Visual Anthropology and the Cinema of Robert Gardner: Review of Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor (eds) The Cinema of Robert Gardner

Jennifer Deger

doi:10.1080/14442210802666000

Deger, Jennifer

2009-03-01 00:00:00

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology Vol. 10, No. 1, March 2009, pp. 4649 Review Essay Visual Anthropology and the Cinema of Robert Gardner: Review of Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor (eds) The Cinema of Robert Gardner Jennifer Deger The Cinema of Robert Gardner ILISA BARBASH and LUCIEN TAYLOR (Eds) Oxford and New York, Berg Publishing, 2007 xi253 pp., 52 ill., bibliography, index, ISBN: 978-1-84520-774-8, £19.99 (paper) Although Robert Gardner has himself claimed an ambivalent relationship to anthropology and its endeavours, he remains among the most celebrated of ethnographic filmmakers. Director of the Film Study Center at Harvard University from 1957 to 1997, Gardner has long been regarded as visual anthropology’s enfant terrible, his poetic sensibility and grandiose themes famously dividing anthropolo- gical audiences*even as they attract wider audiences than most ethnographic films. Early debates about the nature of the split reaction to his work was figured in terms of a dichotomy between art and science (with Gardner cast on the side of ‘art’), a dubious and unhelpful proposition that failed to engage with the epistemological complexities of film and the encounters it mediates. Later critics, although appreciative of a move towards ethnopoetics, took Gardner to task for the

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