Mr. Gardner’s other films include “Deep Hearts” (1981), about a nomadic tribe in central Africa (he filmed the tribe in the Niger Republic) with complex rituals related to human beauty; and “Forest of Bliss” (1986), which takes place in Benares (now Varanasi), India, the city on the banks of the Ganges, held sacred by the Hindus, where many go to cremate their dead. That film depicts daily life as something of an unexplained mystery, unspooling from sunrise to sunrise without narration or dialogue.

“What is that grizzled, bare-chested master of ceremony, aglow in the flames, up to — holding fire in his palm and sprinkling bits of it about, croaking what must be some sort of prayer?” Walter Goodman wrote in his review in The Times. “What do all those chants and ritualized movements and bright colors signify? To what fate are these dead being consigned? Can it be legal, not to mention sanitary, to plop the corpses into the river?

“You will not find the answers here to such questions,” Mr. Goodman continued. “But the pictures are so strong, the vision so sustained that mundane curiosity seems almost irreverent. ‘Forest of Bliss’ itself is a kind of ceremony.”

Robert Grosvenor Gardner was born into a socially prominent family in Brookline, Mass., on Nov. 5, 1925. His father, George Peabody Gardner, was a banker and financier and a descendant of the arts patrons and philanthropists John Lowell Gardner and Isabella Stewart Gardner. His mother, Rose Phinney Grosvenor, was the daughter of a textiles magnate.

He attended the Park School in Brookline and St. Mark’s School, in Southborough, Mass., before graduating from Harvard. After traveling to Turkey with Mr. Whittemore, an expert in Byzantine art and architecture, Mr. Gardner taught briefly at the College of Puget Sound in Tacoma (now the University of Puget Sound). He enrolled in but did not complete a graduate program in anthropology at the University of Washington, where he made a short film, “Blunden Harbor,” about the Kwakiutl Indians, from a coastal village on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.

Invited to take pictures and conduct research on an expedition in the Kalahari desert in Africa, he then returned to Massachusetts and helped start a film production and research unit at Harvard’s Peabody Museum. This became the Film Study Center, which he directed from 1957 to 1997. The Peabody Museum sponsored the New Guinea expedition in 1961.