Robert Gardner occupies an influential and controversial place in the history of ethnographic film. As a filmmaker and founding director of the Harvard Film Study Center, he championed film as an aesthetic medium of poetic interpretation and sensuous experience, directing films in Ethiopia, India, and New Guinea working alongside regional anthropological specialists. The resulting films—Dead Birds (1963), Rivers of Sand (1974), and Forest of Bliss (1985)—endure as documentary classics, inspiring new generations of experimental filmmakers and enlivening contemporary discussions about art practice in anthropology.