ROBERT GARDNER made his first film while living in the American Northwest and reading for the first time such writers as Ruth Benedict (Patterns of Culture) and Edward Sapir (Language). It was the start of his lifelong interest in Anthropology as an intellectual perspective. In 1950 Gardner visited British Columbia with the idea of making a feature about the few remaining and once glorious Kwakiutl Indians but managed only to make a short called Blunden Harbour from footage shot by a co-worker, William Heick.

Gardner went on to make a number of other films between 1955 following his return to the East coast when he collaborated with John Marshall on The Hunters until 2003 when he did a short video on the artist Michael Mazur, Good to Pull. During these many years, he made his widely known non fiction films, Dead Birds, Rivers of Sand, Forest of Bliss, The Nuer (with Hilary Harris), Deep Hearts, and Ika Hands while at the same time writing, producing a television series (Screening Room), teaching film and directing the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard. Many of Gardner's films are availble from Documentary Educational Resources: www.der.org.

Gardner's hope of making a feature narrative film never materialized though he was close to realizing Isle of Dogs about an inexplicable murder on a small French island in the North Atlantic, Cooper's Creek about a fatal expedition through the interior of Australia in the 19th Century and Waiting for the Barbarians about a remote imperial outpost from a novel written by John Coetzee.

The story of all Gardner's films are told in the numerous reviews and essays that have been published and, especially, in his own book published in 2006, The Impulse to Preserve: Reflections of a Filmmaker (Other Press NYC). The Impulse to Preserve is available from Harvard University Press.

There is an as yet (2006) unfinished but progressing long film narrative called Roads End which Gardner hopes, ultimately, to complete.