 16mm, 1964, USA, 83 min.
@ Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West
NOTE: Monday night screening
Monday, June 14, 2010, 8:00pm screening
Dead Birds
Treefall
