Robert Gardner (1925–2014) was the maker of many documentary and ethnographic films, among them Dead Birds, Rivers of Sand, and Forest of Bliss, which the Library of Congress have included in their list of most important American films. Gardner’s films took him to Netherlands New Guinea (now Indonesia), Ethiopia, Nigeria, India, and Spain. Gardner studied art history as an undergraduate at Harvard University, and as a graduate student, he was the first to teach courses there on the subject of film. In 1957 he founded Harvard’s Film Study Center and was its director for forty years. In 1979 he co-founded the Harvard Film Archive. He also produced and hosted “The Screening Room,” a series of nearly a hundred ninety-minute television programs on independent filmmaking and, more recently, founded the small cooperative art making endeavor Studio7Arts. Gardner wrote several books, including The Impulse to Preserve: Reflections of a Filmmaker and Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film. He also won numerous film prizes, including the Flaherty Award twice, and in 2005 he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Anthropological Association.