Arsim Canolli- University of Prishtina, Kosova
DOI: dx.doi.org/10.12835/ve2022.1-101
Abstract
This paper argues that Robert Gardner’s ethnographic films, especially Dead Birds (1963) and Forest of Bliss (1986), aesthetically refuse to serve just as social scientific documents and visual lectures for anthropology, and their status remains true to the film’s ability to mimetically preserve and symbolically evoke the capacity of life under the auspices of what we have all agreed to, at least on general terms, call ‘culture’. Although his films break the boundaries of form and narration, and provide unprecedented method into the representation of ‘other’ cultures in film, it is the way in which his whole cinematic approach to evoke human condition and human culture in film that makes his work unique in the genre of ethnographic film. In his approach, Robert Gardner breaks away with any discipline’s ‘methodological philistinism’ (Gell 1998), meaning that a non-fiction film doesn’t have to necessary be a didicatically structured ‘filmic ethnography’ to get the license to be shown in the gallery in the cathedra anthropologia.
Keywords:
Robert Gardner, ethnographic films, Dead Birds, Forest of Bliss, ethnographicness, filmicness
