The Impulse to Preserve: Reflections of a Filmmaker - Hardcover

Gardner, Robert

9781590512364: The Impulse to Preserve: Reflections of a Filmmaker

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590512367 ISBN 13: 9781590512364

Publisher: Peabody Museum Press, 2008

The life and work of an internationally acclaimed nonfiction filmmaker in words and images.

Despite Primo Levi's dire warning about the "inadequacy of documentary evidence", Robert Gardner's work shows that capturing the light reflected from actuality has its revelatory moments. Including nearly 500 photographs, The Impulse to Preserve contains the thoughts and images of a lifetime spent probing human experience in the world's most remote corners. In each undertaking, an issue or condition common to humanity is intently observed. In Neolithic West Papua in 1961, it is ritual warfare and revenge; in Nigeria 1965, ritual pain; in Ethiopia in the late sixties, male supremacy; in Niger 1978, envy; and in Benares, India, 1985, mortality and its expression in worship. Includes 466 color and black & white photographs and other images throughout.

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About the Author:

Filmmaker Robert Gardner is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; founding director of Harvard Film Study Center (1957-1997); former director, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts; faculty member, Department of Anthropology and Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, 1960-2000. He is the author of The Impulse to Preserve (2006) and Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film (2007).

From Publishers Weekly:

Anthropologist Gardner used his passion and training to become a celebrated documentary filmmaker, whose nearly 40-year-long career includes such films as Ladakh, Deep Hearts and Rushes: Forest of Bliss. This collection of his writing, covering such far-flung locations as Nigeria, Columbia and Kashmir, is fully illustrated with beautiful photographs by Gardner and others. The bulk of the text comes from Gardner's journals, beginning in 1960s New Guinea, where he lived among "the last practicing stone-age society on the planet." The journals are fascinating, not just for their immediacy and the cultures they explore but for the anthropoligcal conundrums they present, especially the tricky question of how his very presence affects the communities he wishes to document; arriving in New Guinea, he observes "I have not seen toys or games ... We are their entertainment at the moment." Gardner's short essays are equally intriguing. Readers without knowledge or access to Gardner's films may find the text incomplete; for example, when Gardner notes that an old Ethiopian man he spoke to at length made some "quite profound" remarks, he fails to note what those remarks were. For those readers, entering this intriguing and worthy book requires a sense of curiosity and the knowledge that it may go unfulfilled-at least until Dead Birds or Rivers of Sand make it to Netflix. Photos.
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