Sunday, February 28, 2010

Forest of Bliss, Robert Gardner

It’s unknown (on purpose?) what Gardner’s film, Forest of Bliss is meant to convey. Echoing this, Jonathan P. Parry, an Anthropologist at the London School of Economics writes that he has “an uneasy suspicion” that this film is likely to convey to Western audiences that, “India is an ineffable world apart which must elude our comprehension. No explanation is possible; and all we can do is stand and stare.”

My thought on reading this final paragraph in his Comment on Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss (SVA newsletter, Fall 1988) is “Exactly right!”

“Let the camera Roll,” says Parry. And roll it does: through shit, dead bodies, polluted water, up and down stairs, through smoky pyres of burning flesh and in and out of the fog and heavy air along the coast of Benares on the Ganges river in India.

Navigating the film, like navigating the process of death – which is essentially life, isn’t it?–is confusing, and unclear. Meanings change and changes bring new meanings. And, in the end, does it all matter? No one can definitively answer questions such as these. Death is silent, still, personal, unexplainable. Gardner creates beauty in a disgusting–and I’m sure foul smelling–place. He doesn’t lead us with narration, or subtitles, or any text whatsoever. There are no verbal explanations, nor translations. Like death, he remains silent. The film speaks on a sensory level, on a level of feeling and intuition. There are no answers, and metaphorically Gardner represents this with a beautiful film. There are some rituals being played out, but with no explanation. Just death. His camera’s movement in the streets amongst filth, and shit (human and animal) is a metaphor for life amongst death, I believe. The camera climbs and descends stairs, it observers strange rituals, and jumps back and forth with time revealing something yet offering no explanation. Often these visual clues show up again later in some context offering just a modicum of understanding. I see this camera work, and play with time as just like life. In life we have ups and downs. Things don’t make sense, then somehow they do. We step in shit, and it stinks, it thwarts our path, but we keep going. Life is always amongst death.

I also see his film as a metaphor for doing anthropology and specifically fieldwork. What is knowledge? We can ask questions, get answers, translate, and nod up and down, ‘yes.’ But, do we always really understand? In effect, I believe Gardner is saying, no we don’t. We don’t always understand, and sometimes a feeling, that which we have no words for, is somehow more true for one. Maybe the ‘I get it’ feeling is just that–a feeling, but not truth, not knowledge. Some questions and some answers are not to be understood. Meaningless. People don’t go to Benares to ask questions and ponder life. The go to die. Benares is death. No words will make that more palpable. The visuals do.

In Benares the representations of Life cannot be separated from the inevitability of Death. Horror and Bliss are not separate. Just as anywhere, Life and Death are one.



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