LITMIR.BIZ

      FIGURE 10. Two Bororo Fulani men, looking beautiful, in Robert Gardner's Deep Hearts (1981). Courtesy Robert Gardner.

      The overall structure of Deep Hearts evokes that of Rivers of Sand, though in this instance the dancing of the men is the central motif: Gardner intercuts between this dancing and other aspects of Bororo Fulani life, many of which provide a clearer context for the dancing: early in the film a woman is scouring what look like golden pots, which, later in the film, are revealed to be decorative tubes worn on one woman’s legs during that part of the Gerewol ceremony when several women indicate who the “bull” is. Like Rivers of Sand, Deep Hearts culminates in a large-scale celebration, and it concludes with the ritual activities that allow the various Bororo Fulani clans to leave the large gathering and move back into their nomadic lives.

      Gardner’s decision to collaborate with Robert Fulton on Deep Hearts seems to have had a considerable impact on the compositional style of the film. The camera is a good bit more mobile in Deep Hearts than it is in any previous Gardner film; in the catalog produced for an Anthology Film Archives retrospective of Gardner’s work in 1995, Thomas W. Cooper describes Fulton’s camera work as full of “moving point-of-view shots taken from irregular heights and angles while Fulton was running, speed-walking, or ‘dancing’ with his camera. . . . Fultonian motion images propel us across sand, under camels, and close to the earth, as if from a running child’s perspective.”²⁹

      While Fulton’s camerawork is often engaging as camerawork, it does not seem particularly relevant to the events portrayed, but despite Cooper’s contention that Gardner has normally added visible cinematic effects “only when they best served the film’s intentions,”³⁰ I see this gap between content and style as less than unusual in Gardner’s early films. In Dead Birds, Rivers of Sand, and Deep Hearts Gardner sometimes includes moments of stop-action and other formal devices that are not motivated by anything in the action. These devices seem to me little more than affectations—”arty,” rather than artful—and I suspect they are a product of Gardner’s decades-long wrestle with the idea of being both documentarian and poetic filmmaker. This struggle has also been reflected in Gardner’s use of narration. Film by film, at least in those of his films that Gardner seems to take most seriously, narration has become less pervasive.³¹ Early in his career, Gardner was under the influence of the poetic voice-overs of such films as Night Mail and Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon (1934) and presumably of Marshall’s narration for The Hunters;³² but in part as a result of his own increasing dissatisfaction with his own voice-overs in Dead Birds and Rivers of Sand, and perhaps because of the increasing prestige of detached observational cinema and its proponents’ hostility toward the overdeterminism of narration of any kind, Gardner has used voice-over less and less. Deep Hearts is less fully narrated than Dead Birds and Rivers of Sand; nevertheless, the voice-over Gardner does include is often less than persuasive—it too seems something of an affectation. It would not be until Forest of Bliss (1986) that Gardner would finish a feature devoid of visual or poetic affectations.

      ROBERT FULTON: REALITY’S INVISIBLE—“SERIOUS PLAYING AROUND”

      In 1971 Gardner hired Robert Fulton (the great grandson of the inventor of the steamboat), to teach filmmaking at the Carpenter Center for the 1971–72 year; and during his brief tenure, Fulton produced Reality’s Invisible, one of the remarkable experimental documentaries of the era—and (as is true of Fulton’s entire oeuvre) one of the most underappreciated. Fulton would go on to make a substantial body of work—though as yet, no one has compiled anything like a definitive Fulton filmography—and to make major contributions to films by others, including Gardner: Fulton contributed cinematography to Mark Tobey Abroad (1972) and to both Deep Hearts (1981) and Ika Hands (1988). He taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1974 to 1976, where he vied with Stan Brakhage for the most remarkable commute (like Brakhage, Fulton commuted from Colorado, but unlike Brakhage, who traveled by train, Fulton flew his own plane). Filmmaker and longtime Canyon Cinema director Dominic Angerame, then a student at the Art Institute School, remembers Fulton as a powerful influence.³³ Until his death in 2002, Fulton remained a productive film artist, working both on personal films and on sponsored projects, and he was widely known as an accomplished aerial cinematographer. Indeed, Fulton died when his Cessna crashed during a storm near Scranton, Pennsylvania.

      Reality’s Invisible was Fulton’s eighth film (if we trust his own informal filmography). By the time he produced it, he had won Cine Golden Eagles for his cinematography on Outward Bound (1968), Portrait of Paul Soldner (1969), The Great Ski Chase (1969), and Nzuri: East Africa (1970);³⁴ and his television commercial for Eastern Airlines, The Wings of Man (1971; narrated by Orson Welles), was, according to Fulton, “estimated to have been seen by over four hundred million people and is considered the longest running commercial in the history of television.”³⁵ According to Fulton’s filmography, Path of Cessation, completed in 1972, is the first film he produced and directed (he also did the cinematography and the editing). It is an evocative portrait of Tibetan religion, beginning with an 8-minute, black-and-white shot of a Nepalese monastery waking up, framed inventively so that we see individuals from a distance through windows and doorways as the morning’s mundane events begin to unfold. The second and third sections of the film are in color: a sequence of mountain imagery leads to a shot of a bridge that provides a transition into a montage of color superimpositions of mountains, a stream, animals, people, time-lapsed clouds . . . Path of Cessation ends with a group of monks chanting, superimposed with imagery of mountains. Fulton’s fascination with Buddhism continued to inform his filmmaking in the following years, including the hour-long Reality’s Invisible, his portrait of life and creativity at the Carpenter Center, the facility designed by Le Corbusier and completed in 1963 (it is the only Le Corbusier building in North America).