Gardner's Forest

"Each journey to Benares in the past 10 years has been connected to the idea that religion, which always perplexed me by its seeming remoteness, can be understood as a way of dealing with certain matters, in particular with what my sister Isabella called in one of her poems, 'it."' --Robert Gardner

Forest of Bliss, a portrait of the holy Hindu city of Benares, India, is the brainchild of Harvard film professor Robert Gardner, considered by many to be the most important anthropological filmmakers of our time. The documentary has no subtitles, no musical soundtrack, no voice-over commentary--only the insistent din of a city at work, a city whose main function concerns the burial of the dead.

Although Gardner filmed Forest of Bliss over a 10-week span (concealing his camera in a green garbage bag so as not to attract the curious masses), he compressed his shots into a single day's medley, sunrise to exquisite sunrise. During the moments after the opening sunrise, we feel baffled, in need of explication. When the sun rises once again, we have experienced what Gardner refers to as "it" and we begin to understand.

The film unfolds with various disjointed shots of Benares and its human and animal inhabitants. A farmer picks orange flowers; strong, muscular bodies chop wood; two men assemble a bamboo ladder; white-robed workers hose down flat stone; holy men chant cryptic chants; a small, squeaky boat glides over the river. Then come the bodies, ushering in with them the audience's epiphany. Bodies covered with orange flowers, bodies over flames, bodies on top of bamboo ladders--suddenly, the disjointed pictorial congeals into a single entity. Death. Everyone in this Hindu society lives and labors for their holy deceased.

Gardner concentrates particularly on three individuals: a priest, a healer, and a fairly eccentric distributor of sacred fire. Keeping them straight, however, presents a somewhat difficult task--an almost unavoidable weakness in preserving the integrity of the cinema verite.

This weakness, however, is counterbalanced by Gardner's brilliant application of the cinema verite technique. Forest of Bliss lays bare a Benares we would see and experience had we been there. We are bombarded by sights and sounds: street noise, the silence of the river, the knelling of bells. We are tourists experiencing Gardner's "it," his ineffable sense of place and not an audience simply being led about like a dog on a leash. Forest of Bliss hangs before us nakedly exposed and uninhibited, without the protective cover of explication.

But what exactly is Gardener's "it"? The movie's subtle texture, effortlessly impelled by Gardener's deft editing, reveals that "it" is the sense of death that pervades daily life. Like cinema verite, "it" is based on an oxymoron. Forest of Bliss actually reasserts life by concentrating on the ceremony of dying. Vitality and color, charisma and charm, abound in the visages of the living inhabitants, most notably the fire seller, whose joie de vivre consumes the screen. And this juxtaposition of life with death necessitates audience observation, not verbal explanation.

His sister Isabella should be very proud.