American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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what a poet might do or what an accomplished film artist might have done, and the result was a tendency toward affectation. Gardner seems to have approached Forest of Bliss with a new kind of confidence and from within a more complete awareness of film history. The film would become a landmark contribution to an important genre—a genre claimed by both documentary and avant-garde film.
CITY SYMPHONY: FOREST OF BLISS
The City Symphony—the cinematic depiction of a composite day in the life of a major city—has become one of the most recognizable and prolific forms of independent cinema. After a series of premonitions, including many Lumière films about Lyon and Paris and much documentation of Manhattan during the 1890s as well as, two decades later, Charles Sheeler’s and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921), the form emerged with a triad of European features: Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (Nothing but Time, 1926); Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Sinfonie einer Grosstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Big City, 1927), the film that gave the form its name; and Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (Cheloveks kinoapparatom, 1929). Each of these films focuses on the life of a modern city—respectively, Paris, Berlin, and the post–Revolutionary Russian “city,” a composite of Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa—as it unfolds from before dawn until night (or the following dawn); and in each instance, the city chosen is understood as the quintessential city of a particular culture: France, Germany, communist Russia. Within this general formal contour, however, the films vary a good deal. While Rien que les heures seems ambivalent about the modern metropolis, Berlin and The Man with a Movie Camera reveal a fascination with industrialization, and Vertov’s film in particular is an all-out celebration of modernization and cinema’s crucial place within modernization’s transformation of a traditional culture. By the end of the 1920s, the City Symphony had become one of the two major forms of nonfiction filmmaking, the other being its inverse: the depiction of preindustrial cultures and ways of life: Nanook of the North (1921) and Moana (1926), Merian C. Cooper’s and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s Grass (1925).
The City Symphony soon became a mainstay in American independent cinema. The early 1930s saw the completion of Jay Leyda’s A Bronx Morning (1931), Irving Browning’s City of Contrasts (1931), and Herman G. Weinberg’s Autumn Fire (1933), all of them focusing on New York; and during the 1940s, Rudy Burckhardt began what was to become a long series of New York City films. The following decades added Frank Stauffacher’s City Symphony of San Francisco, Notes on the Port of St. Francis (1952); Weegee’s New York (c. 1952), by Weegee (Arthur Fellig) and Amos Vogel; Francis Thompson’s N.Y., N.Y. (1957); Marie Menken’s Go! Go! Go! (1964); and Hilary Harris’s Organism (1975), as well as a wide range of other forms of city film. More recent years have seen the appearance of a series of remarkable feature-length City Symphonies that, in scope and accomplishment, compare favorably with the European films of the 1920s: most notably, Pat O’Neill’s pop surrealist depiction of Los Angeles, Water and Power (1989); Spike Lee’s day in the life of a Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, Do the Right Thing (1989); and Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss. These last two radically revise our sense of what the City Symphony can do.
Ruttmann and Vertov firmly established the City Symphony form by celebrating the modern city as culmination of the industrial revolution, and whatever reservations Ruttmann had about the problems that industrial progress might also be creating (Vertov seems to have had none) were minor compared with the excitement of the speed and power of the new, mechanized society.41 This attitude has characterized nearly all subsequent city films. I have argued elsewhere that Spike Lee’s fiction feature is the finest American City Symphony—though to be fair, Forest of Bliss is equally deserving of this designation. While Lee’s insight was to see that the intermixture of people that the mechanized city had produced was of more interest than the mechanical wonders of industry themselves, Gardner’s approach in Forest of Bliss is to question the very notion that energy and excitement are products of industrial transformation by delving into a very particular cultural tradition and embodying it within a spectacular and beautiful form. While other filmmakers who have contributed to the City Symphony have documented their own cities or the cities they see as emblematic of their own cultures, Gardner focuses on Benares (Vāranāsi), India, a city utterly distinct from either Boston or any other American metropolis. However, what we find familiar is determined by what we find strange, and one can also understand Gardner’s fascination with Benares, which he sees as wildly different from any city he has known, as fully a reflection of his American-ness as is Lee’s depiction of Brooklyn.
Forest of Bliss is exciting and full of energy (and it produced an energized response from the academic anthropological community)42—but not because of the transformations of modern life. Indeed, Gardner is at pains to eliminate evidence of modern technology from his vision of Benares. He cannot do this entirely, of course (and perhaps wouldn’t if he could): early in the film, in the background of several shots, we see a major bridge with automobile traffic, and in a few instances the film depicts street scenes that include some automobile traffic or the sound of distant traffic. In general, however, Gardner’s fascination is with the way in which Benares has continued to emblemize tradition: this city may be the quintessence of a culture, but it is interesting precisely because of those elements that are not modern and do not adhere to modern assumptions about what a city should be (fig. 12). While nearly all City Symphonies celebrate life, Forest of Bliss celebrates a culture’s ways of dealing with mortality and with the dead themselves: the focus of Benares (or at least Gardner’s Benares) is the burning of bodies and/or the disposal of the dead in the Ganges: that is, on the city’s cremation grounds, which are sometimes called the “Forest of Bliss” in sacred texts.43 In the end, however, the film’s very distinctiveness from other city films allows Forest of Bliss to function as a metaphor for the inevitability of mortality and the ways in which human beings come to terms with it.
The focus of Forest of Bliss is the many rituals that surround the disposal of corpses; in fact, the daily round of Benares is depicted as an ongoing meta-ritual, made up of countless ritualized activities. This meta-ritual is depicted in an immense montage, held together in three of ways: by the temporal trajectory of dawn to dawn, by the repetition of particular details of image and sound; and by the presence of three men. As in other City Symphonies, Forest of Bliss creates the illusion of a single day, clearly a composite day, filmed over a period of months during 1984 when Gardner lived in Benares on a Fulbright Fellowship. The daily cycle is most evident at the beginning and end of the film, though it is clear that particular activities occur during specific moments throughout the day.
Within the structure provided by the movement from morning to night and the arrival of another morning, Gardner develops a wealth of image and sound motifs: dogs, marigolds, men carrying corpses, stairways, birds flying, boats passing on the river, men transporting wood and sand onto and off of boats, people sweeping with small brooms, and the sounds that accompany these tasks: men chanting, the loads of wood crashing onto cement, hammering, the ritual ringing of bells and striking of gongs, the squeak of oars on wooden boats—Forest of Bliss is truly a City Symphony: its sound montage is as complex and as memorable as its imagery. These visual and auditory motifs accumulate and often intersect and interact (various animals eat marigolds and spiritual men use them in ritual activities), so that, over the 90 minutes of the film, a powerful sense of being inside this strange city evolves. Earlier in this chapter, I mentioned Artavazd Peleshian’s “distance montage” in conjunction with Rivers of Sand, but Forest of Bliss is an even better example of the approach; indeed, it exemplifies distance montage as well as Peleshian’s own films.
FIGURE 12. Man rowing along the Ganges, from Robert Gardner's Forest of Bliss (1986). Courtesy Robert Gardner.
A final structuring device involves three men, each of whom is seen periodically through Forest of Bliss, though none of them is identified within the film. On Gardner’s website, they are described as “a healer of great geniality who attends the pained and troubled [this is Mithai Lal]”; “a baleful and untouchable King of the Great Cremation Ground who sells the sacred fire [the Dom Raja]”; and an unusually conscientious priest who keeps a small shrine on the banks of the Ganges [Ragul Pandit].” As Gardner indicates