Forest of Bliss

Another film with a good deal of critical analyses out there in the documentary realm, Robert Gardner's Forest of Bliss is a 90minute portrait of life in Banares, India, a city off of the Ganges.Gardner chooses to have a minimal amount of text involved in the 90 minute narrative, opening with a quote by W.B. Yeats "Everything in this world is either eaten or eater," and including some speech of the people in the film, but nothing substantial, and he leaves all spoken word completely untranslated (no subtitles). Because of the way the film is shot and edited, the speaking seems to be yet another one of the sounds inhabiting the world of Forest of Bliss, adding to its mystique and energy. Keeping the speaking and sometimes chanting undecipherable throughout the film makes the noise blend together to be a somewhat abstraction, matching the constant movement and random visuals. No individual is a distinguishable character, instead, after watching thirty minutes of everyday life, from all different angles, without having the camera acknowledged, a viewer comes to realize that the character, the "star" of the film is actually the city itself. The film is impressionistic, like a painting with movement and a soundtrack. As Gardner himself says about his work, "I have always been interested in indicating things by suggestion rather than direct statement" (Barbash, 94).

That is not to say the people in the film are not also important to the portrait, after all, the city would just be space if their were no people there making it a specific place. The specificity of this place, Baneres, is clearly a great deal to do with death. Death becomes the kind of running theme of Forest of Bliss, the death of both animals and humans, and how death is out in the open and dealt with throughout the city. In fact, the city seems to be operating an industry, as most laboring shown has one thing or another to do with the ceremonial and paradoxically banal aspects of death. The paradox is really most pronounced in the banality of the sacrament, as it would seem that everything that is done in Baneres is ritualized. Everything from the way one washes oneself to the way one picks flowers seems to be imbued in symbolic and cultural significance.

Gardner plays with camera angles a great deal. "I have always felt obliged to find new ways to use the camera... I feel badly when I let the camera stand back and be passive" (Barbash, 98). Some shots seem to be from a point of view, sometimes of a child or citizen in the street, or from a dead body in a hospice or on a boat. Since the camera is never steady for long, and the shots are unpredictably held, it gives the impression of constant movement, a living, breathing city, saturated in death (not to mention refuse and shit) However, the construction of the shots are not random, there does seem to be a building of some sort. Gardner is a master of building tension, while watching the film one starts to anticipate certain narrative points, and once the time comes, he might give a glimpse and move on to the next "story." For example, one long shot is tracking a man walking through the streets (similar to that Goodfellas famous tracking sequence) up and down stairs, through the refuse/shit in the path, finally we get to the river, and then there is a devastatingly quick shot of a dead man floating in the river, and then just as quickly, we are on another path, following a different man.

When asked about his editing techniques, and his propensity to not follow the stricter "ethnographic" observational film paradigm, Gardner replied, "I would say what seems important is what is being filmed, not how it is done... Everything depends, it seems, on some combination of knowledge, insight, inspiration and talent. These scarcely measurable and mostly unteachable attributes tell me that film, whether we like it or not, is an art form, and that we should welcome, and not despair of that fact" (Barbash, 99). Forest of Bliss is an artistic construction suggesting ethnographic insight. As an anthropologist Gardner clearly spent the time needed to inform an ethnographic film, yet as a filmmaker he is sticking to his guns, relying on an impressionistic paradigm. A film like Forest of Bliss relies on an audience who is willing to put in the time, to be actively engaged in uncovering the cultural truths being presented.

cheers



Barbash, Ilisa. "Out of Words: The Aesthesodic Cine-Eye of Robert Gardner." Barbash and Taylor eds. 2007. The Cinema of Robert Gardner. Berg Publishers.

Forest of Bliss (Robert Gardner, 1986)
Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)

Under the Men's Tree

David MacDougall is famous for his participatory-observational style of film-making. MacDougall’s films exemplify both the subject engagement with the camera, and the movement of the camera through a scene as cinematically documental. In Under the Men’s Tree, MacDougall is sitting among the group of men, not outside of it, or above it, but right in the heart of it. MacDougall does not ask any questions, he is mostly just observing, and the participation is felt by the sheer locality of the camera itself. The subjects or characters are carrying on a conversation, and it is when they acknowledge both filmmaker and camera that the film takes on more of the participatory feel. A man says, “you better not say that, he’s filming,” and an audience becomes privy not just what it is like to be there, but of the complexities of anthropological inquiry itself. This moment in the film addresses the enduring question of would a research participant be acting a certain way if there were no anthropologist in the room? Without answering that one directly, we do know that the anthropologist/ethnographic filmmaker/filmmaker will always be affecting the social world in which he/she observes. These questions are about reality itself, a phenomenon that can be addressed scientifically/culturally through documentary and narrative film.

Under the Men’s Tree (David and Judith MacDougall, 1970)