FIGURE 6. Sidney Peterson and Robert Gardner in Kwakiutl outfits sometime in the early 1950s. Courtesy Robert Gardner.

      In 1949 Gardner moved to Seattle and for a time taught medieval history at the College of Puget Sound in Tacoma. Reading Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture moved Gardner toward anthropology, which he studied briefly at the University of Washington and later on at Harvard. During his years in Seattle, Gardner became involved with the film society at the University of Washington’s Henry Gallery, and in 1951–52, made his first foray into filmmaking, working for a time with avant-garde surrealist Sidney Peterson on a feature about an interracial romance between a Kwakiutl princess and a white man (fig. 6). While Gardner and Peterson did do some shooting on Vancouver Island, nothing came of their work. However, Gardner’s visit to Vancouver Island’s Blunden Harbour would soon instigate his first two films: Blunden Harbour (1951) and Dances of the Kwakiutl (1951).

      Gardner’s Kwakiutl films seem to have been inspired by the lyrical documentaries he was seeing at the Henry Gallery, and especially Henry Watt and Basil Wright’s Night Mail (1936), which Gardner remembers watching about twenty-five times.³ Watt and Wright’s combination of image and spoken poetry (by W.H. Auden) also seem to have influenced Gardner’s third film, an evocation of the person and work of painter Mark Tobey, with whom Gardner became friends while in the Northwest. For both Blunden Harbour and Mark Tobey Gardner wrote poetic narrations; the text in Blunden Harbour was spoken by poet Richard Selig; the texts in Mark Tobey by Gardner and Tobey (Tobey contributed some of his lines). Blunden Harbour and Mark Tobey seem generally representative of film society films of the 1950s, in their interest in other cultures and in art, in their use of poetic imagery and narration, even in the ways in which Gardner worked with sound and image in the years before sync sound was an option for independents.

      Blunden Harbour is an effective portrait of a place. Heinck’s and Jacquemin’s cinematography is lovely, evocative sometimes of Frank Stauffacher’s Sausalito (1948) and Bruce Baillie’s To Parsifal (1963), and Gardner’s editing is capable, and sometimes powerful: for instance, a shot of one older man doing painstaking work on a mask is followed via a direct cut by a shot of the same man during a Kwakiutl ceremony; for a moment we don’t realize that this is the same person, though once we do, we are reminded how participation in a traditional ceremony can transform an individual. The voice-over is carefully controlled, limited to four instances when poetic lines are spoken by Selig; each of the four stanzas of the voice-over vary or build on the original phrase, “From the water: food; from the wood: a way of life,” until we hear “A way of life, a way of death, a way of dreams, and a way to remember” at the beginning of the ceremony (the cut from the man as craftsman to participant in the ceremony occurs just at the phrase “a way to remember,” foregrounding the idea of ceremony as cultural memory).⁴

      Dances of the Kwakiutl is a more straightforward document of Kwakiutl dancers performing in part for the camera, introduced with Gardner’s voice-over: “Fifty years ago, the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia held their winter ceremonial in order to bring back the youth who were staying with the supernatural protector of their society. The songs and dances which belonged to this ritual were vital to the success of the ceremony. Lately, both the intention and performance of the winter ceremonial have been substantially altered. The dances are no longer significant within the ceremonial complex and their performance depends now on an individual and spontaneous will to recreate a very old, syncopated dance form.” In the voice-over, one can sense Gardner’s disappointment with the changes he describes, but the dancing and the enthusiasm of the dancers are effectively documented.

      Mark Tobey was of special importance to Gardner in two ways. First, he did his own (color) cinematography for the first time, and this portrait of Tobey and his Seattle environment is visually impressive. Second, in Mark Tobey Gardner’s fascination with art and his own poetic urge is unbridled: while the poetic voice- over is rather overwhelming—these days it feels strident and pretentious—one can feel Gardner’s enthusiasm for his subject and his excitement that this important artist has trusted him fully enough to be an active participant in the film. If the two Kwakiutl films are early premonitions of the films that would, beginning a decade later, establish Gardner’s reputation as a pioneer in ethnographic filmmaking, Mark Tobey seems a premonition not only of Gardner’s subsequent films about artists (including a second film about Tobey), but of the focus and approach that would dominate his better-known features about the Dani, the Hamar, the Bororo (Gardner spells the name of this group “Borroro”) Fulani, and the Ika. For Gardner the making of art is a fundamental, perhaps the fundamental, function of culture; and the job of filmmaking, especially nonfiction filmmaking within our culture, is to sing the variety of art making across the globe and the ways in which particular art objects and ritual performances have functioned within particular groups as a form of cultural memory and as a spiritual basis for daily life.

      GARDNER AND THE MARSHALLS

      Between the completion of Mark Tobey and the release of Dead Birds in 1964, Gardner studied anthropology at Harvard, immersed himself in the community of poets and artists in Cambridge, and became involved with the Marshall family’s project of documenting the !Kung, assisting John Marshall with the editing of The Hunters (1957). Gardner was in touch with Laurence Marshall as early as 1953. When J.O. Brew sent the elder Marshall a copy of a seminar talk on film that Gardner had given, Marshall wrote back to Brew, expressing his appreciation of Gardner’s talk: “As to the use of film in anthropology, I still feel that it ought somehow to be essential in any study of man. . . . I think my feeling is based on some of the ideas that Bob brings out; the importance of sight in perception, the ability of film to represent the eye and to portray events in actual time so that one can perceive interaction and tempo, and not least in importance, the fact that film can be studied repeatedly and by many people.”⁵ However, Marshall remains a bit dubious about the significance of the films that have come out of the expedition and assures Brew that the costs of the film that John Marshall has been shooting would not be paid for with the money Harvard had granted the expedition, but by the Marshalls themselves.

      Brew apparently shared Laurence Marshall’s letter with Gardner, who responded, on April 16, 1953, with a seven-page letter, exploring more fully his ideas about cinema: “Through very complicated psysio-psychic processes involving principles of identification, association and learning, the net effect possible with film is to impart a credible experience to a spectator.”⁶ Defining experience as “the acquiring of knowledge by the use of one’s own perceptions of sense and judgment,” Gardner (basically paraphrasing John Dewey’s ideas about experiential learning) goes on to explore “what is meant by learning and experience”:

      In a larger sense it could also be thought to be an experiment in the use of one’s perceptions in the process of learning. In this light the old saw about experience being the best teacher gains a little luster. . . . It may already be clear that what I wish to make is a distinction between two kinds of learning, one kind which is the result of rote memorization which has a minimal participation of perceptual organs, and the other which involves multiple senses and promotes experimental participation within the learning process. Although the relative value of these two general types of learning situations depends on the individual learning and the reasons for learning at all, in a broad sense the advantages of what might be called “experience learning” have been dramatically attested in such contexts as training