American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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figures are never portrayed in any depth. In fact, they are never even named. But they do get sufficient attention to emerge as fairly well-rounded individuals.”44 The men and their various activities through the day become another set of motifs that also intersect at times: the class difference between Mithai Lal and the Dom Raja is sometimes emphasized in the editing.
Gardner’s compositional strategy in Forest of Bliss contributes much to the epic quality of the film. Gardner’s Benares is a complex maze of tiny, crowded streets that open onto the broad river, the many architectural approaches to the shore, and the myriad activities taking place on and near the river. As Forest of Bliss develops, each of these activities grows increasingly familiar, and we understand them more and more fully in their multileveled relation to one another. One particularly obvious instance is the early images of the making of what look to be ladders; why would the men be making ladders? Soon it becomes clear that in fact these are devices on which dead bodies are carried—though the original assumption that these are ladders remains implicitly relevant, suggesting the near-universal desire for transcendence of mortality. A typical composition late in Forest of Bliss involves activities taking place in close-up and at various distances from the camera simultaneously, as well as implicit intellectual intersections of multiple motifs. In this, Gardner’s City Symphony is reminiscent of Warren Sonbert’s montage films, where each image is a nexus of motif and implication.
As is true in Dead Birds, Forest of Bliss is punctuated by moments of shock value. The précis before the opening title and director credit concludes with a horrifying moment when several dogs attack, and presumably kill, another dog (the impact of this moment comes from the screams of the dying dog). And at various times, we see decaying corpses floating in the Ganges (a dog eating one; another, ass-up in the water), a dead donkey and a dead dog being dragged down the steps to the river, a dog seemingly so weak it can barely climb stairs, another lying dead among garbage—this in addition to the many corpses being burned and the bones collected, an old woman in a hospice on the verge of death (we see her a few moments later, dead, on her way to the cremation ground), the bodies of two children launched into the river. . . . These shots create a nervous attention and a kind of dread.
This dread is, no doubt, the residue of Gardner’s confrontations of death and dying in Benares. In the conversation between Gardner and Stan Brakhage, an extra on the most recent DVD edition of Forest of Bliss, Brakhage, who claims to have seen the film fifty or sixty times, invokes The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), his shocking film of autopsies performed in a Pittsburgh morgue, in commending Gardner on having the courage and stamina to make his film, courage presumably not only to shoot on and around the cremation grounds in Benares, but in owning the imagery and shaping it into a feature film.45 Of course, the dread created by this imagery is our confrontation of mortality within the film experience, though throughout Forest of Bliss this shock value is carefully balanced by the film’s many remarkably beautiful shots: boats in the mist, a field of marigolds, a gorgeous sunset . . . moments reminiscent of the work of Peter Hutton, Bruce Baillie, and James Benning (fig. 13).
FIGURE 13. Men barely visible, rowing on the Ganges in early morning fog, from Robert Gardner's Forest of Bliss (1986). Courtesy Robert Gardner.
The unusual balance of the horrifying and the gorgeous in Forest of Bliss is itself a kind of metaphor. It reflects the reality of Gardner’s Benares, and it offers a theoretical perspective on the art of cinema. Throughout his filmmaking, Gardner’s primary fascination has been with what he sees as the two ways in which individuals and societies come to terms with mortality: through ritual and the making of art. The emphasis in Gardner’s depiction of Benares is, of course, ritual. From what we see, the industry of the entire city is in service of the various rituals surrounding death. Further, the daily cycle evoked in this film, and in all City Symphonies, foregrounds the idea that the very existence of cities requires that they function as immense, complex rituals that render what may at first look like chaos into a precise and productive order. In other words, Benares itself is a daily ritual, and the only way in which it differs from other cities—and for that matter from other social units of whatever density—is that its primary industry is (or at least in Forest of Bliss seems to be) a continual direct confrontation with the materiality of death itself. Wherever we are and whoever we are, our daily round is our way of ignoring and avoiding mortality and the implication that in the long run death renders everything meaningless. Gardner’s Benares is a holy city because its denizens have the courage to face the fact of mortality while simultaneously transcending its implications: they continue to live and work and to demonstrate, day after day, that the fact of death instigates the passion of life.
On another level, our cinematic experience of Benares is also, as Gardner himself has suggested, “a kind of ceremony.”46 Of course, it is not merely Forest of Bliss that is a ritual, but both filmmaking and cinemagoing. Both have been ritualized experiences fundamental to our society for more than a century. And both filmmaking and cinemagoing share with all rituals the fundamental goal of helping us to come to terms with mortality. If the overwhelming majority of commercial films repress the fear of mortality by redirecting it into heroes and superheroes who transcend mortality or who conquer the representatives of mortality; and, more fundamentally, into the conflict resolution pattern nearly all Hollywood films employ, Forest of Bliss reminds us that the inevitability of death has always been the basic motor of all culture and all art. Forest of Bliss celebrates both the daily cycle of “the holiest city in the world” and (implicitly) the daily labor of the filmmaker documenting this place; and through its power and beauty, the finished film celebrates the way the art of cinema can transform even a subject terrifying to most of us into an engaging, illuminating, even transcendent—of place, of time, of death itself—experience, a literally transcendent experience of death, because the life of the film can be reincarnated, over and over, merely by rewinding the film or starting the DVD again.
THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: IKA HANDS
Among other things I have asked is: why didn’t I put myself in those films? It would have been so easy. Why did I leave something of such interest to me now out when it would have been so simple to do? I could also have imagery of the people who were with me. I could also have documented a process over time which is not uninteresting in itself about how I worked. But I was ultra scrupulous about leaving myself out, thinking it would compromise my intentions to preserve my objectivity.
ROBERT GARDNER47
Forest of Bliss is Gardner’s most “objective” film, in the sense that throughout that film we remain comparatively unaware of his presence as filmmaker. It is difficult not to be aware of his presence in his earlier feature films, because of his narration most obviously, but also because of the very intimacy of so much of his imagery. In an urban setting like Benares, filming doesn’t seem unusual, but in the midst of a battle between Dani groups or during the funeral of a young boy, we can hardly fail to become aware of the fact of Gardner filming, even when the filming doesn’t seem to affect the Dani. The irony is that while it is Forest of Bliss, more than any other film, that has sustained Gardner’s reputation as a film artist, it was completed during a period when Gardner was becoming increasingly dubious about his methods and goals as a filmmaker, a period that would lead to a new motif in his work: his appearance within his films as a character.48
Before beginning Forest of Bliss in 1984, Gardner had already recorded most of the imagery and sound for what would become, two years after the release of the Benares film, Ika Hands (1988), his depiction of the Ika, whose “rich and complex culture,” as Gardner explains in his opening voice-over, was thought “to be a survivor of pre-Colombian high civilization.”49 He had visited the village of Mamingeka in 1980 and returned with Robert Fulton to shoot in 1981. While he did consider further visits to the village, the only additional footage shot for Ika Hands was a conversation recorded in Cambridge in 1985 with Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, whose writing had originally lured Gardner to the Sierra Nevada mountains in northern Columbia. After an opening shot/countershot interchange, Reichel-Dolmatoff’s comments on the Ika and on Gardner’s footage provide a kind of voice-over narration to the finished