FORSAKEN FRAGMENTS
by Robert Gardner

The following synopses written by Robert Gardner describe some of his uncompleted films, collectively referred to as Forsaken Fragments. He has presented these in various forms at Bard College and the Harvard Film Archive, and will be showcasing them again at Light Industry, February 23, 2010. Other bits and pieces will be added as time goes on.

TIDE (1966)
In the late sixties I picked up my seldom used Arri 35mm camera and set off for the famous tidal flats of Nova Scotia. This fragment is of an elderly farmer who fished a weir using his horse and carriage to go out to it with the ebbing time and home with the incoming tide. I thought I saw a nice structure for a film that even included the element of chase, that old standby of film narrative. Would the carriage get home before being engulfed by the incoming tide, would the fog appear and obscure all points of reference?

CREATURES OF PAIN (1968)
In 1967 I was hoping to make a film about sheepherders in Nigeria. Civil War intervened and I had to be content with a few days attending a ritual called "sharo" in a small village near Kano. It qualified as a true 'ordeal', a contest of endurance to pain.

HEALING (1978)
I went to Ladakh in the vain search for a shaman. What I found was a species of Buddhist healing that involved trance and a variety of magical tricks of the healing trade.

SALT (1968)
One of my filmic interests in Ethiopia was to see and film the salt trade between the Highlands and the Dallol Depression, a wondrous environment of unbearable heat and intense color. I managed a start only and these are the bits that emerged.

POLICEMAN (1973)
Early in the seventies I was involved in the programming of a ABC affiliate TV station in Boston (Channel 5). I was given the opportunity to make what I called "non commercials" to be shown between programs just like a conventional advertisement but consisting instead of a 60 second look at a commonplace social activity. Policeman was one of several such "non commercials" that aired on this station to many peoples' astonishment.

THE OLD LADY AKA: A HUMAN DOCUMENT (1958)
The only film except for helping John Marshall with The Hunters that I did when I went to the Kalahari in 1957. I became entranced by an old lady about whom I photographed and made this little film.

IT COULD BE GOOD, IT COULD BE BAD (FLYING IN CHILE) (1997)
Bob Fulton asked me to join him to do aerial photography in the Southern Chilean Andes. We rigged microphones to record what we were saying to each other as we flew among these extraordinary formations.