In October 2009 Bard College honored Robert Gardner’s filmmaking career, which included remarkable, if now sometimes controversial, contributions to ethnographic cinema—Dead Birds (1963), Rivers of Sand (1974), Deep Hearts (1981), Forest of Bliss (1986), and Ika Hands (1988)—as well as dozens of episodes of Screening Room, a late-night, Boston-area TV interview show that focused on independent filmmakers. For the Bard event, Gardner put together a fifty-minute compilation titled “Nine Forsaken Fragments.” In his comments at Bard, Gardner was diffident about the individual fragments or the compilation being considered finished films. As time has passed—along with Gardner himself in 2014, and Peter Hutton, who had organized the Bard event, in 2016—Gardner’s “fragments” have become something more than a compilation for a one-time occasion. In 2021, Documentary Educational Resources, the distributor of much of Gardner’s work, released Forsaken Fragments: a compilation of fourteen short pieces that together can be...

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